Nothing changes

Even when it does.

By Capt. Fogg

Oh goodie, we can stop obsessing about Ebola and the Ottawa shooting and renew the obsessive hysteria about school violence until something else happens. Of course something else is happening constantly, but there's no money in discussing it when you compare it to the blockbuster ratings-boost from red-eyed, glued-to-the-tube, round-the-clock repetition of the same damned video clips under the rubric of "Breaking News!"

I suppose there will be little or no comment on the likelihood that the massive coverage will produce copy-cat incidents of suicide-by-shooting-spree and the usual refusal to attempt perspective by noting that such things seem to clump but all in all have been declining significantly -- over 50% -- for more than 20 years.

It's more profitable to claim that schools aren't safe, although impartial statistics seem to show it's more dangerous at home and that any one American school can expect to have a gun or explosives incident only about once in 12,800 years. People are demonstrably terrible at assessing risk and news providers get rich by helping them panic while other institutions of reform and anti-reform distract and misinform to promote their programs, all of them so convinced of their rightness and righteousness, truth can be damned as an obstruction and lies praised as noble.

(Cross-posted at Human Voices.)

Senate Democrats shamefully abandon President Obama over outstanding surgeon general nominee

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It's one thing for right-wing ideologues and NRA stooges like Rand Paul to oppose President Obama's nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy. Dr. Murthy, after all, has said that gun violence represents a serious public health threat, which of course it does, and reality-denying pro-gun absolutists live in a fetishistic fantasy world where guns save lives.

It's another thing, though, for Democrats, even Republican-leaning conservative Democrats, to oppose a Democratic president's nominee and for their opposition be enough, with Republican opposition, to derail that nominee's confirmation to a post for what he is supremely qualified: 

Facing a possible defeat in the Senate, the White House is considering delaying a vote on President Obama's choice for surgeon general or withdrawing the nomination altogether, an acknowledgment of its fraying relationship with Senate Democrats.

The nominee, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, an internist and political ally of the president's, has come under criticism from the National Rifle Association, and opposition from the gun-rights group has grown so intense that it has placed Democrats from conservative states, several of whom are up for re-election this year, in a difficult spot.

Senate aides said Friday that as many as 10 Democrats are believed to be considering a vote against Dr. Murthy, who has voiced support for various gun control measures like an assault weapons ban, mandatory safety training and ammunition sales limits.

I get that some of these Democrats are generally pro-gun and that some of them are facing tough re-election challenges this year. But it takes extreme ignorance and/or willful stupidity not to see America's plague of gun violence as a public health threat, and, what's more, it's not like Murthy's confirmation would suddenly mean the end of gun "rights."

But beyond that, these are Democrats undermining a fellow Democrat who could certainly use the support right now. I get that politicians are about self-preservation and that supporting the president isn't exactly a major vote-winner at the moment (though of course Congress's approval rating is way lower than Obama's). But these Democrats should a) do what's right for the country, b) support the president's, any president's, nominees unless something truly egregious is uncovered, and c) back up their president even if doing so might subject them to some (but probably not much) criticism back home.

But these Democrats aren't just looking at re-election, they're basically just siding with the NRA and the rest of the gun nuts against sensible gun policy, as well as sensible public health policy. They're NRA stooges just like Rand Paul is, and in opposing President Obama's extremely qualified nominee they're displaying not so much sensible political sensitivity but abject moral cowardice. And for that, they should be ashamed of themselves, just as all Democrats should be ashamed that their party can't even remain united in support of their president for what is, for all intents and purposes, an easy call.

Second Amendment wacko Rand Paul says guns don't pose a public health threat when, of course, they do

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Think Progress:

On Wednesday -- two years to the day after George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin -- Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) placed a hold on President Barack Obama's nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, over Murthy's view that gun violence represents a significant public health threat.

"In his efforts to curtail Second Amendment rights, Dr. Murthy has continually referred to guns as a public health issue on par with heart disease and has diminished the role of mental health in gun violence," wrote Paul in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. 

Oh, really?

