Two mass shootings in one weekend and as the carnage goes on, the only response from the Right: Give everyone a gun and no one will have the guts to start shooting. Arm the teachers, arm the priests, hell arm the nuns, they, at least, have something to bitch about.
But the reality is that arming the public to fight back just doesn’t work. The instant reaction of my generation was to pick up a club and fight back. The instant reaction of this generation is to run and hide. Both are natural reactions. Pulling a gun and starting to shoot is not natural unless you are a sick pup or have serious, military training.
This weekend in El Paso a nut entered a mall with over three thousand people and started shooting. The only guy who did not run or hide stuck around to rescue children, an admirable move. What about the other 2,999? This was in Texas where close to a million carry permits have been issued
I shot a film in San Antonio a while back and every local member of the crew carried a gun. With 3,000 occupants of that mall it’s not unrealistic to figure that at least a couple hundred were packing when this took place. But no one took a shot at this guy for six minutes until the cops arrived and then he folded like a cheap suit and surrendered.
You think maybe if someone had pointed a gun at him before that, he would have done the same? This is one shooter in a place where there are thousands of people. You think maybe someone with a gun was behind him most of the time? But no one stepped up and that’s the reality of most of these situations. Down in Parkland Florida an armed cop didn’t step up as kids were being slaughtered. More guns just mean more people hiding under tables with guns. That’s the reality.
It takes a special mentality or some very serious training to shoot another human being even if he has it coming. Most of us don’t have this in us. Most of us shouldn’t. Any asshole that tells you more people should have guns is just proving that he is what I have just called him. We need fewer guns not more guns.
For over twenty years I was a federally licensed gun dealer. I didn’t sell to the public but that didn’t keep every clown who found out what I did from trying to buy a gun from me. Almost none of those people should have owned guns but many of them ended up doing so.
The NRA is right. Except in specific limited circumstances, we aretrying to take away your guns, mainly because most of you aren’t competent to have them. No one should be able to own a gun without passing a gun safety and competency test. No one outside special occupation limitations should be able to get a gun permit at all unless they can prove they will be using it for hunting and then only hunting style weapons should be available to them. No gun that could be classified as a weapon of war should be sold anywhere within the United States and that should include any automatic, semi-automatic or convertible weapon, including handguns.
And then there’s the last feeble excuse, home protection. What a lame crock of shit! Most people who make the most noise about home protection live in an area where there is never a break-in. For those that do, there is only one weapon that is functional, a short, double-barreled shotgun. Most handgun owners couldn’t hit a cow at 3 feet let alone a burglar at 20. The only thing that keeps them from shooting themselves is that they can’t remember the combination to their gun safe.
So let’s stop the bullshit about arming more incompetent shooters and let’s take a realistic view of the gun problem. You can’t shoot someone if you don’t own a gun.
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I’ve tried to get an effective nickname for Mitch McConnell for a long time. A couple of years back I named him Pruneface after the evil crook in Dick Tracy but later recognized the fact that not many folks are still alive that remember Pruneface. So I dropped it. But now Morning Joe Scarborough has come up with an absolute beauty. It encapsulates the evil of the man, his traitorous nature and his general self-serving, unpatriotic nature. Moscow Mitch is perfect. And to make it even more perfect it annoys McConnell.
It doesn’t really say he’s a spy because that’s too obvious but it does say he’s a Russian asset, which he very much is. Russia attacked us in 2016, again in 2018 and it’s still attacking us today and when Moscow Mitch had a chance to erect defenses; when two separate bills came across his desk that were aimed at helping us to help stop those attacks, he killed both of them. That’s way past unpatriotic, that’s being a Russian asset. That’s being a traitor.
Mitch comes from a state that is chuck-full of flag waving patriots. How come they continue to vote for this Commie lover? Trump keeps braying about all the Dems who are supposed to be socialists and here he is nurturing a punk who gives aid and sustenance to the communists. That’s helping Putin attack our democracy. According to Dana Milbank, Moscow Mitch has blocked legislation that requires presidential candidates to report any offers of campaign assistance, he has stopped a bill that would require campaigns to report contributions from any foreign source and he has buried a bill that would protect lawmakers from cyber attacks by foreign sources.
