Imagine

Americans favor working background checks, but the NRA opposes them, so we're not likely to take any concrete step to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and unstable people.

That means we have to imagine this happening to other families:

In addition to the tragic loss of her playmates, friends, and teachers, my first grader suffers from PTSD. She was in the first room by the entrance to the school. Her teacher was able to gather the children into the tiny bathroom inside the classroom. There she stood, with 14 of her classmates and her teacher, all of them crying. You see, she heard what was happening on the other side of the wall. She heard everything. Shooting. Screaming. Pleading. She was sure she was going to die that day and did not want to die for Christmas. Imagine what this must have been like. With PTSD comes fear – all kinds of fear. Each time she hears a loud or unfamiliar noise, she experiences the fear she had in that bathroom. She is not alone. All of her classmates have PTSD. She struggles nightly with nightmares, difficulty falling asleep, and being afraid to go anywhere in her own home. At school she becomes withdrawn, crying daily, covering her ears when it gets too loud and waiting for this to happen again. She is 6.

Imagine being this age and living like this. My children face their fears every day by getting on the bus and going to school. Would you be able to do the same? How would you feel if these were your children?

It's obvious from events since the Newtown massacre that Wayne LaPierre and his merry band of sociopathic fucks are so opposed to any measures against guns that they are willing to accept mass murder of children as collateral damage in the name of something they believe to be more important.

Imagine a world in which that obscenity were not possible.

Learning from Sandy Hook

Connecticut had a so-called ban on so-called assault weapons in place in December when Adam Lanza used a legal weapon to kill 26 people in Sandy Hook Elementary School. We should learn from this.

Connecticut has an assault-weapons ban, modeled after a federal law that was enacted in 1994 before expiring a decade later. But it takes more than a dark fiberglass body and a menacing shape to fall under the ban.

The Connecticut law restricts semi-automatic rifles — those capable of firing a bullet with each pull of the trigger — only if they include a detachable magazine as well as at least two of five specific features. One of those features — a pistol grip — is ubiquitous on military-style weapons. But to be banned, an AR-15-style rifle would also need to include a folding or telescoping stock, a bayonet mount, a grenade launcher or a flash suppressor, a device typically screwed on to the end of the muzzle to limit the bright flash caused by gunpowder that ignites outside of the muzzle.

Aware of the restrictions in some states, weapons manufacturers have modified some models to stay within the laws. Bushmaster, for example, offers a "state-compliant" model with a telescoping stock that simply has been pinned in the fully open position, making it legal for sale.

The federal assault weapon ban that we had in place from 1994 to 2004 was useless as anything more than a  statement of social norm. If President Obama is going to the mat for something, it shouldn't be this.

Obama should pursue policies whose results rely on more than luck in reducing mass killings and other gun deaths. Since the federal ban expired, mass killings have gone up, but that looks like a coincidence to me.

It's the power and rapid fire of these rifles that matter, not whether they can fix a bayonet or have a flash suppressor. While addressing muzzle velocity and firing speed is much harder, it would be useful, not mere political window dressing.

Buh-bye

Honesty means more than simply not lying, but Richard Blumenthal (D-buh-bye) failed even the easy test of not lying:

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. [emphasis added]

During Vietnam would have parsed as true, but even that phrasing would have left room for deceit. During the Vietnam era would have been still better, with the word era flagging the statement for a bit more interpretive analysis.

Blumenthal could claim - and he has - that he simply misspoke. But there are too many instances of self-interested silence in the face of falsehood to credit this as the slip of his tongue.

The root problem, which should be fatal to his candidacy for Senate, is that Blumenthal has shown a life-long pattern of failure to correct the record clearly and forthrightly. He continues his deceit with this bullshit:

“I don’t know if we tried to do so or not,” he said. He added that he “can’t possibly know what is reported in all” the articles that are written about him.

Bullshit. Politicians care deeply and obsessively how they're covered in the press. They may not see every single article, but they or their staff see all the big stories, especially those in major publications. Nowadays, they all have Google alerts to keep them on top of media all the way down to the smallest blog.

The emotional impact of his reserve service and of seeing the postwar treatment of veterans from in-country could still be true. He could still tell it honestly from the perspective of a reservist. Instead, his claimed experience sounds more like echoing of urban legends than first-hand witnessing to the travails of returning vets.

Here's the principle: If you have to choose your words very carefully to permit listeners to take away a wrong impression, an impression that you want them to retain, you're lying. Never mind that advertisers do this all the time. They're lying too. It's just that your lie while seeking a Senate seat is more corrosive and damaging.

This is especially true of living a lie about being at risk of dying in the service of your country. That's just something that no one should ever fake - or acquiesce in faking.

Even Duhbya didn't try to get away with morphing his defense of Texas and Alabama against the world-wide threat of the Viet Cong Air Force into service in country in Vietnam. Like Blumenthal, he did try to get away with claiming he received no special treatment, also false but on a much smaller scale.

It was John Kerry who put aside offers of special treatment and actually served in Vietnam. That didn't win the Presidency for him, but he at least still has his honesty intact about that very important touchstone of recent American history, no matter how hard Karl Rove and the Swift Boat Liars tried to steal it from him by their own campaign of lies.

Blumenthal should go. But he's obviously too vain to give in to that inconvenient truth.

(h/t to this great post on No More Mister Nice Blog)

Update (5/19): More feet of clay on the Republican side. Lindsay Graham (R-wingy but not wingy enough for teabaggers) repeatedly and persistently claimed to be a veteran of Iraq I, despite never serving in country. (h/t Atrios)

Baldwin on points

The first round of Alec Baldwin vs. Joe Lieberman goes to Baldwin. Lieberman started with a tiresome old Reaganesque chestnut, badly delivered:

“You know, make my day.”

Baldwin, who disclaims any intent to run, offers this rejoinder:

"Part of me would hate to see Lieberman go, because there are so few moderate Republicans left in the Senate today."

Lieberman is going to need better writers, at least until Democrats get a candidate.