Syrian Second Amendment

Click image for full Mark Fiore/Mother Jones animation.

It's your fault if a bullet kills you

Not enough dead yet.

GOP helps al Qaeda get guns right here in the USA

Really? If the shoe were on the other foot, that's what Republicans would claim.

Even al-Qaida gloats about what's possible under U.S. gun laws. In June 2011, a senior al-Qaida operative, Adam Gadahn, released rallying people to take advantage of opportunities those laws provide.

"America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms," Gadahn says, explaining that "you can go down to a gun show at the local convention center" and buy a gun without a background check.

Then a faint smile crosses Gadahn's face. "So what are you waiting for?" he asks.

Under current laws, if a background check reveals that your name is on the national terrorism watch list, you're still free to walk out of a gun dealership with a firearm in your hands — as long as you don't have a criminal or mental health record.

Republicans in the Senate really did block any tightening of background checks - including measures obvious to anyone who actually wants to keep deadly weapons away from violent people. Read the whole (short) NPR story from Ailsa Chang. It's really effing unbelievable.

The honest truth is that nearly all Republican legislators are willing to allow felons and people who are dangerously mentally ill to own guns. Why should potential terrorists be any different?

The Republican Party's leaders think the only point at which we can stop violence is once it has already started - every school, every theater, every political rally an O.K. Corral.

Even rank and file Republican voters know that this is utter madness. You'd think they might do something about it.

Keeping guns away from bad actors

Cold Dead Hand with Jim Carrey from Jim Carrey

We'll see if any morons continue to try to argue with comedy.

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.

Greed, dishonesty, and fear-mongering

Be sure you see the emotional last 30 seconds of this video.

Update (2/16): Added back the video clip that Blogger ate. Did it taste good?

Miserable tatter of background checks

The shooting death of Charles Albert Poland Jr. and the kidnapping of a young boy named Ethan were completely preventable. There is no way Jimmy Lee Dykes should have been permitted to possess firearms:

Mr. Dykes, who has lived in a travel trailer here for about two years, has a troubled past, including arrests on charges connected to drugs, drunken driving and, in Florida in 1995, unlawful display of a firearm. On Wednesday he was due in court in this county, accused of shooting at a neighbor in a dispute over driving on his property.

Everyone who knew Dykes knew he was bad news.

Neighbors of Mr. Dykes generally kept their distance, which he made easy. He frequently made violent threats to anyone who wandered onto his property, once even beating a neighbors’ dog to death with a lead pipe. He would sometimes sit watching and holding a rifle when young children played in a nearby yard. Late into the night he would dig in the backyard of his travel trailer or patrol his property with a flashlight and a long gun.

Now Poland is heroically dead, Dykes has been justifiably killed by the FBI, and Ethan has been rescued.

But Alabama won't rethink its gun laws, and the NRA won't rethink its crazy, extremist position against closing the gun show and private sale loopholes in the miserable tatter of current background check law.

Click image for full Garry Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

Now's not the time to protect children

Cardinal Mahony helped pederast priests escape punishment, we've just learned.

But, of course, it's too soon to protect boys (and girls) from the penises of the wicked priests.

We should consider the mental health of the sexual abusers first.

There are laws on the books about where a priest can put his willie. We should enforce those first.

Most priests are completely honorable. Why should they have suffer for the vile acts of a few?

It's craven opportunism by those who want to destroy the Catholic Church to raise any issues about the priesthood at a time like this - and that goes double for the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Besides, Mahony was a liberal, so we obviously need more Latin mass and less Latino mass.

More priests would have stopped the bad priests.

The only person who ever stopped a bad priest with a stiffie was a good priest with a hankering for justice.

Why not apply NRA logic to child sexual abuse?

Safety off, trigger finger itching

The NRA claims it's protecting all of us by saturating our environment with weapons built for the express purpose of killing human beings. Paul Waldman of the American Prospect has this to say:

[T]he goal of many gun advocates, particularly those who promote concealed carry, is that we make it so as many people as possible take as many guns as possible into as many places as possible. That's been the focus of their legislative efforts in recent years, not only passing concealed carry laws nearly everywhere, but also passing laws to make you able to take guns into bars, schools, government buildings, houses of worship, and so on, and also advocating for laws that would let you take your guns to communities where it would be otherwise illegal to carry them. Which would mean that your right to carry your gun trumps the right of everyone else to say, this is a place where we've decided we don't want people bringing guns.

Update (1/25): Experimenting with a new title...

Slippery slope

NRA Fights Legislation That Would Ban Gun Sales To Those Currently On Killing Sprees

By reason of mental defect

The NRA's position is that we can't prohibit anyone from owning a gun, lest someone be denied a right he should have. They may not state this position directly, but it's obvious in their unwillingness to consider any new restrictions and their clear desire to remove all existing restrictions.

But...

James Yeager owns guns:

“I’m telling you that if that happens, it’s going to spark a civil war, and I’ll be glad to fire the first shot. I’m not putting up with it. You shouldn’t put up with it. And I need all you patriots to start thinking about what you’re going to do, load your damn mags, make sure your rifle’s clean, pack a backpack with some food in it and get ready to fight.”

