The Nature of Things

From today's Daily Kos : Click on image to enlarge. Yes, everybody knows that any regulation of a dangerous instrument leads inevitably to its confiscation and outlawing. And by "everybody" I mean anybody who takes seriously the pronouncements of the National Rifle Association.

So, it looks like there is actually going to be some kind of vote in the Senate on getting at least minimal control over the wide open sales and trafficking of guns in this country. President Obama said in his State of the Union address that victims of gun crimes deserve such a vote, and, to his credit, he has continued to push for those votes, even when the Conventional Wisdom within the Washington Beltway says that imposing any kind of control of guns is impossible. Of course, that same Conventional Wisdom said that Barack Obama had no chance to be reelected last year. After the tragic slaughter of twenty six-year-olds and their teachers who tried to protect them at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut last December, I wrote to all of my elected (though not by me) representatives from Texas in Washington -  namely Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz and Rep. Kevin Brady - and asked them to please support sensible gun control laws to reign in the senseless mass slaughter that...

At times of national angst, it is useful to consider what great philosophers have to say. Today we consider what that great Texas philosopher Molly Ivins had to say about guns in our society. ( With a tip of the hat to the Great State of Maine at Daily Kos for bringing this to my attention .) In truth, there is no rational argument for guns in this society. This is no longer a frontier nation in which people hunt their own food. It is a crowded, overwhelmingly urban country in which letting people have access to guns is a continuing disaster. Those who want guns---whether for target shooting, hunting or potting rattlesnakes (get a hoe)---should be subject to the same restrictions placed on gun owners in England---a nation in which liberty has survived nicely without an armed populace. […] Molly Ivins Michael Crichton makes an interesting argument about technology in his thriller "Jurassic Park." He points out that power without discipline is making this society into a wreckag...

There really are no words to convey the horror. Another day, another massacre in the USA. This time most of the victims were children, babies really, barely even launched on the sea of life. The other victims were people who had dedicated their lives to helping children like them get launched. The sadness simply overwhelms me and, I am sure, most parents, who understand the images that the parents of those twenty children who died must live with for the rest of their lives. There is no way to mitigate the pain. The killing of so many innocents in one place at one time certainly gets our attention and grabs all the headlines for a few days, but the truth is that this many people die most days in this country as a result of being killed with a gun. Some 10,000 deaths per year occur in the United States because of gun violence. And what is our response? Why, to make guns more widely available and easily accessible , of course. The response of many of the gun nuts to yesterday's trage...

David Sirota of Salon.com has named yesterday's massacre in Colorado for what it is - terrorism. Our media would lead us to believe that terrorism is only the purview of dark-skinned Islamicists, but that is faulty thinking. The country is under siege and at the mercy of domestic terrorists like the Colorado murderer because we refuse to take responsibility for standing up to the NRA and passing and enforcing laws that will inhibit the gun traffic in this country. This will not change until we mature enough as a country to give up our adolescent obsession with guns and violence. Frankly, although it depresses me beyond measure to say it, I see no possibility of that happening. Meanwhile, predictably, a certain segment of our society rushes to the microphones to say that if only there had been someone else in the audience with a gun to take the shooter down, all of this could have been avoided. Never mind that the shooter was wearing full body armor and that the hero would have ha...

A man walks into a movie theater with a rifle, a shotgun, and a handgun, plus two canisters of gas. He sets off his smoke bombs and then opens fire, randomly, at the packed crowd. He kills twelve people outright and wounds at least 38 others, some of them seriously enough that their survival is in doubt. He is captured almost immediately. He is a white male American, 24 years old. Another day, another massacre in America. By now, our national consciousness is almost inured to such violence. Ho hum. Move along. Nothing to see here. For a day or two or three, all the politicians and public officials will offer sober words about the killings. They will talk about how their prayers are with the victims and their families. They will talk about how the perpetrator must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. And then they'll go back to business as usual. The victims, their families, and their pain will be pushed to the background and forgotten. Soon enough, there will be another s...

