The following words appeared on the front page of the New York Times today: “By raising expectations that a bipartisan deal on gun safety, mental health and school security is even possible…”
The Dems can't make a move with their slim congressional margins. Schumer is marking time till the next election, while holding a giant spotlight on the Party of Death across the aisle. It's up to us to get out, vote like hell and pack the House, Senate and state and local governments with Democrats in November.
This election needs to be about guns and protection of the rights of living citizens from unhinged people with assault weapons. People don’t hunt with rapid fire military weapons.
Political leaders lead, period full stop. That includes being ahead of the learning curve on what must be done. You can't win on this constellation of "gun rights issues," or anything else worth fighting for, if you insist on winning immediately. But you do have to begin immediately and hammer on the issues surrounding it relentlessly.
The currently controlling powers on this issue, "guns rights," who are defending their victories, are a right wing minority which has been propagandizing on this set of issues for several generations, starting from a time when their views were not controlling via the laws, political inaction, mass media laziness, the corruption of lobbying money and perks, and the failure of the Democratic Party opposition to their views to constantly hammer on these issues; call it "reasonable and unreasonable gun rights."
No excuses for the Democrats will do anything to let them off the hook : no rationales, justifications, caveats, explanations, nothing.
Democrats and anyone else concerned need to focus on "gun rights" relentlessly, that is the only way to win through. And they need to start with something close or identical to what is outlined by Lucian, with a similar level of justified moral outrage whenever the venue allows for it, not mealy-mouthed compromsing proposals almost guaranteed to lose anyway, and do little even if anything if enacted into law!
NYTimes Charles Blow column couple of days ago laid out reasons these pathetic measures are fodder for legal bypasses and work arounds and just a waste of time and money. Must outlaw machine guns and rapid fire hand guns. Period
Bloomberg saw this. Sees this. Truth is, even those trained in how to use these weapons in defense vs “ the bad huy” are afraid to use them or go up against even ONE person who is shooting. Just imagine if a whole group went on a rampage. Freud was right. There is a death instinct. It’s not a metaphor. We are witnessing it with covid refusal to vaccinate or mask …and political refusal to eliminate lethal weapons from open market
Rand Paul certainly makes a better comrade than those sitting 25 feet away from the dictator. He's been practicing his Russian for decades. I'm wondering where his Dacha is located.
I think of the GOP now as the Party of Death - guns, violence, rights, Covid - everything they touch turns to dust. They chose a dear leader who killed every enterprise he ever touched because he embodies who they are. As you note above, it's a "death instinct." They want to murder our democracy and burn everything to the ground. For power.
I think there's an even stronger Eros/Agape Instinct but it terrifies those already in the grip of the Death Instinct, who constantly organize most human societies to suppress, oppress, control, punish, and manipulate it for their own (already twisted) ends. We could have quite a discussion about that, for sure!
But I suppose everything from The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Freud's erstwhile student Wilhelm Reich to Man's Search for Meaning by Frankl is simply beyond the scope of this comment thread, unfortunately!
How about a “Red Flag” law with a $10K “reward” for anyone reporting someone who’s even thinking about committing a mass murder. If some innocent people get unnecessarily dragged into court we’ll send them “thoughts and prayers” as compensation
Yes, it's all about deflecting out attention from the real problem which is a proliferation of guns including weapons of war and the easy access to them. I think these gu nuts saw too many cowboy movies when they were kids and and are nostalgic for the old West. except back then gun control was popular contrary to Hollywood's version. "Dodge City, Kansas, formed a municipal government in 1878. According to Stephen Aron, a professor of history at UCLA, the first law passed was one prohibiting the carry of guns in town, likely by civic leaders and influential merchants who wanted people to move there, invest their time and resources, and bring their families. Cultivating a reputation of peace and stability was necessary, even in boisterous towns, if it were to become anything more transient than a one-industry boom town.
Laws regulating ownership and carry of firearms, apart from the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, were passed at a local level rather than by Congress. “Gun control laws were adopted pretty quickly in these places,” says Winkler. “Most were adopted by municipal governments exercising self-control and self-determination.” Carrying any kind of weapon, guns or knives, was not allowed other than outside town borders and inside the home. When visitors left their weapons with a law officer upon entering town, they'd receive a token, like a coat check, which they'd exchange for their guns when leaving town.
