The problem of gun violence, especially mass shootings, is not all that complicated.  The solution for it has been figured out by every other industrialized nation on the planet.  The US has CHOSEN to not solve it.  Those reasons are also simple – power.  As long as the gun culture has an outsized voice with the electorate, namely the Senate, nothing will happen.  That doesn’t mean the answer is complicated, but money and power wont allow it.  To avoid talking about the real solution to gun violence, politicians and the gun lobby repeat bullshit every time there is a mass shooting, which is now a weekly occurrence.

Let’s review said bullshit:

1. Good guy with a gun – the most common, yet one of the most false.  Almost no mass shootings are stopped by an armed citizen, and in fact, armed citizens are generally killed or wounded trying to help, like the security guard at the Tops Grocery in Buffalo New York a few weeks ago.
2. An armed society is a polite society” – this one is as stupid as it sounds.  Name me an Open Carry Texas member who is a polite member of society and I’ll show you a fictional character.
3. More guns equals more safety – if that were true, we’d be the safest society on the planet.  As it is, our gun violence death rate is 4 times that of industrialized nations.
4. Crime decreased as we loosened gun laws – which equals, “I ate ice cream yesterday, then it rained.  Eating ice cream causes rain.”  Correlation does not equal causality, but I can say now that the states with looser gun laws have greater per capita gun deaths than those with strict gun laws.
5. What about “shall not be infringed” do you not understand – which is one of the silliest arguments.  All historic documents, including James Madison’s own notes, showed that the Founders were terrified of standing armies, (especially the British) and decided to defend the new US government with citizen militias under local authorities federalized during times of war.  That history is well documented and easily studied for those who read past the NRA’s propaganda.  In the early days, firearms were kept at home, but ammunition and gun powder were kept in local armories for safety.  Our founding generation was not populated by idiots.
6. Criminals don’t follow the law – again, an idiotic argument which supports the notion that, if this is true, we shouldn’t have stop signs, traffic lights, or speed limits.  Laws aren’t written for people to obey, since responsible citizens do that.  Laws are written to establish a framework of enforcement and punishment for those who don’t follow the law.
7. We should harden our schools and have armed law enforcement guarding the schools – again a stupid argument.  First, making every school in the nation a fortress is impossible.  Second it doesn’t work.  Case in point, just YESTERDAY, there were armed police at the school in Uvalde when the shooter got there.  They shot at him, but he was wearing body armor and was returning fire with an AR-15.  Even though there were armed officers at the school, he got in anyway, then killed 19 children and two teachers.  The cops got him only after SWAT arrived and blew him away with comparable weapons to what he was using.
8. We should arm the teachers – Ted Cruz made this idiotic statement many times including yesterday. This is the dumbest goddam suggestion of all.  See number 7 above.  If police couldn’t stop him, how the fuck is little Ms. Perrywinkle, the second grade arithmetic teacher two years out of college going to do it?

Ted Cruz, pull your head out of your ass.

Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot 3 people, killing two, was acquitted yesterday by a jury in Kenosha Wisconsin. Taking almost 30 hours for deliberation, the jury showed careful diligence in arriving at its verdicts, yet those verdicts were not only unjust; they exposed the raw and tragic truth that when it comes to gun violence, our justice system can no longer actually deliver justice.

The killings and the resulting verdicts defy logic.  An underaged teenager illegally possessing a firearm that was illegally bought by a straw purchaser crossed state lines to join an illegal police action by an unauthorized self-styled “militia”.  He then left the group that was “guarding” businesses and wandered into the crowd that was protesting police brutality.  Rittenhouse, displaying the maturity of a 17-year-old, walked into an angry crowd protesting a police shooting and was then shocked at those people’s reaction.  Had he walked into the crowd without an AR-15 strapped to his chest, probably nothing would have happened; with an AR-15 he almost guaranteed to provoke a response, and he got it, in spades.  Rittenhouse fired a number of shots, hitting three people and killing two of them.  But for him toting an AR-15 in plain sight, this tragedy would not have happened.

Let’s go through the crimes committed by Rittenhouse and his compatriots.  First, the straw purchase.  Rittenhouse’s friend, Dominick Black, aged 20, bought the gun for him because he was too young.  That purchase violates federal and state laws, and Black has been charged, but not tried.  Second, Rittenhouse was charged with minor in possession, but just as final arguments began in his trial, the judge, citing a ridiculous reading of the statute, ordered the charge dropped.  The technicality he cited? An inconsistency in the law that said minors can’t carry a weapon unless it has a long barrel.  The defense had argued this technicality, and the judge bought it, effectively rendering the entire law toothless and unenforceable.  The remaining charges were first degree reckless homicide, two counts of first degree recklessly endangering safety, first degree intentional homicide, and attempted first degree intentional homicide.  The defense argument was simple – self-defense.  They painted Rittenhouse as a good intentioned teenager who was attacked by vicious rioters while trying to protect property and provide medical aid.  The judge, acting more like defense co-counsel rather than the trial judge, went along with this argument, banning the term “victim” or “victims” for those who were shot, but allowed them to be called “rioters”, “looters”, and “arsonists”.

