Last Saturday, 21-year-old Ryan Christopher Palmeter arrived at a Dollar General store in a black neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida, and killed three people before turning his gun on himself and committing suicide. “The gunman used racial slurs, left behind a racist screed and drew swastikas on his firearm, authorities said.
Lucian, this is the most devastating thing I have read on "guns in America". The photos made it all the more chilling. I actually want to erase this knowledge from my memory, but know i won't.
It's like several of the scenes in Psycho, unforgettable impacts but one might really prefer to forget them!
Martin Balsam as the psychologist giving a cogent, extremely plausible explanation of what was driving Norman Bates /Anthony Perkins to commit such horrific crimes and all the rest of his bizarre behavior, is a kind of respite from the insanity Hitchcock depicts, though.
So Lucian is the voice of outraged reason speaking matter-of-factly, like some of the best journalists in that sense, and we really need that.
Lucian, A huge increase in gun sales started several years ago. Record sales and record gun manufacturer profits reported year after year. I watched it, stupefied. We already had more than one gun for every man woman and child in the country, and guns are durable - they last a very long time. It really seemed to be madness.
Do you have any insight into what was that surge (which seems to still be going on)? .
5letter word beginning w O ending in a and the final clue is the 3rd letter is also an a.
With that came a Vincent Price voice claiming they're coming to take your guns away.
My concern goes beyond the firearms to include military type to mil grade accessories, the blossoming of tactical gun ranges, the number of indoor and outdoor ranges offering fully automatic weapons to rent, the number of "reported stolen" firearms that is all too often a euphemism for an illegal, highly marked up sale, 3D printers/ghost guns, nothing more than a background check, no qualification of the firearms, no re-qualification, no insurance required, no sin tax at purchase (oddly Alcohol and Tobacco are but the F in ATF is not, and it is more difficult for some to purchase beer, likkur and cigs than a WMD) ease of becoming a licensed firearms dealer, specialized ammo, open carry and on and on.
If you can locate your local equivalent of what's broadcast here in the Twin Cities area as "AM 1280 : The Patriot!" listen for maybe an hour or two and count the gun ads and other slimy forms of paranoid ideation, might be a revelation to you?
I happed to hear some of it earlier today and taped it (I have audio cassettes purchased specifically for making backup copies of Plausible Denial by Mark Lane on Audiobooks from I think 1991, also abridged version of On the Road read by David Carradine (brilliantly) and The Dharma Bums read by Allen Ginsberg (what's beyond brilliantly?) and also for ad hoc recordings of "stuff I can not believe" is being taken seriously. Alex Jones type ravings are one example, this was a different key of wingnut craziness, more measured, but the same basic paranoid bullshit.
😰😖🤯.....I grew up in and still live in a very rural area. Everybody hunted and nearly everyone had a hunting rifle in the house--most also had a shotgun. But geez, handguns were considered silly...(they were ineffective for hunting and a bit too citified to be a "real weapon".) Nobody 'carried' and it was illegal to carry a loaded rifle in your vehicle.
We didn't make a fetish of the things--they were for bringing in extra protein for the dinner table or shooting the occasional rabid critter or marauding bear. Now the guns are practically the object of drooling worship. Sick, sick culture.
And no...I have no objection to guns but they should be AT LEAST as well regulated as cars and alcohol and tobacco for crying out loud.
The far right has reconfigured the language of the Second Amendment out of all reasonable proportion, part of their bogus "Originalism" bilge.
With close access to a good Hennepin county library branch about eleven blocks away I have made use of it during the Trump debacle to research topics like originalism, specifically via this text, by the author of the classic Blasphemy: Offenses
Against the Sacred from Moses to Salman Rushdie, here's a review of that text and his book on originalism:
Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie
Leonard Levy. Alfred A. Knopf, $35 (688pp) ISBN 978-0-679-40236-7
Socrates, Jesus, Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno, Quakers George Fox and William Penn, Daniel Defoe and Thomas Paine were all condemned for blasphemy. In a tour de force of lively writing and keen historical interpretation, prolific legal historian Levy shows that the charge of blasphemy has served as a means to besmirch opinions or people held objectionable to those in positions of authority. For centuries the Catholic Church persecuted blasphemers and heretics for their divergent views. Protestant reformers adopted the epithet ``blasphemer'' to castigate dissidents within their own ranks. Proceeding from fifth century B.C. Athens to medieval persecution of the Jews to the ``hysteria'' over Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, this work is both an essential casebook and an outspoken, feisty, important study of the struggle for intellectual and religious liberties. History Book Club alternate. (Sept.)
