Edward Stanton

14 November 2017

I’m not in the White House Situation Room right now because I’m representing the Free World in Asia, but I want to tell you the situation anyway. I’ll make this brief because I like short documents. I like them even more if they have bullet points. I also like plain bullets.

The situation in Asia is that we have a lot of good friends here, and a really bad enemy. Japan is a friend and they have nice golf courses. I don’t know if China is a friend or an enemy because they don’t have as many golf courses and they’re so inscrutable. North Korea is an enemy because they don’t have a single golf course, they have really bad weapons like ballistic missiles and a leader who called me a dotard, whatever that means. That takes care of the international situation.

In America we don’t have any bad weapons, only bad people who use them. Thanks to the Second Amendment of our great Constitution, we have more guns than any other country in the world, 270 million to be exact. That’s 42 percent of the world’s guns, even though we only have 4.4 percent of the global population!

My thoughts and prayers go out to the victims of the recent shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas. That wasn’t a guns situation. It was a mental health situation. We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries. That was a very, very sad event. But fortunately, two good guys had guns that were shooting in the opposite direction, otherwise it would have been—as bad as it was—it would have been much worse. It’s also lucky that the good guys weren’t more bad guys, otherwise it would have been much, much worse. Good guys never have mental health problems.

Devin Kelley, the Texas shooter, has a nice Irish name so he’s not a terrorist. But he is a very deranged individual who had been court-martialed for assaulting his wife and breaking his baby’s skull. I was never court-martialed because I got 5 draft deferments. Some people are really sick. Just saying.

The shooting in Las Vegas wasn’t a guns situation either. That was another mental health problem. Stephen Paddock also has a good Irish name so he couldn’t be a terrorist, but he’s another very deranged individual. The sucker had an arsenal of 47 guns, bought with good money in the great states of Nevada, Utah, Texas and California, 33 of them purchased in the last year!  What a buying spree! But that doesn’t mean it was a guns situation, even though it was plenty good for the firearms business. I’ll bet if you put 47 shrinks in a room with Paddy, they’d come up with at least 47 mental health problems, even some with bump stocks.

That’s the situation on the home front.

Edward Stanton is the author of eleven books, including the novel Wide as the Wind, winner of the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Young Adult Fiction