The slippery slope

From today's Daily Kos:

Click on image to enlarge.

Yes, everybody knows that any regulation of a dangerous instrument leads inevitably to its confiscation and outlawing. And by "everybody" I mean anybody who takes seriously the pronouncements of the National Rifle Association.

Let them put their personal safety where their big, loud mouths are

So, it looks like there is actually going to be some kind of vote in the Senate on getting at least minimal control over the wide open sales and trafficking of guns in this country. President Obama said in his State of the Union address that victims of gun crimes deserve such a vote, and, to his credit, he has continued to push for those votes, even when the Conventional Wisdom within the Washington Beltway says that imposing any kind of control of guns is impossible. Of course, that same Conventional Wisdom said that Barack Obama had no chance to be reelected last year.

After the tragic slaughter of twenty six-year-olds and their teachers who tried to protect them at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut last December, I wrote to all of my elected (though not by me) representatives from Texas in Washington -  namely Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz and Rep. Kevin Brady - and asked them to please support sensible gun control laws to reign in the senseless mass slaughter that is taking place in our country. What I got back from each of them were form letters that might have been written by Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association. None of the gun laws that are proposed would have saved any of the children at Sandy Hook, they said. Background checks do no good, they said, because criminals will not submit to background checks. We can't ban assault rifles because of the Second Amendment, they said. Even though when the Founders wrote that amendment, they had muskets in mind, not assault rifles with high capacity magazines that can shoot more than one hundred bullets in a matter of seconds and rip apart the tiny bodies of innocent children, not to mention the lives of those who love them.

Those responses made me very angry and disgusted with the quality of people who allegedly represent me - but not really - in Washington. In reality, they represent the NRA and the oil companies and the insurance companies and all the big spenders who have given them millions of dollars to purchase any principles they might have had.

But wait, I thought. What if these guys really believe this stuff? What if these really are their true principles? How could they prove their sincerity?

Then, it came to me - a modest proposal for how Cornyn, Cruz, Brady, et. al., can stand foursquare for their belief that guns should not be fettered in any way and people should be able to brandish those weapons in any venue.  

I suggest to my esteemed Congresspeople that they should each introduce legislation in the Senate and the House to allow visitors to each of those Houses to freely carry any weapon which they choose, assault weapons with high capacity magazines not restricted. No background checks allowed. After all, Second Amendment! Don't the people have a right to carry their beloved weapons into "their" House?

In this way, our elected representatives can be just as safe in their workplace as our school children and every other ordinary citizen in this country. And my courageous representatives will have the opportunity to put their own personal safety on the line, right along with the school children. In other words, they can put their personal safety where their big, loud mouths are. Don't you think that seems fair?

What would Molly say?

At times of national angst, it is useful to consider what great philosophers have to say. Today we consider what that great Texas philosopher Molly Ivins had to say about guns in our society.

(With a tip of the hat to the Great State of Maine at Daily Kos for bringing this to my attention.)

In truth, there is no rational argument for guns in this society. This is no longer a frontier nation in which people hunt their own food. It is a crowded, overwhelmingly urban country in which letting people have access to guns is a continuing disaster. Those who want guns---whether for target shooting, hunting or potting rattlesnakes (get a hoe)---should be subject to the same restrictions placed on gun owners in England---a nation in which liberty has survived nicely without an armed populace. […]

Molly Ivins

Michael Crichton makes an interesting argument about technology in his thriller "Jurassic Park." He points out that power without discipline is making this society into a wreckage. By the time someone who studies the martial arts becomes a master---literally able to kill with bare hands---that person has also undergone years of training and discipline. But any fool can pick up a gun and kill with it.

"A well-regulated militia" surely implies both long training and long discipline. That is the least, the very least, that should be required of those who are permitted to have guns, because a gun is literally the power to kill. For years, I used to enjoy taunting my gun-nut friends about their psycho-sexual hang-ups---always in a spirit of good cheer, you understand. But letting the noisy minority in the National Rifle Association force us to allow this carnage to continue is just plain insane.

(March, 1993.)

Since the horror of last Friday's murders at an elementary school in Connecticut where the bodies of first graders were literally riddled with bullets by a psychopath wielding an assault rifle, many of the usually predictable apologists for gun nuts have been notably silent, but some never learn when to shut up. In that category would be another Texas philosopher named Louie Gohmert who is of the school of thinking that if only that principal had had an assault rifle of her own, she could have stopped the killing. He, of course, fails to address the fact that the killer's mother apparently had a whole arsenal of assault rifles at her home. They didn't protect her. She's just as dead as the innocent children.  