The practice of gun control was started in Southern states, which were among the first to enact laws against concealed carry of guns and knives, in the early 1800s. While a few citizens challenged the bans in court, most lost. Winkler, in his book Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, points to an 1840 Alabama court that, in upholding its state ban, ruled it was a state's right to regulate where and how a citizen could carry, and that the state constitution's allowance of personal firearms “is not to bear arms upon all occasions and in all places.”
Louisiana, too, upheld an early ban on concealed carry firearms. When a Kentucky court reversed its ban, the state constitution was amended to specify the Kentucky general assembly was within its rights to, in the future, regulate or prohibit concealed carry.
Still, Winkler says, it was an affirmation that regulation was compatible with the Second Amendment. The federal government of the 1800s largely stayed out of gun-law court battles."
Let me guess: Those southern gun-control laws were primarily aimed at keeping firearms out of the hands of *Black people*? Like maybe they had something to do with the perennial white southern fear of slave rebellions? Amirite??
You've hit the nail on the head! I studied black history in some depth at the U. of Minnesota in courses taught by Prof. Earl Lewis, and wrote an undergrad paper on American slave revolts. There's a far more extensive set of examples than most of us, black or white, or any other sociogically-defined "race," tend to have realized exists, from the usual studies and courses in American history we study at university.
Thanks for that --- it's obvious that the usual right wing zanies who agitate about what should be taught in our public schools would contort the facts to "prove" the info you mentioned here doesn't matter, but insist on citing every last instance from that era when a "good guy with a gun" really did stop some kind of mayhem, they are complete hypocrites 24/7/365.
Oh yes, that's for sure. They'll just brush it aside the same as anything else that doesn't fit in with their mindset that "guns don't kill people. people kill people" totally ignoring the fact that it's people with guns that kill people, esppecially people with easily accessible high powered weapons of war.
I think a few thousand billboards that say simply "people with guns kill people" and a pic of the war weapon itself might help counter that ridiculous narrative the NRA has been espousing for far too long.
Their usual fallback evasion is to start in on bladed edge weapons used in murders, they have a number of biases deeply ingrained, so it would help with countering the NRA-type narrative with others.
But the hardcore gun nuts, I mean the serious "cases," not people on remote farms or ranches many miles from any help through local law enforcement, etc., those people seem beyond hope. Young people are are best hope, they are, many of them, able to see right through the dangerous cant and reject it.
The power of having very general myths about guns endlessly repeated really does a number on people, and the "gun lobby" has exploited that to the max, unfortunately. It's a lot to overcome. I only have optimism about the younger generations not falling for it nearly as easily, really.
If the Repugnants are so worried about mental health, they should look within their own party. They have more than enough whack jobs to fill all the mental hospitals.
The only upside to some of that is the educational potential for the younger voters, who are encountering the GOP at its all-time low and seeing just how crucial and serious the stakes are in this deadly serious game of politics.
I would like to say something meaningful, to be decent and to offer light in a dark room. I can't do it. We are waiting for the next mass slaughter and the one after that. Unless I go into a dark place and ignore everything, the sadness will continue. The United States has become a place where justice cannot compete with the money from the purveyors of death.
Counsels of despair? Hmm, I recommend reading Celine's Death on the Installment Plan and Journey to the End of the Night as a kind of "shock therapy" for despairing, but very well-intentioned people who are seeking, however unconsciously, to see where nihilism leads. There is always a place beyond despair and nihilism. Are you open to the idea that we can still avoid total disaster on this front, that is, school massacres? Of course you are!
Alternatively, if Celine is too "NC-17 rated" in his raucous profane attacks on the crackpot establishment idiots who sent him and millions of others into World War One, there are plenty of other books about what happens when nihilism and despair began to paralyze our hopes. It's just that I am re-reading Celine right now and he is an amzing writer, desite his odious poltical theories, mind you.
It’s unbelievable that civilians can own assault weapons. What is wrong with our representatives? The problem is people vote for them!! 71 million people voted for Donald Trump for president. And I’m afraid they will again!
It's necessary to campaign over and over again in the fall of a presidential year in swing states. Not pile up majorities in NY and California. SWING STATES. Clinton did not do that and there is no possible justification that holds water for that blunder, none.
