Of all the crazy and asinine things I have ever seen in my life, this morning’s so-called ‘report’ on Good Morning America is the end of the end. They did a segment with a wannabe warrior man giving advice on how to survive office shootings. REALLY?! Apparently, workplace violence training is becoming a ‘thing.’
They recommend that when you are cornered you get aggressive and attack with anything you have – scissors, a letter opener – anything. Hurt the attacker with the gun by stabbing him or her in the face with a letter opener. Yep – you’ll live through that – NOT!
Here’s the deal – you want to survive office shootings? Don’t work in an office. Stay huddled in your damn house, afraid of your shadow because at any moment anyone in your outer-net can snap and shoot you dead. They can get their guns at Walmart and just get pissed at you because you spent too much time in the bathroom and shoot you dead. If you don’t get shot at work, you’ll get shot by your neighbor because you asked him not to mow the grass at 7:00 a.m.
Maybe you just spend too much time at the watercooler and your co-worker feels slighted because they had to answer the phone at your desk when your wife called for the 50th time to make sure you were at work. Maybe you teased the co-worker about a new hairstyle, or an ugly Christmas sweater.
The fact is, you can be involved in a weapons incident at work, at the mall, at the movie theater, picking your children up from elementary school, on the freeway stuck in rush hour traffic, at the supermarket picking up those last minute dinner rolls your wife forgot for your boss’ dinner party.
It doesn’t matter where you are or what you are doing. Any small perceived slight can cause someone to snap. Should you have to undergo office training akin to fire drills to learn how to protect yourself from crazy-ass mother fuckers with no regard for human life? Should you have to live your life in fear of the person at the next desk because you never know when they’re going to snap and become the next angry idiot with a gun and no common sense?
The short answer is NO. You should not. Our government – those people that were elected to be YOUR voice in Washington DC need to do their damn jobs. It is time for us, as citizens and voters, to hold them accountable for the mess they have created with their marriage to the NRA. It is an unholy union and it should be illegal. We need responsible gun regulations in this country and they need to be enforced. NOW.
The people that are supposed to represent you are being PAID big bucks to ignore your needs and desires and swing their vote to support the gun lobby so they can sell more guns to you. Their entire purpose is to keep you living in fear so you feel like you NEED that gun to protect yourself from your co-workers. YOU need to call them, email them, make their lives miserable until they start doing the job that you sent them to DC to do. And when the next election comes along you need to vote them out of office. Kick them to the curb. For a handy list of people and organizations the NRA hates – the NRA produces this handy list for you.
We need a revolution and we don’t need guns to get it done – we need an informed electorate that is passionate enough to GO VOTE. You have a voice and you have failed to use it. In this Democratic country, your elected officials (the people that make your laws) are being selected for you by a minority of uninformed voters that get up on election day and go to the polls, with their open-carry AR-15 slung across their shoulder and their trusty sidearm at their hip in a locking holster that they probably can’t get the gun out of anyway.
They select the person they see most on TV, regardless of their qualifications or who is paying them. That small 20-40 percent of people have been selecting your government while 60-80 percent of you stay home on voting day and say your vote doesn’t matter.
IT WOULD IF YOU USED IT DUMBASS!
HELLOOOO. In case you flunked math – 60-80 percent is BIGGER than 20-40 percent. The MAJORITY of people in this country (the ones staying home on election day) could very easily retake our government within two election cycles. Just go vote.
Four years – in four years you can make a difference – but you need to start today. When you step forward, these idiots that are in Congressional office voting and taking money for the corporations and the gun lobby will tuck their tails between their butt cheeks and run, scared. They will run away from an informed electorate that has had enough, probably peeing their pants as they scurry away.
Featured image is a cropped version of an original image by Elvert Barnes on Flickr available under Creative Commons Attritribution-ShareAlike License.