Paul is actually out of step with most physicians. The idea that gun violence is a danger to public health is utterly uncontroversial among doctors' groups, academic institutions that focus on public health, and children's safety advocates. Although Paul criticizes Murthy's position that physicians and pediatricians should ask patients about the presence of guns in their households, the American Medical Association (AMA) adopted a resolution in 2011 officially opposing any law that bars doctors from having open conversations about gun safety and the risks of having firearms in a household with their patients.

In fact, just yesterday, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued new guidelines recommending that households with children who are diagnosed with depression should remove guns and ammunition from their homes entirely.

And it may even be worse that we know:

[G]un violence may actually be an even bigger public health problem than current studies indicate. That's because the gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association (NRA), pushed through a package of legislation in 1996 imposing a virtual freeze on federal funding for gun violence-related research. President Obama ended that ban in the wake of Sandy Hook -- but experts say there's still far too little funding appropriated by Congress to entice more detailed research in the area.

Paul likes to stress his "physician" bona fides when discussing such matters, but of course he's a right-wing ideologue first and foremost. Saying that guns don't post a public health threat and shouldn't be treated as such, and therefore that a highly qualified nominee for Surgeon General deserves his "hold" (and how stupid is it that a single senator with a radical agenda can do that?), simply disqualifies him from, and proves he isn't capable of given his ideological and partisan blinders, intelligent rational discussion.

Just ask the relatives of the victims of Columbine, Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook... and just pay some fucking attention to what's going on day after bloody day all across a violent and deadly America.

Gun control vs. "gun control"

By Mustang Bobby

Steve M makes the case that while a majority of Americans support specific proposals to prevent gun violence, they don’t like the laws that have been written to enact them. Hence the recall of two state senators in Colorado who backed laws requiring universal background checks and limiting magazine sizes, but the majority of voters in the state support the elements.

Why? It’s because the NRA has been very good at framing the issue as an “us vs. them” — the “us” being Real Muricans and the “them” being the commie pinko hippie fruits from Noo Yawk.

It’s all part of the culture war we’ve been living through for at least half a century. Oh, sure, Americans support universal background checks, and want the likes of Aaron Alexis — previously arrested for more than one gun offense — not to be able to obtain guns effortlessly … but “gun control” is something that comes from liberals and hippies and untrustworthy rootless-cosmopolitan city slickers like Mike Bloomberg. Whereas the NRA (despite being a Beltway lobbying operation) is identified with heartland America, so it’s trustworthy and admired.

Heartlanders don’t reject gun control because of how they feel about gun control proposals. They reject gun control because of who supports it. If we’re for it, it’s absurdly easy for the NRA to tell heartlanders they should be against it.

And that’s why twelve people had to die at the Washington Navy Yard today.

Not only that, the NRA knows it’s an absurdly easy way to both raise money — there will be a Navy Yard-based fundraising letter going out to the NRA membership before the yellow crime-scene tape comes down — and intimidate members of Congress. They will wave the bloody shirt of the Navy Yard and the Colorado recalls, and before the day is out you will be hearing members of Congress tell us it’s “too soon” to be talking about gun control again.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

World leaders should tape this to their walls

By Carl

A Haaretz op-ed opines that Israel should follow Nelson Mandela's lead in trying to come to grips with the Palestinian question:

The first and clearest lesson one can learn from Mandela is that peace is only achievable if the putative peacemakers believe in it. "One cannot be prepared for something while secretly believing it will not happen," Mandela once said. Does Israel's current leadership truly believe in peace? Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett are on record as saying that they don't. Netanyahu maintains that he does, though I can't help looking for the fingers crossed behind his back whenever he says it.

Peace is both an abstract concept – "a winner is a dreamer who never gives up," according to Mandela – and a very finite calculation of profit and loss. Peace means making compromises – and Mandela came perilously close to losing his base of support among South Africa's blacks in compromising to the extent that he did. He was prepared to take significant risks in the interest of peace. Are Israel's leaders prepared to do likewise?

Mandela was able to take risks and make compromises because he believed in what he was doing and he had a clear vision of the South Africa that could emerge. Addressing the court at the conclusion of his trial for treason in 1964, he said: "I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

And there it is: one has to wonder what the Israeli leadership really wants. Hegemony? Over a billion Muslims, most of whom could care less whether Israel lives or dies, and a minority of whom want to destroy that nation?