It is also astonishing that anyone underestimated Trump, not at first, when most of the nation only knew him from The Apprentice t.v. show, some other real estate conected publicity about his buildings in NY, and the casino in Atlantic City, and some let us say "colorful" marriages and divorces, but once he actually showed in appearance after appearance in the 2016 campaign he is some kind of populist-neo-fascist amalgam who understands television and hot-button rhetoric.
He is able to connect on a visceral level with the very worst instincts of his tribe, so to speak.
Those kinds of unscrupulous con men have been successful before in the USA and other nations, and will be successful again, especially when their opposition is overconfident.
The fact is we can realistically expect Trump to face multiple felony indictments connected to the "Big Lie" and the January 6 seditious insurrection, but if Trump, aka "Herr Gropenfuehrer," is still legally able to run for POTUS in 2024, he would get millions of votes, some would even see the indictments as "still more proof the system is biased against Trump and conservatives," they really are that far gone.
It's not exactly required that one "sell all one's goods and give the proceeds to the poor" to work against poverty, or start devoting one's entire waking life to "gun control" to work to stop school massares, but we can certainly help in many other ways, and it's completely fair to expect every elected rep (especially of course, the Democrats, who are so often well-meaning as can be but very confused) on every level who has any direct power to campaign for change to do it, now, tomorrow, and until we win.
It all comes down to the facade that the Congress actually cares about its' citizens. Basically it's all a lie because you can look up the names of those people who took money from the NRA and discover that for all of their 'thoughts & prayers' they don't really give a damn.
We're basically being run by the NRA (defanged though it may be) and this proves we'll never have the kind of radical change that this country requires.
Remember, these people get elected every time-by people who have no idea that they've got targets on their backs. If it's not Covid that will kill them, it's guns.
The old saying is still true: "Money doesn't talk-it screams."
An NYT op-ed today about the gun debate is worth reading. It's written by two former law clerks who drafted the majority and minority opinions for Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Stevens in the infamous Columbia v. Heller case. The piece makes it clear that even originalist (aka very conservative) Scalia saw plenty of room to impose laws restricting guns.
But, as we tragically know, the ever-more extremist GOP members of Congress are fine with school shootings and other mass-murder events as long as their bribes — oops, campaign contributions — from the NRA and gun manufacturers keep rolling in.
This time, yes, however the NRA has banned armaments at other recent conventions at which 45 was not present. One again their rank hypocrisy is exposed: Safety for me, but not for thee.
Trying to work with Republicans on gun control is like pissing into the wind. This is just a ploy by McConnell to string things out, refusing to let anything come to the floor for a vote, or voting against whatever might be proposed. Then, blaming the Dems for not getting anything done. You would think the Dems would have figured this out by now, but what can you expect when the President talks in public about reasonable Republicans. Bunch of out of touch, delusional and cowardly legislators. I fear the country is beyond repair.
Exactly. And *I* fear that if the Republicans capture both houses this November and the Oval Office in '24, we'll never have another free election. At the turn of the last century, Germany was the most liberal, most enlightened country in Europe. In 30 years, that was gone. We are dancing on the abyss of fascism.
Choose your metaphor: Mitch McConnell and his lackeys are doing a tap dance or engaging in rope-a-dope, either of which describes a play to run out the clock. We're being played for suckers again. None of them should be taken seriously. Bad faith writ large.
This morning, as I read ted cruz's statement that "gun controls don't work, they don't stop crime", I suddenly remembered a line from the popular 1960s southern comedian and down home philosopher "Brother Dave" Gardner. Said Brother Dave .........
"I think they oughta make everything legal. Then there wouldn't be no crime."
So here's an idea that might appeal to brain-dead-ted (and probably to quite a few other republicans as well):
If we really want to stop school shootings, why don't we just close all the schools. Then there wouldn't be any more school shootings
Hey ted! I didn't really mean it! .... I was just joking! ted ..... ted ..... ted!!!
The Dems can't make a move with their slim congressional margins. Schumer is marking time till the next election, while holding a giant spotlight on the Party of Death across the aisle. It's up to us to get out, vote like hell and pack the House, Senate and state and local governments with Democrats in November.
This election needs to be about guns and protection of the rights of living citizens from unhinged people with assault weapons. People don’t hunt with rapid fire military weapons.
Political leaders lead, period full stop. That includes being ahead of the learning curve on what must be done. You can't win on this constellation of "gun rights issues," or anything else worth fighting for, if you insist on winning immediately. But you do have to begin immediately and hammer on the issues surrounding it relentlessly.