Then, of course, there is the self-righteous twaddle of Mike Huckabee who has run the gamut from blaming the lack of public prayer in schools to, now, abortion pills and homosexuals, for the deranged murder of children in their classroom. He utterly refuses to address the fact that virtually 100 percent of these incidents are perpetrated by a particular social group - young white males with a history of mental problems and appallingly easy access to guns. 

Perhaps we would do well to look at that social group and see what it is that is making them so devoid of human feeling and empathy to be able to commit such crimes. Perhaps there is even something we could do to ameliorate their situation and help to integrate them into society instead of allowing them to be outcasts with no stake in society. But, no, in Gohmert/Huckabee World, better to just issue an assault rifle and kevlar vest to everyone, including, I suppose kindergarteners. 

It is just barely possible, I think, that we may finally have reached a tipping point in this country. At least in the last few days politicians seem more willing to discuss the issue of guns and their control and of instituting sensible laws to restrict their availability. Sen. Diane Feinstein has said she will introduce such legislation in the next session of Congress. As has been pointed out by various commentators, the Democrats are never going to get the votes of the gun nuts anyway, but it is possible to win without them, just as they won the last election without the help of white rural Southerners. And so they might as well be bold in proposing sensible gun control regulation. They may well find that the vast majority of Americans will support them and appreciate their efforts, even though as long as the Tea Party Republicans control the House of Representatives, it is unlikely that such legislation will be able to pass. Regardless of the outcome, it is still a fight worth having, and it is all the more reason to start organizing NOW to take back the House of Representatives in 2014!

In an op-ed today in The Washington Post. Joseph A. Califano, Jr.  wrote about the experience of another Democratic president in a similar situation:

If ever there were a moment for President Obama to learn from history, it is now, in the wake of Friday’s shootings at the elementary school at Newtown, Conn. The timely lesson for Obama, drawn from the experience of Lyndon B. Johnson — the last president to aggressively fight for comprehensive gun control — is this: Demand action on comprehensive gun control immediately from this Congress or lose the opportunity during your presidency.

If ever there was a moment to politicize an issue, this is it. It is time for the Body Politic to make its wishes known to its elected representatives. It is not a time for them or their representatives to be cowed by the bullies of the National Rifle Association and their allies whose only goal is to line their own pockets. Don't believe for one second that they are concerned about the Constitution! They are concerned about making money and controlling politicians and only that.

We have an opportunity at this moment to turn the conversation away from the "rights" of gun nuts to the rights of our children to be safe in their classrooms from psychotic killers wielding assault rifles. The innocent blood of the children demands that we seize this opportunity with both hands. Molly Ivins would counsel us to be brave.

Another day, another massacre

There really are no words to convey the horror. Another day, another massacre in the USA. This time most of the victims were children, babies really, barely even launched on the sea of life. The other victims were people who had dedicated their lives to helping children like them get launched. The sadness simply overwhelms me and, I am sure, most parents, who understand the images that the parents of those twenty children who died must live with for the rest of their lives. There is no way to mitigate the pain.

The killing of so many innocents in one place at one time certainly gets our attention and grabs all the headlines for a few days, but the truth is that this many people die most days in this country as a result of being killed with a gun. Some 10,000 deaths per year occur in the United States because of gun violence. And what is our response? Why, to make guns more widely available and easily accessible, of course.

The response of many of the gun nuts to yesterday's tragedy has been more than predictable: "Oh, if only one of those kindergarten teachers had had a gun. She could have taken out the shooter and saved lives." You might as well say: "Oh, if only one of those five-year-olds had had a gun. She could have taken out the shooter and saved lives."  Time and again we have seen that when an innocent bystander does have a gun, he will not be able to react in time or else he is just as likely to shoot the wrong person. Still, the myth of the heroic bystander persists in the minds of gun worshipers.

Then there is the response of people like Mike Huckabee, or as I think of him the execrable Mike Huckabee. His theory is that because public Christian prayer is not allowed in schools, his god has removed his protection from them so that such murders can occur. So, let's just think this through for a moment: Huckabee and his ilk worship a god who permits the murder of innocent children because the adults don't stand up in school and intone paeans of praise to his name. I want no part of such a god nor of his minions like Huckabee.