Mandela did take risks, but then he was willing to lose it all, even after his release from prison, even after his ascendancy to president. He had courage, which Mandela defines as not the absence of fear but the strength to overcome it. It seems odd to me that a nation whose people have courage in boatloads can't bring themselves to use that courage to create a niche for themselves that doesn't involve the constant vigilance of armed forces.

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Just a reminder

By Mustang Bobby

In case you missed it: Via ThinkProgress:

Five are dead after a gunman rampaged through Santa Monica, CA, on Friday, ending at the local community college. The Santa Monica shooting marks the tenth mass shooting on a school campus in California since 1976.

The suspect, 23-year-old John Zawahri, was known as an angry young man with a “fascination with guns” that worried family friends. Zawahri was born in Lebanon but has lived in the U.S. for at least 10 years. In a press conference on Sunday, police said the troubled young man had planned out the attack and likely hoped to kill hundreds. The spree lasted 10 minutes, ending when police shot and killed Zawahri on the scene.

It’s been six months since the slaughter in Newtown. In our collective short-term memory, that’s a lifetime.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Strong gun control laws reduce gun violence

By Michael J.W. Stickings

That's stating the obvious, but of course the obvious is anything but obvious not just to the gun nuts but to the rest of America's gun-obsessed culture. And even if it were obvious to them -- the nuts, their supporters, and all their various enablers -- they'd deny it because they live not in reality but in a dystopia of denialism.

Via ThinkProgress, here's the key finding in a new report from the Center for American Progress:

While many factors contribute to the rates of gun violence in any state, our research clearly demonstrates a significant correlation between the strength of a state's gun laws and the prevalence of gun violence in the state. Across the key indicators of gun violence that we analyzed, the 10 states with the weakest gun laws collectively have a level of gun violence that is more than twice as high -- 104 percent higher -- than the 10 states with the strongest gun laws.

Of course, when you're dealing with people for whom the facts mean nothing, this report will mean nothing. And so the denialism, and the violence, will continue. Not even Sandy Hook could do anything about that.

Assault weapons

By Mustang Bobby

In case you missed it, Wednesday was an emotional day at the Senate hearing on assault weapons. Via TPM:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sparred with Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn over prosecuting people who fail firearms background checks, a common line of attack from the gun rights side of things. The back-and-forth grew heated, requiring Feinstein to gavel in asking for order.

But it was from the gun control side where the strongest emotions came. Among the Democratic witnesses was Neil Heslin, a father of a boy killed in the Newtown shooting. He spoke about his recent testimony at a Connecticut hearing where gun rights advocates in the audience shouted out to him after he posed a question during his testimony, leading the chair to accuse them of heckling. Once again, Heslin asked why guns like the AR-15 that was used to kill his son should be in civilian hands.

"What purpose those serve in civilians' hands or on the street?" he asked.

Chances that the assault weapons ban will actually pass the Senate are slim, and when you get the to the House, virtually nil. The NRA have bought and paid for enough members of Congress to ensure that nothing will get through without their blessing. And they'll have no problem attacking Mr. Heslin or any other victim of gun violence as an enemy of freedom, America, and Smith & Wesson's bottom line.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

A perfect place for bloodythirsty NRA members to move

By Carl 

South Africa:

To understand South Africa's gun culture, it's crucial to go back nearly two decades. In 1994, apartheid ended. The official system of racial segregation, in place since 1948, took rights away from black Africans and gave virtually all power in every aspect of life to whites.

For generations, violence born out of apartheid spawned a kind of arms race; blacks and whites fought against each other, and everyone else armed themselves, afraid to be caught in the cross fire.

Gun violence was at a record high as the country made its first effort to become what archbishop and peace crusader Desmond Tutu envisioned -- a rainbow nation.

Sort of sounds familiar, doesn't it? A waning white majority panicked over the rise of people of darker complexion purchases crates of guns to protect itself in an overheated paranoid delusion.

Not surprisingly, that forced South Africa to toughen its gun possession laws. Less surprisingly, the anti-apartheid and liberation movements also stockpiled weaponry in response to the perceived threat that white people would start shooting black people on sight.


