Well the Governor of New York has already jumped in and the President is now deeply embroiled in the gun issue so it’s time for all of us to pick a side and start shooting.
First let’s look at some statistics. Every single day of every single year 24 people are killed by people with guns in the United States. That comes to 8,760 dead bodies per year and that doesn’t even count those that are killed by accident or suicide. If you counted them it would bring the total to over 25,000 gun deaths a year.
Requirement to board a plane-You must be viewed naked by the TSA.
Requirement to buy a gun from a private seller at a gun show- None.
The USA is responsible for 80% of all gun deaths in the 23 richest countries in the world… combined.
The favorite slogan of the gun loving right, headed up by the NRA, is “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” It’s catchy but like almost everything else the NRA says, it’s inaccurate. It should read, “Guns don’t kill people. People with guns kill people.” I never saw anyone kill anyone else with a slogan.
The NRA has taken its stance. It is firmly opposed to any and all gun restrictions, no matter how many kids get killed, or to whom they belong. Not only are they staunch in their resolve but they have loudly announced that they intend to fight this battle on every front, with no concept of public decency and no limits to their despicable tactics. All one has to do to grasp the depths to which they are willing to stoop, is to view the newest ad for the anti-gun control position that brought the President’s daughters into the equation. I’m speaking about the ad where they declare that the school the President’s daughters go to has armed guards to protect them but he doesn’t want your kids to have armed guards in their school. Any moron knows that the President’s daughters are guarded by the Secret Service, and there are no armed guards at her school. There can be no doubt that the NRA has established a position outside acceptable parameters even for them, when Morning Joe displayed his outrage at this slimy output.
On the other hand there are a number of people who have already established series of criteria that should be met in order help the nation deal with a problem that is seriously out of control. These criteria include but should not be limited to; a practical rethinking on the subject of how we evaluate and treat our mentally ill, how we expand and make available all records of those who sell, apply for, buy and are denied licenses to buy guns, how violent movies and video games affect people and yes, even what guns and equipment should be banned or restricted and how to accomplish that without violating individuals rights.
This kind of comprehensive approach is necessary if we are to make any real progress toward the goal, which is to increase the safety of our citizens. I say increase because total safety, although the ideal goal, is not a reality.
The problem with facilitating this kind of logical approach is that the world is full of greedy pigs and their moronic sycophants who make a living by exposing the rest of us to all kinds of danger. I am speaking, of course, about the NRA, an organization, which once backed a responsible position in the protection of sportsmen and hunters rights but has sunk to the depths of being a lobby for the gun industry.
It’s being run by a coterie of degenerate swine like Wayne LaPierre and David Keene, with support from the likes of Ted Cruz (R) a newly elected fascist Senator from the lowest depths’ of Texas, Asa Hutchinson, former congressman from Arkansas, former administrator of the DEA and former head of the Border Patrol, but still a biased nut job that thinks guns are beautiful but not dangerous and Grover Norquist of “No Tax” fame, who when asked if the NRA will concede a need for gun regulation of any kind has refused to address the NRA position which he knows to be indefensible.
This group is aided by people like Arizona Republican, Matt Salmon, who likes to pull a copy of the constitution out of his pocket, just so he can misinterpret the Second Amendment. His staunchest ally in this misinterpretation is none other than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who should know better but would rather let his vision remain clouded by bias, fostered by a gun industry that surely has him in its pocket.
Enough has been written about the interpretations of the Second Amendment to keep us reading for the next ten years, without a coffee break. This is especially bizarre considering the brevity of the one sentence amendment.
The gun lobby puts all it marbles in the basket of a 2010 interpretation, known as the Hellar case and a 2011 expansion of that verdict, both, by the current, far right, supreme court, led by neocom, Scalia and his sycophant Clarence, “What are ethics?” Thomas.
This interpretation completely ignores the first clause of the sentence that makes up the amendment and bases it’s ruling on only the second clause, thereby ignoring the text and the intentions of the men who wrote it. This is such a flagrant denial of both the spirit and the text of the constitution that it would be considered a joke if it weren’t so tragic.
Just to be clear on this, the Second Amendment states: “ A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
This is a compound declarative sentence. It’s not as easy to comprehend as a simple declarative sentence but it shouldn’t be beyond the intellectual grasp of US congressmen and a Supreme Court judge. And it wouldn’t be, if they weren’t working from a position of bias.
What the sentence does, is to reveal a problem and give us the solution. We need a militia and so we have a right to own guns in order for us to make that militia functional. There’s no mention of hunting, it doesn’t deal with collecting and never touches on the need for defense against home invasion. This is not to say that these aren’t legitimate concerns of various citizens, just that they are never mentioned in the constitution so the various rights to these functions get no legitimacy from a constitution in which hey are never mentioned.
Scalia wants to discard the first clause of the sentence, calling it a “prefatory phrase” and interpret the last part alone. “The amendment could be rephrased,” he says. Maybe it could, but it isn’t. It’s right there in black and white for us to read, and it says that a militia is necessary and so we have a right to own guns so that we can man that militia. If anything else was intended
there was no reason to include the first clause. If anything else was intended than the first fathers would have written the sentence differently.
