Alphabet Soup in the Floral State

Everybody and his brother ...

... who was watching the Dunn trial instead of the Olympics has an opinion about the partial verdict reached by the jury last evening. More than a stupid alphabet moron was on trial. Our values. Who and what we are. Us. Our legislature. Those who elected them. Our state legal system. We aren’t coming out so well.

It is clear from this and other cases, especially that similar case, that our gun law meant to let us protect ourselves without turning tail and trying to escape is being abused. People who are not worth the price of the bullets they shoot are using the law to claim they felt threatened after they kill someone then wake up and realize how stupid they were. The cost of their stupidity -- or maybe not always stupidity, maybe cunning, because sometimes they are getting away with it -- is being the lives of cocky but innocent and unarmed people who refused to be bullied. Dunn actually thought he had the right. He’s a fool. Raca, as in this morning's gospel. Thanks to Dunn's and others’ stupidity, the law needs changing, because instead of a law being helpful as intended, we are reverting to the Old West, trigger-happy cowboys who didn’t get enough Gene Autry and John Wayne movies. It’s fine to have a gun. It’s usually pretty stupid to fire it. An angry cowboy has as much conscience as that other gun.

Going to logic, if an enraged Dunn in his cowboy hat is guilty of three accounts of Attempted Second Degree Murder, it is obvious that he succeeded in the first attempt of Second Degree Murder, and the jury on which none of us served and therefore shouldn’t so quickly second-guess should have brought in a conviction. As in that other similar case that is on everyone’s mind, the same overzealous prosecutor could have gotten a conviction if she had used her head instead of being a politically ambitious lawyer posing as a righteous social reformer. I couldn’t believe it last night when I heard her say that any defense attorney who thought she was over-charging could object. Where does stupid end? No defense attorney in his right mind would object when he has a better chance to get an acquittal on an over-zealously prosecuted over-charge. Once she gets her face on enough TV shows, she will be running for state Attorney General. If elected, she will be running for Governor. God forbid. Where does stupid end? We'll see.

Both sides are in the soup. All of us.

Pardon my language. At least I said alphabet instead of forsythia.