I was glad to see Obama show some emotion today, in his announcement of the executive orders to tighten up gun laws. It is right to shed a tear for those killed by our absurd gun laws…or lack thereof.
But it’s only a start. We need to actively reduce the number of guns in our communities; I would like to see more restrictions and confiscations.
I would also ask that Obama should shed a tear for the innocents killed abroad by our military.
Politicians should be asked would they like it if somebody pointed a gun at them or if they feel safe or threatened with someone bringing a gun into the Congress or the House of Representatives.
Thanks, Obama. Glad you’re starting to take gun violence seriously. But where the hell were you in the first 7 years of your presidency? This would have been a good start in 2009. Now, it’s probably too little too late.
The really scary people are those who needlessly lost somebody to guns and who still support the NRA madness, aka “it’s a terrible tragedy but what can you do”
@#2, dianne:
Well, let’s see. In year 1-2, he was busy trying to avoid doing anything about the banks or the wars. So he spent that time telling anyone who asked that health insurance was the really important thing, so important that nothing whatsoever other than health insurance could be even considered until a bill was passed. Then he stuck us with Mitt Romney’s anything-to-avoid-single-payer plan just in time for the Congressional session to end.
Year 3-4, he was busy trying to pretend that “ending the war” was something he had actually been trying to do (even though we left Iraq on Bush’s original timetable and we’re still in Afghanistan). In order to make sure the Republicans would provide as much of a sideshow to distract us from the fact that he still wasn’t taking on the banks or addressing the economy in any way, he caved in to them every time they wanted anything.
Year 5-6 were the tricky part — he had to pretend that Republican intransigence had nothing to do with the way he gave in to their every demand (remember how he even insisted on watering down the ACA back in year 1 because the Republicans hated it, and then it turned out that they weren’t going to vote for it anyway so it was watered down for no reason whatsoever? Good times!), but on the other hand the increasing losses of the Democratic Party made it possible for him to posture occasionally, to keep people believing he wasn’t the architect of his own failure. Since he was increasingly powerless, it was becoming okay to pretend to be a leftist again, for the first time since 2008. (His willingness to pretend to be left-of-center is in direct proportion to how impossible it is for him to actually get anything done. If there’s even the slightest chance he might make a difference in the long term, then there is no chance that he’ll so much as mumble under his breath.)
Now he can’t accomplish anything because the Republicans control both houses of Congress, so he can pretend he’s a populist 24/7 if he likes. This particular posturing will quickly be quashed by the Republicans — he knows it, they know it, we all know it — so he can shed those crocodile tears and pretend he actually cares.
It is always somewhat depressing to hear even the most sincere concerns about gun violence from someone like Obama must be punctuated by repeated caveats that their move to restrict the currently all but unfettered access to lethal firearms is emphatically not an attack on the Second Amendment ‘right to bear arms’ that is so repentantly fetishised by the gun-fondlers and the cynical right wingers who court their votes. And of course the Republican idiots inevitably rail against any form of gun control as an attack upon what is weirdly considered an essential right anyway
The Second Amendment was written to help militia formations train in an era where such groups might conceivably serve some sort of purpose – it was never intended to function as an absolute right for almost any citizen to carry lethal weapons just because. It is no longer fit for purpose, and until that constitutional haemunculous is cast off the epidemic of gun violence in the US is not going to be meaningfully curtailed, and there will be countless more preventable massacres and innocent lives lost to shed tears over.
As Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- says @ 3, the most frightening thing is the sheer strength of the cult of gun ownership in the US; even some of the relatives of victims of gun violence continue to treat the misbegotten ‘right to bear arms’ as the ultimate in sacred cows, and it is all tied up with toxic constructions of masculinity and machismo and the monstrous notion that only an extensively armed populous living in perpetual mutual fear is truly free since supposedly the only thing standing between you and oppression at the hands of a nation state with access to the most powerful and technologically advanced military in the world is… a handful of trigger happy buffoons with light arms. What use are functional constitutional checks and balances or the maintenance of a democratic culture of universal enfranchisement anyway? I am of course absolutely sure that, come the day the big bad central government kill squads come for them, their pop guns would totally stop a main battle tank in its tracks. Yup, no question. Surely the lives of a few innocent kids more or less is a small price to pay for a guarantee of freedom like that…?
‘Repentantly’ should be ‘repugnantly’ in my last post.
