15 February 2018. 29 Mass Shootings in 45 Days… If That Isn’t Mass Insanity, What Is It?

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It’s happened again. It’s another mass shooting in the USA. It doesn’t happen in Russia… it doesn’t happen in China… it doesn’t happen in Iran. It doesn’t even happen in Afghanistan or Iraq… that is, non-war-related shooting… most folks have guns, but they’re not for indiscriminate shooting, like in the USA. People don’t shoot you unless there’s a reason… if you’re sneaking about their property at 2 AM, for instance. This chronic dysfunction speaks volumes about our post-Reagan rightwing “paradise”… why, we can’t restrict guns in any way… that’s impinging on people’s “freedom”. Note well that the neoliberals blubber about the “freedom” to own guns, the “freedom” to buy politicians, and the “freedom” to exploit working people (they ARE related), but they’re adamant that people shouldn’t have the freedom to organise in the workplace, the freedom to express themselves openly, or the freedom to access healthcare as a right (not as an expensive privilege).

The Republican Party refuses to act. The Democratic Party refuses to act. Both are in the pay of the NRA. BOTH. If we wanted to put in sensible gun-control norms like they have in Canada, we’d have them. Trust me, rural people and hunters in Canada have guns… that’s legal. It’s simply hard for gun-nutters and freakazoids to get guns, that’s all. You also can’t go about brandishing weapons, either. There are legal rules on transporting weapons, which only makes good sense.

Neoliberal pols refuse to rein in the NRA, both “conservative” and “liberal”… why, there’s gold in them thar hills and Wayne LaPierre is handing it out. That’s why I voted for Bernie in the primary and Dr Jill and Brother Ajamu in the general. We need a new way… the old one is killing us… literally. Oh, yes… the pro-gun nutters are mostly “pro-life”… fancy that…

BMD

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Why Americans Won’t Give Up Their Guns

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Editor:

This is a read n’ heed from top to bottom. I have nothing to add. Shall we act or shall we continue our slide into anarchy and police-state repression? Yes… anarchy and repression at the same time… it’s called “conservatism” and “libertarianism”. If you call yourself a “conservative” and/or “libertarian”, you’re an enemy of responsible order and fair dealing. After all, in the view of “conservatives” and “libertarians”, might makes right… that’s why they say that we need guns.

May God preserve us…

BMD

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The USA needs new gun laws… first, it needs to shed the myths that sustain its reliance on weapons

Around 03.30 on 23 November 2013, a stray bullet shattered the window of an apartment in Indianapolis IN where a couple watched television while their two-month-old baby slept. The man called 911, with panic in his voice. He told the dispatcher, “I need to get out of here. Can you get a car so I can get out of here?” The dispatcher replied, calmly, “I think there’s several officers already over there”. The 911 recordings reveal the man breathing heavily as he talked to his partner. “Put the stuff in the baby bag. Find it tomorrow. We’ll carry it to a hotel”. He urged the dispatcher to hurry up and rescue them until she lost her patience. She said, “They’ll be there as soon as they can, all right? As. Soon. As. They. Can. OK? Just stay inside your apartment. Do not go out. We’ll get an officer to you”.

Four months later, in the same city, the country’s main gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, held its annual convention with the slogan “Stand and Fight”. In a speech in equal measure demagogic and apocalyptic, the CEO, Wayne LaPierre, evoked a nation in peril and demise. “There are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and carjackers and knockout gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers … I ask you: do you trust the government to protect you? We are on our own … The things we care about most are changing … It’s why more and more Americans are buying firearms and ammunition”.

Sunday’s horrific incident in Las Vegas was the 273rd mass shooting in America this year. There’s been another since then, in Miami, with four people shot while attending a vigil to mourn a 30-year-old woman shot dead in her car last week. One can in no small part answer the enduring question of why America continues to maintain such lax gun laws when such atrocities are so commonplace by this frightened man’s call and LaPierre’s dystopian response. The man’s fear and LaPierre’s fearmongering are intimately connected. That connection goes beyond the weapon itself, and the piecemeal laws that might control it, to some of the country’s most cherished myths and pervasive pathologies. When the national narrative is a story of conquering, dominating, force, and power, an atavistic attachment to the gun can have more pull than a rational case against it.

In a society that fetishises self-reliance, the gun speaks to rugged individualism… each person should be responsible for saving themselves. In a political culture that favours small government, the gun stands as a counterpoint to a lumbering and inefficient state… defend yourself, because, by the time the police get there, you’ll be dead. It underpins a certain sense of masculinity and homestead… a real man should be able to protect his family and home. The dispatcher told him to sit and wait; the NRA told him to stand and fight. These claims for the gun are, of course, nonsense. Most people killed by guns kill themselves. People who have a gun in the house are far more likely to be shot dead than those who don’t. If more guns really made you safer, America would be one of the safest places in the world. As it is, seven children or teenagers are shot dead on average every day. Once a week, a toddler injures someone with a gun. It’d be easy to blame all of this on the NRA. The gun lobby has been central to stonewalling even the most basic commonsense reforms. It has an unparalleled capacity to lobby and fund politicians, locally and nationally. It’s because of the NRA that people on the no-fly list can still buy guns and there’s no government funding for research into how to prevent gun deaths.

