"Gobsmacked" is a great word. According to oxforddictionaries.com, it's an informal British term meaning utterly astonished; astounded. Use it in a sentence, you say? Okay. I'm gobsmacked that anyone would fail to see the need for tougher gun-control laws after the massacre that occurred in Newtown, Connecticut, which was only the latest in a series of mass murders in this gun-crazed land of ours.
More precisely, I'm gobsmacked by the fact that some people apparently believe an occasional murder spree in a public place, such as a school, movie theater or shopping mall, is the price we have to pay for our cherished "right" to own assault weapons, even when the victims are young children. After all, we all know how wily deer can be.
There's a particularly ludicrous post making the rounds on Facebook (see above) that says "guns are not the problem" because Timothy McVeigh didn't use one in the Oklahoma City bombing back in 1995.
That's like saying drunk drivers are not a problem because, sometimes, sober motorists cause highway fatalities too. Or how about this analogy? Preventing young children from playing with unsecured firearms in the home isn't a key to keeping them safe because, sometimes, they burn their houses down by playing with matches.
Ludicrous? Of course. But no more so than claiming that we shouldn't try to prevent would-be killers from getting assault weapons because, sometimes, they use truck bombs instead.
Yup. There's no way around it. I am truly, royally, utterly and completely gobsmacked by the lunacy, delusional weirdness and ass-backwards "logic" of the world in which we live. Beam me up, Scotty. And hurry!
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