The currently controlling powers on this issue, "guns rights," who are defending their victories, are a right wing minority which has been propagandizing on this set of issues for several generations, starting from a time when their views were not controlling via the laws, political inaction, mass media laziness, the corruption of lobbying money and perks, and the failure of the Democratic Party opposition to their views to constantly hammer on these issues; call it "reasonable and unreasonable gun rights."
No excuses for the Democrats will do anything to let them off the hook : no rationales, justifications, caveats, explanations, nothing.
Democrats and anyone else concerned need to focus on "gun rights" relentlessly, that is the only way to win through. And they need to start with something close or identical to what is outlined by Lucian, with a similar level of justified moral outrage whenever the venue allows for it, not mealy-mouthed compromsing proposals almost guaranteed to lose anyway, and do little even if anything if enacted into law!
yes.
you put your finger right on the prime source if the problem, LKTIV.
and pointed out all the other dodges on the issue.
no one, absolutely no law abiding, sane, responsible citizen needs an assault type rifle.
NYTimes Charles Blow column couple of days ago laid out reasons these pathetic measures are fodder for legal bypasses and work arounds and just a waste of time and money. Must outlaw machine guns and rapid fire hand guns. Period
Bloomberg saw this. Sees this. Truth is, even those trained in how to use these weapons in defense vs “ the bad huy” are afraid to use them or go up against even ONE person who is shooting. Just imagine if a whole group went on a rampage. Freud was right. There is a death instinct. It’s not a metaphor. We are witnessing it with covid refusal to vaccinate or mask …and political refusal to eliminate lethal weapons from open market
Putin was so wise to buy the NRA and the Republican Party. American citizens make much better Russian soldiers than Russian ones.
Rand Paul certainly makes a better comrade than those sitting 25 feet away from the dictator. He's been practicing his Russian for decades. I'm wondering where his Dacha is located.
Dogpatch?
In the future Moscow Trump Tower?
Spot on!!!
I think of the GOP now as the Party of Death - guns, violence, rights, Covid - everything they touch turns to dust. They chose a dear leader who killed every enterprise he ever touched because he embodies who they are. As you note above, it's a "death instinct." They want to murder our democracy and burn everything to the ground. For power.
On surface for power but even power partakes of the life force. These people are Death Eaters alla Harry Potter
I think there's an even stronger Eros/Agape Instinct but it terrifies those already in the grip of the Death Instinct, who constantly organize most human societies to suppress, oppress, control, punish, and manipulate it for their own (already twisted) ends. We could have quite a discussion about that, for sure!
But I suppose everything from The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Freud's erstwhile student Wilhelm Reich to Man's Search for Meaning by Frankl is simply beyond the scope of this comment thread, unfortunately!
How about a “Red Flag” law with a $10K “reward” for anyone reporting someone who’s even thinking about committing a mass murder. If some innocent people get unnecessarily dragged into court we’ll send them “thoughts and prayers” as compensation
Hey, if Texas can use vigilantes, so can we. I'd gladly drop a dime on some of my trumphumper neighbors.......
Yes, it's all about deflecting out attention from the real problem which is a proliferation of guns including weapons of war and the easy access to them. I think these gu nuts saw too many cowboy movies when they were kids and and are nostalgic for the old West. except back then gun control was popular contrary to Hollywood's version. "Dodge City, Kansas, formed a municipal government in 1878. According to Stephen Aron, a professor of history at UCLA, the first law passed was one prohibiting the carry of guns in town, likely by civic leaders and influential merchants who wanted people to move there, invest their time and resources, and bring their families. Cultivating a reputation of peace and stability was necessary, even in boisterous towns, if it were to become anything more transient than a one-industry boom town.
Laws regulating ownership and carry of firearms, apart from the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, were passed at a local level rather than by Congress. “Gun control laws were adopted pretty quickly in these places,” says Winkler. “Most were adopted by municipal governments exercising self-control and self-determination.” Carrying any kind of weapon, guns or knives, was not allowed other than outside town borders and inside the home. When visitors left their weapons with a law officer upon entering town, they'd receive a token, like a coat check, which they'd exchange for their guns when leaving town.