My theory of why such tragedies occur is quite different. Simply stated, I believe that they happen because guns are more easily accessible than mental health care in this country. All countries have their quota of mentally disturbed people, but it is only in this country, the most armed country in the world, that lethal weapons are everywhere and can be picked up at the local Wal-Mart by such mentally disturbed people for a few dollars. If the Connecticut killer had not been able to access guns, those precious children would be alive today and their families' lives would not have forever been blighted.

Why has our country reached this state? Because politicians in this country are terrified of the National Rifle Association. They are convinced that if they try to pass even the mildest restrictions on gun ownership, the NRA will go after their scalp. They are right, but, at least in the case of Democrats, the NRA will go after their scalps whether or not they do anything about gun control. They will continue to demagogue on the issue and to insist that "Obama is coming to take your guns." In fact, the only thing that Obama has done about guns as president is to sign a law allowing them to be carried in national parks! But you'll never convince the NRAists of that because, like others of their philosophical persuasion, they seem to live in a fact-free bubble.

The irony in all of this is that this is NOT what the American public wants. Public poll after public poll has shown conclusively that a rather large majority of Americans support tougher gun laws and making it harder to get most guns and impossible for the public to get automatic and semi-automatic weapons. And still politicians are afraid to act.

I don't know what it would take to stiffen the spines of politicians and make them willing to stand up to the NRA and to act in the interests of the public good and public safety. I don't know what it would take to make them willing to expand the availability of mental health services and to include mental health checks as a part of rigorous program of health care in schools. That would be a positive step toward turning back this tide of a massacre a month which seems likely to overwhelm our society. Is the blood of twenty children enough of a sacrifice to cause it to happen?

Whenever one of these horrors occurs, the cry of right-wing politicians is always, "Don't politicize it! Now is not the time to talk about gun control!" I beg to differ. Now is the perfect time to talk about gun control, now while the terror of dying children and the unquenchable grief of their parents is fresh in our minds.

When these things happen, public officials always rush to put out statements about how their "thoughts and prayers" are with the victims and the survivors. I'm here to tell you, thoughts and prayers won't do it! By all means, pray if it makes you feel better, but only human action can stop these tragedies from occurring. We need to make clear to our elected representatives that we hold them personally responsible for their inaction. By such inaction, they are complicit in the murders of children. Perhaps it might just be enough to finally reach that tipping point where the life of a child is worth more in our society than the right to own a gun. Any gun. I live in hope and hope is all that is left on such a sad, sad day.

Domestic terrorism, domestic politics

David Sirota of Salon.com has named yesterday's massacre in Colorado for what it is - terrorism. Our media would lead us to believe that terrorism is only the purview of dark-skinned Islamicists, but that is faulty thinking. The country is under siege and at the mercy of domestic terrorists like the Colorado murderer because we refuse to take responsibility for standing up to the NRA and passing and enforcing laws that will inhibit the gun traffic in this country. This will not change until we mature enough as a country to give up our adolescent obsession with guns and violence. Frankly, although it depresses me beyond measure to say it, I see no possibility of that happening.

Meanwhile, predictably, a certain segment of our society rushes to the microphones to say that if only there had been someone else in the audience with a gun to take the shooter down, all of this could have been avoided. Never mind that the shooter was wearing full body armor and that the hero would have had to shoot around the vast crowd that was in the audience and that was panicked by the assault and then have his bullet pierce the armor in order to take him down. All it would have taken is one Clint Eastwood type hero and he would have made the day for all of us, so goes their reasoning.

One of the proponents of that kind of thinking is our own Texas Republican Tea Party Representative and resident wackadoodle Louis Gohmert. He believes that the massacre was caused by "ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs" and that if only that hero gun toter could have been in the audience, all would have been well. Gohmert was last heard from last week when he signed on to Michele Bachmann's hate campaign against Islamic Americans. And he is one of our elected representatives! Do we wonder that the country is in such trouble when we continue to elect such idiots?

Another massacre. Ho hum.

A man walks into a movie theater with a rifle, a shotgun, and a handgun, plus two canisters of gas. He sets off his smoke bombs and then opens fire, randomly, at the packed crowd. He kills twelve people outright and wounds at least 38 others, some of them seriously enough that their survival is in doubt. He is captured almost immediately. He is a white male American, 24 years old.

Another day, another massacre in America. By now, our national consciousness is almost inured to such violence. Ho hum. Move along. Nothing to see here.