I wonder if Chief Gun Fondler Christopher will show up to shit on these smalls steps in the right direction.
Click over to the article to see the post captures, they are…something.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/bundy-backing-arizona-repub-floats-state-bill-to-ignore-obamas-executive-order-on-guns/
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/fox-host-president-obama-put-a-raw-onion-in-his-podium-so-he-could-cry-fake-tears-for-kids-killed-by-guns/
I hear this assertion all the time. The thing that gets me about it: if this is their actual concern, why are they not calling for the abolition of the military? If they’re legitimately afraid the U.S. government is right on the verge of declaring martial law and throwing us into a despotic police state, why do they not demand the very apparatus the government would use to enforce it be dismantled? I suppose they’d insist the military is needed so the nation could defend itself from outside threats, but they’ve already addressed that with their claim they could withstand the strongest military force in the world- a brag many of these same people gleefully make when we’re pounding on other people. If they’re so certain they could protect the nation from our own military, I’m sure they’d agree we could just airdrop a bunch of them in any country that rattles its sabers at us and the problem would be solved.
@Jeremy Shaffer, you are labouring under the naive assumption that gunfondlers follow rules of logic in their reasoning. They do not. The NRA has US politicians firmly in the grasp of their fi$t and US population at large is poisoned by gun culture to the point where the rest of the world either shakes their head in despair or has their jaws dropped in disbelief. The second ammendment should never be in constitution in the first place. To my knowledge no functioning state has such idiotic thing on the books. It is a fossil and a living and dangerous one at that.
PZ, in the OP:
This. The video shows a mass murderer, who has killed more innocent civilians in personally-authorized drone strikes than any serial killer or mass murderer on US soil (except 9/11) by two orders of magnitude, and possibly more than 9/11 as well, weeping about the killing of innocents.
Jeremy Shaffer, #10:
Precisely. The actual intent of the 2nd Amendment had nothing to do with hunting OR defense against muggers, but was intended to prevent the formation of a standing army. The framers (mostly) intended the Federal government to maintain an officer corps and call out militias for civil defense.
This did not require that only the (equivalent of) the national guard be armed; the intent was the reverse: to maintain a pool of armed citizens from which a(n equivalent of) the national guard could be drawn as needed.
The lack of a standing army was touted (e.g., in Federalist 46) as a counterbalance to government overreach: the citizenry at large would be better armed than the government, which had no standing army, and would need to persuade (the equivalent of) the national guard to mobilize to enforce its edicts. Easy, if the redcoats are coming; much harder, to enforce Catholicism as state religion, say. (But hardly foolproof: troops could rally around any popular sentiment, like crushing a slave rebellion or rounding up Japanese.)
The gun nuts have built a mythology around Federalist 46, etc., but have simultaneously embraced military and police as comrades. Plenty of gun nuts are actual veterans or police. And so we get the worst of both worlds–a standing army that could do anything the rulers damn well please, and a pool of armed citizens who are actuated by very different motives than simply preparing for the common defense.
Jeremy Shaffer:
why are they not calling for the abolition of the military?
Exactly! You’d think they’d have learned from the Whiskey Rebellion.
supposedly the only thing standing between you and oppression at the hands of a nation state with access to the most powerful and technologically advanced military in the world is…
At the very least, the NRA buffoons ought to be in full freak-out mode when the national guard gets deployed on some imperial adventure. After all, the national guard is the force that would be expected to resist the oppressive government’s standing army, when/it turns its claws on the US itself.
The whole thing is, of course, fantasy. If the standing army became an oppressive occupation force within US borders, it’d fall to insider attacks and other forms of 4GW. The gun nuts never seem to notice that we sit across the US military’s supply chain. So, their premise is that they need the guns to fight off the oppressor whose salary they pay and who they arm and feed. Dumbasses!
The world will be perfectly fine without the Second Amendment, but…
Restricting gun ownership to one handgun per household with a specified maximum amount of ammo does not violate the Second Amendment.
Requiring the owner to submit an official statement explaining what happened to the previous bullets when he/she goes to buy more ammo does not violate the Second Amendment.
Requiring insurance for gun owners does not violate the Second Amendment.
Requiring guns to be kept in approved safes at all times does not violate the Second Amendment.
Requiring sufficiently long wait periods to conduct thorough background checks does not violate the Second Amendment.