If Guns Don’t Kill People What the Hell Does?

 

So once again some nut case shot up a crowd of people, this time with really impressive numbers. So what are we going to do about it? The answer is nothing. Nothing because Winchester, Remington and all the other weapons manufacturers are making so much money on the bodies of your kids that they just won’t stop and they know that they can convince just enough greedy politicians or just enough gun lovers to see things their way so that they will be able to sponsor this carnage as far into the future as we can see,

I just watched a debate on whether the problem is mental health or gun laws and it was obvious that the guy who wanted to tighten gun laws was the winner simply because a mental health solution is impossible to make functional. Even if you could line up everyone in the country and make them take a test, that test would be invalid as soon as their life conditions changed. Besides, there are many who hold the position that anyone who wants a semi-automatic weapon, a weapon of war, is already too unstable to own one.

The only argument for the proliferation of guns that holds up is that the gun manufacturers are willing to spend enormous amounts of money to protect their ability to keep guns moving across the counter.

Anyone who has the ability to read English correctly understands that the Second Amendment has no relevance to conditions in the modern world. We no longer have legal militias that are needed to protect us from invading armies, nor do we keep slaves, which those militias helped to keep in line. No one wants to talk about it but that’s the real reason for the Second Amendment. It’s just another curse of the Confederacy. And for those who are really crazy and really paranoid, THEY are not after you, but if THEY were, THEY would have gotten you a long time ago.

The reason that restricting guns wins out over testing for mental problems is that no matter what your mental condition, you can’t shoot a gun if you don’t have one. Background tests don’t work either. This guy in Vegas easily passed a background test and still killed all those people. I repeat; there is no practical reason for anyone to own an automatic weapon. For those who want us to believe that we will be ruining their enjoyment of life if they cant shoot a gun, all I can say is you don’t have a lfe worth living.

An interesting conversation on This Week about guns and gun laws between two young congressmen, one, Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts and the other, Scott Taylor, a Republican from Virginia. I found it interesting that Taylor, the Republican who is not in favor of gun restrictions made his argument on two points. One was that all attempts at gun restrictions were political and the other that background and mental checks wouldn’t work. Of course he didn’t want any restriction on guns either. It seemed that he just wanted t let the killing go on. Moulton, the anti-gun Democrat didn’t seem to have anything like a solution. He just wanted to have a conversation. We’ve had nothing but conversations about this and the killing just keeps going on.

Taylor kept referring to history in his argument. If he really knew anything about history he would know two things. The First Amendment was ratified in 1791 when those who signed it had no more knowledge of the sophisticated weaponry that would exist today then they did about space travel. Also that the amendment was sponsored by slave owning plantation owners and that the militia they needed to arm was the same one that they needed to protect them from slave uprisings. The concept of that same militia being needed to protect us from foreign invasion was very strong at that time but is now as invalid as everything else about this discussion. That, of course, is the rational point of attack on this antiquated piece of legislation. Not only is it no longer valid, it is no longer has any real basis

It’s time we overcame the gun manufacturers money and influence and passed some legislation that will eliminate the ability of our nuts to have weapons of war. It’s time we stopped worrying about the entertainment rights of gun owners and started worrying about the lives of our children.

Over 70% of Americans want gun restrictions. Over 90% want weapons of war banned. So why can’t we get 500 odd House members and 100 Senators to turn down the bribes they get from gun manufacturers and finally do the right thing?

More people have been killed with guns in this country in the last 50 years than have been killed in all our wars since the revolution. More people were killed in Las Vegas than have been killed by terrorists in this country since 911.

A very interesting theory of gun responsibility and rights was proposed by Fran Townsend, former Homeland Security advisor to George Bush, who points out that in the wake of the shootings in Vegas, many hotels are instituting much more stringent security protocols. These will inconvenience guests and cost the hotels millions. Rather than infringe on the rights of the general public and business, she proposes that gun security be made the problem of the gun owners themselves and that this can be done by reducing the ability of the bad guys to fire automatically. This can be done by reducing the size of magazines and eliminating bump stocks. After all she argues, why should everyone else’s rights be infringed upon so that gun owners can be free to shoot up the landscape.

Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA was on Face the Nation spewing out his bullshit in gargantuan quantities. He first spoke of all the NRA members who were victims of the shooting. Wait a minute! Are we supposed to be upset because these clowns whose opposition to serious gun restrictions caused the shooting, got caught in it? Seems like just retribution to me. La Pierre is a lackey of the gun manufacturers so when he speaks to the need for people to protect themselves we know he is doing it with forked tongue. How many NRA members in that crowd shot back at the gunman? Zero!

With no logical defense of the guns he tries to keep in circulation, LaPierre attacks the Hollywood elite for their reaction to the killings. That’s as logical as everything else he says. Because La Pierre has no intelligent point of view on this or any other subject he lies and obfuscates.

