My insensitive bad luck

So yesterday was a typical day for me.

I got up at noon. This is after staying up until five in the morning researching something stupid and/or boring. In other words, I went to bed at my normal time, and got up at my normal time. A few years ago, I used work the four pm to midnight shift, and I think that it permanently messed up my body clock.  

I went on the internet long enough to make the latest move in a game I was playing. It used to be Cafeworld; now it is Vikings Gone Wild. I looked at a few items in the newsfeed; one needs to check every few hours to see if there anything spectacularly stupid going on when you are an angry blogger like myself.

Now, every day around two, I have to make a decision. Do I try to be productive? Or do I remain on the internet reading Facebook all day? Lately, I have been being good and getting off of Facebook and being productive; or at least, I have been off of Facebook for most of the day.

Yesterday, I looked at my notes, and decided that I was going to write my little spree about guns and politics. After all, one of my goals for my little write-cation is to piss everyone off at least once this month---remember, this write-cation motto is “Morgan hates all of you!”

I did go with my wife to the library when she got home. But afterwards, I did go out in the studio, petted the outside monster, and got to writing. I cranked out eight hundred plus words. Some of the words are actually good in my less than humble opinion. After I was finished with the piece, which I had typed into my Neo, I sat out in the studio, keeping my wife company as she glazed a few jewelry pieces. Then I went into the house, ignored the internet, and transferred the piece I wrote into a Word document before editing, correcting some spelling, and copying and pasting the words into a blog post.

Now at this point, I could have been sensitive and checked to see if any mass shooting had happened during the day. But I didn’t. And instead of scheduling the blog post for midnight, I decided to hit publish instead. After all, what harm could it do?

It is only after hitting publish that I opened up the browser I use for keeping track of the news. And yes, my timing once again sucked.

Now for some reason, my luck seems to be insensitive to the feelings of other people. For instance, when I was doing the page view sites, I once wrote an article on the Tower card, posted it, and then turned on the news just in time to learn that an airplane crashed at the local airport. Another time, I accepted a new friend request on Facebook, and then promptly shared a meme of some dumbass dying from shooting off fireworks off his head, only to learn that my new Facebook friend actually knew the parents of the fore-mentioned dumbass.

I always feel guilt when these coincidences happen. I know that I am not in any way responsible for other people dying and getting seriously injured. I am guilty of reporting or sharing the news, but that is a bad professional decision on my part---not actual inherent evil on my part.

Unfortunately, yesterday’s post had every potential of being published on the wrong day. Why? Because at the moment, in this country known as the gun capital of the West, there is a mass shooting every day. Ok, maybe not every day, but damn close.

So far this year, we had only eight consecutive days without a mass shooting. In the space of the 274 days so far this year, we had only 294 mass shootings—a mass shooting being defined as an incident where four or more people are shot in the same incident. Ok, at this point, the FBI and NRA would like to point out that the official USA definition of a mass shooting is when three or more people are killed in the same gun incident; therefore I am using the wrong number because it is not gun violence if you survive the attack. The NRA would also like you to know that it does not matter that in a mass shooting that a person dies every fifteen seconds on average. It also does not matter that we have had fifteen mass shootings that the President of the United States has addressed during his tenure in office. And the NRA also says that the 380 deaths in "not-really" mass shootings this year so far, and the 10,000 people killed and 20,000 people injured in the 40,000 gun violence incidents so far this year do not matter.

The only thing that matters is that the members of the NRA are constitutionally allowed to have all the guns and ammunition that they can load in their SUVs---none of the violence matters---only your right to have a gun matters.

Oh, and the fact that assholes like me are insensitive to the NRA’s feelings when people like me point out exactly how much gun violence there actually is. For that crime, the NRA would like to take me outside and shoot me in the head---unfortunately, the Constitution does not promise them that right. But don’t worry the politicians who accept the NRA’s political donations will make it happen in the next decade. And then none of us will have to worry that I might accidentally post something insensitive about gun control on the same day as a mass shooting.  

Mass shootings so far this year.