But worse than the judge putting his foot on the scales of justice is the idiocy of today’s gun laws in most US states.  Many states, like Texas, have undone two centuries of common-sense gun laws by perverting the meaning of the Second Amendment through decades of junk law that now permeates federal and state case law.  Intended as a protection for the newly founded US government by providing for a citizen army made up of militias under state and local authority, the Second Amendment has been turned on its head from providing for the common defense to enabling any idiot to own and carry a gun in public.  This effort, driven by gun manufacturers and their lobbyists, with a big assist from Antonin Scalia and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, is virtually complete. Just this year, Texas joined nineteen other states that eliminated all licensing requirements for the open carry of guns in public.  It already allowed open carry of guns, but eliminated all licensing and training requirements, falsely calling such a radical practice as “constitutional carry,” which is nonsense.  All but a handful of states now allow the open carry of firearms in some form or another.  What could possibly go wrong?

Guns are now a fixture in political rallies and protests.  This practice is almost exclusively on the right wing of the political spectrum where outrage is fueled by systemic disinformation which drives the outraged to show up in body armor, helmets, and toting loaded firearms.  Guns and politics don’t mix, have never mixed, and will never mix, but now threats of physical violence and actual violence is commonplace during protests.  Troublemakers often pose as legitimate protestors for the sole purpose of starting destruction and violence, like they did during the George Floyd protests of 2020.  They then use the trouble they caused as an excuse to carry firearms to “protect” businesses and property, mostly owned by white people.

And now, after the Rittenhouse acquittals, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle.  The lesson learned in this trial is that self-defense is a winning argument even when the person claiming self-defense actually started the incident.  The fact is that, but for Rittenhouse wandering into a protest with a locked and loaded AR-15, no one would have died that night in Kenosha.  HE provoked the protestors by openly carrying a weapon of war into a political protest that was already very tense.  When people responded to his provocation, he then shot them, killing two, and then successfully defended that action in court by pretending that the incident began at the moment protestors responded to his provocation.  We have a very similar argument going on right now in Georgia, where three white men chased, confronted, and threatened an unarmed black man, Ahmad Aubrey, who was simply jogging through a neighborhood.  After pulling out a shotgun, one of the defendants then murdered Aubrey.  Their legal justification?  Self-defense.  As ridiculous as that sounds, the trial is in Georgia, and the jury is made up of 11 white men.  I have virtually no expectation that justice will be done in that case either, and I’ll bet you a dollar to a donut that the defense cites the Rittenhouse acquittals as precedent.

I quit the NRA in the 1980s when it went nuts and Charlton Heston started screaming, “From my cold dead hands!” at every meeting.  Being a gun owner, I have been actively opposing for well over a decade the radical gun culture that permeates Texas.  Our politicians have totally failed us, even failing to protect other Texans from gun nuts in the goddam state capitol, creating the necessity of installing panic buttons in every politician’s office to summon state troopers in the event a gun nut gets upset.   Death threats against anyone that gun nuts don’t like is commonplace.  Outrage from disinformation has created an alternative reality where up is down, left is right, the earth is flat, and the sun rises in the west.  Gun nuts even bring guns to protests against science based public health policy.  Career health officials are being driven from office by these threats, and now school board members and their families must be protected by police.

This is insanity that cannot be altered by reason, so I’m changing tactics.  Tomorrow I’m trotting my happy ass down to Guns ‘r Us and buying myself a nice AR-15 with all the trimmings – a couple dozen boxes of ammo, a pile of 30 round mags, and body armor and a tactical sling.  I’ll guarantee that if a couple hundred of us protesting for social justice, fair elections, and racial equality start showing up armed to the teeth, especially those with non-white skin, the politicians will change their tune in a hurry, calling for protection from “radical leftists”.  Nothing else has worked, maybe this will.  After all, we can’t depend on elected officials or even the courts to protect the common good; it’s time to use some of the same tactics as the other side to level the playing field.