More constitutional analysis from Levy (Humanities/Claremont Graduate School), author or editor of 27 other volumes, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Origins of the Fifth Amendment (1968). He is also editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of the American Constitution. ""Original intent"" could easily be the judicial hot potato of the recent merry-go-round of Reagan Supreme Court nominees. By his complete analysis here, Levy demonstrates the futility of adhering too strictly to a doctrine of original intent (the somewhat intellectually murky belief that, somehow, the founding fathers intended specific constitutional restrictions or sanctions for whatever issues might surface, no matter how far removed from their time). Levy finds a great irony in the particular gravitation to this doctrine by conservatives such as Robert Bork and Ed Meese (who asserted that original intent would ""produce defensible principles of government that would not be tainted by ideological predilections). In actuality, the author suggests, the conservatives veer from original intent in every area except in the expansion of executive power. ""The more one looks at a jurisprudence of original intent, the more it seems politically motivated as a disguise for political objectives."" Levy backs his claim by raising questions about just how any one can even suggest that the founding fathers could have had an original intention about the constitutionality of, say, wiretapping or surrogate mothers. While Levy lambastes the uses to which original intent have been put in recent years, he certainly doesn't do so wildly or maliciously. He considers himself an ""interpretivist"" (although a broad one), which some might call the first cousin to an original intentionist. But he raises some important questions in the two-centuries-old attempt to make sense of our judicial process--an attempt on which he sheds much intellectual light.
This should be on the front page of every paper across the country with the photos of all the innocent dead.
The NRA needs to be stripped of its nonprofit status as a beginning. Manufacturers and our friendly neighborhood gun shops should only accept cash payments, and assume liability for all weapons sold.
Holding patriotic gun-loving Americans making money in the best tradition of amoral capitalism, I mean, the tradition of godly free enterprise, responsible for helping our citizens defend their homes, their families, from the invading hordes of wild-eyed criminal immigrants?
Why, what you suggest only proves beyond any doubt that you hate God and will burn in hell, Miss Commiepants!
You are clearly an incorrigible trouble maker, so we must all pray for your eternal soul Patris - that it miraculously contrives to repent from your life of crime and wanton complaining, so as to escape the fiery, smoky realms where little imps with pitchforks run around doing horrible things on behalf of the Prince of Darkness, that is, if you and ungrateful wretches of your ilk deserve our prayers at all!
Richard I meant to tell you I finally heard from my niece about that nightlife area you asked about in Athens. She confirmed it’s the place that attracts most night life. Psiri? I don’t have my notes. When she told me where it was I knew but when I lived in Athens in the 1960s it was still a hangover mess from ww2 and the civil war. She described it as very much how Brooklyn is now. (Where she and my son shared an apartment for years) lots of nightlife, bands, bars.
First-hand view and more direct background I really appreciate it, thanks. It helps "psych me up" to revive that private investigator "stumbles along from divorce case which is actually husband fleeing with several million acquired in arms smuggling ring bizness," and another, very different story.
The "Interlude in Athens" is meant partially to get my sincere but haphazardly reckless (that is, he takes some very stupid risks, and only gets out alive after about a week in Psiri and nearby, as he aims to do one thing, but instead stumbles upon a very connected, very well protected Beirut and Cyprus-based arms dealer in the course of trailing someone so OBVIOUSLY that he gives himself away, has to escape from the Museum of Antiquities, hides out in Monastiriki ? (let me google this church for correct name, was over seven or so years when I last spent time on it ........ because some local people help him, ok
"Panagia Pantanassa
Panagia Pantanassa is one of the oldest churches in Athens (circa 10th century) located in Monastiraki Square. “Monastiraki” meaning small monastery refers to its origins as a monastery which was once annexed to the Monastery of Kaisariani and used by monks during the Frankish occupation and later as a nunnery."
