All My Friends Are Fictional’s Reviews > Bloodbath Nation > Status Update

„Add in the vast changes to the American and world economies since the early seventies […], and then factor in the notion spread by Ronald Reagan that government is not the solution to our problems but the problem itself (which, in a democracy of "we the people," would mean that we ourselves are the problem), and a nameless, formless cloud of discontent has slowly seeped into every corner
of society.“

„Is that what we want from America today — the right to live in a society of permanent armed struggle? If the problem is too many bad men with guns, would it not be wiser to take those guns away from them rather than arm the so-called good men, […] and thereby eliminate the problem altogether, for if the bad men had no guns, why would the good men need them?
As my mother used to say […]: "Dream on, Paul."

„The less than good man gloats over what he has accomplished. The good man eats himself alive over what he has failed to do, even when and especially when he has accomplished more than anyone else would have thought possible.“

„Mooney reports, "he [Stephen Willeford] remembers crying more the first week after the shooting than he had the rest of his life com-bined." Some months later, he told Mooney: "We aren't designed to take the life of another person. It damages us. It changes us." Or, as he put it in one of the first interviews he gave: "I'm having all kinds of issues. I can't put my finger on what my feelings are."“

„Antonin Scalia […] said: "I have classes of little kids who come to the court, and they recite very proudly what they have been taught, 'The Constitution is a living document.' It isn't a living document. It's dead. Dead, dead, dead!" Three days after that, Waldman reminds us, "a deranged young man walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and murdered twenty children and six adults."“

„Peace will break out only when both sides want it, and in order for that to happen, we would first have to conduct an honest, gut-wrenching examination of who we are and who we want to be as a people going forward into the future, which necessarily would have to begin with an honest, gut-wrenching examination of who we have been in the past. Are we ready for this [..]? Perhaps not today. But if not today, when?“