Showing posts with label society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label society. Show all posts

Saturday, June 14, 2014

The NRA's "Open Carry" Movement Doesn't Work in Civilization

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President Obama has been in office for six years and in all that time he has never implemented the dreaded "Gun Grab" that rightwing nutjobs obsess about. In spite of all the school shootings and mass public shootings, people have more guns than ever, and Congress is owned by the Gun Lobby so they do NOTHING about it. And the school shootings continue.

Last Week President Obama once again spoke out on the issue in an interview with Tumblr, trying to get through to Congress that something must be done:



Full Transcript on WhiteHouse.Gov

I have to say that people often ask me how has it been being President, and what am I proudest of and what are my biggest disappointments. And I’ve got two and a half years left. My biggest frustration so far is the fact that this society has not been willing to take some basic steps to keep guns out of the hands of people who can do just unbelievable damage.

We’re the only developed country on Earth where this happens. And it happens now once a week. And it’s a one-day story. There’s no place else like this. A couple of decades ago, Australia had a mass shooting similar to Columbine or Newtown. And Australia just said, well, that's it -- we’re not seeing that again. And basically imposed very severe, tough gun laws. And they haven’t had a mass shooting since.



Our levels of gun violence are off the charts. There’s no advanced, developed country on Earth that would put up with this. Now, we have a different tradition. We have a Second Amendment. We have historically respected gun rights. I respect gun rights. But the idea that, for example, we couldn’t even get a background check bill in to make sure that if you’re going to buy a weapon you have to actually go through a fairly rigorous process so that we know who you are, so you can't just walk up to a store and buy a semiautomatic weapon -- it makes no sense.

And I don't know if anybody saw the brief press conference from the father of the young man who had been killed at Santa Barbara. And as a father myself, I just could not understand the pain he must be going through and just the primal scream that he gave out -- why aren’t we doing something about this?

And I will tell you, I have been in Washington for a while now and most things don’t surprise me. The fact that 20 six-year-olds were gunned down in the most violent fashion possible and this town couldn’t do anything about it was stunning to me. And so the question then becomes what can we do about it. The only thing that is going to change is public opinion. If public opinion does not demand change in Congress, it will not change.

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I’ve initiated over 20 executive actions to try to tighten up some of the rules in the laws, but the bottom line is, is that we don’t have enough tools right now to really make as big of a dent as we need to.

And most members of Congress -- and I have to say, to some degree, this is bipartisan -- are terrified of the NRA.
. . . The last thing I’ll say: A lot of people will say that, well, this is a mental health problem, it’s not a gun problem. The United States does not have a monopoly on crazy people. (Laughter.) It’s not the only country that has psychosis. And yet, we kill each other in these mass shootings at rates that are exponentially higher than anyplace else. Well, what’s the difference? The difference is, is that these guys can stack up a bunch of ammunition in their houses and that’s sort of par for the course.

So the country has to do some soul searching about this. This is becoming the norm, and we take it for granted in ways that, as a parent, are terrifying to me. And I am prepared to work with anybody, including responsible sportsmen and gun owners, to craft some solutions. But right now, it’s not even possible to get even the mildest restrictions through Congress, and we should be ashamed of that.



The President is telling the truth. If he wanted to confiscate weapons he would do that, but the reality is that anyone can buy a gun any day of the week. It is easy in America. You can buy guns at Gun Shows and Swap Meets. You can buy them at sporting goods stores. You can buy them online. You can buy guns at Walmart. You can buy guns at Target down the aisle from the diapers and baby food.

And now gun nuts want to parade around with loaded guns in the restaurants and stores! And far-right conservative state legislatures have helped them with their Old West Fantasy by passing "Guns Everywhere" laws.

But what about the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for those who don't want to see guns, especially while they are eating or shopping? Why do we have to live in a world where everyone is armed to the teeth?

Well, the NRA says "good guys" should be armed to stop the "bad guys" with guns. But as we often see, even trained policemen are shot, as they were recently in Las Vegas - shot in the head while eating lunch at a Cici's Pizza. And a person with a concealed weapon who tried to stop the shooters was shot dead by the the same two sociopaths.

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Fallen Las Vegas Officers
Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo

The man who shot the cops, Jerad Miller, was a convicted felon who wasn't supposed to have guns, but he asked his friends and family for guns on Facebook. Then he bragged about going to Bundy Ranch where he paraded around with an assault rifle. In fact, he was told to leave Bundy ranch BECAUSE he was a felon! His wife legally bought the guns they used in the attack, but she gave them to her husband, which is a crime. These two thugs weren't patriots, but criminals who wanted to "Start the Revolution." They bragged to all the neighbors what they were going to do, but either no one believed them, or were too intimidated to call 911.

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More About Jerad and Amanda Miller:
Snark Amendment: Vegas Shooting
Inspired by Alex Jones and Bundy Ranch

A small faction of our populace has an obsession with guns and perceived glory as they fight against the very government that has held this country together for 250 years. Why do they want another Civil War? Why are they so hell-bent on everyone being just as bloodthirsty as they are? How can we possibly know when a person with a gun walks towards us in a store or restaurant whether they are a "good guy" just proud of the 2nd Amendment or a horrible monster who want's to mow us down to make a point?

A friend of one of the dead policemen wrote this essay:

Killing Cops Doesn't Make You a Revolutionary
Two wackos walked into a fast food restaurant, ambushed my friend Alyn and his partner, Igor Soldo, shooting them point blank as they ate their lunch. They then turned and yelled something about it being the “start of the revolution”, killed one other person and then themselves.