The CEO concluded: “I’m not fucking putting up with this. I’m not letting my country be ruled by a dictator. I’m not letting anybody take my guns! If it goes one inch further, I’m going to start killing people.”

The State of Tennessee yanked this raging moron's handgun carry permit, but I haven't heard a report that they confiscated his weapons.

Alex Jones owns fifty guns:



There's no way these psychos are sane enough to be trusted with a weapon that can kill from a distance greater than 10 feet. Hell, we probably should seize their kitchen knives and their hammers.

These are the people we know about, who haven't yet done anything. But, shit, you'd never say about James Yeager or Alex Jones, "Well, I'm so surprised he went postal. There were just no signs of it - he was so quiet and unassuming."

Clearly, there are gun nuts in the sense that I'm a sports nut. And then there are gun nuts, as in too effing crazy to possess any gun loaded with anything more volatile than tap water.

God, media, and crazy people

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Scapegoat Hunter - Gun Control
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

You can always count on Louie Gohmert (R-dumb as a bag of hammers) to state the most extreme wingnut position possible. He's almost - almost - a good reason to let Mexicans vote. They couldn't possibly do as shitty a job as his dumbfuck East Texas constituents.

OK Corral

Even trained police officers couldn't bring down a single shooter in a populated setting without hitting nine bystanders:

The volley of gunfire felled Johnson in just a few seconds and left nine other people bleeding on the sidewalk.

Yet the NRA's so-called solution is armed amateurs meting out hot lead wherever they feel a threat. This idea is unbelievably stupid.

I shudder to imagine a citizen's intervention by the guy next to me at the handgun range last week, belching out bullets by the clip with his .45. He couldn't hit a zombie poster with a tight group at 10 feet.

(Note to those who can't read without assuming things I haven't said: I'm not saying this was a bad shoot.)

Update: Turns out Atrios was waaay ahead of me in shooting this particular fish in a barrel.

Acceptable breakage

The NRA can't honestly evade responsibility for the legal environment in which a known lunatic like Kenneth Roop was able to build an arsenal of 14 weapons and was able to retain his concealed carry permit until he executed someone for the minor civil infraction of trespassing.

Roop's neighbors knew he was unstable. They had little power to keep their children safe from Roop, other than abandoning the public street in front of his house. They walked with a neighbor after Roop began to stalk her.

The local cops knew. They did nothing other than put the onus on Roop's neighbors.

This man should not have been permitted to have guns. At all.

The NRA's standard solution, more guns!, would not have worked in this case, even in the fevered imagination of Wayne LaPierre. Maybe full military tactical gear 24/7!

There will surely be dishonest evasions. Mitt Rmoney is trying one that I see frequently from wingnuts in comment threads: If there's any means of killing that's not regulated, no matter how inefficient compared to gunfire, then guns shouldn't be regulated.

Dying for principle

Gun rights and the Second Amendment are not as simple as either side of the gun control debate pretends. There's no hope of getting the conservatives to acknowledge that - they don't do complicated - but liberals should be willing and able to learn.

Here's a case where a concealed carry permit seems like a good idea - assuming enough safety training to go with it. If you're being stalked by a weirdo or an old boyfriend, 911 may not be fast enough if the stalker has also availed himself of America's NRA-driven permissive gun culture.

I assume that Jennifer Willis must have chosen the double-action revolver over a semi-automatic for its added protection against accidental discharge. Gun nuts should acknowledge the danger every muzzle poses to its owner, as Willis appears to have done. Many of them won't, of course, and more of them - and their family members - will die in preventable accidents.

I still believe that government has a just and Constitutional role in the regulation of gun possession, but I no longer think an unarmed populace is the immediate answer. In any case, it's not politically possible, and we all need to deal with reality instead of pretending we live in an ideal society.

AK-47 won the American Revolution

Someone's holding a gun lobby to Lindsey Graham's head. Graham (R-you thought he could be both from South Carolina and sane? Ha) sacrifices this burnt offering on the altar of the NRA:

“I think you’re going too far here,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday. He was speaking in opposition to a bill that would keep people on the F.B.I. terrorist watch list from buying guns and explosives.

This is a guy who thinks he can't get any more heterodox on any topic, and his model for orthodox is Jim DeMint (R-teabaggers' first Presidential candidate). Graham keeps going:

[He] pointed out, “when the founders sat down and wrote the Constitution, they didn’t consider flying.”

Though of course the founders did all keep their budget Chinese AKs over the fireplace, and their superiority over ancient British musket meant they didn't need to venture up to Saratoga except to bet on the ponies. Yorktown was just some movie-maker's wet dream. The whole revolution was done in a couple of months - to account for the awful transportation infrastructure of the time, though I'd bet they in fact were wishing they could fly even then.

Valley Forge? George Washington was just an SOB, holding back the AKs so he could get to know Lafayette better.