I studied the "floor plan" of the church - Alex Raynes is the kind of protagonist who spends some time just "seeing the sights," while waiting for his assistant to arrive from overseas, she's delayed in Italy because of some family business (has Italian roots herself) anyway he is followed there and nearly killed, this goes on like that.
Anyway thanks again Patris, we also have sympatico politics that's for sure.
Deadly weapons are just a short walk away for you, Lucian. Living in NYC, where legal guns are hard to come by, we know there are more guns than people in the US...but we don't see the stores. Where you live, gun stores are baked into the economy. And no way will that change.
Many of the same people who scream the loudest about the "sanctity of life" re the unborn also scream the loudest about the right to own firearms including semi-automatic weapons regardless of the fact that so many die of gunshot wounds including children as we all know so well because of school shootings and accidents.
Ironically mother nature is the biggest killer of the unborn. , Research shows that more than half of successful fertilisations will end in miscarriage. Many women don't even know they're pregnant initially; and, since most miscarriages happen in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, many miscarry without even knowing it's happening.
It's these unknown miscarriages that make up the majority,. In fact,a woman in her 20s is just as likely to miscarry as carry the foetus to term.
And, because the miscarriage rate only rises with age, the number of miscarriages far outnumber live births.
It appears to me that Republicans are more concerned about the sanctity of life than God is..
But if they really cared that much they'd do something about the proliferation of guns, at least the weapons of war. most favorable to mass shooters.
And when you put those two things together -- pro-gun and anti-choice -- it's not hard to see that these people are consistent: they're racist, misogynist, and anti-democratic. The "sanctity of life" has nothing to do with it, and their god is mostly a projection of their own warped desires.
Well said, Susanna, the evangelicals are the most narrow-minded of them all. and they are supposed to be just the opposite. Although I read that a group of them are aghast at the others and don't agree with them at all.
However, the white evangelicals are not running the GOP. The people who are trying to placate them are, and I doubt they have any religious, moral, or ethical scruples at all.
Exactly. Uhis is an excerpt from a NY times article of one who broke away from the political faction. As you say, no power over the GOP but at least not voting for Trump "“Four more years of Donald Trump will move our culture further away from the church,” Mr. O’Bannon said. “And sadly, some further away from a relationship with God.”
Listen up podner, they think YOU are the hapless, hopeless, stumble bum liberal headed for disaster when you are the victim of (insert horrific random crime, at which point you would give ANYTHING to have learned how to defend yourself with a bazooka!
I don't even object to that basic concept, in theory, sans bazooka, but it's the almost total lack of screening, background checks, red flag laws, limits on firearms types and ammunition quantities and suitability for hunting OR any realistic necessity for what amounts to a weapon easily made fully automatic - IOW a machine gun, outlawed in 1934 for chrissakes! - with a simple "switch" attachment, and on and on. Also the sheer numbers of outlets susceptible to straw buyers as outlined in Lucian's account.
So many things to fix and so little will. Maybe we need laws (good luck with that), so that all advertising graphically shows what an assault weapon does to a human. Forget the heroic defender of liberty, make them show a classroom piled with murdered children, and the true horror of it all. You and I both know what these things do, but I doubt even 10%, unless they are veterans, have any idea , other than punching holes in paper targets, just what that gun does and how well it does what it was designed to do. They are very efficient killing machines, and they have no business on our streets, much less Schools, Churches, Concert Halls, and Stores............
Yes, Dick, I have said and thought that that is the only way to get people to sit up and take notice. As horrid as it would be, I feel strongly about it. Look at what Emmitt Till’s mother did. Uvalde’s children comes to mind.
You are right....as in the case of Emmet Till, his mother made people look at what was done to him, but did it actually change anything? Even law enforcement is in favor of sensible gun control - even "W", for god's sake, was in favor of banning assault rifles. The world has gone mad and full of fear that killers and burglars and home invaders are around every corner and of course, the government is coming to take your guns so you need to protect yourself from them, too.