For a day or two or three, all the politicians and public officials will offer sober words about the killings. They will talk about how their prayers are with the victims and their families. They will talk about how the perpetrator must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. And then they'll go back to business as usual. The victims, their families, and their pain will be pushed to the background and forgotten.

Soon enough, there will be another such massacre to claim our attention - for a day or two - and everyone will be shocked, shocked that this has happened again.

I'm not shocked. I've come to expect this. While I am sad for the victims and their families, I know they will not be the last, as long as we do not have the political will in this country to stop the trafficking in assault rifles and other such guns that have no business being in the hands of the general public. This in spite of the fact that a majority of Americans want this traffic stopped. But it doesn't matter what the people want. What matters is what the National Rifle Association wants because it owns our government.

And so I have a modest proposal. Since we are obviously not going to stop people from getting these guns, I think some canny Republican in Congress should propose a law that requires every American over the age of ten to carry a fully armed assault rifle at all times. Being caught without one's rifle should require a mandatory sentence of 30 days in prison, preferably a privatized for-profit prison. If one is too poor to buy a  rifle, then the government should issue vouchers to help them purchase. Not only would that get a gun into everyone's hands as the NRA wants, but it would also stimulate the economy! Two birds with one bullet, so to speak.  

Would this reduce the number of massacres we have? Probably not. It would most likely increase them, but so what? Every newscast would lead off with the story of the day's massacre(s) until they become so commonplace that they drop out of the news altogether. Anyway, we're going to have these events eventually, so we may as well go ahead and get them over with.

One other thing: If everyone has to carry an assault rifle and we engage in our daily massacres, it will at least reduce our carbon footprint by the simple means of reducing the number of people. We can accelerate the extermination of ourselves and save the Earth! Again, two birds with one bullet.

You're welcome.

Michele Bachmann, hunter

Michele Bachmann brags that she's a good shot with an AR-15 assault rifle and that it is her favorite weapon of choice for hunting. She told an interviewer on radio that she was going pheasant hunting with her fellow crazy, Rep. Steve King of Iowa, and left the impression that she was going to use an AR-15. Pheasant hunting with a semi-automatic assault rifle? Really, Michele?

I freely admit that I don't know much about guns and I know less about hunting, but I did grow up among some very successful hunters. I don't remember them ever using assault rifles. Rifles, yes, or sometimes shotguns, but they didn't find the need to resort to semi-automatic weapons. Still, they were able to bag their prey.

But in Republican politics, the bigger the gun you can claim to use the better, apparently. Whether it is actually the type of gun that is needed to kill your prey is irrelevant. I guess in Bachmann's case though her actual prey is the gullible voters of Iowa and she's hoping to bag them by flaunting her macho-ness.

This is disgusting.

Crazy neighbors

A few miles from where I live, a house burned last week. It was what the local newspaper called "a historic homestead" that had been in the family of the man who owned it since 1927.

The house burned to the ground even though the fire department was on the scene. The firemen were unable to get near the house because it contained an estimated 100,000 rounds of ammunition! As the fire spread, the ammunition started exploding and popping in all directions, making it dangerous for the firefighters to approach and so all they could do was stand and watch it burn.

According to the newspaper, not only did the house contain all that ammunition, it also had 30 to 40 family guns inside! Thirty to forty "family" guns?  Were these people planning on starting their own army?

The craziest thing about this story is that, in the gun-worshiping culture that is Texas, this is not even considered an aberration worthy of note. The headline in the paper said "Fire destroys historic family home" and you had to read the whole story to find out about the guns and ammunition. This is what passes for normal where I live.

Just makes me wonder what some of my other neighbors might be hiding behind those walls.

The ten least peaceful states

The Institute for Economics and Peace recently released a report of its rankings of the 50 states according to their peacefulness. Their rankings were based on five factors:

1. Number of homicides per 100,000 people.
2. Number of violent crimes per 100,000 people.
3. Number of people in jail per 100,000 people.
4. Number of police officers per 100,000 people.
5. General availability of small arms.

Using these criteria, these are the top ten least peaceful (or the top ten most violent) states:

1. Louisiana
2. Tennessee
3. Nevada
4. Florida
5. Alabama
6. Texas
7. Arkansas
8. Oklahoma
9. South Carolina
10. Maryland

The thing that I notice first about this list is that most of them are in the South and that most of them are among the poorest states in the country. I'm not sure how Nevada managed to insert itself in the list, but it does have a very high unemployment rate and perhaps suffers from crime related to its gambling industry. But I would definitely surmise that poverty and lack of economic opportunities play a very large role here.

