Showing posts with label gun control. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gun control. Show all posts

Friday, June 9, 2023

Whose Freedom is it Anyway?

 

I originally wrote this a few weeks ago for the Palm Beach Post as an Opinion Piece.  The paper published others of mine before, but they chose not to in this case.  Perhaps it is because of the ennui of thoughts and prayers on the subject.

 

Therefore I publish it here as the dreaded date of July 1 approaches, when Florida House Bill (HB) 543 goes into effect. This was advocated by the Republican majority and Governor DeSantis, further expanding the 2nd amendment to allow permit-less carry of weapons in Florida.

 

It will lead to more gun deaths in the state.  I’ve expressed my views on the subject of gun control numerous times in this space and consider this a summation and further expansion. 

 

The very preamble to the Constitution states it was to “insure domestic tranquility.” The proliferation of modern weaponry instead has facilitated a form of domestic dread.

 

Whose Freedom is it Anyway?

 

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address articulated four fundamental human rights that should be universally protected.

 

    Freedom of Speech

    Freedom of Worship

    Freedom from Want

    Freedom from Fear

 

In 1943 Norman Rockwell immortalized those Freedoms in paintings which were reproduced in “The Saturday Evening Post.” We saw the originals when visiting the New York Historical Museum in 2018

 

The painting “Freedom from Fear” depicts two children safely sleeping in their beds as their parents look on, the wife tucking them in, and the husband holding a newspaper which partially reveals a headline about the Blitz Bombings in London. 

 

That primary freedom we all want for ourselves and especially for our children, and our grandchildren, has mutated into the “freedom” to own and even carry military style weapons.  We now have two “competing” freedoms and a culture that celebrates weapons.

 

In Texas the sound of gunfire, just for the “fun” is so pervasive it is accepted as the norm in rural areas.  The recent Texas Mall shooting was the 199th Mass shooting of this year in the United States.   Next month it will be lawful to carry a concealed weapon in Florida, without a permit and without training.  Expect more gun violence here.

 

This is not the first time that we’ve had “freedoms” square off against one another.

 

At one time smoking was the accepted norm. It was part of our culture, as firmly entrenched as guns are today.  It took decades to remove the Marlboro Man from the popular American Mind.  The tobacco industry’s relentless ads subliminally communicated tough American independence.  Science proved that the ubiquity of 2nd hand smoke has a detrimental impact on non-smokers. Living in a smoke free environment transcends the freedom of smokers to deny that fundamental right.  Laws were finally changed.  

 

 

Similarly, we have a gun culture representing so called American independence.  Some of our elected representatives even “celebrate” that “freedom” with social network pictures of themselves posing with weapons of war, even with their young children.  This form of indoctrination is not much different than the wide-spread smoking advertising which permeated the media of the past.  We genuflected to the tobacco industry as we now do to the NRA.

 

The time has come for our representatives to recognize that their constituents’ freedom to live in relative safety transcends the rights of gun owners to embrace AR-15s and to legislate against the deadly mixture of “stand your ground” and “permit-less carry” laws.  Recently we’ve seen anecdotal evidence of the consequences of the former, innocent people being shot because they mistakenly rang a doorbell or drove into the wrong driveway.  The gun owner simply felt “threatened.”

 

Furthermore, “permit-less carry” puts impossible demands on our police who now may have to go into a public place where a shot has been fired and suddenly scores of untrained citizens are there with their guns drawn.

 

The widespread carrying of guns simply leads to more deadly gun consequences.  The United States has more guns than citizens; it also has an exponentially higher rate of gun deaths and accidents.  It is a statistical inevitability.

 

One of the standard arguments against doing anything, even by those who agree that something must be done, is that there are so many weapons “out there” it is hopeless.  In the early 1980s we also thought that regulating smoking was hopeless.  It took years, but a civilized solution finally prevailed.

 

It has to start somewhere, sometime.  We need to change the gun culture; our representatives have to either agree or be voted out.  Weapons of war need to be outlawed. 

 

As in New Zealand, Congress needs to provide meaningful dollars for an amnesty period for turning in such weapons of war, paying fair market price for them.  After that period, anyone who is discovered with one (no door-to-door seizures, another fabricated action gun-mongers caution) would be subject to legal recourse.

 

Weapons would have to be registered, just like motor vehicles (the unregulated use of which would make them even be more dangerous).  As with automobiles, those with more than a certain number would be considered a dealer and subjected to another level of registration and scrutiny.