Lucian I just read the testimony of the kid who was shot in Kansas City when he rang the wrong doorbell. True we have too many gun stores, but the laws that protect the shooters are the worst part. There are few consequences to shooting kids through a door. The trial in Kansas City is all about whether the shooter felt threatened, and justified in shooting through his locked door. A lot hangs on whether the kid opened the screen door or just touched it!! Forgive me but I believe I was taught to not open the door to strangers, and that would keep me safe. Not to shoot strangers through the locked door.
Sep 1, 2023·edited Sep 1, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
Lucian, a friend had an old-fashioned propane bottle on her grill. We looked for a place that could refill it and, strangely, found on the Internet that a gun shop in a small town nearby had a large tank and might be able to do it.
When we got there, we didn’t see any sign of a big tank, so we went inside to ask. The place looked like that photograph of the Tommy Gun Store.
It gave me a really creepy feeling. I told my friend I wanted to leave before somebody recognized me there. I had the same kind of feeling I imagined I would’ve had if I was worried somebody might see me coming out of one of those “adults only” porn stores.
I wish I could explain why Americans have fetishized firearms like we have. It’s a type of porn, too.
We got rid of slavery, but not racism. We haven’t rid ourselves of guns, and certainly not the mayhem and mass murder they cause.
Terrifying, but not surprising, statistics. Thanks for opening our eyes once again, Lucian. I searched on Google maps and found about ten firearms stores within about a half hour from where I live.
Again, the media does not report how a mass shooter got the money to buy so many weapons in the first place, which I'd be interested to know, since so many of these guys (almost always a guy) are losers, poor, unemployed, young, etc. Is there a pattern that could be helpful to know? Are they borrowing money, paying cash no one knew they had, writing bad checks, using credit cards (their own or someone else's)?
I don't just have several thousands of dollars available to go out and buy a small armory, and I'm a stable fellow (retired) with a regular lower-middle class income. Where are these murderers getting their gun money from?
The current situation is a direct result the 2004 Republican Congressional majority and President George W. Bush’s failure to renew the the Clinton administration’s 10 year ban on assault rifles. We must remove as many Republicans from congress as possible so we can to turn Congress around and reinstate the nationwide ban.
I knew of only one gun shop near my home (15 miles), but a Google search revealed 11 within a 25-30 mile circle. And I live in a rural area of small towns and farms, not wealthy or economically vibrant by any means. Where does the money come from to support so many firearms dealers in this environment? And what are people doing without to be able to afford what guns cost? There was just this last weekend a 4 year old girl in a neighboring town killed by someone attempting to instruct her in 'gun safety'. This country has gone mad. Between political violence and gun violence, we have dug a hole so deep we will never be able to crawl out.
Lucian, this is the most devastating thing I have read on "guns in America". The photos made it all the more chilling. I actually want to erase this knowledge from my memory, but know i won't.
It's like several of the scenes in Psycho, unforgettable impacts but one might really prefer to forget them!
Martin Balsam as the psychologist giving a cogent, extremely plausible explanation of what was driving Norman Bates /Anthony Perkins to commit such horrific crimes and all the rest of his bizarre behavior, is a kind of respite from the insanity Hitchcock depicts, though.
So Lucian is the voice of outraged reason speaking matter-of-factly, like some of the best journalists in that sense, and we really need that.
Keep writing, Lucian!
Lucian, A huge increase in gun sales started several years ago. Record sales and record gun manufacturer profits reported year after year. I watched it, stupefied. We already had more than one gun for every man woman and child in the country, and guns are durable - they last a very long time. It really seemed to be madness.
Do you have any insight into what was that surge (which seems to still be going on)? .
Ans to surge question:
5letter word beginning w O ending in a and the final clue is the 3rd letter is also an a.
With that came a Vincent Price voice claiming they're coming to take your guns away.