But that was in 1779 and this is 2013 and we don’t have or need militias because we now have a standing army to keep us safe from the British King and anyone else who screws with us. So the reason for the right to bear arms, which is stated in the same sentence, is no longer valid and even if it were, none of the other things we do with guns are supported by any language in the constitution and therefore could easily be made illegal by any presidential decree.
The true meaning of the Second Amendment was clarified and enforced when the Second Congress passed the Militia Act, which stated that all men of military age must obtain a musket, shot, powder and other equipment for service in militias. It would seem obvious that a supposed scholar like Scalia would have learned of this and understood its meaning but I guess that is just beyond his abilities.
Firearms, in those days were single shot weapons that took a god deal of time to load, not auto or semi automatic weapons that can kill people the way a lawnmower cuts down grass. The point of the second amendment is to ensure security not undermine it. It’s time that all the people in this country, the Right, the Left and the Center recognize that this kind of at will killing is not what the founders had in mind when they added the Second Amendment into the Bill of Rights.
It’s clear that Scalia, Salmon and the rest that are trying to sell us various phony interpretations of the constitution are the bought and paid for agents of the gun industry.
The NRA uses as part of their platform the concept that rather than ban guns, we should expand mental health services and that would help with the problem but the NRA has continually fought to evade the N.I.C.S. Improvement Act, which has dealt with mentally ill people being banned from buying or owning guns since its inception in 2007. They have chipped away at parts of it until it is all but useless. The truth is, that the NRA would rather have all your kids shot by mentally ill people than lose one sale for their gun industry sponsors.
In the Washington Post, this weekend, Joe Manchin, (D) Senator from West Virginia laid out a comprehensive and sensible plan for the protection of Americans. Manchin admits that he is a hunter and a lifetime member of the NRA but when questioned about gun bans he falters and evades specifically naming what guns he would ban. He also states that, “If you blame the NRA for what happened there (Newtown), you’re blaming 4 million law abiding Americans.” He’s wrong. Polls show that a majority of those 4 million Americans that belong to the NRA don’t back their policies on assault weapons and other non-sporting firearms and bear no blame. The blame goes to the leadership of the NRA who don’t care if your kid gets killed as long as they pick up their paycheck from the gun industry.
And it’s not just in America that the NRA is making trouble. Not content with blocking legislation that might control the ability of crazy people to carry out massacres in this country they are also working to thwart International action. They have helped to scuttle the Global Arms Treaty by which governments were to agree not to export weapons to countries that are under arms embargos or to areas where genocide, crimes against humanity or other violations of international humanitarian law existed. I guess they figured that all those hunters and sportsmen, around the world, who like to massacre women and children shouldn’t be deprived of their right to a good kill. It seems incomprehensible that anyone with any moral compass could be against this law but the NRA has come down firmly in that position.
Amnesty International has called on the NRA to drop their campaign of lies and distortion in opposition to the Global Arms Treaty on humanitarian grounds but there’s nothing human about the NRA
Wayne LaPierre, David Keene and Asa Hutchinson all think the answer to child safety is putting armed guards in our schools, a move, incidentally, that would boost gun sales. Keene compares Israel where a war rages against the Palestinian population and they have guards in all the schools to Newtown, CT, a quiet rural town. It never occurs to him that Israel is a war zone and that to equate rural Connecticut to it, is to admit defeat in the war against guns. He ignores the fact that the rest of the world has insane people and sees violent films and violent video games but doesn’t have our history of mass murders and he doesn’t admit that the rest of the civilized world doesn’t have a gun murder problem because the rest of the civilized world bans guns.
Wayne LaPierre also thinks guards in schools is the solution. He doesn’t see that it is a declaration of failure. The guy is a supercilious pig who would lie about anything just to make his point. He has stated as fact, that all the kids were killed in the infamous school attack in China, even though the attacker had only a knife. This is a flat out lie. None of the kids in the China attack were killed, specifically because the attacker didn’t have a gun.
He claims that millions of Americans in his organization agree with his position on guns. In fact a majority of NRA members think that we should ban assault weapons and large magazines.
Tears flow from his eyes, ostensibly at the thought of the tiny bodies in Newtown but more realistically at the thought of his bosses in the gun industry, firing him for not being able to stop gun legislation. He has the nerve to say out loud that we should try every means to stop this slaughter but not to ban any kind of gun. He says that guns are nothing but tools. True but the best way to save a tree is to take the chainsaw out of the lumberjack’s hand.
Each horrendous event was somehow different and individual but the one constant in each slaughter was that they were all done with guns. Insanity, young white males with problems, lack of enforcement, entertainment influences, all can be said to have effected these slaughters, but guns were the primary factor and without them, none of these mass killings would have happened.
The US gun homicide rate is thirty times that of any other economically advantaged country. Why? Other countries have mental problems, some a lot more than us. The whole world watches pretty much the same movies, TV and music. England’s culture is pretty much the same as ours but they have only 3% of the gun deaths per year that we do. Why? Japan is the absolute home of violent TV and video games but their gun death rate is almost Zero. Why, because we have 5% of the world’s population and 50% of the world’s guns.
Learn how to reload