Day 1076, Guns and the Internet 

 

Our Founding Fathers said that we could keep and bear our guns.

Their guns were muzzle-loaders, three shots a minute, max.

And we could organize militias, so that future sons

Could stand together to defend their states from all attacks.

 

Mass shootings by a muzzle-loader never crossed their mind.

Three shots a minute in a crowd can’t cause mass casualties.

One shot into a crowd and then the shooter’s in a bind.

Mass shootings could not happen in our early centuries.

 

The AK 47 and its twin, AR 15,

Now make mass casualties the rule; each week we count the dead.

And damn near every week we see another shooting scene,

In schools and churches, synagogues, from gun nuts spraying lead.

 

Until Johannes Gutenberg, we copied books by hand.

The average person read no books; that was the priest’s domain.

Then Gutenberg’s new printing press spread books throughout the land.

One author could be widely read, and church control would wane.

 

When Galileo and Charles Darwin became widely read,

The Church tried to suppress them but their reputations grew.

Explaining nature, science, and not what the bishops said,

Would stand the test of time.  (Some of the Bible was not true.)

 

And then we got the internet and, presto, nuts arise.

And crazy posts were read by millions, spreading in one day.

Though Facebook posts and tweets could be just bullshit or plain lies,

More bigots, anti-Semites, anti-vaxxers had their say.

 

As automatic rifles and the internet have spread,

The harm that single nuts can do has greatly multiplied.

Now hatred, lies, and nonsense can fill up an empty head,

And people die and scientific truth is nullified.

 

Our science and technology are roses that bear thorns.

We’ve made progress to both save lives and take our lives as well.

The MRI and the vaccine the anti-vaxxer scorns,

And Medicare, mass shootings, better public health, or hell?