My concern goes beyond the firearms to include military type to mil grade accessories, the blossoming of tactical gun ranges, the number of indoor and outdoor ranges offering fully automatic weapons to rent, the number of "reported stolen" firearms that is all too often a euphemism for an illegal, highly marked up sale, 3D printers/ghost guns, nothing more than a background check, no qualification of the firearms, no re-qualification, no insurance required, no sin tax at purchase (oddly Alcohol and Tobacco are but the F in ATF is not, and it is more difficult for some to purchase beer, likkur and cigs than a WMD) ease of becoming a licensed firearms dealer, specialized ammo, open carry and on and on.
Madness.
Sadness.
Are the fully automatic weapons they rent for use at their shooting range, or rented to be taken off the premises to use at will?
If you can locate your local equivalent of what's broadcast here in the Twin Cities area as "AM 1280 : The Patriot!" listen for maybe an hour or two and count the gun ads and other slimy forms of paranoid ideation, might be a revelation to you?
I happed to hear some of it earlier today and taped it (I have audio cassettes purchased specifically for making backup copies of Plausible Denial by Mark Lane on Audiobooks from I think 1991, also abridged version of On the Road read by David Carradine (brilliantly) and The Dharma Bums read by Allen Ginsberg (what's beyond brilliantly?) and also for ad hoc recordings of "stuff I can not believe" is being taken seriously. Alex Jones type ravings are one example, this was a different key of wingnut craziness, more measured, but the same basic paranoid bullshit.
😰😖🤯.....I grew up in and still live in a very rural area. Everybody hunted and nearly everyone had a hunting rifle in the house--most also had a shotgun. But geez, handguns were considered silly...(they were ineffective for hunting and a bit too citified to be a "real weapon".) Nobody 'carried' and it was illegal to carry a loaded rifle in your vehicle.
We didn't make a fetish of the things--they were for bringing in extra protein for the dinner table or shooting the occasional rabid critter or marauding bear. Now the guns are practically the object of drooling worship. Sick, sick culture.
And no...I have no objection to guns but they should be AT LEAST as well regulated as cars and alcohol and tobacco for crying out loud.
The far right has reconfigured the language of the Second Amendment out of all reasonable proportion, part of their bogus "Originalism" bilge.
With close access to a good Hennepin county library branch about eleven blocks away I have made use of it during the Trump debacle to research topics like originalism, specifically via this text, by the author of the classic Blasphemy: Offenses
Against the Sacred from Moses to Salman Rushdie, here's a review of that text and his book on originalism:
Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie
Leonard Levy. Alfred A. Knopf, $35 (688pp) ISBN 978-0-679-40236-7
Socrates, Jesus, Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno, Quakers George Fox and William Penn, Daniel Defoe and Thomas Paine were all condemned for blasphemy. In a tour de force of lively writing and keen historical interpretation, prolific legal historian Levy shows that the charge of blasphemy has served as a means to besmirch opinions or people held objectionable to those in positions of authority. For centuries the Catholic Church persecuted blasphemers and heretics for their divergent views. Protestant reformers adopted the epithet ``blasphemer'' to castigate dissidents within their own ranks. Proceeding from fifth century B.C. Athens to medieval persecution of the Jews to the ``hysteria'' over Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, this work is both an essential casebook and an outspoken, feisty, important study of the struggle for intellectual and religious liberties. History Book Club alternate. (Sept.)
