Tag: NRA

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Listening Thoughtfully to the Least Thoughtful People on the Planet

If the NRA wanted Mitt Romney to support the rights of guns owners, he would say yes, clearly.

If they asked him to support expanded “conceal and carry” laws, I’m sure he would.

If they asked him to support continued legalization of personal ownership of semi-automatic machine guns, he’d be delighted.

A United Nations resolution guaranteeing the right to guns for everyone in the entire world? No problem with that. He would point out that Assad would have been overthrown by now if only his citizens had had guns. Well, aside from the tanks. Or the artillery. Or the helicopters.

And now, Mr. Romney, we would like you to put on this tutu and these ballet slippers and tights and perform “Tiny Dancer” for us.

Absolutely.

Is there anything, anything at all, a Republican will not do for the gun lobby? Is it normal for a lobbying group to be able to demand anything at all, without limit, of a politician? Is it normal that a politician like that would get elected?

Have you considered carefully the fact that he NRA came into being at the same time that the KKK disappeared?

Have you considered that the NRA is not really about guns at all. The people pulling the strings don’t care about guns. The Republican Party surely can’t be quite as stupid as they look on the issue. The guns have always been a wedge issue. Mitt Romney might just as well go around saying “and I will keep the darkies in their place”.

I would like to hear someone mock Romney: do you think for yourself on the issue of guns because it appears to me that there is not one single thing you will not give to the NRA if they ask for it. Shouldn’t a politicians exercise some independent judgment? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself.

The parents of the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting are on the phone– will you take their calls? I didn’t think so.

 

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The Naked Assassin: Nidal Malik Hasan

Nidal Malik Hasan killed 14 soldiers the other day, at Fort Hood, Kileen, Texas.

Hasan was an army psychiatrist who was supposed to help frustrated and anxious soldiers deal with their issues before being sent back to war, or civilian life. He was also a devout Muslim. Republicans are sounding the alarm about this– kind of screeching, really, that you can’t trust a Muslim, and that this whole idea of “tolerance” and respect for diversity, should be shelved in a favor of a good, old-fashioned, bitchin’ jihad.

Pat Robertson solemnly intoned that Islam is a religion of death. This, from the guy who supports the death penalty and once advocated assassinating Hugo Chavez.

Hasan is a Muslim. He apparently became more and more disturbed about the idea of serving an army that was involved in war against Muslims as it became clear that he himself was going to be deployed to Afghanistan. I suppose he wouldn’t have been bothered if we had been making war on fellow Christians, as in World War I and II, or Buddhists, or Hindus or Communists.

Come to think of it– why was it a problem? In all of the history of the world, has the religion of our enemies ever been a factor in whether or not we were gladly willing to slaughter thousands of them without mercy? My goodness, Mr. Hasan– what’s your problem? Why are you in the military in the first place? If you don’t want to kill people….

The real reason we kill people is, usually, money. Oil. What’s love got to do with it?

Or is it race, after all? If Germany had continued to fight like the Japanese, would we have used the nuclear bomb on Berlin? Do you even wonder for a moment? Never.

When I first heard about the shootings at Fort Hood, I thought, well, there you go: another trained killer does his job. Why are we surprised? Why is anyone surprised when, occasionally, trained killers “go off” without orders, without a plan, without logic, except that blinding, incoherent fury at the world?

But Hasan is a Muslim. He is a devout Muslim. He went to a strip club. That’s right– several times, shortly before the shooting, where he paid girls to give him lap – dances. So how did we know he was a “devout” Muslim? Because he said so? The way we say so, when we proclaim that we are devout Christians, going off to destroy Iraq even though it had nothing to do with 9/11?

There was usually more than one customer at the strip club, and most of them were not “devout” Muslims.

Senator Joe Lieberman insists that he is going to investigate if the army did a lousy job of assessing the risk posed by Dr. Hasan, since he clearly proclaimed his ethical problems with serving in the American army long before he exploded into the news.

Now let me be clear– I don’t think anybody can know for sure, in advance, just who is going to be the next mass killer in America. If the signs were that clear, you would hear about people being detained because some credible experts believed these persons were about to go on a shooting spree. Never happens. Why? Because we can’t know who is about to do it. Well, yes, there is that constitutional issue– but Bush solved that and Obama doesn’t seem poised to change it. Yes, we can arrest and detain and even torture people who have not committed any crimes. Damn right. Bless you, Rudolph Giuliani.

It seems to me that the army was actually quite sensible about dealing with Hasan. I would bet that he wasn’t the only Muslim in the army who expressed strong misgivings about the mission to Afghanistan. I would bet that there was not a single “unmistakable” sign that he was about to do what he did. Unless you count the fact that he bought some guns.

But then again, he was in the army. Then again, he was in America.

