Have you ever seen the opening of the movie RED (a great fun flick, BTW) where Bruce Willis walks outside his house and sees every house in the neighborhood all lit up for Christmas with various snowmen, Santas, and reindeer all over the place except his? That’s what I feel like every time I step out our front door. Us, we just have some old-style plastic candles in the window, and the only house with less are the folks across the street who are Islamists from Bangladesh and the renters two doors down, both of whom have nothing up. I’m not complaining or making judgment, it’s just that I’ve never seen our street so lit up before. Almost makes me want to go back to Big Lots and buy that $40 family of reindeer and stick them on the front lawn. Maybe take one of my phony palm trees and put it next to them so it looks like they’re eating it. What do you think? I think $40 is a little pricey for such cheap and tacky holiday decorations.

Been reading a number of blogs out there in the wake of yesterday’s mass killings in Newtown, CT. Some are calling for the outlawing of guns (yeah, that will work about as well as Prohibition did), some for an outright ban on automatic weapons, while others are trying to rationalize something that really can’t be rationalized. One of the commentaries, I think, is Jazz Shaw’s at Hot Air, where he compares the shooting in Connecticut with another potential mass killing that was averted in Oklahoma. While noting that Connecticut has some of the toughest guns in the country, Shaw writes that the best weapon against this kind of thing lies in recapturing the sense of community – both macro and micro:

The last point this brings up, though, has to do with community. If there is any remedy to be found to these events, it’s not through legislation or restricting the tools (read: guns in these cases) used by madmen. It’s the rebuilding of a sense of community and responsibility to each other.. a shared sense of decency being passed down to each generation. When that collapses, the entire system is weakened. The government is, in reality, very limited in their ability to protect us if responsible citizens are not engaged in the duty to protect and defend ourselves. And that includes speaking up when we learn that somebody is even considering doing something like this. That worked in Oklahoma by all accounts. It somehow failed to work in Connecticut. This is a time for all of us to pull together and hopefully remember that we are stronger and safer when we stand up together and look out for one another.

Read the whole thing.