Just when you think the gun nuts have reached the apogee of idiocy a new challenger steps into the ring. Who would have thought, after the catastrophe of 2010 that there would be an electorate dumb enough to vote another Tea Party candidate into office but here he is, folks; Rep. Ted Yoho, Yoho? (R) Florida. This idiot spent the weekend going on record that all citizens should have the right to own he same weapons as the military. Sure Ted, that’s what we want, a bunch of brain dead crackpots running around with 20mm cannons and getting where they’re going in tanks. What’s fascinating is that his reason for this position is so twisted that it almost comes back to logical. His ruptured little mind has figured out that if people were armed to be militia in 1776, we should be armed today like our troops are. It almost works until you realize that we don’t need militias today because we actually have an army, just like a real country.
In 1996 there was a gun massacre in Australia that got a gun ban passed into law. It was a real ban, not like the one that we had in the 1990’s with 600 exemptions. Gun related homicide in Australia dropped 59% over the next decade and there were no more mass killings.
Sure, we can and should do more work on mental health but can we really identify the dark impulses that lead to these horrendous crimes? The answer is probably not. We have to decide which we treasure more, our guns or our children. The problem is that once we decide we are faced with people like Larry Ward and Todd Tiahrt
Larry Ward, chairman of the brand new Gun Appreciation Day which just so happens to coincide with Martin Luther, Jr. day, tried unsuccessfully to explain on CNN that the celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was a black man shot by a white man with a gun, is actually enhanced by gun appreciation day which, honors the legacy of Dr. King. You have to be seriously detached from logical thought to make that leap in concept, that or you have to be on the gun industry’s payroll. Both obviously apply to Larry.
But that’s not the end of it. Ward claims that if African slaves had been armed they would have been able to prevent slavery from actually happening. Duh!!! Let me see; these people had no right to freedom, to vote, to breed without permission, to live where they wanted or anything else. Where would they get the right to own guns? Sure. If they had been armed they never would have been slaves, Larry… unless, of course, the slave traders had better weapons, which they did. The old adage, don’t bring a spear to a gunfight, being extremely apropos here.
The reality is that Larry Ward, is dumb as a post and a bigger liar than Romney. Anything else and he never would have brought up this absurd idea. But this is what the gun lobby depends on, guys like Larry Ward, who are liars and not shy about proving it.
The Tiahrt Amendments, sponsored by Todd Tiahrt, were slipped into House appropriation bills so that no one would notice them and as with much of our legislation, no one did, until it was too late.
They prohibit all other law enforcement from accessing ATF gun data which show how guns are coming from gun shows and how to trace them as they are being trafficked to bad guys. They require the FBI to destroy background check records within 24 hours, making it impossible to help solve crimes or identify gun buyers who had been incorrectly approved, despite having criminal histories,. They also block ATF from requiring gun dealers to conduct inventory checks to detect loss or theft.
One would wonder, what is the purpose of these seemingly mindless amendments. Their only end is to allow illegal gun buyers and dealers to ply their murderous trade, yet they are fully backed by the NRA even as they sound off about how they are for strong gun legislation and how we don’t take advantage of the laws we already have on the books. Of course we don’t take advantage of laws on the books, legislation like the NRA backed Tiahrt Amendments are specifically aimed at keeping lawmakers from using the existing laws to apprehend criminals and eliminate illegal gun sales. The key phrase here is gun sales, because that’s what it’s all about, selling guns. The number of kids who are killed by them doesn’t matter as long as Colt and Remington enlarge their profits.
Tiahrt, just to prove what a gross pile of excrement he really is, stated, while opposing a measure to sanction government funded abortion, that President Obama’s mother, because she was poor, might have aborted him if the government had funded abortion when he was born. Yes Todd, and the same is undoubtedly true for your mother, no matter what her economic circumstances, if she could have seen the way you would turn out.
What the gun lobby and the nuts that expound on it have done is tried to make mental health and entertainment violence, substitutes for gun control. The truth is that there are many opinions on both side of the argument that agree with the complicity of our lack of mental health care and TV and Video violence so let’s take a look at them.
The lack of mental health care in this country, regardless of its relation to guns, is an enormous problem. All over the country, states are cutting back on mental health care programs. Much of this has to do with the problems caused by the recent depression brought to us by many of the same elements that are fighting gun regulation. We have seen shortfalls of over $4.35 billion in mental health related dollars between 2009 and 2012. It’s the largest reduction in mental health care funding since the de-institutionalization of the 1960s & 1970s. A good deal of this is due to misguided austerity politics embraced by conservatives.
The lack of advocacy for the mentally ill makes the situation inevitable. More than 45% of all homeless in the country are mentally ill. Because of laws like the aforementioned Tiahrt Amendments background checks for mental illness are overlooked or deleted shortly after their creation. Of course all mentally ill people are not threats to do violence but many have been. This makes for an extremely volatile situation. The solution is not simple but more money and more attention are definitely needed to help in all mental health areas. The problem is exacerbated by the existence of the important, much needed, privacy laws that were brought about by abuses in our institutions exposed in the 1960’s primarily through the Willowbrook scandal. These laws help to ensure that people are not unjustly incarcerated in mental health facilities but they also make it almost impossible to treat a mentally ill patient who does understand his situation or not want treatment.
I was a personal witness to the results of this entire process in 1986 when I was shooting a film at the abandoned mental hospital n Wingdale, NY. I asked one of the caretakers what had happened to the former patients when they closed the place. He took me to a nearby town where about 15 or 20 people were sitting around in a park, mostly staring into space.