www.publishersweekly.com/9780679402367
ORIGINAL INTENT AND THE FRAMERS' CONSTITUTION
BY LEONARD W. LEVY RELEASE DATE: SEPT. 1, 1988
More constitutional analysis from Levy (Humanities/Claremont Graduate School), author or editor of 27 other volumes, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Origins of the Fifth Amendment (1968). He is also editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of the American Constitution. ""Original intent"" could easily be the judicial hot potato of the recent merry-go-round of Reagan Supreme Court nominees. By his complete analysis here, Levy demonstrates the futility of adhering too strictly to a doctrine of original intent (the somewhat intellectually murky belief that, somehow, the founding fathers intended specific constitutional restrictions or sanctions for whatever issues might surface, no matter how far removed from their time). Levy finds a great irony in the particular gravitation to this doctrine by conservatives such as Robert Bork and Ed Meese (who asserted that original intent would ""produce defensible principles of government that would not be tainted by ideological predilections). In actuality, the author suggests, the conservatives veer from original intent in every area except in the expansion of executive power. ""The more one looks at a jurisprudence of original intent, the more it seems politically motivated as a disguise for political objectives."" Levy backs his claim by raising questions about just how any one can even suggest that the founding fathers could have had an original intention about the constitutionality of, say, wiretapping or surrogate mothers. While Levy lambastes the uses to which original intent have been put in recent years, he certainly doesn't do so wildly or maliciously. He considers himself an ""interpretivist"" (although a broad one), which some might call the first cousin to an original intentionist. But he raises some important questions in the two-centuries-old attempt to make sense of our judicial process--an attempt on which he sheds much intellectual light.
www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/leonard-w-levy-2/original-intent-and-the-framers-constitution/
Regular American lemming-like craziness.
Semi-automatic ban expired in 2004. Obama elected president in 2008. Need I say more?
Why I can’t stand looking at Bernie Sanders.
Reading this and my stomach is clenching.
This should be on the front page of every paper across the country with the photos of all the innocent dead.
The NRA needs to be stripped of its nonprofit status as a beginning. Manufacturers and our friendly neighborhood gun shops should only accept cash payments, and assume liability for all weapons sold.
Holding patriotic gun-loving Americans making money in the best tradition of amoral capitalism, I mean, the tradition of godly free enterprise, responsible for helping our citizens defend their homes, their families, from the invading hordes of wild-eyed criminal immigrants?
Why, what you suggest only proves beyond any doubt that you hate God and will burn in hell, Miss Commiepants!
Not the first time I’ve heard that!
You are clearly an incorrigible trouble maker, so we must all pray for your eternal soul Patris - that it miraculously contrives to repent from your life of crime and wanton complaining, so as to escape the fiery, smoky realms where little imps with pitchforks run around doing horrible things on behalf of the Prince of Darkness, that is, if you and ungrateful wretches of your ilk deserve our prayers at all!
Richard I meant to tell you I finally heard from my niece about that nightlife area you asked about in Athens. She confirmed it’s the place that attracts most night life. Psiri? I don’t have my notes. When she told me where it was I knew but when I lived in Athens in the 1960s it was still a hangover mess from ww2 and the civil war. She described it as very much how Brooklyn is now. (Where she and my son shared an apartment for years) lots of nightlife, bands, bars.
First-hand view and more direct background I really appreciate it, thanks. It helps "psych me up" to revive that private investigator "stumbles along from divorce case which is actually husband fleeing with several million acquired in arms smuggling ring bizness," and another, very different story.
The "Interlude in Athens" is meant partially to get my sincere but haphazardly reckless (that is, he takes some very stupid risks, and only gets out alive after about a week in Psiri and nearby, as he aims to do one thing, but instead stumbles upon a very connected, very well protected Beirut and Cyprus-based arms dealer in the course of trailing someone so OBVIOUSLY that he gives himself away, has to escape from the Museum of Antiquities, hides out in Monastiriki ? (let me google this church for correct name, was over seven or so years when I last spent time on it ........ because some local people help him, ok
"Panagia Pantanassa
Panagia Pantanassa is one of the oldest churches in Athens (circa 10th century) located in Monastiraki Square. “Monastiraki” meaning small monastery refers to its origins as a monastery which was once annexed to the Monastery of Kaisariani and used by monks during the Frankish occupation and later as a nunnery."
I studied the "floor plan" of the church - Alex Raynes is the kind of protagonist who spends some time just "seeing the sights," while waiting for his assistant to arrive from overseas, she's delayed in Italy because of some family business (has Italian roots herself) anyway he is followed there and nearly killed, this goes on like that.
Anyway thanks again Patris, we also have sympatico politics that's for sure.
Yes, photos of the dead, and the damage a military grade firearm can do, Revoke the NRA's nonprofit status. How have they gotten away with that?