It is my understanding that the Obama Administration is continuing George Bush’s policy of “extraordinary rendition”– detaining and hold terror suspects and shipping them to other countries like Egypt or Jordan or Syria to be tortured.

Was there ever a bigger public illusion than the illusion of democracy in the U.S.?

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So a guy, apparently, shows up at an Obama town hall meeting in New Hampshire a few weeks ago with a semi-automatic weapon and a t-shirt that refers to Thomas Jefferson’s statement: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” This guy’s t-shirt actually says “It’s time to water the tree of liberty…”

Let’s imagine that a few steps away some other dude pulls out a doobie and lights it up. And a few feet from him, some woman decides to breastfeed her baby. And a few steps from her, two men kiss each other on the lips. And a few steps from those two, an Arabic man puts a mat on the ground in the direction of Mecca. And he is standing close to guy wearing an “impeach George Bush” t-shirt.

Of these loyal citizens, whom might the police choose to detain? Well, all of them, except the man with the gun.

The gun-toting “libertarian” won’t be detained– he is exercising a sacred right. He also loudly and rather hysterically claims that he is standing up for liberty– he doesn’t want the government acting like a nanny and telling him what to do, nosirreee. Like telling him who he can kiss or what he can smoke or who he can pray to.

Of course, if that same government wants to tap his phone without a warrant, or put him on a plane and send him to Syria for some serious questioning, or send him to some other foreign country to lose his arm or leg or life on behalf of an oil company, or allow his job to be outsourced to some sweatshop in Asia somewhere… well, that’s fine with him. And if a corporation tells him what kind of health coverage he can have and what kind of treatments he can receive, well, gosh, that’s not like “liberty” or anything like that, I guess.

I’m just trying to imagine the American mind set here… when a protestor shows up with a t-shirt that advocates impeaching George Bush, he gets busted, dragged off– by government employees– because he constitutes some vague sort of risk. The courts almost always find these actions unconstitutional but the Bush Administration never paid much attention to the courts or judges or the law. But a man hangs around the venue at which President Obama is appearing with a semi-automatic weapon…. ?

I don’t think the hysterical right is even a large minority right now. I think these are marginal people, ill-informed, a little crazy. But their hysterics, at these town-hall meetings, are getting enormous media play– from the mythical “liberal” media, no less– and they seem to be scaring Obama, who seems to be backing away from a public option on health care even though polls of the rational majority have shown that most people are in favor of it.

There was a woman at a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire who got all teary and emotional about the threat to America by a health care plan that threatened to turn her nation into another Russia. She might as well have added that the fairies are trying to steal her turnips, for all the logic in her position. But she gets on the air, on TV, and makes people uneasy, and the Democrats back away.

It’s beyond contempt. It makes you wonder why anyone ever thought there was such a thing as “progress”.

It’s really easy to look back at McCarthyism and chuckle and assure ourselves that we have far more sense than that nowadays. No we don’t. And I have a feeling that a lot of people who find McCarthy ridiculous today might someday look back at this decade and find a lot of ridiculousness too. The use of torture and arbitrary arrests and detention? The hysterical rituals by which we think we’re keeping terrorists from blowing up Ellis Island and the Brooklyn Bridge? The determination of the widows of victims of 9/11 to honor liberty and freedom by banning unpatriotic plays from the theatre to be built as part of the new World Trade Center complex?

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The Courteous Gun

Mr. Wong told the man that he had probably shot 10,000 rounds in about a year’s time. “He was pleasant,” the man recalled. “He was courteous. You would never suspect that he would pose a threat to anyone.” NY Times, April 11, 2009

You mean, aside from shooting 10,000 rounds?

What more information do you need? The man who didn’t want his name used happened to be using the shooting range next to Jiverly A. Wong one day. He noticed that Wong was practicing the art of firing his hand gun rapidly and accurately. This is America, where “you would never suspect” that someone practicing using a handgun would pose a threat to somebody. After all, Mr. Wong had a permit.

If that statement– “would pose a threat to anybody”– doesn’t alarm you, you must a red-blooded red-state rural American.

The NRA would probably respond, as they have in the past, that if only someone else in the room had had a gun, Mr. Wong would have been stopped.

Okay– let’s say someone else in the room had a pistol strapped to his leg. Mr. Wong fired 98 shots and killed most of his victims in the first 60 seconds. So this potential hero is sitting in the classroom working on his forms and a stranger walks in. The stranger pulls out his pistols and starts firing, quickly, randomly. Let’s say we’re really lucky and our hero isn’t one of the first ones hit. Let’s say we’re even luckier and he doesn’t happen to be directly in front of the shooter. The potential hero, quick as he can, gets to his feet and pulls out his own heroic tool. Is he going to stop Mr. Wong with an accurate shot, under terrifying circumstances, before the damage is done?