The ATF has stated very clearly that they have no authority to outlaw Bump Stocks. Therefore Diane Feinstein has proposed a law that will outlaw them. LaPierre won’t comment intelligently on Feinstein’s law but repeats ad nauseam that it’s the ATF’s job to do something about them, when it clearly it is not until congress outlaws them. LaPierre goes off on a rant about how every time bad guys with guns create a problem it’s good guys with guns that stop them. Yeah, Wayne but those good guys are cops, not gun nuts in the street with carry permits. It’s illogical to think that in a Las Vega crowd of many thousands of people no one had a gun on them and yet all these vigilantes with their carry permits cowered on the ground and didn’t shoot back. So the whole argument about defending yourself with your gun is pretty much bullshit, just like protecting yourself in your home from an armed burglar is bullshit. Most clowns who have guns in their homes have no idea or training in or any idea of how to use them. They are more likely to shoot off a finger or kill their own kids than they are to stop a home invasion.

There is no argument that we are fascinated with guns. One of the first things a kid does is pick up a stick and make believe it’s a gun. That’s true today just as it was true when I was a kid many years ago. The difference is that when I was a kid, if you got into a fight you didn’t go home and get a gun to solve it. You put up your fists and either got the crap kicked out of you or you kicked the crap out of the other guy. Either way both of you went home after the fight. That doesn’t happen if one of you has a gun.

This column always said that congressman Steve Scalise was as dumb as a post but then he got shot and everybody felt sorry for him. Now Scalise is back on the scene, hobbling on crutches but still proving that he is one of the dumbest asses in congress. He was interviewed this Sunday on Meet the Press, and just to prove that getting shot doesn’t enlighten you, he held to all his gun beliefs. He babbles about all the good that came out of him getting shot but is never able to mention anything that will actually help keep anyone else from suffering his fate. He speaks to all the love and prayers that people bestowed on him but he isn’t able to identify one thing that might have kept Paddock from killing 58 people last week. One wonders, how does one become so obtuse? Scalise, as do many other gun supporters, talks a lot about how Chicago with stringent gun laws has such a high rate of gun deaths. He argues this without seeming to realize that all one has to do if one wants a gun in Chicago, is drive ten minutes to Gary, Indiana and buy a gun. He seems to have no recognition of the fact that gun laws only work if they are federal rather than state based.

One of the biggest problems with indiscriminate gun ownership, one that Scalise obviously doesn’t recognize is the inability of many gun owners to functionally handle weapons. This is certainly true of the guy who shot him. If that guy had been at all skilled Scalise wouldn’t have been standing there telling us it’s okay for any clown who can afford the price to own a gun.

Many people, including Trump have called Paddock a sick man. That’s an evasion. Everyone who commits mass murder is in some way, shape, or form crazy. But to simply call Paddock crazy is to mask the problem. This guy was not diagnosed as having any severe mental problems. It would seem he was simply evil. The attempt to get into a discussion about mental illness is just a blind, erected by the gun industry to keep us from the single logical conclusion about gun deaths. Guns cause them!

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Is pure unadulterated bullshit! If Paddock didn’t have automatic weapons would over 500 people be wounded now, would 58 people be dead? Without a weapon in his hands, this 66 year-old man would not have been able to kill anyone.

The gun death rate in the US is 10 times more than in other industrialized countries. Japan and South Korea have close to zero gun deaths a year while America has over 30,000.The rate of gun deaths is 40 times higher here than it is in Britain but the rate of mental illness is not 40 times higher. Gun death has very little to do with mental illness and everything to do with the fact that we have more guns than people in this country.

Just to give you an example of the power of the gun lobby; The Center for Disease control has been expressly forbidden by law to even study the situation for the last two decades. This is because of a law sponsored by the NRA that prohibits the CDC from studying any aspect of gun control that might result in legislation that would, in any way, advance gun control. Hello 1984!

If the Vegas killer had been of foreign origin we would already have planes in the air to bomb some capital where brown people congregate, but because he is an old white man, our government is doing what we expect; nothing. The orange ape in the White House salivates over the possibility of some foreigner shooting up an American scene but there have been less than 100 deaths in this country due to foreign sponsored terrorism since 911 and there have been hundreds of thousands of American sponsored gun deaths.

The great anomaly of this crazed process is that gun laws get looser instead of stricter after each of these massacres. This is because of the great fallacy that owning a gun makes you safer. In fact keeping a gun in your house puts you and your family at a very high risk of getting shot.

Warren Berger, Republican, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court called the Second Amendment a FRAUD, perpetrated on the American people by special interest groups. He was, of course, referring to arms manufacturers, What Berger was speaking about was a reinterpretation of that amendment in the 1970s to suit the needs of Winchester and Remington.

Look, everyone knows what has to be done, just as everyone knows that it can’t be done until we get all the legislators who are on the gun lobby payroll out of office. There will be no functional gun legislation until every candidate has to swear to promote new gun laws before he gets your vote. Until that happens they’re just going to keep killing your kids.