Guns and Rabbits

And I was all set to tell you about our fabulous New Year’s Day dinner.

My family and I did not officially welcome 2023 until Saturday, after our January 1st extravaganza had to be postponed on account of illness.

We had an excellent Chinese feast in two phases: a takeout order of appetizers from Red Bowl, one of our favorite local restaurants, followed by a screening of “Great Expectations,” a holiday tradition in our family, and then a Red Ball redux for the main course.

And while our dinner was late for the Times Square ball drop, we were just in time for the Lunar New Year.

This is the Year of the Rabbit, the fourth animal in the zodiac sequence of 12, and is seen as the luckiest. Or at least it was.

I was going to tell you about my fortune cookie message which told me to “be receptive to new ideas from all fronts” and which I consider to be excellent advice.

And I was going to tell you about the weird dreams I’ve been having during the last week, including one involving the actor Bruce Willis, and another one where a former best friend of mine who ghosted me several years ago reappeared in my life and we were buddies once again.

I have no idea why Bruce Willis was wandering around my subconscious, as I had not seen any of his movies or even thought about the guy in recent memory.

The buddy delusion stemmed from a particularly low moment over the weekend when I got to thinking about my ex-pal and rather insanely wishing I had never met him.

Extreme emotions like these are the stuff that dreams are made of…

Yippee Ki-Yay

And that’s why I especially enjoyed the delayed New Year’s get-together with my family since I could be around the people whom I love and who won’t flake out on me.

Yeah, I was going to tell you about all that. But then I switched on the TV this morning and learned that there had been a mass shooting in Monterey Park, Calif. that had left 10 people dead and 10 more injured.

I know what you’re thinking: “A mass shooting in America? Golly, what a shock! That never, ever happens here in the Land of Second Amendment Rights.”

Pardon my snark, but I don’t know what else to say at this point.

The latest massacre was the nation's fifth mass killing this month—the very first month of the New Year. It was also the deadliest attack since May 24, when 21 people were killed in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

An Associated Press/USA Today database on mass killings in the U.S. shows that 2022 was one of the nation's worst years in terms of mass killings, with 42 such attacks — the second-highest number since the creation of the tracker in 2006.

The database defines a mass killing a four people dying, not including the perpetrator.

Now we’ll get the whole “thoughts and prayers” routine, along with endless lies about guns not killing people and invocations of the Founding Fathers, who lived in a time when firearms only had one bullet.

And the Star Ballroom Dance Studio, where this latest massacre took place, will be turned into a makeshift shrine and adorned with flowers to honor the dead. Then it’ll happen somewhere else.

The shooter, who killed himself, was a 72-year-old man and the comedian Kristina Wong said a guy that age couldn’t have killed 10 people with his fists. No, but this is America, where the killing is easy.

Bruce Willis can’t save us from these massacres. The actor has retired due to a cognitive disoerder and the wise-cracking, gun-wielding characters he portrayed in the movies don’t exist.

So, by all means, be receptive to new ideas from all fronts.

But if you hear gunshots, hit the floor, and say, “God bless America,” and maybe you’ll live to see the next Lunar New Year.