Deadly weapons are just a short walk away for you, Lucian. Living in NYC, where legal guns are hard to come by, we know there are more guns than people in the US...but we don't see the stores. Where you live, gun stores are baked into the economy. And no way will that change.
Reading this column made me resolve (again) never again to leave New York. I remember one gun store near City Hall, maybe Warren or Murray Street near the Fountain Pen Hospital. Seemed to be for cops, deputy sheriffs, marshals, et al., but a while back—creepy anyway. So duckduckgo just turned up a readable Forbes feature on Manhattan's two remaining gun stores, neither downtown. https://www.forbes.com/sites/aaronsmith/2021/08/16/take-a-look-inside-beretta-gallery-one-of-the-last-gun-stores-in-nyc/?sh=7695b1e2185d
Many of the same people who scream the loudest about the "sanctity of life" re the unborn also scream the loudest about the right to own firearms including semi-automatic weapons regardless of the fact that so many die of gunshot wounds including children as we all know so well because of school shootings and accidents.
Ironically mother nature is the biggest killer of the unborn. , Research shows that more than half of successful fertilisations will end in miscarriage. Many women don't even know they're pregnant initially; and, since most miscarriages happen in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, many miscarry without even knowing it's happening.
It's these unknown miscarriages that make up the majority,. In fact,a woman in her 20s is just as likely to miscarry as carry the foetus to term.
And, because the miscarriage rate only rises with age, the number of miscarriages far outnumber live births.
It appears to me that Republicans are more concerned about the sanctity of life than God is..
But if they really cared that much they'd do something about the proliferation of guns, at least the weapons of war. most favorable to mass shooters.
And when you put those two things together -- pro-gun and anti-choice -- it's not hard to see that these people are consistent: they're racist, misogynist, and anti-democratic. The "sanctity of life" has nothing to do with it, and their god is mostly a projection of their own warped desires.
Well said, Susanna, the evangelicals are the most narrow-minded of them all. and they are supposed to be just the opposite. Although I read that a group of them are aghast at the others and don't agree with them at all.
However, the white evangelicals are not running the GOP. The people who are trying to placate them are, and I doubt they have any religious, moral, or ethical scruples at all.
Exactly. Uhis is an excerpt from a NY times article of one who broke away from the political faction. As you say, no power over the GOP but at least not voting for Trump "“Four more years of Donald Trump will move our culture further away from the church,” Mr. O’Bannon said. “And sadly, some further away from a relationship with God.”
This year, he cast his vote for Joe Biden.
I respect that guy's integrity!
Gee, Lucian, this is truly nightmarish.
And nobody pays attention and the guys selling these weapons just
pocket the money - and then go to bed and sleep soundly??!!
Listen up podner, they think YOU are the hapless, hopeless, stumble bum liberal headed for disaster when you are the victim of (insert horrific random crime, at which point you would give ANYTHING to have learned how to defend yourself with a bazooka!
I don't even object to that basic concept, in theory, sans bazooka, but it's the almost total lack of screening, background checks, red flag laws, limits on firearms types and ammunition quantities and suitability for hunting OR any realistic necessity for what amounts to a weapon easily made fully automatic - IOW a machine gun, outlawed in 1934 for chrissakes! - with a simple "switch" attachment, and on and on. Also the sheer numbers of outlets susceptible to straw buyers as outlined in Lucian's account.
So many things to fix and so little will. Maybe we need laws (good luck with that), so that all advertising graphically shows what an assault weapon does to a human. Forget the heroic defender of liberty, make them show a classroom piled with murdered children, and the true horror of it all. You and I both know what these things do, but I doubt even 10%, unless they are veterans, have any idea , other than punching holes in paper targets, just what that gun does and how well it does what it was designed to do. They are very efficient killing machines, and they have no business on our streets, much less Schools, Churches, Concert Halls, and Stores............
Yes, Dick, I have said and thought that that is the only way to get people to sit up and take notice. As horrid as it would be, I feel strongly about it. Look at what Emmitt Till’s mother did. Uvalde’s children comes to mind.