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Justified

By Capt. Fogg

It isn't common for the U.S. media to make an issue of the level of violence in South Africa, but Oscar Pistorius is a celebrity and the woman he's accused of murdering was a celebrity. The lives of our secular pantheon are important to the public and particularly if the celebrity has to do with sports. Are the successful athletes we love to appoint as role models, whom we love to pretend to emulate, really paragons of virtue and discipline or does their drive, their ego, their motivation spill over into something sometimes less than wholesome? I'm not going to generalize about the famous, but like the U.S., South Africa is a violent nation and one with a long history of violent racism and violent crime, and a population with a large difference between haves and have-nots. The murder rate is high, about 50 per day, and while I read that only about 12% of South Africans own guns, the probability is that many more are not reported and are illegally owned.

White middle- and upper-class South Africans live in fear, and those who can afford to live in gated enclaves behind iron barred doors and windows, behind electrified fences with sophisticated alarm systems and armed security guards -- and they own guns. The standard of living is lower for non-whites, but the level of fear is high for all, and one can argue that it's justified. Guns are used in 77 per cent of house robberies and 87 per cent of business robberies, and they are the cause of death in more than half of all murders. Many burglars are seeking guns over other items.

South Africa is often described as a "gun-loving" country. Yes, of course, if one lives on a remote farm in the bush, there are leopards and lions and hippos and elephants that argue for heavy arms, but I think that for the most part owning a gun is all about crime and a sense of security in a violent nation.

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The government rescues boy from gun-loving anti-government nut in Alabama, ending hostage standoff

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Great news from Alabama:

A 5-year-old child abducted from a school bus six days ago is safe, and his kidnapper is dead, ending a nearly weeklong ordeal for the little boy, his family and a small Alabama town.

The child appeared to be OK when he was freed, law enforcement officials said.

It's not clear what happened, nor how exactly officials were able to figure out what was going on, but it appears that something serious prompted the rescue attempt:

FBI Special Agent in Charge Steve Richardson at the scene said negotiations had broken down with 65-year-old Jimmy Lee Dykes, the child's abductor, and Dykes was "observed holding a gun."

Believing the child to be in imminent danger, an FBI team entered the bunker at 3:12 p.m. CT (4:12 p.m. ET) and rescued the boy, Richardson said, adding that the hostage-taker is dead.

Let me make a few points:

First, what a relief. I really don't like to see killing of any kind, and I wish this had ended peacefully, but the key is that the boy is safe after a long and horrible ordeal for him and his family.

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When guns are around, people get shot

By Michael J.W. Stickings

And people get killed, including famous ex-military people:

A former Navy SEAL known for claiming a record number of sniper killings in Iraq was one of two men shot dead at a Texas gun range, allegedly at the hands of a fellow military veteran, officials say. 

Chris Kyle, the author of the best-selling "American Sniper," and Chad Littlefield, also a veteran, were gunned down Saturday afternoon on the grounds of the expansive Rough Creek Lodge and Resort in Glen Rose, Texas, southwest of Fort Worth, law enforcement officials said. 

About four hours afterward, and 90 miles from where those two men's bodies were found by a hunting guide, authorities arrested suspect Eddie Ray Routh, 25, on a capital murder warrant.

Of course, there's a lot to this story that isn't yet known. But you know we'll continue to be told that guns aren't the problem (even if they make killing a whole lot easier/likely) and that America's troops (in uniform or vets) are the greatest people on the planet and deserving of our hero-worship (many of them are good, courageous people, but a lot of them aren't).

Because America has a crazy gun culture, because jingoism runs rampant while the empire collapses, and because people don't learn a fucking thing.

Baby on Board

By Capt. Fogg

If all that I read were the sporting goods catalogs that arrive in the mail I would still know something was up.  There are suddenly pages of drum magazines for sale to fit  everything from non-military versions of  long guns to shotguns to semiautomatic pistols.  Drum magazines, you'll remember seeing them on The Untouchables, great round things holding 75 to 100 rounds mounted on the infamous "Chicago Typewriter."   One catalog even features violin and cello cases fitted out to carry them.  Fedora and Zoot Suit sold separately. What you'd need to carry a Glock pistol with a 75 round drum mounted below the grip, I don't know, but it's next to useless as a concealable or even portable weapon. So why this feeding frenzy?  Why just now?  Is there an invasion coming?