The practice of gun control was started in Southern states, which were among the first to enact laws against concealed carry of guns and knives, in the early 1800s. While a few citizens challenged the bans in court, most lost. Winkler, in his book Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, points to an 1840 Alabama court that, in upholding its state ban, ruled it was a state's right to regulate where and how a citizen could carry, and that the state constitution's allowance of personal firearms “is not to bear arms upon all occasions and in all places.”
Louisiana, too, upheld an early ban on concealed carry firearms. When a Kentucky court reversed its ban, the state constitution was amended to specify the Kentucky general assembly was within its rights to, in the future, regulate or prohibit concealed carry.
Still, Winkler says, it was an affirmation that regulation was compatible with the Second Amendment. The federal government of the 1800s largely stayed out of gun-law court battles."
. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gun-control-old-west-180968013/
Let me guess: Those southern gun-control laws were primarily aimed at keeping firearms out of the hands of *Black people*? Like maybe they had something to do with the perennial white southern fear of slave rebellions? Amirite??
You've hit the nail on the head! I studied black history in some depth at the U. of Minnesota in courses taught by Prof. Earl Lewis, and wrote an undergrad paper on American slave revolts. There's a far more extensive set of examples than most of us, black or white, or any other sociogically-defined "race," tend to have realized exists, from the usual studies and courses in American history we study at university.
Thanks for that --- it's obvious that the usual right wing zanies who agitate about what should be taught in our public schools would contort the facts to "prove" the info you mentioned here doesn't matter, but insist on citing every last instance from that era when a "good guy with a gun" really did stop some kind of mayhem, they are complete hypocrites 24/7/365.
Oh yes, that's for sure. They'll just brush it aside the same as anything else that doesn't fit in with their mindset that "guns don't kill people. people kill people" totally ignoring the fact that it's people with guns that kill people, esppecially people with easily accessible high powered weapons of war.
.
I think a few thousand billboards that say simply "people with guns kill people" and a pic of the war weapon itself might help counter that ridiculous narrative the NRA has been espousing for far too long.
Their usual fallback evasion is to start in on bladed edge weapons used in murders, they have a number of biases deeply ingrained, so it would help with countering the NRA-type narrative with others.
But the hardcore gun nuts, I mean the serious "cases," not people on remote farms or ranches many miles from any help through local law enforcement, etc., those people seem beyond hope. Young people are are best hope, they are, many of them, able to see right through the dangerous cant and reject it.
For sure.
Great idea!
The power of having very general myths about guns endlessly repeated really does a number on people, and the "gun lobby" has exploited that to the max, unfortunately. It's a lot to overcome. I only have optimism about the younger generations not falling for it nearly as easily, really.
Indeed! So true...
If the Repugnants are so worried about mental health, they should look within their own party. They have more than enough whack jobs to fill all the mental hospitals.
Amen. Either they're totally divorced from reality, e.g., psychotic, or they're pathological liars. Either way, they are not mentally well.
The only upside to some of that is the educational potential for the younger voters, who are encountering the GOP at its all-time low and seeing just how crucial and serious the stakes are in this deadly serious game of politics.
I would like to say something meaningful, to be decent and to offer light in a dark room. I can't do it. We are waiting for the next mass slaughter and the one after that. Unless I go into a dark place and ignore everything, the sadness will continue. The United States has become a place where justice cannot compete with the money from the purveyors of death.
Counsels of despair? Hmm, I recommend reading Celine's Death on the Installment Plan and Journey to the End of the Night as a kind of "shock therapy" for despairing, but very well-intentioned people who are seeking, however unconsciously, to see where nihilism leads. There is always a place beyond despair and nihilism. Are you open to the idea that we can still avoid total disaster on this front, that is, school massacres? Of course you are!
Alternatively, if Celine is too "NC-17 rated" in his raucous profane attacks on the crackpot establishment idiots who sent him and millions of others into World War One, there are plenty of other books about what happens when nihilism and despair began to paralyze our hopes. It's just that I am re-reading Celine right now and he is an amzing writer, desite his odious poltical theories, mind you.
It’s unbelievable that civilians can own assault weapons. What is wrong with our representatives? The problem is people vote for them!! 71 million people voted for Donald Trump for president. And I’m afraid they will again!
It's necessary to campaign over and over again in the fall of a presidential year in swing states. Not pile up majorities in NY and California. SWING STATES. Clinton did not do that and there is no possible justification that holds water for that blunder, none.