You are right....as in the case of Emmet Till, his mother made people look at what was done to him, but did it actually change anything? Even law enforcement is in favor of sensible gun control - even "W", for god's sake, was in favor of banning assault rifles. The world has gone mad and full of fear that killers and burglars and home invaders are around every corner and of course, the government is coming to take your guns so you need to protect yourself from them, too.
Lucian I just read the testimony of the kid who was shot in Kansas City when he rang the wrong doorbell. True we have too many gun stores, but the laws that protect the shooters are the worst part. There are few consequences to shooting kids through a door. The trial in Kansas City is all about whether the shooter felt threatened, and justified in shooting through his locked door. A lot hangs on whether the kid opened the screen door or just touched it!! Forgive me but I believe I was taught to not open the door to strangers, and that would keep me safe. Not to shoot strangers through the locked door.
I don't understand where these nutjobs get the money to buy these expensive weapons and tactical gear!
Lucian, a friend had an old-fashioned propane bottle on her grill. We looked for a place that could refill it and, strangely, found on the Internet that a gun shop in a small town nearby had a large tank and might be able to do it.
When we got there, we didn’t see any sign of a big tank, so we went inside to ask. The place looked like that photograph of the Tommy Gun Store.
It gave me a really creepy feeling. I told my friend I wanted to leave before somebody recognized me there. I had the same kind of feeling I imagined I would’ve had if I was worried somebody might see me coming out of one of those “adults only” porn stores.
I wish I could explain why Americans have fetishized firearms like we have. It’s a type of porn, too.
We got rid of slavery, but not racism. We haven’t rid ourselves of guns, and certainly not the mayhem and mass murder they cause.
I weep.
Porn indeed. There’s a reason they’re referred to in some circles as “ammosexuals”.
The slave market is alive and well today.
We support if by importing and buying items produced by slaves here and abroad, we just don’t know because it’s not disclosed by manufacturers.
Prisoners in the USA are “employed”, at sub-par wages and have little choice but to “work”.
Child labor and enforced slave labour abroad is considered an accepted business practice.
What we don’t know can harm us and others!
There are religious extremists in some parts of the globe who are completely convinced it is endorsed by the Supreme Being they worship.
Cf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Mali#:~:text=Inside%20the%20borders%20of%20present,%2C%20Mand%C3%A9%2C%20and%20Fula%20communities.
Terrifying, but not surprising, statistics. Thanks for opening our eyes once again, Lucian. I searched on Google maps and found about ten firearms stores within about a half hour from where I live.
I always look forward to your column, but, damn, this one is downright depressing.
Reculer pour mieux sauter!
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reculer_pour_mieux_sauter
Again, the media does not report how a mass shooter got the money to buy so many weapons in the first place, which I'd be interested to know, since so many of these guys (almost always a guy) are losers, poor, unemployed, young, etc. Is there a pattern that could be helpful to know? Are they borrowing money, paying cash no one knew they had, writing bad checks, using credit cards (their own or someone else's)?
I don't just have several thousands of dollars available to go out and buy a small armory, and I'm a stable fellow (retired) with a regular lower-middle class income. Where are these murderers getting their gun money from?
Often it’s mom or dad, which is why the law should prosecute the parents. As they did in Michigan.
Certainly, for these minors. I'm sure that's breaking a law, or laws, in most places.
The current situation is a direct result the 2004 Republican Congressional majority and President George W. Bush’s failure to renew the the Clinton administration’s 10 year ban on assault rifles. We must remove as many Republicans from congress as possible so we can to turn Congress around and reinstate the nationwide ban.
I knew of only one gun shop near my home (15 miles), but a Google search revealed 11 within a 25-30 mile circle. And I live in a rural area of small towns and farms, not wealthy or economically vibrant by any means. Where does the money come from to support so many firearms dealers in this environment? And what are people doing without to be able to afford what guns cost? There was just this last weekend a 4 year old girl in a neighboring town killed by someone attempting to instruct her in 'gun safety'. This country has gone mad. Between political violence and gun violence, we have dug a hole so deep we will never be able to crawl out.