 

“Stand your ground” “permit-less carry” laws must be changed. The freedom to live in relative safety must prevail over the freedom to own (and carry) military style weapons

 

Wednesday, July 6, 2022

July 4 Ignominy

 

When I started writing this entry, the Highland Park parade shooting was just being reported.  Highland Park, Parkland, Any Place, USA, a land of gun culture.  In the absence of real gun control, our feckless representatives are accessories to the next mass shooting already brewing in America Land.  We fought wars to live safely and freely and now the cancer from within society is our greatest enemy.  This is central to the pieces I read during the “holiday.”

 

Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer for the New York Times wrote an interesting article for the July 4 holiday, The American Flag Belongs to Me, Too, and This Year I’m Taking It Back

 


Essentially it recounts a dilemma I have felt – our flag seems to have been purloined by the MAGA crowd.  But she had an experience which led her to hang “the American flag again for the first time in years. It’s right next to the front door, and it does not symbolize MAGA lies or MAGA tyranny. We are flying it proudly in honor of our fellow Americans who are fighting for justice of every kind.”

 

To me it is merely an inspirational piece.  Our partisan SCOTUS is just beginning to show its clout.  And the J6 Hearings clearly show Trump’s role in that attempt to overthrow the peaceful transition of power. Where is justice ask the following pieces?

 

Jim Wright’s Stonekettle Station’s wonders where Merrick Garland is in When Good Men Do Nothing,  He used to write these hard-hitting progressive pieces on a regular basis before migrating to Twitter.  Still he writes a monthly wrap-up.  Essentially his piece can be summarized by “Why should I have any faith in the Department of Justice?”   


Another weekender was John Pavlovitz’s When the Law Fails You, Where Do You Go?  He approaches the same topic but from the viewpoint of a humanistic pastor (which he is).  These articles are there for anyone to read, so no further comment on them from me.

 

I’ll add a piece I wrote eight years ago Independence Day Reverie Hard to believe, eight years.  I was startled coming across this as it proves the old adage, the more things change, the more they stay the same.  I was writing about the same issues as today, and this is pre-Trump.  He is merely an accelerant on our national nightmare.

 

Wednesday, June 8, 2022

It’s Time to Bring the 2nd Amendment Up To Date

 


Predictably, I had to leave out much, even key arguments, to consolidate this Op Ed piece on Gun Control for publication in the June 4, 2022 Palm Beach Post.  The online version invited readers’ comments and I was astonished by the personal vitriol it generated, just more evidence of our broken country.  All those comments were shielded by anonymity.

While the Constitution’s 2nd amendment gives its citizens the right to bear arms, it has to be open to interpretation and refinement as times change.  With the radical metamorphosis of the “arms” of the 18th century, its definition (and its original purpose) should have been steadily narrowed; otherwise, at its most absurd extreme, munitions manufacturers could be selling tanks, bazookas, you name it at your local gun shop. Meanwhile, that same Constitution gives States inherent "police power" to protect public health and safety.  One would think that those who do not carry guns should have the “freedom” to live without threats from those who do carry guns.

The freedom concept is not too far removed from one that pertains to tobacco.  Until the full impact of being exposed to second-hand smoke became well known, nonsmokers essentially had no rights.  Smokers “lost” their “freedom” to smoke in public once the tobacco industry lost its grip on the narrative it controlled.  Things must change when public health and safety are demonstrably at risk. Since Columbine more than 300,000 students have experienced or witnessed gun violence at school. It is time for our children no longer have to fear attending school, as well as their parents for sending them. 

My article makes the point of comparing gun registration to automobile registration and regulation.  Both instruments are potentially dangerous and laws governing their ownership and use are needed.  Absurd say the gun lobbyists.  But is it?

Imagine an alternative universe where automobiles were not invented until the last twenty years.  These same people would be arguing that their “freedom” is being curtailed having to register vehicles, getting licenses, being tested, requiring them to obey traffic laws. Having government oversee gun sales would also control how many one person could own without being declared a dealer (as it is with autos), and therefore be subjected to another level of scrutiny.  Mass shooters have a tendency to have arsenals, owning more than one gun and in some cases huge collections. Red flag!

The tired argument against the foregoing is it doesn’t stop the “bad” guys and that it would not immediately eliminate mass shootings.  Agreed!  But over time, the mandate of registration, with laws governing the consequences of the failure to register, report sales to another person, etc. is a more permanent solution.  Australia had a successful buyback program for guns.  Buy them back, no questions asked, putting a premium on assault weapons, banning the purchase of the same.  Anyone possessing such a weapon after the moratorium or selling one would be breaking the law.