In addition he has blocked a bill that would require all Internet suppliers to report the purchase of all political ads. That went with a bill to ease cooperation between state election officials and intelligence agencies, a bill that imposes sanctions on any foreign entity that attacks our elections and a bill with sanctions specifically on Russia for their cyber attacks on us.
Look at all of the above. Tell me that you don’t see that all this damage to our security by one person doesn’t amount to treason. Tell me that Moscow Mitch isn’t a Russian asset. Maybe it’s going too far to say that Moscow Mitch is a communist but his actions have to tell you, no matter how dense you are, that he is definitely a communist asset.
But why is he doing it? Two simple answers! One is that he decided when Trump won the GOP primary in 2016 that the only survival for the billionaire led GOP was to go along with anything Trump wanted because that would give him time to subvert our entire judicial system. While Trump has been spewing out racial epithets, attacking our allies across the world and kissing the asses of dictators, Moscow Mitch has been installing inept Right wing judges all over the country, judges that will survive long after Trump is in jail, judges that will pervert our entire system with idiotic decisions that will cause democracy to fail and a billionaire class to take over our government.
But there’s also a big second reason why he has become Moscow Mitch and it’s all about personal power. Moscow Mitch is currently the beneficiary of a huge aluminum plant, paid for by a Russian oligarch, a buddy of Putin that will create a ton of jobs in places where the coalmines have already gone out of business. Moscow Mitch knows that those ex-miners will vote his way if he can get them back to work. Even if they understand what he is doing to the nation and to democracy, they will vote for him if he gets them a job and that may be the only way he will ever hold his seat in the Senate when all this comes out.
Moscow Mitch knows all this and he also knows there’s only one road for him to take. That road runs directly through Moscow and that’s why from now on he will always be Moscow Mitch.
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Elizabeth Warren was asked recently how she felt about America’s long-term policy of never being the first to launch a nuclear weapon. She declared she approved of it, as have most of the people in this country since we decimated Nagasaki and Hiroshima to end WWII.
It seemed a reasonable stance but then this week Liz Cheney, spawn of quite possibly the most evil man in the history of American politics, attacked Warren for that position when she Tweeted: “which American cities and how many American citizens are you willing to sacrifice with your policy of forcing the US to absorb a nuclear attack before we can strike back?”
It seems Liz’s nuclear policy hasn’t fallen far from the poisonous tree of her father. Of course Sleazy Dick wanted to nuke everyone who looked sideways at him. We’re still fighting one of the two useless wars he lied us into almost two decades later.
What Liz Cheney is too ignorant to understand is that our “don’t shoot first,” nuclear policy is the bedrock of our national security policy and the strongest deterrent to nuclear war available.
There is no question that we have the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. That puts us in a position to absolutely destroy any nation that would ever consider nuclear war with us. All the nations of the world, even the ones run by nuts, understand this and more than anything else it is what keeps them from even considering a first launch. But if we should use our weapons first, we lose that power because other nations that might consider war with us, knowing that we are trigger happy, will be afraid not to strike first. The threat is much more powerful than the action, at least in maintaining the peace.
Cheney’s off the wall babble makes one wonder about the much whispered idea, now circulating in GOP backrooms, that she might be a potential successor to Trump as party head once the Fat Liar is safely in prison. Yes, it would be another disastrous choice for the Republicans but they have distinguished themselves of late for picking the worst possible leaders and allowing them to run the Party and as much as possible, the nation into the ground.
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So now we have two new massacres to talk about and Greg Abbott, Governor of Texas where the largest shooting took place, tells us that this isn’t the time for action, this is the time for mourning. Yes, mourning is important you moron but action is the only way to stop this plague. It’s always time for action except when you’re a sleazy politician who has taken big bucks from the gun lobby.