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Posts Tagged guns
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So Obama has given us his bill of particulars for mitigating against the next mass killing spree, and New York governor Andy Cuomo has charged merrily ahead with assault weapons ban for my home state. I’m sure some of the ideas presented between the two of them (and with more certainly to follow from other politicians) will help make a difference, but in the short run they will probably not show results.
That is fine, since the problem of gun violence is a behemoth. It is the trajectory of the gun crimes that needs to change, and it would be foolish to hope to reverse course immediately. The difficulty, of course, is our national Attention Deficit Disorder which could easily thwart even these modest improvements. And, as was pointed out by he president, the spree killings we’ve seen of late are not even the main course of our feast of sorrow. It is the routine shootings and maimings that occur in their dozens every week that ought to be our focus.
What is interesting is the sop that Obama apparently felt compelled to throw to the NRA in order to stymie their “blame the video games” cannard. I have been watching a lot of C-Span’s Washington Journal call-in program, and the number of yee-haws who have gotten lost in Wayne LaPierre’s smokescreen is staggering. Does anyone doubt that if Wayne had targetted pinball machines during his infamous presser that half the country would now be demanding that Netflix destroy all it’s copies of “Tilt”?
And yet, one cannot fault the NRA for its gift at  spinning PR gold from bullshit. Here is a clip of Republican congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, just one of many Republicans who have dutifully toed the line:
Diane Franklin, a Missouri legislator, is also playing the “blame the games” game. She has suggested taxing violent video games and putting the proceeds towards mental health treatment. Can you imagine if this twit had the nerve to tax guns for the same reason?
I thought I would use Diane Franklin as the final, “most outrageous” example of the GOP response to Newtown, but it actually gets worse! Martha Dean, a lawyer and recent (unsuccessful) GOP candidate for Connecticut Attorney General is–you guessed it–a “Newtown Truther”! Yes, there is a conspiracy movement afoot advancing the notion that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary was staged! A video promoting the theory (and which this cuh…cuhhh…cooooonsenting adult links to from her Facebook) already has over ten million hits!
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| Ol’ Painless: Sleep tight, kids!
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Now, you would think that all these right wingers nose-diving into their own vomit would leave  Obama free to let the video game meme eat itself. Instead, as part of his 500-point plan to prevent every fucknut in our galaxy from acquiring their  own replica of Ol’ Painless, the President seems to have taken the bait and has requested Congress authorize $10,000,000 for a CDC report on guns which will probe the connection between shootings and video games.
The joke may be on the NRA, however, since the real intent of the proposal appears to be to get lawmakers to undo a prohibition, in place since 1996, against the CDC investigating the causes of gun violence, a prohibition lobbied for by the NRA who feared it would lead to anti-gun propaganda.
It seems unlikely that at the end of the day the CDC will report back that the Super Mario Bros. are more responsible for events like Newtown and Aurora than Bushmaster is, but I look forward to watching the NRA reap what it has sewn. In the meantime, video games are poised to do to the GOP what rape did for them only a few months ago.
Update: Sam Harris has some sobering thoughts about the gun issue.
It is rare for karma to deliver such a stinging rebuke to one of society’s proudest assholes, but such was the case this past week when the latest of our semi-annual school shootings was mitigated after a teacher talked the gun out of the would-be killer’s hands. This unusual example of God tipping his hand comes mere weeks after NRA spokesfuck Wayne LaPierre declared that “the ONLY thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”, after which he declared that the NRA’s response to  the Newtown massacre is to put a gunslinger in every school. At taxpayer expense.
If our president is wise, Ryan Heber will be in the gallery at this year’s State of the Union address. Twist the knife, Barry! (Oh Christ, now someone is going to whine about how more people are killed with knives than guns on the third Thursday of every month ending in “R” and why don’t we ban those too…)
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I am still recovering from the flu-that-would-not-end, and I would prefer that that, along with the Fiscpocalypse, was all that was on America’s collective mind. Obviously it isn’t.
I don’t know what I can say about Connecticut that would be more to the point than what I said a few months back when a similar tragedy broke in Aurora , CO. Apparently I don’t need to, either. For the first time in a long while the NRA and its obsessive need to keep every lunatic in the nation armed for World War Z is under scrutiny. And while one can never predict Washington and her fickle moods, its possible that at least some modification of our gun laws may emerge from this horror.
The real takeaway from this obscenity has to be that it will not be the  NRA, Washington or our nation’s fruitcakes that will set the course from this point forward. It is us. If the butchery of all those children, wives, mothers and friends is not enough to change all of our attitudes, to say once and for all that we are on the wrong course civilly when it comes to our permissive attitude towards weapons of war, that the bad obviously outweighs the good, then we simply are a nation of  voluntary inmates in a concentration camp.
It does not matter that we still don’t know the “right” answer. I am not going to pretend that I have heard of any sort of magic wand policy that will assure an end to this rolling holocaust of murder, but it is time at last to put the weapon mongers on the defensive.
My starting point? “One man, one gun”. If you absolutely must be armed, a single weapon is all you may own. This fits the criterion of the 2nd Amendment, and leaves the vulnerable in possession of everything they could possibly need in the way of self defense. Let the other side argue as best they can against the sensibility of that position in the teeth of the obvious diminishing returns of our over-powered weapons fetishism. The “conversation” has to begin with a position for sane gun laws that is  as immovable as that of the NRA’s, before a sensible midle ground can emerge.
One man, one gun. If you need more than one gun, then you are probably on your way to butcher an elementary school.
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