Yet while one shouldn’t underestimate the NRA, one shouldn’t exaggerate its role either. Even as it wins (or blocks) votes in Congress, a consistent majority of Americans polled this year believe gun laws should be more strict, that it’s too easy to buy a gun, and that if more people carried guns America would be less safe. When it comes to supporting background checks for all gun buyers there is near-unanimity (94 percent). The NRA has far more power in the polity than influence outside it. Nevertheless, it’s been able to tap into many of the core themes of the broader American narrative in a way that gun-control advocates have not. There is nothing inevitable about this. When a gunman shot children in Dunblane in 1996, Britain tightened its gun laws; when a shooter ran amok in Port Arthur that same year, Australia did the same. That’s what mature and responsive democracies do. However, in America, appeals to freedom, masculinity, small government, and individualism, even when they’re flawed, have more purchase than arguments for background checks and weapons bans, even when those arguments are right.

The problem goes all the way to the top. With the largest military in the world by far, raw power was a central tenet of American foreign policy before Trump promised to unleash “fire and fury” on Kim Jong-un. When accused of abdicating America’s role on the world stage, Barack Obama (who had a “kill list”) responded like a Mafia don. He said, “Well, Muammar Gaddafi probably doesn’t agree with that assessment. Or at least if he was around, he wouldn’t agree with that assessment”. At home, many invoke the gun as a cornerstone of America’s founding story and a safeguard against tyranny. In 2012, David Britt, a gun owner, explained to me at the NRA convention, “It’s about independence and freedom. When you have a democratic system and an honourable people then you trust your citizens … In Europe, they cede their rights and freedoms to their governments. But we think government should be subservient to us”.

These myths are, of course, partial. In a nation that became possible through genocide and slavery, among other things, the gun was central to a particular notion of racial power. If gun enthusiasts were seriously concerned about state tyranny they would’ve been marching alongside Black Lives Matter demonstrators protesting police shootings and calling for the mass armament of poor black neighbourhoods. That’s not the kind of tyranny they object to. However, the myths are also powerful. What the gun lobby lacks in breadth of support it makes up for in depth of commitment. After the Sandy Hook shootings in 2013, gun advocates were far more likely to have contributed money to a pro-gun group or contacted a public official about guns than those who support gun control. Gun-control advocates, for the most part, want to change laws. Gun-rights advocates, largely, believe they’re preserving “essential truths” that make the country what it is. They’ve proved themselves more motivated because long after those distressing scenes from Vegas are a distant memory, these myths will remain vivid.

Americans need new gun laws… but to get them they’ll have to start telling themselves a new story about the country… what it is, what it’s been, and what it wants to be. Their lives depend on it.

6 October 2017

Gary Younge

The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/06/americans-guns-nra-las-vegas-shooting

Gabrielle Giffords Sez “Too Many Children Are Dying”

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On Wednesday, former US Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D–AZ), two years after she was shot in the head and critically wounded in a mass shooting in Arizona, surprised lawmakers when she testified during a US Senate hearing on gun violence in America. Speaking slowly and deliberately, on Wednesday, Giffords told the Senate Judiciary Committee, “Too many children are dying… we must do something. It’ll be hard, but the time is now, you must act. Be bold, be courageous, Americans are counting on you”. This was the committee’s first hearing since last month’s shooting massacre at a Connecticut elementary school left 20 children and 6 adults dead. Giffords and her husband, former cosmonaut Mark Kelly, have become two of the leading advocates in America on the issue of gun safety, forming a group called Americans for Responsible Solutions, which calls for universal background checks for gun buyers and limits on high capacity ammunition magazines. Kelly also testified at the hearing, saying, “We aren’t here as victims, we’re speaking to you here today as Americans. … When dangerous people get dangerous guns, we’re all the more vulnerable.”

Also testifying at Wednesday’s hearing was the head of the powerful American gun lobby, the National Rifle Association (NRA), Wayne LaPierre. He told lawmakers that new proposals to ban assault weapons and increase background checks were not going to solve the problem of gun violence, saying, “Let’s be honest. Background checks will never be universal, because criminals will never submit to them”. LaPierre also called for stricter enforcement of current gun laws, pointing up, “violent felons, gang members and the mentally ill who possess firearms aren’t being prosecuted. That’s unacceptable”.

US President Barack Obama called for new gun control legislation, including banning military-style assault weapons, requiring background checks on all gun purchases, and outlawing ammunition magazines with more than 10 rounds. US Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) introduced legislation banning the sale and manufacture of more than 150 types of semiautomatic weapons, as well as limiting ammunition magazines to ten rounds.

 30 January 2013

RIA-Novosti

http://en.rian.ru/world/20130130/179130099/Too-Many-Children-Are-Dying-Critically-Injured-US-Lawmaker.html

Editor’s Note:

Isn’t that an oddbod argument for the NRA to use? “Let’s not have a law because the criminals won’t follow it”… that’s sheer bonkers and we deserve to laugh it out of court out-of-hand. We need robust gun laws, with especial attention paid to enforcement in the south and southwest, where scofflaws would be most common (that’s where most gun nutters and rightwing kooks are). At the same time, we should preserve the rights of the rural population and registered hunters to appropriate firearms (who ever heard of a mass shooting carried out with a shotgun or hunting rifle?). We can do it… we’ve allowed the rightwing gun nutters to run rampant for too long. Second Amendment be damned… its purpose was to provide for a well-regulated militia to protect the state and society (to keep national defence in the hands of citizen-soldiers, not standing “volunteer” mercenary forces, as is being done today), not provide a rationale for potty nutters to have access to whatever weapons their pointy little heads desired.

BMD