Gun shops are getting very crowded again.  There's a large supermarket style one under construction in my area of coastal Florida.  Prices are rising and they can't seem to keep military-looking fake 'assault rifles' on the shelves.  Another catalog features a kit allowing one to bolt together two Ruger 10/22 rifles - the kind of gun some country gentleman might give his son on his 18th birthday into a two barrel, crank operated .22 rimfire Gattling gun, complete with tripod.  Only $397 but you have to supply your own pair of rifles. Their website bears a headline saying they're up to a week behind on shipping orders because of  massive demand.

In barber shops and hardware stores and the Sporting Goods department at the local Wal-Mart, you hear muttering and whispering about "that monkey" and they don't mean Wayne LaPierre.  I heard an octogenarian friend say at dinner the other night "we don't have any freedom any more."  She'd just sold her handgun from the fear that someone would steal it and murder someone and she'd be blamed.  It isn't true of course, I don't think there's any way of tracing guns in Florida, but the fear is on the street and in the retirement homes and the mansions and yachts and trailer parks. That monkey is after our guns.

Yes, it's gun control time again with one side arming themselves for war and the other side howling Gun Control like ragged extras in a  Frankenstein movie.  The President has offered a package of measures designed to calm the hysterical on both sides and  it's not likely to do that, or so I think.  It's the "biggest legislative effort in a generation" says the Huffington Post,  "a bold and potentially historic attempt to stem the increase in mass gun violence."  Lets see what it looks like after passing through the entrails of Congress. Surely some of the proposals were pinned to the coat-tails of  a tragedy like a rider on an unrelated bill: ban the armor piercing ammunition?  Well it's really not that nor are the hollow points we use for hunting "Cop Killer Bullets" either.  How does one argue for meaningful gun control with all that lying going on?

 Really most of these inflammatory lumps of high velocity hyperbole are just that: attempts to emotionalize and to dupe the uninitiated and succeed in polarizing the attempt to do something useful. To me, much of this heated argument  is corrupted by dishonest coinage, invention and the refusal by both sides to examine  the axioms their arguments rely on. GUN CONTROL! and when I ask "what kind?"  The expression I get from either side is the same -- I must be one of them!

Will banning the millions and millions and millions of  guns and accessories now in 150 million private hands  do anything?  By the time anything like another loophole-ridden, designed-to-fail ban hits the streets, the number of these things buried in back yards and hidden behind paneling in basements will have doubled and the ranks of camo-clad, militiamen and survivalists and preppers will have grown further and short of a house to house search of 100 million private residences and storage lockers and bunkers, very little will be done to reduce their numbers. And nice people, ordinary people, educated people, affluent people are buying guns they would have had no interest in -- because Obama's gonna ban them.   The best way to create demand is to ban something.

And if Congress does do it again, and if they suddenly disappear with a wave of the magic wand, will someone still be able to find the hardware to kill a score of innocents?  Could you get drunk in 1929?  Can you get stoned in 2013? Of course.

Have all the miscellaneous and ballyhooed safety regulations done anything?  Mandatory trigger locks, microstamping of firing pins, loaded chamber indicator and magazine disconnect regulations?  No. Has there been an increase in the murder by firearm rate as is being said?  No. It's lower than it was in the 1950's. The fear is oversold.  Much of what is being proposed can be no more effective in protecting school children than those stupid, yellow Baby on Board signs people put on their cars in the '70s.  It's just there for the "I hate guns" people.

I'm still wondering if there has been an increase in mass gun violence or if the handful in the last few years is a statistical blip and the result of the unrelenting "never forget" emotional media coverage  that promotes repeat performances, but that question will never be settled when opinions on both sides are bolstered by selective facts, when the tenets of faith, the proclamations of activists and politicians and lobbyists are taken as axiomatic without question.  