Maybe the hero gets lucky and gets his gun out before he is himself hit, and maybe he draws it without drawing Mr. Wong’s attention, and maybe he isn’t too nervous and excited and is able to aim and keep his hand steady and get off an accurate shot or two. Even under the best of circumstances, several people will already be dead. And anyone who has seen real footage of people engaged in a gun battle know that it is very difficult to shoot calmly, accurately, under those circumstances.

I wonder if the families of Mr. Wong’s victims consider themselves martyrs to the second amendment. They died so Americans can be free to own guns without the slightest impediment.

On this website a writer argues, remarkably, that if we allow the government to abridge the rights guaranteed under the second amendment, they will feel free to take away the rights guaranteed under any of the other amendments.

Okay. Would this person be amenable to the argument that if we allow the police to tap our phones, they will then feel free to plant hidden cameras and microphones in our bedrooms? If we allow the government to ban pornography, will they soon come after our editorials? If you let your child have a sip of beer, will he then feel free to do drugs?

From the same hilarious pro-gun website:

To deny a human the right to defend him- or herself from any threat is the most grievous crime against humanity that I can think of. Human enslavement, you say? Genocide? Well, that kind of thing can’t happen to an armed populace. Hitler’s holocaust, together with a world war, began by disarming the German people. So to own a gun for the purpose of defense is one of the most universal and basic human rights – period.

That’s pretty amazing.  Aside from the historical inaccuracy (the Nazis never “disarmed” anybody) the writer essentially asserts that the only way to preserve freedom is through violent resistance.  Virtually every developed nation in the Western world is a vigorous example of the contrary.

And when, pray tell, have Americans ever used their guns to defend liberty?  And you really think you will stop tanks and aircraft with your pistol and your AK-47?

What’s even more amazing is that after years and years of solid majorities favoring some form of gun control, the NRA has been able to stymie every effort to do it.

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The NRA and Iraq

Does the NRA, and Charlton Heston, know what their lusty cohorts in the White House are doing in Iraq?

The NRA argues that every man, woman, and child in America should be armed. That’s the best way to ensure democracy and freedom. If the government starts regulating the possession of handguns, rifles, shotguns, and Uzi submachine guns, it will soon be able to take away our precious freedoms and liberties.

The U.S. government under George Bush is trying to do precisely that to Iraq. It is bursting into their “homes” and searching for weapons and it plans to take them away if it finds them.

The NRA says that just because guns are dangerous and are often used to commit felonies doesn’t mean that any citizen should have the slightest difficulty obtaining them. In other words, you can’t assume someone is going to do something illegal with a gun, the way you can assume someone is going to do something illegal with a blank CD or a minidisc.

But here you have George Bush acting as if Saddam Hussein doesn’t have the natural right as a citizen of the world to own a few nukes or chemical bombs.

My question is– what if Saddam, or somebody, persuaded the U.N. to send a weapons inspection team to the U.S., to see if they have anything that could hurt people around the world? Like mines, chemical weapons, nukes, artillery, and guns.

Ah– but we’re the good guys. Well, we are. But we’re not perfect. And who knows what kind of idiot might end up in the White House some day?

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that in a society that controlled access to guns, the police would still have access to them. That’s the special nature of their jobs. They have special authority. They’re supposed to keep us from hurting ourselves and each other.

So the U.S., it could be supposed, has to have nukes to make sure that the Saddam Husseins– and Charlton Hestons — of the world don’t go around bullying other people.

The trouble is that the U.S. sells mines and helicopters and bombers to other countries. Sometimes, through happenstance, we end up facing the barrels of our own guns.

Why doesn’t the NRA step up and put an end to this nonsense? Where is Charlton Heston when you really need him? He should be railing against the Bush administration! Chemical weapons don’t kill people– despots do! And when you criminalize the possession of nukes, only the tyrants will have nukes! Saddam Hussein should show up at the next NRA party– usually held in a nearby town after a mass shooting– and hold a nuclear bomb in his arms above his head and proclaim, “…from my cold dead fingers!”

I can’t even begin to explain North Korea or Iran in this context. Except that Iraq, of course, has the oil.

And that reminds me of what a famous outlaw, Willie Sutton, said when someone asked him why he robbed banks.

Because that’s where they keep the money.

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The Festive Charlton Heston

In a letter, the N.R.A. president, actor Charlton Heston, said the group was canceling a gun show along with all other “festive ceremonies normally associated with our annual gathering.” The group was nevertheless going to hold its annual members meeting at the city’s convention center. From the New York Times, April 21, 1999

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“Festive ceremonies normally associated with our annual gathering”?????