Don’t know if y’all saw it yesterday, but the NRA announced on Twitter that it has cancelled its 2021 annual meeting to be held in Houston out of uncharacteristic concern for the health of its members who would be exposed to COVID.  As we all are painfully aware, we’re now experiencing a 4th wave of infections due to the callous incompetence and indifference of Abbott and his supporters.

Harris County Judge, Lina Hidalgo responded to the NRA’s tweet with this:

Sending thoughts and prayers. https://t.co/fkSBLnk4oR

— Lina Hidalgo (@LinaHidalgoTX) August 24, 2021

Now THAT is some serious shade, mocking the NRA for their normal response to massive gun violence.  They most certainly deserved what Lina dished out, but we’re certainly glad that for once the NRA has done the right thing.

Today, Dan Patrick (who I regard as a lunatic) announced that he didn’t have enough votes to pass the Unqualified Carry Law that allows any idiot to openly (or concealed) carry a handgun in public without ANY licensing requirement.  He did say that if he got enough votes, he would advance the bill, and was looking for advice from the NRA and other gun advocacy organizations. Swell.  Thankfully, law enforcement is opposed to this bill for obvious reasons.

Gun nuts in Texas have been pushing the notion of Unqualified Carry for about 7 or 8 years now, even coining the term “Constitutional Carry” which doesn’t exist.  What it really is is Unqualified Carry, that is, the ability of anyone to carry a handgun openly without a permit and with no mechanism for law enforcement to examine a carrier’s qualifications.  The one successful thing the gun lobby, lead by the NRA, has done is to rewrite the Second Amendment over the last 5 decades pushing the notion that the Founders envisioned a society where guns are omnipresent; nothing could be farther from the truth, but it took decades of junk law based on manipulated and faked data to finally get this rewriting incorporated into caselaw. This rewrite culminated in the Heller decision, written by Antonin Scalia, who overturned two centuries of caselaw declaring the the Second Amendment was all about guns for everyone which it wasn’t. The Second Amendment was established to enable the new government to defend itself from 1) foreign enemies, and 2) insurrection.  All this bullshit being peddled about an armed citizenry being able to overthrow the US government for “tyranny” is just that: bullshit.  We saw the logical result of such bullshit on January 6th when brainwashed morons stormed the US Capitol to stop democracy from functioning and to force their own will on 300 million Americans.

Back to the present effort to undo remaining gun laws in Texas, and let’s be blunt; there is one reason, and one reason only for gun nuts and their various organizations to push Unqualified Carry, and that is to allow criminals and other unqualified individuals easy access to firearms so manufacturers can sell more firearms.  That’s it, period, end of sentence.  Gun nuts, lead by really crazy gun nuts, have been brainwashed by decades of bullshit published by the gun lobby that society must be the omnipresence of deadly firearms because society is evil and everyone must protect themselves and their families from scary dark people, socialist politicians, and government tyranny that they can’t define.

To make matters worse, Texas allows unregulated private sales and internet sales of ammunition and gun parts including 80% receivers which allow criminals who can’t put their hands on a firearm to just build one.  To take away the permitting requirement for handgun carry opens the floodgates for criminals, many of whom who have pushed for Unqualified Carry because they can’t get a license due to their past criminal records.

When a law is being considered, the question needs to be asked: Will this law make citizens lives better or safer?  Because this law puts more guns in unqualified hands, the answer is a resounding no.  The Unqualified Carry law won’t improve any lives (except criminals).  Because it will put more guns on the street, it will make law enforcement more difficult, risk law abiding citizens’ lives, AND enable criminals to carry guns without being challenged.  It will greatly complicate police officers’ jobs while a crime is being committed, and will slow their response.  In short, there is no good reason, no great need, and no problem that will be solved by allowing Unqualified Carry.   It’s already proven that the presence of guns increases violence, increases crime, and increases deaths.  This law will do no good, and cause a lot of grief for Texans, as if we needed that.

Written by Nick Carraway –

“Cause you gotta be hangin’ tough

Hangin’ tough, hangin’ tough,
We’re rough.” — New Kids on the Block

There’s nothing quite as ridiculous as watching five suburban white teens dancing in unison and telling us how tough they are. This song sold millions of records, so I guess it fooled someone. It’s just hard to say if it was anyone over the age of fourteen. They certainly weren’t fooling any teenage boys or any adults. It’s one of those songs that inspires laughter today. It almost makes you feel sorry for those five boys. Almost.

The problem comes with the illusion of masculinity. We saw that again when Lindsay Graham tried to defend gun rights in the only way he can. He asserted that he owns an AR-15 and he would use it to hunt down gangs. Yup, I can see him now just mowing down street hard gangsters. Sure, and the New Kids were rough.

