Tag Archives: gun control

Political Rants

Shouting down the barrel of a gun

As often happens, I’ve taken at least a week to think about a major event before commenting on it. I resisted writing about this last time around because so many voices were weighing in and I felt I had nothing useful to add. The nation is cycling through the iterative process of absorbing yet another mass shooting and ultimately choosing to do nothing about it. What can I say to make sense of this?

After the Sandy Hook atrocity, when Congress did nothing to restrict the sale and ownership of assault weapons, I felt certain that they never would. Slaughtering young school children with a weapon of war felt like a bridge too far, but it turned out not to be. Now it has happened again, in Uvalde, Texas, right on the heals of a racist massacre in Buffalo, NY, and the Senate has gone on break. Schumer may attempt a demonstration vote in a couple of weeks – that’s their response. What the burning fuck?

Gun-shy good guys

The debate about whether or not we should restrict gun ownership is over, frankly. If this massacre in Texas proves nothing else, it has certainly demonstrated this much. The Uvalde school district had all the resources it was supposed to have to prevent this sort of thing. It did active shooter drills, created its own police force, established a SWAT team that practiced at the school – none of this amounted to shit. The model the right and the NRA has been advancing for the last thirty years is an abject failure.

This is true even at the level of “good guy with a gun” vs. “bad guy with a gun”. In this case, at least nineteen good guys with guns stood in the hallway while the shooter did his work. Hard to criticize their reluctance – who wants to be the first to walk through that door? Let’s face it – consumer fire arms are now so powerful that even the cops are afraid of them to the point of inaction. If you’re a law-and-order Republican, why the hell doesn’t this bother you?

Prohibitive cost as an accessory

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the Second Amendment and some possible ways around its application. That was in response to Buffalo. Now, with this latest school shooting, I’m convinced that we need to push for positive change wherever and however government will accommodate it. If we don’t have the votes to pass an assault weapons ban / buy-back program at the federal level, we need to do two things: (1) get more votes in Congress, and (2) experiment at the state and local levels, where possible.

One thing that might be worth trying is the application of legal liability. It’s possible that something like this could pass in states like New York or California. Senator Kevin Parker introduced a piece of legislation to this effect in the NY State Senate about five years ago. This law would require any gun owner in New York state to carry $1 million in liability coverage. That sounds like a splendid idea, particularly with respect to AR-15s and other high-powered killer rifles. My vote would be to raise the coverage required in accordance with the deadliness of the weapon.

Texas v. Texas

Then there’s that other kind of legal liability – the kind envisioned by Texas lawmakers when they passed Senate Bill 8 last year restricting abortion. Empowering citizens to sue gun owners sounds like a ripping idea, particularly since the Supreme Court seems unwilling to touch this legal vigilante brand of legislation with a ten foot pole. Can we pass a bill that would empower citizens of New York to sue anyone who owns an AR-15? How about suing the manufacturers of AR-15s?

Hey …. when the right hands you the tools to blow them to hell, you may as well use them.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Imaginary Lines.

Our press tends to frame subjects in the most superficial ways. I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t already know, but sometimes it’s so blatant that it hits you in the face. The “crisis on the border” coverage is frankly kind of shocking, a bit like the talk during the Trump years of “caravans” heading north from the “northern triangle” countries we spent decades rendering ungovernable. Practically every outlet has used the term “crisis” in their headlines. I understand the incentive structure here – if it bleeds, it leads – but what they’re referring to is literally more of the same phenomenon we’ve been seeing on the U.S. southern border for years. It certainly isn’t way out of line from recent months. Stats compiled on Factcheck.org, from CBP numbers, show that crossings are not nearly as high as they were in May 2019 and more or less even with March, April, and June of that year. Was their hair on fire back then?

This is probably a good week to point out that this “crisis” keeps happening because we don’t take any meaningful steps to address it, just as might be said of mass shootings in America. It’s the classic definition of insanity, right? Granted, the influx of people from Central America is not down to one simple cause, but this thing that the right professes to hate like fire is largely a product of the toxic policies they and many of their liberal adversaries have been pursuing since the Second World War and longer. Why are people leaving Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and other Central American countries in such large numbers? Because they are failed states, in essence, thanks in no small measure to the so-called anticommunist crusades we undertook in the region from the first decades of the last century. Between bad governance, corruption, and dominance by criminal cartels funded through drug sales to the United States, the northern triangle nations are virtually unlivable for most of their battered citizens. That’s the return on our investment in fascistic governments.

Then there’s the border itself. It’s an imaginary line bristling with armed officers. The fact that it’s highly militarized and that it’s very difficult to make the crossing means that when people come here, they tend to want to stay. I’m not someone who thinks that immigration is an intrinsically bad thing, but there was a time when people could cross the border without a lot of trouble, stay for a while, work, send money home, then return to their families. Now if they manage to survive the crossing, they stay put and send for their families. The very efforts designed to keep people out is, in essence, keeping them in. Frankly, it’s fortunate for us that people want to come here and work. These “illegal immigrants” include many, many essential workers. Think about that for a moment: both illegal and essential. They get food to our tables. They take care of our grandparents. They do the jobs most Americans shun. Why the fuck do we put a target on their backs?

As I said previously, these are not simple issues that can be solved easily. We need to get our heads around what’s causing this misery, year after year, and try to work towards solutions that are radical in that they would necessarily dismantle the systems of oppression and exclusion that we have built over the course of our history. Or …. we could find something easy to do, and just keep complaining about it. Up to us.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

American carnage.

It is possible to kill people with your mouth, particularly when you’re president of the United States. I’m referring to the kind of rhetoric that has broad public impact rather than speech that sets deadly official policies in motion – both kill, and we should take both very seriously. In the wake of the El Paso shooting, it’s that first kind that calls for extra examination. A president’s public expressions of hate, bigotry, whatever, provide space for extremists and overzealous citizens to act.  Nixon called student anti-war protesters a bunch of bums, and before long we saw Kent State. Now Trump has done the same thing, except to a much more explicit degree.

As he did three years ago, Trump is centering his campaign on fear of brown immigrants. Not immigrants in general, you understand – he doesn’t seem to have a problem with people from Canada or “Normay”. The president claims repeatedly and consistently that the United States is being “invaded” by large numbers of undocumented aliens bent on committing serious felonies. He and his administration have implemented multiple scare campaigns about dark caravans moving northward, populated by Muslim terrorists and criminals from “Mexican countries”, your placid suburban backyard squarely in their sites. They have pushed for a Great Wall of Ignorance along the southern U.S. border, though I have yet to hear of any corresponding structure along our northern border (or, for that matter, around our airports, as that is how so many people who overstay their visas enter this country).

Photo of sociopaths posing with orphan infant

We’ve all heard the administration’s childish gaslighting on this issue, as well as that of their supporters in Congress. Good luck with that. They can’t run away from their own shouted words. They have been waving the bloody shirt since before they arrived in Washington … it’s a little late to claim that they don’t mean to rile people up with their contant talk of demographic Armageddon. In his poorly-crafted inaugural (honestly, Steven Miller is objectively the worst speechwriter ever to serve a president), Trump spoke of “American Carnage”. What we are seeing now is exactly that – a continuation of the mindless death toll generated by our gun-obsessed society, but also a resurgence of right-wing violence directed at the targets of Trump’s tirades. Ordinarily these movements fade during Republican presidencies, but this time around they know they have a friend in the White House, regardless of his hostage-video statements of condemnation against white supremacy.

This administration is an American fascist’s dream come true. Now all they have to do is keep him in office. That’s what we’re up against.

luv u,

jp