Expensive, yes, but it must start sometime, or we will be having a new Memorial Day for school children.  Are their lives worth discarding for the “freedom” to own assault weapons?

YET…Senate Republicans have already said that they will not consider the regulations experts think are central to stopping mass shootings: an assault weapons ban such as we had until 2004, limits on ammunition magazines, and expansions of background checks to cover private gun sales are all off the table. They also say an age limit of 21 to purchase an assault-type rifle like that AR-15 is unlikely. – Heather Cox Richardson, June 7, 2022 “Letters from An American”

 

Saturday, April 30, 2022

Baking the Cake

 

It’s a multilayered apocalyptic confection, suitable for a world addicted to dystopian hedonism.   Irreconcilable political ideologies, the plutocracy and the new class of “influencers,” have found the perfect recipe for destroying democracy.  And yet we go on, one step in front of the other, as if life can continue like this.  I’ve avoided these issues in my blog, but not in my mind, so time for a polemic catharsis.

To borrow from Dickens, the human race, like Joseph Marley, now wears the chain it forged in these times, having “made it link by link, and yard by yard; [and] girded it on of [our] own free will, and of [our] own free will [wear] it.”  I am now mixing metaphors (chains and cake), flailing for understanding.

We have embraced the kleptocratic emperor who wears no clothes, so transparent in his horrific iniquity and ignorance, but so in sync with popular culture, bolstered by social media.  We have become vassals to the very technology we now can no longer live without (somehow we managed before the ubiquity of the smart phone).  An agnotological oven has baked the cake and forged the chains.

It’s become a topsy-turvy world where an indoctrinated post-truth minority has turned the Bill of Rights and the Constitution on its ear.  The archaic Electoral College was almost toppled by its vulnerability to manipulation in the last election and state Republican bodies are now arranging for the members of the College to become their marionettes. 

The ideals of the Democratic Republic are under siege.  The Supreme Court was the first to topple.  The imagined rights of individuals hijacked those that the social compact of the Constitution was supposed to ensure.  One only has to consider the endless jousting over vaccines and mask mandates in a pandemic that has killed one million in the U.S.  Or the “rights” of military-style weapon owners transcending the right of society to live safely.  Only a morally bankrupt society would tolerate more guns than there are citizens.

The previous administration laid the long-term groundwork for January 6, and its execution on that fateful day using mob psychology.  Sedition, an act of a third world country was perpetrated in front of our own eyes, and yet here we are more than a year later still waiting for justice to prevail. 

The pandemic hastened supply side issues, labor shortages, the flooding of the financial markets with liquidity, and now, the consequence, inflation.  This will be borne on the backs of those who can least afford it with increases in transportation, housing, and food outweighing other inflation measures.  Not discussed much is the elephant in the room: as the Federal Reserve increases interest rates, the current National Debt of $30 Trillion will have to be financed at higher interest rates, a self-fulfilling prophesy (in the absence of higher taxes on the rapidly growing uber-wealthy class) of either default or still higher inflation in the future so debt can be retired with depreciated dollars.  One only has to look at the US Debt Clock which is a real time pulse of our economy and debt.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine assaults our senses daily, accompanied by a feeling of helplessness without risking a nuclear war.  It is far beyond my understanding to discuss this horror in any kind of detail.  Finger pointing can be found for whatever position one wants to take.  Putin very quickly referred to slaughtered Ukrainians as “fake news.”  Doesn’t this resonate?  We have forged the chains of gaslighting over years of social media.  Four years of the prior administration made “fake news” the centerpiece of how to manage its citizens where truth/lies are fungible according to one’s own belief and feelings.  In fact, feelings are as valid as scientific evidence. 

How all this will end is anyone’s guess; nothing is beyond the realm of possibility, including a civil war or a nuclear war between East and West.  Civil war is “easier” to imagine than the latter, but the April 30 Wall Street Journal carries an opinion article by Peggy Noonan, Putin Really May Break the Nuclear Taboo in Ukraine which goes to that very place.  She makes a persuasive argument:  “It seems unthinkable, but American leaders’ failure to think about it heightens the risk it will happen.”

Indeed, we have forged the chains, link by link. By weakening democracy here we have emboldened Putin’s actions with heretofore unimaginable consequences.

 

The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, known in the West as Joe-1, on Aug. 29, 1949, at Semipalatinsk Test Site, in Kazakhstan