This is Moses speaking. Moses also asserted that the massacre at Littleton, Colorado shows that every school should have armed guards. Governor of Minnesota and Wrestler Jesse Ventura agreed: “Had there been someone who was armed, in this particular situation, in my opinion, it may have stabilized.” But what does “stabilized” mean to a man who used to run around in tight underpants and throw chairs at people in masks?

Well, why stop at permitting concealed handguns? I think they should be obligatory. Just imagine: you’re at school. A couple of kids come in wearing black trench-coats with furtive expressions on their faces. You gonna wait to see what happens? Hell, no. Case closed. Incident ended. No more anxiety for all those parents sending their kids off to school in the morning– they can trust that everyone is well protected!

Wouldn’t you feel better knowing that your teenage daughter was at school, surrounded by a bunch of illiterate metal morons carrying concealed handguns?

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Think of how convenient that concealed hand-gun might be as well, next time you meet up with those hooligans from that rival football team across town, or that dorky teacher that failed you in Consumer Ed!

Charlton Moses Heston, interrupting his prayer breakfast (I kid you not) also said this: “If there had been even one armed guard in the school, he could have saved a lot of lives and perhaps ended the whole thing instantly.”

Errr…. according to the New York Times, Neil Gardner, of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s department, was in the school at the time, and was quite armed. In fact, sounds like he took a few shots and then cleared out as quickly as possible.

And I’m ashamed about the prayer breakfast bit. Deeply ashamed. Deeply, deeply, deeply. Everyone reading this should know that many, many Christians abhor violence and guns, and don’t consider a gun show to be a “festive” occasion, regardless of whether or not it opens with a prayer breakfast.

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The Wilder and Crazier Lawyers

New Approach to Gun Control

Since the lawyers have finally taken care of the evil tobacco industry, let’s think about some good things lawyers might do for us.

I have an idea. The lawyers sued the tobacco industry because the tobacco industry markets a product which has been proven to cause serious medical problems for the consumers that use it, and which costs our society billions of dollars to provide medical treatment for these consumers.

That line of reasoning sounds simple and logical enough. But the tobacco industry is just a start. Why not sue the companies like Browning Arms (Utah, makers of the Browning shotgun), or Smith & Wesson that make guns? Here again we have a product which is bad for the consumer, but which the consumer stupidly buys anyway, deluded into thinking the product enhances his manhood or femininity, and which causes death and untold suffering, and which costs us taxpayers billions of dollars every year to provide medical treatment for the casualties.

This is really not much of a stretch, folks. The government routinely analyzes products or activities that are harmful to the public and, if it is proven that the harm they produce exceeds their usefulness or value, they enact legislation to prohibit or restrict it. The government does this for pornography, cigarettes, alcohol, toxic chemicals, radiation, drugs, and so on. The government even assumes that anyone who buys a recordable CD might be thinking about duplicating a copyrighted piece of music. It doesn’t wait to see if you are actually going to do it or not. It ASSUMES you are, and taxes you for it. Gives the money to the recording industry so they can pay their lawyers.

Now, the government looked the tobacco industry and came to a weird conclusion. It said, well, you do a lot of damage to people’s health. You lie to them and deceive them. You probably put additives in that increase the users level of physical addiction. Pay us and we’ll let you continue to do these bad things.

If Mosanto corporation, for example, produced a fertilizer that caused cancer in the people who eat the food grown with it, would we accept a payment from Mosanto in exchange for letting them continue to sell it? Only if we were complete idiots.

Guns are dangerous. Only an idiot would believe they do more good than harm. Think about it. Would we be safer in a world where everybody had a gun, or where nobody had a gun?

Since the government has already made a bargain with the NRA to allow the continued sale of almost any kind of gun you can imagine, we have no alternative but to hire lawyers and sue the gun industry.

Of course, if the end result is an agreement similar to the one reached with the tobacco companies (Clinton had a much better proposal but the tobacco lobby bought off enough Republican Congressmen to get it killed) what we will end up with is this: the gun lobby acquires immunity from further prosecution in exchange for about $250 billion dollars, almost all of which goes to the lawyers anyway. The $250 billion dollars are earned back by the gun lobby mainly by applying surcharges to sales of weapons to the military and police departments. Not only does the taxpayer get to fund the legal challenge, they also get to pay the penalty. And the icing on the cake: we have the same problem as before, except that it’s worst, because the gun manufacturers will have immunity from prosecution.

We could do the same for weapons manufacturers. Sue them for hundreds of billions of dollars for all the suffering and death they contribute to people around the world. Give all the money to the lawyers. We get to continue providing weapons to every 2-bit revolutionary or reactionary government in every sad, pathetic little starving country in the Third World, while, once again, the lawyers make a killing.

Don’t look at me. You elected the fools.