Michele Bachmann brags that she's a good shot with an AR-15 assault rifle and that it is her favorite weapon of choice for hunting. She told an interviewer on radio that she was going pheasant hunting with her fellow crazy, Rep. Steve King of Iowa, and left the impression that she was going to use an AR-15. Pheasant hunting with a semi-automatic assault rifle? Really, Michele? I freely admit that I don't know much about guns and I know less about hunting, but I did grow up among some very successful hunters. I don't remember them ever using assault rifles. Rifles, yes, or sometimes shotguns, but they didn't find the need to resort to semi-automatic weapons. Still, they were able to bag their prey. But in Republican politics, the bigger the gun you can claim to use the better, apparently. Whether it is actually the type of gun that is needed to kill your prey is irrelevant. I guess in Bachmann's case though her actual prey is the gullible voters of Iowa and she...

A few miles from where I live, a house burned last week. It was what the local newspaper called "a historic homestead" that had been in the family of the man who owned it since 1927. The house burned to the ground even though the fire department was on the scene. The firemen were unable to get near the house because it contained an estimated 100,000 rounds of ammunition ! As the fire spread, the ammunition started exploding and popping in all directions, making it dangerous for the firefighters to approach and so all they could do was stand and watch it burn. According to the newspaper, not only did the house contain all that ammunition, it also had 30 to 40 family guns inside! Thirty to forty " family" guns?  Were these people planning on starting their own army? The craziest thing about this story is that, in the gun-worshiping culture that is Texas, this is not even considered an aberration worthy of note. The headline in the paper said "Fire destroys histo...

The Institute for Economics and Peace recently released a report of its rankings of the 50 states according to their peacefulness. Their rankings were based on five factors: 1. Number of homicides per 100,000 people. 2. Number of violent crimes per 100,000 people. 3. Number of people in jail per 100,000 people. 4. Number of police officers per 100,000 people. 5. General availability of small arms. Using these criteria, these are the top ten least peaceful (or the top ten most violent) states: 1. Louisiana 2. Tennessee 3. Nevada 4. Florida 5. Alabama 6. Texas 7. Arkansas 8. Oklahoma 9. South Carolina 10. Maryland The thing that I notice first about this list is that most of them are in the South and that most of them are among the poorest states in the country. I'm not sure how Nevada managed to insert itself in the list, but it does have a very high unemployment rate and perhaps suffers from crime related to its gambling industry. But I would definitely surmise that po...

Remember the shock, anger, and revulsion that we felt when the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and several of her constituents, including a child, took place in January? The shooter used a Glock semi-automatic with which he was able to get off 31 shots in seconds before bystanders could subdue him. You might think that that event in Tucson would have made Arizonans leery of guns. And, furthermore, you might think that the Arizona legislature would have a very full plate considering the budget crunch, the unemployment rate, and the health care crisis in the state. Silly you! It turns out that in spite of everything that has happened Arizonans still worship at the altar of the gun and their legislature is never too busy to spend time honoring that religion. They are all set to take time away from working on solutions to the above-mentioned REAL problems to designate the Colt Single Action Army revolver as the "State Gun." I guess we should just be grateful they didn...

In Florida today, a five-year-old dropped a loaded gun in his pre-kindergarten classroom. Meanwhile, out in Utah, the state legislature is all set to make the Browning M1911 semiautomatic pistol , a gun whose only purpose is to kill people, the state gun. It would be the first state to designate a state gun, but no doubt will not be the last. Can Texas be far behind? And, of course, all across the country today, 34 more people were murdered with handguns, but that hardly even qualifies as a news story any more. It is expected and we just accept it. What kind of country have we become? I am disgusted.

Earlier this week, I saw a reference to a story about the most armed countries in the world and so I went Googling to find the source. Sure enough, there it was in a Reuters story from three-and-a-half years ago. It seems that the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies had completed a Small Arms Survey of the world and had found that U.S. citizens owned 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms. This made the United States far and away the most armed country in the world. That worked out to 90 guns for every 100 people. That was 2007. During much of the time since then, some Americans have been in a frenzy of gun-buying. I feel sure that if a survey were done now, it would show us even more out in front in the arms race - maybe 95 guns per 100 people would be more like it. Yemen was the second most heavily armed country on a per capita basis. They had 61 guns per 100 citizens. Slackers! Falling even farther behind were countries like Finland (...