This was the week that Dr. Kidglove performed his most thrilling stunt: stepping into a phone booth, ripping off his street clothes, and emerging as Captain Courageous.
Staring the NRA bully straight in the rifle-scope, he told Congress to pass legislation banning so-called assault weapons and limiting the size of gun magazines to no more than ten rounds. Then he issued 23 presidential declarations intended to militate against further mass slaying in public places in this country.
We do applaud his noble goals. Now let us see if he achieves them -- or if he reverts to mild-mannered, easily -intimidated Dr. Kidglove the next time House Republicans say "Boo!" The Casper Milquetoast Democrats in Congress have already warned that the laws Capt. Courageous demanded might be very hard to pass. Poor dears.
Some in the media have praised Capt. Courageous for offering the boldest effort ever to control gun violence in the United States. That's a matter of perspective. Ten-round magazines would mean that school shooters could kill only ten youngsters, max, considerably fewer than the shooters at Newtown or Blacksburg. If numbers are all you care about, this would be progress.
I hope the round-heeled crowd in Washington gets behind Capt. Courageous on this one. Putting the entire Obama agenda into law would be a good first step toward sanity regarding armed citizens in the U.S.
Generously conceding moral neutrality to the practice of hunting wild game in a modern, civilized nation, the rest of the NRA gun crowd are, as the New York Post put it, nut cases.
From its inception, after all, the Second Amendment was a sop to slave owners, hardly the most admirable segment of the inchoate nation that became the United States of America. Brilliant as they were, prescient as they were in writing most of the document that is our Constitution, even James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were large-scale slave-owners. And "the militia" whose maintenance justifies the ironclad right of "citizens" to bear arms was in fact the militias of the southern states whose sole mission was to suppress any attempt at insurrection by slaves who outnumbered whites in broad swaths of the south, and to run down escaped slaves and bring them back to the lessons of the lash. The NRA's precious "right" to its private arsenals is writ in human blood.
Capt. Courageous, legal scholar and history buff, surely is aware of all of this. What irony, what travesty, if the nation's first black president were to cave on these issues, betraying the legacy of his forefathers.
Americans are buying guns at a near-record rate since Newtown. They're falling over themselves to join the NRA. They're nut cases.
It is time for government to save them from themselves. Keep on being Capt. Courageous, Barack Obama. Kidglove has has already caved to our lesser angels far too often. This isn't about budgets; it's about lives.
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
The NRA does not represent the average gun owner any more than unions represent the average worker. I personally do not see a reason the ordinary person should own an assault style weapon, but I do know the Constitution protects this right even though it was passed in the day and age of flint-locks and duels to settle disputes.
ReplyDeleteULTIMATELY THE GUN IS NOT THE PROBLEM! The problem is the person behind the gun, knife, rocket propelled grenade, etc. There are many problems with over-reacting to the gun violence.
1) Governor Cuomo apparently in his zeal to create a sweeping New York law made a blanket law restricting the use of the number of rounds a gun may fire, did not consider law enforcement that uses weapons that would be unlawful. Now there has to be amendments to the law.
2) President Obama signed 23 Presidential Orders, one of which directs mental health providers or physicians to inform authorities if they feel the state of a patient might be harmful to others. This possibly was a back door way to try and force through one of the provisions of his ‘Obamacare’ bill that was struck down because it was a direct violation of the HIPPA Law enacted by President Clinton and passed by Congress. Because the Presidential Order is in direct violation of Federal Law, it is unlikely it will be supported even if challenged in a court of law.
3) Many of the problems with the persons using the guns directly link back to their upbringing. Most of them were gamers which grew up playing video games (often violent ones), and watching TV rather than being parented. Another direct correlation is that many of the shooters came from dysfunctional childhoods such as divorce.
HISTORY TELLS US PROHIBITION OF LIQUOR, DRUGS, OR WEAPONS WILL NOT WORK! The solution to many of our problems is to end the ‘nanny state’ by no longer supporting those people that do not want to work. Coupled with this we need to restore family values and reduce the opportunity to have divorce or single-parent environments.
C'mon man. Those lame arguments went out with . . .er, Prohibition. A shooter just killed three more children here in New Mexico. How many more kids have to die before Americans realize that all this macho gun bullshit is based in fiction?
ReplyDeleteYou are right. Take away guns.
DeleteWhile we are at it, we should take away all drugs, cell phones, and all alcohol which miss use has resulted in the injuring or deaths of thousands of American youth.
Prayers for the 3 you mention. Any life lost prematurely is a heartbreak.
Reductio ad absurdum.
DeleteThe 3 apparently you mention were 3 siblings and the 2 parents of a child that was obsessed with violent video games and admitted so to the police as well as his contempt for his mother which aparently did the hideous act of disciplined her child.
DeleteHumm...sounds like the gun was not the issue as much as a deranged youth that dreams through video games of ways to kill and does not understand the value of a life. Good job Hollywood?