“They get drugs from a dispensary and they have housing, he explained but absolutely no supervision so no one knows whether they take the drugs or use the housing. They’re just on their own.”
And that’s the state of our mental health care in this country today. Sure something has to be done about it and as quickly as possible, but there are no guarantees that it will have much of an effect on the kinds of gun massacres that we have been experiencing in the last few years.
The other big bugaboo is film, TV and video game violence and while there are a large number of exponents of censorship that claim these forms of entertainment are greatly responsible for violence in our society today, there isn’t a great deal of proof for that point of view. Most of the European countries see the same or the same kind of movies and TV that we do, yet their gun death statics are a minor fraction of ours. Japan is the home of violent films and even more violent video games yet their gun death total is almost zero per year. How do you explain that? The numbers don’t lie.
I have always felt that all of us, even children, have a built in filter that allows us to understand the difference between fiction and reality. We, all of us, going back to the first men have been weaned on stories of death and dismemberment, just read the bible. We are a violent species and we always have been. It’s now the job of the more sophisticated among us to limit the tools that allow us to do horrendous violence to each other. Why don’t we want Iran to have the A-bomb. For the same reason we don’t want Billy Bob Blow to have an Uzzi with a thirty round clip.
Of course the big argument for gun ownership, used by all gun proponents, is self-protection. This is a sick joke, recognized by anyone knowledgeable about gun handling and gun safety. Did someone mention Dick Cheney, the greatest argument for gun control in the history of US politics?
Most hunters have learned how to handle a gun and even a modicum of gun safety but I have hunted with any number of them who are almost completely ignorant of both. I never hunted with any of them a second time.
The reality of the guy who buys a handgun or a semi-automatic weapon of any kind for home protection is that he is more likely to kill or wound himself or a loved one than he is to ever even see a burglar. If, by some fluke occurrence, he does see an armed burglar, that’s when he really gets in trouble. This home protector bought the gun out of fear. Now he will be called on to use the gun responsibly and accurately when that fear has been brought to a reality and multiplied almost a thousand percent by the presence of someone who can actually kill him. Good luck. The fact is, that if you want a weapon for self-protection the only realistic weapon to own is a shotgun. No matter how hard your hands are shaking, it’s hard to miss in the average living room. It’s messy but effective. The reverse is true for a nut in a movie theatre. He gets only two shots and before he can reload someone is trying to tear his head off.
It seemed last weekend as if gunners attending the gun shows around the country were trying to prove my point. No fewer than six gun lover’s were shot in four different gun shows on Larry Ward’s Gun Appreciation day. At the Dixie Gun & Knife Show in Raleigh, North Carolina, a shotgun accidentally discharged at a gun safety check. The lady who owned it was taking it out of its case and wounded three bystanders. Let’s hear it for those Tarheel shooters.
Two other incidents happened in gun shows in Medina, Ohio and Indianapolis, Indiana where one guy shot himself in the hand while trying to reload his gun an action we used to consider rather basic while another incident sent a man to the hospital.
The gun people who have tried to sell us the idea that schools will be safe if we have armed guards, lost a lot of ground this weekend. I mean, these guys who attend gun shows are supposed to have some knowledge of gun safety but another one in Michigan had his gun go off at another safety check while surrounded by hundreds of people. Luckily he hit only one. This shows that not only does he know nothing about gun safety but he’s also a pathetic shot.
It seems clear that while we have to do a lot of work on mental health, the first step in the process that could lead to gun safety in
this country is to remove the tools from the hands of the children of all ages. I’m not speaking about hunting rifles or even certain handguns but I am definitely speaking about all semi- auto and automatic weapons and all extended clips. After all we don’t let people own hand grenades and they’re lots of fun to watch explode. There is no realistic reason why anyone should be allowed to own attack weapons or armor piercing ammunition. The only use for them is to kill people. Anyone who needs to hunt with anything but a single shot rifle needs to go back to the range and practice, practice, practice before he’s allowed to go out on a hunt again. Anyone who can’t kill an unarmed animal at up to 900 yards with a single shot doesn’t belong in the field anyhow.
So what can really be done; the congress is made up of cowards and fools. They are so scared that they won’t win the next primary if they vote for gun regulation, that they are paralyzed; but that doesn’t go for the President, who is riding on a tide of popularity from the recent election and at this point in his career has nothing to lose but his legacy.
The President has, from the National Firearms Act of 1934, broad powers to oversea gun dealers. He could use those powers to make it almost impossible for gun dealers to do business until they stopped selling attack weapons and turned in all the weaponry that the president wants to ban. He could also issue executive orders improving information sharing among state, local and federal law enforcement regarding mental illness, criminal records and illegal gun selling and he could extend the law that demands that sellers report the purchase of two or more of any weapon on the attack weapon list. From what he has been saying lately, that is exactly what he is going to do if the congress doesn’t act and act fast on whatever legislation Joe Biden and his committee put together.
But like anything else, the government shouldn’t be in this alone. It takes an engaged citizenry to push congress, to make sure that they know where we stand, to get done what we want done. So get involved. Get off your butts and get into the fight. Either that or sit down, shut up and take what you get because the gun industry is shelling out millions to keep their product out there and they are using people with no morals, people who will lie, cheat and steal to keep all the guns made by Remington or Winchester or Glock or Uzi or whoever, on the market. The are the tools that will kill your children and if you don’t help us rid the world of their evil presence, you will have no one to blame but yourselves.