The trouble with a topic like this is that it exists in layers. The first layer is that we know Graham isn’t exactly the picture of stereotypical masculinity. There have been nasty rumors about his sexuality since he’s not married and seems effeminate to some. So, the picture of Graham with his big gun is laughable at best.

Of course, then there is the immediate second layer. What exactly is the definition of a man? Then, we get the question of whether any of this really matters. What if Lindsay Graham is gay? What if he doesn’t really participate in stereotypical alpha male activities? Should any of that really matter? Certainly, it is a little rich for progressives to trumpet the rights of LGTBQ+ individuals and then turn around and whisper about Graham. If you are going to support some people on that journey you need to support all people on that journey.

Of course, this doesn’t mean anything about Graham. I’m not speculating one way or the other. I honestly don’t care. What I care about is how people portray themselves and portray masculinity as a whole. The insinuation is that men own guns and bigger men own bigger guns. In my younger days, I remember seeing a bumper sticker that said, “If you own a gun you are a citizen. If you don’t you are a subject.” I certainly didn’t realize that the right to own a gun had turned into the duty to own a gun.

I don’t own a gun and I’m pretty confident in saying that I never will. I guess you would surmise that I’m not really a man. Would I become more of a man if I somehow lied about that? Maybe I could say I own a gun. Maybe I could say that I can lift 200 pounds. Maybe I could brag about a would be enormous porn collection. Maybe then I would be a man.

All of this goes back to marketing. The NKOTB were mass marketed as a group of tough teens that could also sing and dance. Graham is mass marketing himself as the man’s man there to protect us from the big bad government. Meanwhile, we can’t help but wonder what this is all saying about manhood and what it means to be a man. Obviously, these notions inspire more laughter than anything else and yet we can’t be blind to the overall effect that it has on us as men and on culture in general.

Men as a whole are struggling. Some of us are struggling since we aren’t going as far in our careers as we thought we should. Not being the breadwinner in a family can be a blow to the male ego. Some men are struggling with the “Me Too” movement and how to navigate the workplace and society at large with women. Some men struggle with the concept of male identity as it pertains to their own sexuality and how they are perceived in the world. All of these things get jumbled up when we are bombarded by the images of false bravado.

So, it isn’t so much to poke fun at NKOTB or Lindsay Graham for what they are. It is about poking fun at who they were trying to convince us they were. No one really believes those five teens were hanging tough and no one really believes Graham is roaming around town with his AR-15 looking for hoodlums to kill. Maybe he’s going after that Trump vote after all and thinks he can fool us into thinking he’s the man’s man. Most of us don’t care and those that do aren’t buying it for a minute.

Yesterday the DOJ announced the arrest and charging of 3 insurrectionist leaders who planned and led the attack on the Capitol.  In an extensive 23 page indictment, 3 individuals were named, Thomas Caldwell, Donovan Crowl, and Jessica Watkins, associated with extremist groups including Oathkeepers, Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters.  The charges detailed how they forcibly entered the Capitol, assaulted officers, destroyed property, interfered with Congress, and pursued members of Congress.  One particular chilling part of the indictment describes FB messages Caldwell was receiving from co-conspirators that were actually guiding him down flights of stairs and through tunnels as he pursued fleeing members of Congress.  In messages between other co-conspirators, they even talked about “Paul” who has “the goodies in case things go bad and we need to get heavy.”  And stupidly, they put a lot of this communication and evidence of their lawbreaking up on social media for all to see.  Unbelievable.

It’s becoming very clear that the attack on the Capitol wasn’t just a demonstration that got out of hand.  The attack was planned among conspirators in multiple states in multiple extremist groups.  Their military training, radical rhetoric, and threats made it clear they intended to capture, and even kill members of Congress whom they had decided had somehow committed “treason”.  The evidence is also becoming clear that they had help from the inside of the Capitol.  Who that is, we don’t know yet, but I predict we will.

The feds must continue investigating, arresting, trying and convicting as many of these conspirators.  These extremists are gun nuts who advocate unlicensed and unregulated ownership of all firearms.  Many are convicted felons who are excluded from owning guns, by law.  Even though many of these radicals are not allowed to own guns, they can still get them through private sales and black markets, but the feds must continue pursuing these criminals and enforcing the law.  The Congress in collusion with George W, let the genie out of the bottle in 2004 when they let the Assault Weapons ban expire.  Millions of weapons of war have flooded into the market feeding the violent tendencies of extremists groups that have proliferated all over the country.  The only tool we have remaining is charging, convicting, and jailing thousands of these gun nuts who threaten our democratic republic.

This is at least a start.