In my day, people with root cellars filled with guns, butter and likker or backyard bomb shelters were called survivalists. They’re now called “preppers,” which is a term that I’d never heard of until today. It turns out thatNancy Lanza, the mother of the mass murdering Newtown monster, was a prepper.

Nancy Lanza, whose gun collection was raided by her son Adam for Friday’s
massacre at Sandy Hook school, was part of the “prepper” movement, which
urges readiness for social chaos by hoarding supplies and training with
weapons.

“She prepared for the worst,” her sister-in-law Marsha Lanza told reporters.
“Last time we visited her in person, we talked about prepping – are you
ready for what could happen down the line, when the economy collapses?”

Paranoid mother, crazy son, it now makes a sick sort of sense. Logic obviously had nothing to do with this mayhem but the great explainers in the MSM are already trying to turn this into a “teachable moment.” Step away from that thought, y’all. Nothing teachable here other than assault weapons are lethal and shouldn’t be in the hands of preppers, survivalists or whatever you want to call them.

The most perplexing thing about today’s revelation is that a small and very prosperous town of the sort that is usually known for preppies is now known for prepper madness. I guess Stephen Stills got it right back in the 1960’s when he wrote, “paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep.”He wrote those lyrics before he worked closely with David Crosby who had a cocaine driven descent into paranoid gun toting madness in the 1980’s.

I’ve never liked guns, never owned one or even lived in a house with anything beyond a squirt gun or cap pistol. My Republican father carried one for 3 years during World War II and never wanted guns around.I have no problem with responsible gun owners-and they do exist- but I wish more of them would speak out against the NRA, which has morphed during my lifetime into a doomsday cult worthy of the People’s Temple.

I get frustrated with the predictable back and forth that always follows a massacre such as this. I *wish* it would lead to sensible gun control legislation but there’s nothing sensible about the Newtown Massacre or about the gun culture itself.

I don’t usually favor symbolic actions but I’m glad that Dianne Feinstein plans to go back to the future,as it were, and push to restore the assault weapons ban. I have no illusions that it will pass the Senate let alone the Teabagger controlled House, but sometimes you’ve just got to take a stand and this is one of those times.

Does anyone seriously imagine that the framers envisioned military-style weapons in the hands of some whackadoodle loser with Mommy issues? I would hope not. I also don’t recall the NRA or Huckabees and Gohmerts of the world challenging the assault weapons ban in court, which would have been litigation that only Wayne LaPierre or Nino Scalia could love. I know Justice Scalia is an opera buff. I wonder if his taste extends to Wagner and not just to Rossini and Verdi…

Circling back to Senator Feinstein. This is a rare Senator who has personal experience with gun violence. I’ll never forget her announcing the murders of Moscone and Milk in 1978. After that and Jonestown, which occurred not long before, I was concerned that we really could be: