The Only Solution Left
I write about gun violence on occasion knowing full well that it’s an exercise in futility. Why? Easy; our elected representatives, our law enforcement organizations, and now the courts have been overtaken by weirdos and ideologues who have morphed the powers of local, state, and federal government from “law and order” to an alternate reality believing that overturning over 200 years of legal precedent and history and putting guns into the hands of everyone is somehow sane public policy. We’re 24 days into the new year and have already had 40 mass shootings in the US, killing 74 and wounding 170. In that same period of time, over 2,800 people have died from guns and over 2,100 have been wounded. Gun violence has overtaken car accidents and drug overdoses as the leading cause of death in children in America.
There has been an unrelenting effort by the gun lobby to rewrite the Second Amendment from its original intent into a gun-humper’s dream. The amendment that provided for a citizen army to protect the newly formed government in the late 1700s has been turned onto its head with junk law and fake “studies” to turn the amendment into a Guns for Everyone ideology. In unwinding 200 years of case law, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito have relied on bullshit and junk law to justify their politically motivated rulings which included gutting Washington, DC and New York gun safety laws. They’ve relied on a doctrine of “originalism” which, translated from Bullshit to English, is an excuse to turn everything on its head forcing 21st century technology into an 18th century framework of law. The Heller case was the death blow to sanity by declaring that an amendment that provided for a citizen army lead by state and local authorities was actually enumerated a person right for any idiot to carry a firearm anywhere he/she damn well pleased. Using this insanity, even more insane state politicians use the same junk law codified by the SCOTUS to unwind centuries of gun safety laws all over the country. As Michael Waldman, Director of the Justice Brennan Center at NYU Law, said after the Court struck down the NY gun safety law,
“The ruling Thursday says that all these judges got it wrong. Instead, the majority said, courts must assess gun rules especially focusing solely on ‘history and tradition.’ Don’t look at public safety; search for analogies to past laws from a very different time.”
Waldman has written extensively about the history of the effort to rewrite the Second Amendment. The gun lobby did it in plain sight, pumping out bullshit and fake studies while at the same time paying Republicans to kill federal funding into gun violence for almost 40 years. Add that to decades of gutting the ATF and attacking any authority trying to curb gun violence, and the takeover of America by gun nuts is complete. SCOTUS has already communicated that the gun safety law debate is over and insanity won. The Congress won’t protect us, the President can’t effectively act alone so he can’t help; red state governments have completely unraveled what gun safety law we had left, and ideologues sue local and state governments who dare try to protect their citizens. This war is lost.
Until the Court was bought by the multi-billion dollar Federalist Society, we had a chance. But that was lost with the triple assist from TFG. The SCOTUS is now a zombie court that has asserted that it has no authority to protect Americans from massive gun violence, radical gerrymandering and unlimited money that has completely corrupted our elections and destroyed democracy from within. This war is lost so we have two choices – give up and go arm ourselves and join in the chaos and carnage; OR fight back. Grass roots is all that’s left and the job is massive.
The only solution to this dystopian alternate reality is to get rid of the Second Amendment. I know that sounds crazy, but we’re already up to our eyeballs in crazy, so we have nothing to lose. In 2018, Justice John Paul Stevens proposed just this in an op-ed in the NY Times. He was right then, and remains right today. Let’s stop niggling over definitions of assault weapons and semi-auto firearms. The solution is to start – and win – a new war that takes back the safety of our citizens away from the gun nuts and zealots. I know that by no means is this going to be easy, but it’s the only solution left.
Talked to gun nut & he said ‘well England got rid of guns and people now kill with knives’. SO What!! When we have a mass murder in schools every month, then we will deal with knives. But guess what? I can out run a guy with a knife. I can survive a knife wound. Try out running a AR15 bullet and surviving being hit a few times!!! NO COMPARISON…gun nuts are insane!
1The citizens of the USofA care more about assault weapons than the lives of their children. It is an addiction facilitated by the idolatrous interpretation of the Second Amendment. They have no understanding of the historical context of that amendment and have warped it into a defense of their own making.
2This country is awash in guns. There are more guns than people. I have given up on anything ever being done to remove guns from the public. We will just keep killing each other and extending the hackneyed “thoughts and prayers” at each occurrence. We may as well leave our flags at half staff because almost as soon as they’re raised, we need to lower them again.
3The local sheriff said in a radio interview that the three problems we face are addiction, mental illness and poverty. These all lead to misuse of guns. I think guns should be regulated like cars, user licensing and gun registration and liability insurance. Then for goodness sake tackle those three problems our society has. BTW, Gov. Abbott has $33B to do something good – do you think he’ll work on any of those issues? Nah, I don’t think so either!
4Gun nuts have a very stubborn version of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Would their level of fact resistance respond to medication? After Uvalde one might think the majority of LE would want sane gun safety laws, too. Seriously. LE is charged with maintaining the peace, so seriously how do they expect to do their job safely when they’re out gunned? How many deputies, troopers, etc have lost their lives responding to calls because some wingnut was armed? That answer as with how many children, innocent bystanders and every gun death should be the same: too many.
Apologies El Jefe. You want answers, not more questions. Better yet you want solutions. This topic has been discussed at the WMDBS and there is a long list of great solutions that have been provided. But. That begs the question of how we force Congress to pass a national solution. 2024. We the peeps have to deliver a Democratic Congress along with a progressive President. Yeah. Again. Easier said than done. But we were so close 2022. So let’s try one more shove for 2024.
As for SCROTUS? Good idea, but President Biden has to push for expanding the court before any help comes from that quarter. Odds on impeaching those who lied their way onto the court?
