Right Meme, Left Meme, Gun Meme

As is typically the case, when we have a mass shooting such as the one last week in Roseburg, the memes make their way onto social media sites.  Left meme, right meme, left meme, right meme, marching across our Facebook and Twitter feeds, collecting likes and dislikes, upwardly pointing thumbs and middle fingers held just as high.

Yeah, we can't have an actual conversation but we sure can meme!

Here are a few I've seen in the past couple of days.

This one's absolutely correct - making drugs illegal did not stop everyone from doing them. But it did give us the opportunity to get lots of drug dealers off the streets, and lots of meth labs out of our back yards.

Laws against drunken driving don't keep every idiot from getting behind the wheel when they're impaired either - but it has helped, as have speed limits and seat belt laws and a whole bunch of other laws that are not obeyed by every single American - only by most of them. Does that mean that we shouldn't try?

There was also this one. I never met God in any school I attended, and I suspect most people who didn't attend some kind of religiously-affiliated school didn't run into God in their school either.

Sure, we said the Pledge of Allegiance (which only added "under God" in the 1950s, in response to the scourge of Communism, by the way), but we did not collectively pray or practice religion in any other way. Nothing stopped anyone back then, or anyone today, from having a silent prayerful moment of their own.

I recall the Catholic kids leaving early, I think it was Thursday, for religious ed, and us heathens -- the Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians and the rest -- stayed behind and played King Chase Queen with erasers on our heads and stuff like that. But even then, God wasn't in the school, I think He was down the street at St. Pat's.

Besides, doesn't God only give you what He thinks you can bear? So, whether He was in the schools or not, would He have stopped any of these mass shootings, or would they still have happened under the theory that our faith needs to be tested, and strengthened, in the face of terrible tragedy?

And then there's this meme, posted by many, including former Minnesota Congresswoman and permanent RWNJ Michele Bachmann.

Because we all know that the only reason why people shoot up schools is because they are 'gun free zones' right?  Or churches, not a lot of guns there or even in movie theaters. Yeah, when the angry people, the grudge-holders, the racists, the whatever-you-want-to-call-them are looking to shoot someplace up, they specifically read the signs in the windows looking for one that's a gun-free zone.

Stop it.

You know why they choose schools? It's because they're students there, or recently were; it's because they know the lay of the land, where the exits are, where the people they don't like are, what classes the teacher they hate will be in, and, more importantly, it's because they know they'll get the attention they seek if that's where they commit their heinous crimes, compared to, say, shooting up a Walmart.

But, by far, my favorite gun meme is this one: