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Hallmark, have you developed appropriate cards?
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
National Curmudgeon Day
Hallmark, have you developed appropriate cards?
Saturday, January 19, 2013
It's Just Not Going Away
It's a good thing that so many people and news outlets and bloggers are now paying attention to the proliferation of guns. The DailyKos blog site is tracking news stories about a ridiculously long list of "gun fails" in which people have shot themselves, friends, neighbors, pets, and floors by accident or incompetence or both. Some of these incidents are actually funny in a sick sort of way, such as the Indiana case of a police officer responding to an emergency call to find a drunk guy with a pistol and shotgun, a jug of urine, along with a bunch of shot up television sets. Some are more disturbing, like the guy hired by a Michigan school as a guard after the Newtown murders, who left his pistol in a restroom "for a few moments." Read over this list at DailyKos and remember these people are all around us.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Can We Get Any Crazier?
Is it possible for America to get any more paranoid and schizoid about weapons in general and automatic weapons in particular? I think not, but I am not taking any bets on that.
So we've had 20 kindergarten and 1st grade children murdered by a man with an assault rifle, a bunch of people gunned down in a movie theater by another guy with an arsenal on his back, a couple of volunteer firefighters murdered when they responded to a fire alarm by another man with an assault rifle, and the NRA has come up with a plan to fix our gun violence by putting armed guards in every school in the country. That was before the NRA put out an ad calling the President a hypocrite because he is opposed to arming all the schools while his daughters have armed guards (aka, Secret Service) in their school. Clearly the NRA has abandoned all pretense that they are anywhere near a mainstream organization and even some conservatives are now labeling them a "fringe group."
Never mind that it would cost in the neighborhood of $15 BILLION per year to put armed guards in all 100,000 schools in the country. Never mind that it's unlikely that even spending that kind of wealth would even prevent loss of life. Never mind that there is a flourishing conspiracy movement out there that has already declared the Newtown school murders didn't even happen.
One of the major problems is that the availability of military style weapons (or IMO any clearly non-hunting firearms) allows anyone to become a horrendous killer at the drop of a hat. It's the people who "snap" and have access to these weapons that worry me. These are people who will easily pass a serious background check (which too often doesn't even happen due to loopholes in current laws) because they haven't previously done anything horrible. But it seems that past behavior is not necessarily an indicator of future behavior (along the lines of that financial disclaimer that companies provide with their stock prospectuses: past performance is not indicator of future return). The person who has been law-abiding in the past may very well "snap" in the midst of a child support battle, buy an easily obtainable automatic (or semi-automatic) weapon, and kill his girlfriend and a couple of her family members. It would inarguably be harder to do such a thing with a 22 rifle or a shotgun; not impossible, but more difficult than with a semi-automatic pistol. As I said in a previous post, the U.S. in 2013 is simply not the same country it was in 1789 when the Constitution and its amendments were produced.
By the way, it's hard to know exactly when the guy in Tennessee "snapped." Was it when he went out to buy the pistol and acted "perfectly normal?" Or was it five hours later when he killed his girlfriend? Does "snapping" preclude premeditation?
No, I don't think we can get any crazier. We will, however, undoubtedly have more examples of our collective craziness in the future. And that is very sad indeed.
So we've had 20 kindergarten and 1st grade children murdered by a man with an assault rifle, a bunch of people gunned down in a movie theater by another guy with an arsenal on his back, a couple of volunteer firefighters murdered when they responded to a fire alarm by another man with an assault rifle, and the NRA has come up with a plan to fix our gun violence by putting armed guards in every school in the country. That was before the NRA put out an ad calling the President a hypocrite because he is opposed to arming all the schools while his daughters have armed guards (aka, Secret Service) in their school. Clearly the NRA has abandoned all pretense that they are anywhere near a mainstream organization and even some conservatives are now labeling them a "fringe group."
Never mind that it would cost in the neighborhood of $15 BILLION per year to put armed guards in all 100,000 schools in the country. Never mind that it's unlikely that even spending that kind of wealth would even prevent loss of life. Never mind that there is a flourishing conspiracy movement out there that has already declared the Newtown school murders didn't even happen.
One of the major problems is that the availability of military style weapons (or IMO any clearly non-hunting firearms) allows anyone to become a horrendous killer at the drop of a hat. It's the people who "snap" and have access to these weapons that worry me. These are people who will easily pass a serious background check (which too often doesn't even happen due to loopholes in current laws) because they haven't previously done anything horrible. But it seems that past behavior is not necessarily an indicator of future behavior (along the lines of that financial disclaimer that companies provide with their stock prospectuses: past performance is not indicator of future return). The person who has been law-abiding in the past may very well "snap" in the midst of a child support battle, buy an easily obtainable automatic (or semi-automatic) weapon, and kill his girlfriend and a couple of her family members. It would inarguably be harder to do such a thing with a 22 rifle or a shotgun; not impossible, but more difficult than with a semi-automatic pistol. As I said in a previous post, the U.S. in 2013 is simply not the same country it was in 1789 when the Constitution and its amendments were produced.
By the way, it's hard to know exactly when the guy in Tennessee "snapped." Was it when he went out to buy the pistol and acted "perfectly normal?" Or was it five hours later when he killed his girlfriend? Does "snapping" preclude premeditation?
No, I don't think we can get any crazier. We will, however, undoubtedly have more examples of our collective craziness in the future. And that is very sad indeed.
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