5Getting rid of the Second Amendment may be impossible for now, but it is still an idea that might save the country. Despite the fact that it has become an excuse for a firearms free-for-all, it was essential to the early United States, which did not have a standing army. Our present Supreme Court has decided to ignore the first part–the provision for “well-regulated militias”–then used to train citizen-soldiers for times they might be needed–in favor of expanding the second part, making it very difficult to keep firearms out of the hands of anyone who wants them, in whatever numbers they want.
The US is in constant danger from the sheer number of firearms in this country, and the lack of adequate gun regulations. We can’t continue like this for much longer. So, yes, I agree: the Second Amendment, which is now serving the opposite of its original purpose, needs to be abolished.
6“If you see something tell someone.” Three elementary students reported that a classmate had a gun on the playground. The administrator decided not to believe them; a teacher was shot.
7If you see something and you are a kid don’t tell an adult, tell a police or public safety officer, except if you live in Uvalde, Texas.
Richard J Bennink says:
… citizens …care more about assault weapons than the lives of their children.
Yes.
8Sometimes it does come down to a choice, a priority. Certainly you can have both children and guns, but laws should reflect which is more important. Banning abortion so a child can get shot a few years later in school doesn’t count as prioritizing a child.
Dont get rid of 2nd Amendment ENFORCE IT!!! ALL gun owners must be an ACTUAL member of a TRAINED militia. Just as it says!
9If the supremes were to rule on what a trained militia is, the way the court is currently packed they’d probably say the proud boys, oath keepers, 3 percenters and the like would qualify. That’s the way things have been going in the SCOTUS.
10Mandating a trained militia, or if physically – and even mentally – unable to do the training, then what? I have been considering for decades the idea of adding a requirement for insurance on guns of all sorts, much like the idea of home insurance or even business insurance. It would be prorated according to income, which means the rich would pay a whopping amount per gun which would “allow” the poor to pay an “acorn rent”. If anyone objects, the answer is simple. No gun.
Plus, all guns in this country prior to sale would have a sensor type thingy somewhere on the tool, usually where you absolutely cannot find it, much like the way a pet dog is “chipped” at the vets. This sensor would be tracked the second the weapon is in “traffic” and hopefully stopped before it gets anywhere near a school or any other gathering of people such as at a dance hall or laboring on a farm. This would cut mortality of any sort.
Of course, a gun does not do its own thinking. After what we have seen, especially on Jan. 6 a few years ago, the next question is what the bleep do we do about toxic people who really do think the world (or the government) is out to get them. You know the type. They have a boatload of grievances, real or otherwise, and it takes nothing to get them outraged. Any suggestions on that?
11While y’all fret about an issue that the Democrats [nor anyone] can do a damned thing about in the foreseeable future, the Rethuglikans are fixing to sandbag the [asleep-at-the-wheel] Democrats yet again!
As I’ve been ranting about for more than a decade, the #%&#^% Democratic Party is/has let the Hispanic voting bloc slip through it’s feeble fingers:
A Media Ceiling is about to Fall In On Democrats [by] thomhartmann
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/26/2149382/-A-Media-Ceiling-is-about-to-Fall-In-On-Democrats
“The white vote in America is split, leaning 53%-42% toward the GOP. The Black vote is reliably 83 percent Democratic.
But the Hispanic vote is up for grabs [**note– it’s likely long past this point]: they represent the second largest and fastest growing demographic group in the country at 13.3 percent of the 2020 electorate (Blacks were 12.5 percent, whites 66.7 percent) and, as conservative Spanish-language radio proliferates, they’re shifting to the right.
If Republicans can pull just a few percent of the Hispanic vote their way, they can hold the House, retake the Senate, and seize the White House in 2024. Not to mention flipping multiple purple states red.
Now, wealthy partisans aligned with the GOP are going for that Hispanic vote in a big, big way. They intend to use the same tools that have turned state after state reliably red since the 1980s: radio and television.”
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My own Texas county is 50-60%+ Hispanic and has gotten redder and redder with each election, in 2020 it went for DJT over Biden by 75%+.
In 2022 a Rethug took over US House District TX-15, R-53% D-45%, [wherein es mi rancho], which had been solidly Democratic since it was created in the 1930s . It runs from the Mexican border [Hidalgo Cty] to Seguin east of SA [a ‘fajita strip’ district ~300 miles tall by 15-80 miles wide], and is heavily Hispanic, 82%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_15th_congressional_district
WTF are the Dems doing about this? The Hispanic voting bloc is far more important than the Black bloc, in sheer numbers which are/have slipped away, in many states and nationally [not to slight the Black group, who have been the most loyal of all Democrats].
12Sandridge, totally agree. I can see it in some of the results in NW Oregon and suspect California could be in danger in many of their blue and purple areas, especially in SoCal. The Democratic “think” tanks need to get thinking about it and soon and seriously.
13Steve from Beaverton @13, rAmenudo Brudda.
14I’m seeing too many overly optimistic Democratic articles eagerly awaiting a 2024 blue tide. Look out. The Rethugs are carefully plotting a total takeover, in which a flipped Hispanic electorate is a/the key element, their odds are damned good.
As Hartmann implies, that Rethugs are pulling a few % of Hispanics, the real numbers are much greater, from my observations.
Despite the ‘apparent’ Rethug biases against Hispanics, they actually appeal greatly to them in many under the radar ways. I see it play out in local media and venues, some of the most rabid MAGAots and tRumpnutz are Hispanic.
The Democratic ‘leadership’ had damned well stop whistling past the graveyard and do some serious Hispanic rapprochement.
Heller was written by Justice Harlan Black. Blame him and Roosevelt.
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