These two idiots didn’t start a revolution. They just ripped the life from two heroes as they ate. They took fathers from their children. They brought darkness into the lives of those who loved these two men. They traumatized people who witnessed the tragedy, probably for the rest of their lives. They left a horrific scene for dozens of police workers to have to process emotionally and mentally. And the greatest irony of this infuriating act of horrific stupidity and delusion is that if they were truly acting out of some kind of perverse revolutionary intent, they only hurt their own cause — whatever that is.



. . . These weren’t policy makers. They weren’t “Obama’s henchmen.” They weren’t hired drones of the “evil Koch Brothers.” These were two of the good guys.

. . . If you’re frustrated with government, if you’re worried about the republic, if you’re convinced black helicopters are watching you in the night, if you think Obama is a reptile alien sent to destroy the human race, or whatever is under your skin, do us all a favor: start a blog, write a book, go to a protest, join a cause, call a senator, call a talk show, run for office, do what people in a free society do, not what people in the Lord of the Flies would. And if you just can’t restrain yourself from going on a murderous rampage followed by your own cowardly suicide, do the rest of us a favor and do it in reverse order.
Shooting a cop doesn’t make you a revolutionary. It just makes things worse…for everyone.





















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Thursday, August 2, 2012

Guns, Germs, Steel and Mitt Romney

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Today there's a brouhaha over the anthropological bestseller called Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. Diamond's theory is that geography is destiny insofar that latitude, land fertility, access to the ocean, and quality of food have always made some civilizations possible, and some cultures more prosperous.
For an Overview: See PBS

This is about Mitt Romney relying too much on the advice of his Neocon handlers. It's about wrong-headed thinking that could lead to World War Three. It's about a candidate thinking he's really really smart when he keeps displaying stark evidence that he isn't. And it's about an author who wants to distance himself as fast as possible from Mitt Romney.

Romney mentioned Diamond's book in his Jerusalem speech this week. In an essay on Daily Kos, Meteor Blades points out that the "ultrahawkish senior foreign policy adviser Dan Senor" is probably the member of Romney's camp who gave him the literary name to drop.

From the speech:
I noted that part of my interest when I used to be in the world of business is I would travel to different countries was to understand why there were such enormous disparities in the economic success of various countries. I read a number of books on the topic. One, that is widely acclaimed, is by someone named Jared Diamond called Guns, Germs and Steel, which basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.

Then later in the speech, Romney seemed to tie Guns, Germs and Steel to another book called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor by David Landes, and these statements put Romney in hot water with the Palestinians when he said this in Jerusalem:

He says if you can learn anything from the economic history of the world, it's this: culture makes all the difference. Culture makes all the difference. And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.
As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality

Notice that Romney mentioned "several books" and implied that one book was somehow lending creedence to the other and to his hypothesis about why Palestinians are not able to make as much money as the Israelis.


Because of those remarks, Palestinian negotiator Sa'eb Erekat responded called Romney a racist.
via CNN:
This man, before he came here, he should have got some education about Israelis, Palestinians, and the region. . . . The Romney statements on Jerusalem and the racist statements about the Israeli culture being superior to the Palestinian culture reflect someone who needs to be educated, who needs knowledge. His statements are serving those extremists in the region now . . .

Romney seems to miss the rich irony that the Jews were a people without a country after World War II, and that's why they went to fight in Palestine. In Biblical times, the Jews were enslaved to the Babylonians, then the Egyptians, then Greeks and Romans, before being denounced for centuries by the Catholic Church,. By Romney's hypothesis, they were in the same position as the Palestinians throughout history, therefore all their "cultural values" were somehow inferior, which is ridiculous, since those same values are praised today as successful and part of the "Judeo-Christian" heritage of the West. I honestly don't want to know what Romney thinks of the Holocaust - good grief.

While Guns, Germs, and Steel is not my favorite book, and seems to overstate the obvious point -  that a successful culture needs location, location, location - for Romney to mention the book in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was misguided and just plain weird.

If Romney's handlers had bothered to read the introduction to the book, they would have noticed that the author was careful not making judgments about one people over another, one culture over another. He points out that all great civilizations have influences from other cultures. Hunters/Gatherers are no less "successful" than civilized peoples in Western Europe.

From page 8 of the Prologue:
"My motive for investigating these geographic differences in human societies is not to celebrate one type of society over another but simply to understand what happened in history."
~ author Jared Diamond

Now the author has written a OP-Ed in the New York Times in which he sounds like the Anti-Romney and makes it clear he did not approve of Romney's Israel speech, or of Romney as a candidate:
Romney Hasn’t Done His Homework
. . . It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”

That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. My focus was mostly on biological features, like plant and animal species, and among physical characteristics, the ones I mentioned were continents’ sizes and shapes and relative isolation. I said nothing about iron ore which is so widespread that its distribution has had little effect on the different successes of different peoples. (As I learned this week, Mr. Romney also mischaracterized my book in his memoir, “No Apology: Believe in America.”)

. . . Can we assume that the United States, blessed with temperate location and seacoasts and navigable rivers, will remain rich forever, while tropical or landlocked countries are doomed to eternal poverty?

Of course not.

. . . Our geography won’t keep us rich and powerful if we can’t get a good education, can’t afford health care and can’t count on our hard work’s being rewarded by good jobs and rising incomes.

Here's the excerpt from Mitt Romney's book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, in which he misrepresents Diamond's thesis, via AtlanticWire. There's something rather odd the way Romney goes from "Iron Curtain" to "Weapons" of Iron Ore to describe why some cultures are thriving while some are not. It's a word association worthy of Sarah Palin for sure. (I realize the type is small to fit the page, so zoom in with CTRL+ or click the pictures to see a larger view).

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