I suspect that the ready availability of guns and the societal worship of the gun also plays a large role. All of these states, I believe, do fit that profile. As if to emphasize the point, here in Houston today a 6-year-old kindergartner took a loaded gun to school with him. The gun fell out of his pocket and discharged, injuring three small children.

This is the kind of society that we live in, where loaded guns are readily available to kindergartners, and they have not been taught by parents to leave guns alone. Indeed, there are actually people in the state of Texas who would seek to have schoolchildren armed. (I don't know if they would extend that to kindergartners, but frankly nothing would surprise me when it comes to guns and Texans.)

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Institute rated these ten states as the most peaceful:

1. Maine
2. New Hampshire
3. Vermont
4. Minnesota
5. North Dakota
6. Utah
7. Massachusetts
8. Rhode Island
9. Iowa
10. Washington

So, if you are looking for a peaceful place, you should head up East. You have several states to choose from there. You had best get as far away from the South and its armed citizenry as you can.

The big shoot-out between Utah and Arizona

Remember the shock, anger, and revulsion that we felt when the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and several of her constituents, including a child, took place in January? The shooter used a Glock semi-automatic with which he was able to get off 31 shots in seconds before bystanders could subdue him.

You might think that that event in Tucson would have made Arizonans leery of guns. And, furthermore, you might think that the Arizona legislature would have a very full plate considering the budget crunch, the unemployment rate, and the health care crisis in the state. Silly you!

It turns out that in spite of everything that has happened Arizonans still worship at the altar of the gun and their legislature is never too busy to spend time honoring that religion. They are all set to take time away from working on solutions to the above-mentioned REAL problems to designate the Colt Single Action Army revolver as the "State Gun."

I guess we should just be grateful they didn't choose the Glock. Frankly, it wouldn't have surprised me if they had, considering that legislature's track record.

In this action, Arizona is in an old-fashioned western shoot-out with Utah to become the first state to designate an official state gun. The Utah legislature has already passed its bill to designate the Colt .45 as its state gun, and apparently the governor is all set to sign it into law. So, unless it can find a way to speed up its legislative process, it looks like Arizona is going to lose this shoot-out.

Two news stories about guns

In Florida today, a five-year-old dropped a loaded gun in his pre-kindergarten classroom.

Meanwhile, out in Utah, the state legislature is all set to make the Browning M1911 semiautomatic pistol, a gun whose only purpose is to kill people, the state gun. It would be the first state to designate a state gun, but no doubt will not be the last. Can Texas be far behind?

And, of course, all across the country today, 34 more people were murdered with handguns, but that hardly even qualifies as a news story any more. It is expected and we just accept it. What kind of country have we become?

I am disgusted.

The most armed country in the world

Earlier this week, I saw a reference to a story about the most armed countries in the world and so I went Googling to find the source. Sure enough, there it was in a Reuters story from three-and-a-half years ago.

It seems that the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies had completed a Small Arms Survey of the world and had found that U.S. citizens owned 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms. This made the United States far and away the most armed country in the world. That worked out to 90 guns for every 100 people.

That was 2007. During much of the time since then, some Americans have been in a frenzy of gun-buying. I feel sure that if a survey were done now, it would show us even more out in front in the arms race - maybe 95 guns per 100 people would be more like it.

Yemen was the second most heavily armed country on a per capita basis. They had 61 guns per 100 citizens. Slackers!

Falling even farther behind were countries like Finland (56 guns per 100 people), Switzerland (46), Iraq (39 - Iraq, for heaven's sake!), and Serbia (38).

This country also has one of the highest rates of homicides by gun of any country in the world and most of those are committed with handguns. In 2005, for example, there were 10,100 gun-related homicides, 75% of which were committed with handguns.

Since the murders in Tucson last Saturday, Bloomberg News reports that there has been a run on Glocks in Arizona. It seems that everybody and his sister wants to own one of the guns that killed six people including a Federal judge and a nine-year-old child and almost killed a sitting Congresswoman. Allegedly, they are anxious to buy the guns now because they are afraid Congress will ban them!

They should have no fears. This Congress would never have the courage to stand up to the NRA and do something as sensible as banning semi-automatic handguns whose sole purpose is to kill a lot of people quickly.

Where do you suppose the next mass murder by handgun will be?