You mean the founders didn't consider automatic weapons either when they wrote the Second Amendment? Unbelievable! Where was the NRA?

If Democrats had any sense of reciprocity, they'd be on all the talk shows saying, "Republicans want to arm terrorists." They wouldn't even be lying.

Slightly more fair-minded: Republicans would rather kiss the NRA's ass than keep automatic weapons and high explosives away from car bombers and other terrorists.

Give Graham the last word in poseur tough-guy security against terrorists:

“I am all into national security. ... I want to stop reading these guys their Miranda rights,” he said.

You'll get this camera

... off me when you pry it from my cold dead face.

Or when middle age sets in with a vengeance.

Sarah Palin does have a certain animal cunning. She probably knew she'd have to strike now to make any money off the popularity of her appearance.

Play Cheney for me

Mitt Romney is so desperate to be President that he's willing to whore himself out as the handsome second coming of Darth Cheney.

The truth is that the Bushists pissily and irresponsibly dismissed the concern the Clinton administration had about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. (Note to wingnut trolls: Sure, Clinton could have succeeded against these enemies, and he didn't, but he at least identified the priority problem, where Mayberry Nero told his briefers that they had covered their asses.) The Bushists were focused instead on redeeming Bush I's PNAC-deplored failure to depose Saddam Hussein.

Romney's varmint-huntin' (see, really a country boy despite the $5000 suit!!!!!) is so lame he's going to need to shoot a friend to prove he's really the NRA's boy Cheney successor.

As a bonus, he's happy to defend the so-called free market's allocation of life-saving to those who can pay the most for it. Hey, works for him (and screw you).

Mitt Romney is the perfect expression of Republicanism - willing to say any bullshit, filled with rhetoric that misrepresents reality, a whore for the ruling class. He is the most obviously insincere politician since... Man, I'm having a hard time coming up with a politician who's more insincere than Mitt. Mostly, it's talk show hosts. Except John Boehner! Strom Thurmond, maybe - staunch racist shtupping the colored help but still making his black daughter come in through the back door.

I was slow to see the essential dishonesty of Romney, but I'm making up for lost time.

High noon in home room

At the end of April, the Commercial Appeal ran an important report about guns in the Memphis public schools - 162 incidents over five years. Even with no fatalities and only a few actual woundings, this is a jaw-dropping number - close to one a week during the school year.

Six of the incidents happened at a school I once attended. One happened where my mother taught remedial reading many years ago, another where my father taught math even more years ago. Three guns were found at the high school that I could see from the dining room of the first house I really remember.

I have to wonder how many guns are not being found. Metal detectors only managed to find eight of the guns. Tips led to most of the confiscations. Many of the violating kids started as victims. How many gang members are too intimidating for anyone to rat on? How many of them carry a gun every day without the school system finding out?

What's the right way to make this better?

The NRA and its more rabid adherents will tell you that an armed society is a polite society. Oh, yeah, right. Like Baghdad. They will claim that the solution is to arm the teachers so that they can blow away the little miscreants.

High noon in home room, film at 11:00.

In fact, some of the kids are themselves enacting the NRA theory. They don't feel safe, so they arm themselves for self-defense. Of course, it's seldom that cut and dried; some of them, teetering on the brink of a life of crime, are defending themselves against violent consequences of their own acts.

I have no objection to more cops in the schools, especially those with large gang populations, and those cops have to be armed. They have to be more judicious than the cops who killed Sean Bell.

If metal detectors don't do much, is there a technology that could help? Sniffers for nitrogen compounds? They're way too expensive, but they might have fewer false positives than metal detectors. What about the airport machines that see through your clothes? Oh, yeah, imagine sending your daughter in to school every day for a high-tech strip search. Surveillance cameras? Aside from the fact that the schools probably have them already - Big Brother Jr. - I've never seen any security video outside of the movies that is more than slightly useful to find a gun before it's in flagrant use, when there's still something to do besides proving guilt.

What's left? The short answer is that I don't have a short answer. It's a hard problem.

Triage, first. One of the kids was only expelled after three offenses. I'm not interested in throwing away anyone - by forty, most of these kids will be through with crime, and the ones who are still alive will need education to succeed at all in work. But I'm most interested in preserving a chance to learn for the children who don't sling a gun into their book bags.

That's going to mean pulling juvy kids out into more secure schools. They can earn their way back to a normal schools by cleaning up.

But there are also liberal remedies that need to be applied to prevent the loss of youth. Kids need things to do, lots of them. I was appalled to learn that one of the kids who got caught in Memphis had found much less support from the community and government in New Orleans before Katrina washed it all away and sent him to Memphis as a refugee.

Conservatives love to lampoon midnight basketball, but you can't carry a gun on the court, and basketball doesn't cost much.

Originally published on TennViews.

The NRA vision

Hey, c'mon, an armed society (Iraq) is a polite society. Yep, them Hatfields and McCoys always a-treated each t'other with the utmost respect.

Originally a comment on KnoxViews.