Whatever happens, I doubt my shotgun will be confiscated, nor my Civil War pistols or my Flintlock Rifle. I'm sure I'll still be able to go to the outdoor shooting range and make holes in targets with a .22 pistol  Top Shot will still be on the History Channel and the Biathlon will still be held and Sarah Palin can still hunt for moose. Floridians will still be able to shoot wild hogs and Burmese pythons and out in the bayou, they'll still be able to hunt 'gators with .22 rifles. The fear is oversold.

Whatever happens, much legislation will be designed by people who know dangerously little about firearms and in a state of near hysteria and much will be sabotaged by their opponents terrified of symbolic emasculation and little will change. No one will bother to mention or discuss or factor in the fact that gun violence is still on the decline and that the level of gun control in any particular state or city does not correlate to that decline. It's a battle of preconceived notions and it's all about irrational fear.

Increased penalties and such won't effect anyone bent on committing  suicide and taking a few dozen innocents with him. Banning an auto-loader with a 15 round magazine when Abraham Lincoln's brass bound Henry repeater will fire 16 rounds in 16 seconds will  not make anyone all that much safer and we'll go on banning all kinds of things to "save the children" and setting the stage for a massive Republican victory in 2016.  America loves guns or we wouldn't own 300 million of them. America loves guns the way it loves trucks and football and beer and that's not going to change. 

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

More gun violence takes the lives of two firefighters

By Michael J.W. Stickings

CNN:

A man convicted of killing his grandmother decades ago ambushed firefighters on Monday, fatally shooting two of them as they arrived to battle a blaze in upstate New York, police said.

Two other volunteer firefighters were wounded in the attack in the Rochester-area town of Webster. A police officer from the nearby town of Greece suffered minor shrapnel wounds when his vehicle was hit by gunfire.

Investigators believe the suspect, William Spengler, 62, set the original fire, then likely set himself up on a berm with a clear view of the scene and started shooting.

As Pam Spaulding writes in response: "When will we have the broader discussion about why so many Americans are so damned violent and have hair-trigger tempers lit over irrelevant bullsh*t. The fact that lethal weapons are the first resort in minor disputes or even just uncertain situations (like this one — in what context should you shoot at a firefighter?!) is extremely troubling.

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NRA's absurd scapegoating of violent movies, video games doesn't hold up to scrutiny

By Marc McDonald 

For five days after the horrific bloodbath at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the National Rifle Association went eerily silent. They slithered under a rock and nobody heard a peep from them until Friday. The cowards even temporarily took down their Facebook page. 

Finally, the NRA's head ghoul Wayne LaPierre spoke up. And in his idiotic, error-filled statement, LaPierre fell back on the one of the gun lobby's oldest scapegoating tactics. He blamed Hollywood for its violent movies, as well as video game makers. He called them "a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and sows violence against its own people." 

Like all the NRA's claims, though, this one doesn't hold up to scrutiny. 

As film director Oliver Stone noted, Hollywood movies are viewed all over the world. And violent video games are played worldwide. 

If one takes a look at Japan's culture and society, one begins to realize how idiotic LaPierre's argument is.

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Do the math

By Mustang Bobby 

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre said on Friday that there should be an armed police officer at every school in the country. Aside from the fact that there have been incidents where there were already people with guns protecting a facility and still a shooter got in and did his carnage — Fort Hood, for example — let's indulge Mr. LaPierre in his masturbatory Rambo fantasy and put one well-trained armed guard at every school in the country. How will he pay for it? The cost would be out of the reach of most school districts, and even if Congress decided to pay for every one of them via a federal grant, it would be a budget buster.

Let's just take a look at one school district. How about one I know pretty well, such as Miami-Dade County Public Schools? It is the fourth-largest district in the country, with over 347,000 students. It has 354 schools or facilities with students, so we'll need one guard per school. Let's say that the base average salary of a guard is $75,000. I know that seems a little high for a cop, but we're talking average salary, not starting.

But you just don't pay for the base salary and you're done. There are other costs, such as paying into their retirement account, Social Security and Medicare contributions which the district has to pick up a portion of, contribution to health insurance, and the required payment of workers compensation, liability, and unemployment insurance, all required under contract or state or federal law.