It is also astonishing that anyone underestimated Trump, not at first, when most of the nation only knew him from The Apprentice t.v. show, some other real estate conected publicity about his buildings in NY, and the casino in Atlantic City, and some let us say "colorful" marriages and divorces, but once he actually showed in appearance after appearance in the 2016 campaign he is some kind of populist-neo-fascist amalgam who understands television and hot-button rhetoric.
He is able to connect on a visceral level with the very worst instincts of his tribe, so to speak.
Those kinds of unscrupulous con men have been successful before in the USA and other nations, and will be successful again, especially when their opposition is overconfident.
The fact is we can realistically expect Trump to face multiple felony indictments connected to the "Big Lie" and the January 6 seditious insurrection, but if Trump, aka "Herr Gropenfuehrer," is still legally able to run for POTUS in 2024, he would get millions of votes, some would even see the indictments as "still more proof the system is biased against Trump and conservatives," they really are that far gone.
This is a just do it moment. But we won’t.
Canada just did it!
"If not you and me, who? If not now, when?"
It's not exactly required that one "sell all one's goods and give the proceeds to the poor" to work against poverty, or start devoting one's entire waking life to "gun control" to work to stop school massares, but we can certainly help in many other ways, and it's completely fair to expect every elected rep (especially of course, the Democrats, who are so often well-meaning as can be but very confused) on every level who has any direct power to campaign for change to do it, now, tomorrow, and until we win.
Ban assault weapons. No wishy-washy compromises. Thanks for this “rant,” Lucian. Agree 100%.
It all comes down to the facade that the Congress actually cares about its' citizens. Basically it's all a lie because you can look up the names of those people who took money from the NRA and discover that for all of their 'thoughts & prayers' they don't really give a damn.
Here's a link to start with:
https://elections.bradyunited.org/take-action/nra-donations-116th-congress-senators
We're basically being run by the NRA (defanged though it may be) and this proves we'll never have the kind of radical change that this country requires.
Remember, these people get elected every time-by people who have no idea that they've got targets on their backs. If it's not Covid that will kill them, it's guns.
The old saying is still true: "Money doesn't talk-it screams."
An NYT op-ed today about the gun debate is worth reading. It's written by two former law clerks who drafted the majority and minority opinions for Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Stevens in the infamous Columbia v. Heller case. The piece makes it clear that even originalist (aka very conservative) Scalia saw plenty of room to impose laws restricting guns.
But, as we tragically know, the ever-more extremist GOP members of Congress are fine with school shootings and other mass-murder events as long as their bribes — oops, campaign contributions — from the NRA and gun manufacturers keep rolling in.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/opinion/supreme-court-heller-guns.html
The Secret Service banned guns, not the NRA. Orangutans are endangered.
This time, yes, however the NRA has banned armaments at other recent conventions at which 45 was not present. One again their rank hypocrisy is exposed: Safety for me, but not for thee.
Trying to work with Republicans on gun control is like pissing into the wind. This is just a ploy by McConnell to string things out, refusing to let anything come to the floor for a vote, or voting against whatever might be proposed. Then, blaming the Dems for not getting anything done. You would think the Dems would have figured this out by now, but what can you expect when the President talks in public about reasonable Republicans. Bunch of out of touch, delusional and cowardly legislators. I fear the country is beyond repair.
Exactly. And *I* fear that if the Republicans capture both houses this November and the Oval Office in '24, we'll never have another free election. At the turn of the last century, Germany was the most liberal, most enlightened country in Europe. In 30 years, that was gone. We are dancing on the abyss of fascism.
Choose your metaphor: Mitch McConnell and his lackeys are doing a tap dance or engaging in rope-a-dope, either of which describes a play to run out the clock. We're being played for suckers again. None of them should be taken seriously. Bad faith writ large.
This morning, as I read ted cruz's statement that "gun controls don't work, they don't stop crime", I suddenly remembered a line from the popular 1960s southern comedian and down home philosopher "Brother Dave" Gardner. Said Brother Dave .........
"I think they oughta make everything legal. Then there wouldn't be no crime."
So here's an idea that might appeal to brain-dead-ted (and probably to quite a few other republicans as well):
If we really want to stop school shootings, why don't we just close all the schools. Then there wouldn't be any more school shootings
Hey ted! I didn't really mean it! .... I was just joking! ted ..... ted ..... ted!!!