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Thanks, NRA cowards, for the Connecticut bloodbath

By Marc McDonald

Thanks, NRA, for fighting any meaningful regulations that could help keep guns out of the hands of the violent and mentally ill. Thanks to you, guns can be bought in America as easily as a loaf of bread.

We also appreciate your work on ferociously opposing the Brady Act (which Ronald Reagan, by the way, supported). Rest assured, though, despite your crazy, paranoid fantasies, NO meaningful action will be taken on guns in the aftermath of this latest horrible bloodbath.

Thanks to you, dozens, if not hundreds of more children will be brutally slaughtered in the decades to come.

The NRA truly is a cowardly organization. For example, they cowered under a rock and waited nearly five days to offer any kind of response to the Connecticut bloodbath. How chickenshit is that? If they had the courage of their convictions, they would have spoken up sooner.

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We need a federal agent at every...

By Frank Moraes

(Ed. note: This post was written last night. Frum must be up to, like, 2,109 such tweets by now. He is, as they say, en fuego. -- MJWS)

In an update for a post earlier today, I noted that Jim Naureckas tweeted, "If only an armed guard could be placed next to every state trooper." Well, it has become a thing. David Frum has now similarly tweeted 14 times.

First, dental clinics:

We need a federal agent at every dental clinic abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?sec…
— davidfrum (@davidfrum) December 22, 2012

Later, strip clubs:

We need a federal agent at every strip club wdrb.com/story/20372337…
— davidfrum (@davidfrum) December 22, 2012

And most recently, muffler shops:

We need a federal agent at every muffler shop topix.com/forum/philly/T…
— davidfrum (@davidfrum) December 22, 2012

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A place to start

By Mustang Bobby 

Charlie Pierce has a suggestion on how to institute gun control: go after the companies that make and sell them.

This could be the start of something real — a disinvestment campaign, modeled on the one aimed at companies doing business in South Africa and, later, at the tobacco industry, on the part of police, and fire, and school teachers' unions to remove their money from the marketing end of mass killing. A campaign that would redefine gun violence as a public-health crisis, as David Satcher tried to do years ago, and to redefine it on the balance sheet, where that would really count. This could be the start of holding the people who really make the money accountable for how they make it. You could close the NRA tomorrow, and there'd be another lobbying arm started up by armaments money within the hour. You could shoot Wayne LaPierre to the moon, and there'd be 100 other lobbyists lining up to take his place. Both LaPierre and the NRA serve not their members, but weapons manufacturers. (That's why all those polls about "rank and file" NRA members who support, say, background checks, are worthless. At its top, the organization no more answers to them than it does to the Brady Campaign.) The paranoia stoked by NRA fundraising — which, alas, seems to have worked its dark magic on Adam Lanza's mother — is not directed merely against sensible gun legislation. It's to sell more guns to the people who marinate themselves in that paranoia, so the people who make the guns can make even more money. That's the place you want to paint the bullseye.

This is America, after all: the place where everyone wants to make a buck... and then go out and shoot one.

Guns: providing freedom and taking it away since 1791

By tmcbpatriot 

Friday's atrocity is starting to sink in with each new day, and it just gets worse and worse. I have not been reading a thing about the killer or the children or that crazed woman who birthed this maniac. I can't. I think I hit my limit with this one. I honestly have to look away. Even reading the news is hard because every story is interspersed with a photo of a dead child who was my son's age. I stare at him while he is eating dinner and try not to imagine, but it just creeps in there and I have to push it away. 

Now, I expected the nuts to come out swinging after this insanity and say their usual line about how it's not guns that kill people, it's people. Guns, they say, have nothing to do with it. It is an incredible feat of the brain to come up with such a theory. To say it without even the slightest sense of awareness or irony is simply chilling and maddening to say the least. These people go on to make comparisons saying things like pencils don't make typos, writers do, or cars don't crash into trees, drivers do. One nut on my blog said this in the comments of my previous post:

Those guns killed no one, the mental missfit tool holding them did, the black trench coat, black brief case carrying tard killed those people and your liberal stench enables whackos like this to roam freely all amongst the general population. You dont like guns, MOVE.

I dare not ask this insane person what happens to me if I don't move. My guess is that he would shoot me.

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