232 I’m Angry!

Okay, so what’s my beef now?  Mostly, I’m extremely annoyed at the fact that my blood pressure is up, the “stupidity meter” is pegging the high end of the scale, and the only way I know of to try to contribute to resolving the problem at hand is to spend the time I usually enjoy working on this blog, researching and writing about things I find interesting and/or amusing, is to spend my time and emotional energy trying to deal with the insanity of the USA’s obsession with mass shootings.
 
On June 3 of this year, as I was trying to avoid thinking about this stuff, ABC’s “Good Morning America” reported that there have been 233 “mass shootings” (that’s four, or more, dead) so far this year.  Since June 3 falls during week #23 of the calendar year, if that is the correct number, it means that we are averaging better than TEN such incidents a week!  Wow, there’s a record we can all be proud of!  Of course, unless we live where one of these happens, the odds are we won’t even hear about any individual case.  Yeah, we might hear about a “big” deal, lots of dead, a big school shooting, a well-known church, a concert or movie theatre, but probably not just a run-of-the-mill mass casualty “incident.”  I’m tired of such things.  

What’s been stirring things up lately, of course, is mostly the school shooting in Texas where nineteen kids (aged 9, 10 & 11) and two teachers got killed and, a week later the police still can’t figure out how and/or why their response was so badly handled.  There’s no reason to believe, of course, that, if they had actually followed the standard operating procedure any of the victims would have been saved, but it seems pretty likely that the “Keystone Kop” approach that appears to have been used did NOT contribute to saving any lives.  Nor does one inadequate/improper response explain or excuse the other incidents of the recent past.

What it DOES provide, obviously, is yet another chance for too many politicians to offer their “thoughts and prayers” for these dead, while refusing to do anything about the problem.  Yes, it does look like some, few, steps might be proposed, but it seems VERY unlikely that they will actually even be voted on, let alone accomplish anything.  After all, the Constitution (please note that it WASN’T God) grants all citizens the right to “… keep and bear arms…”.  Of course, even the Supreme Court has allowed restrictions to this “right,” including certain types of weapons (strangely enough, there once WAS a time when even assault rifles, larger magazines, etc., which seem to be the weapons of  choice in mass shootings) and for certain individuals (convicted felons, the mentally incompetent, children, etc.).  So, I CAN’T go out and buy a surplus tank or a bazooka for my personal protection even if I have the resources and the desire.  

But, apparently, the National Rifle Association, a group which has never had more than about six million members out of the 330+ million in the US population, thinks that even acknowledged “weapons of war” should be available to anyone who wants to buy them.  And, since the NRA has the backing of the arms industry, they can provide us with the best politicians that their money can buy.  (Those politicians who vote as the NRA leadership desires.)  I confess that it seems highly unlikely, at least to me, that the six million NRA individual members actually have donated the sizable amounts of money that the NRA has already spent on political campaigns in 2022.  If I am correct, logically, that money must be coming from arms makers, for who else would see this as being to their advantage, Russia?  
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In any case, apparently, the NRA has bought enough politicians to make it impossible for Congress to recognize that the very open-ended “right to bear arms,”  which was probably reasonable and sane when applied to expensive, muzzle-loading, single-shot flintlock rifles, or similarly loaded and fired smooth-bore muskets, may not apply equally sensibly to high powered, semi-automatic rifles firing thirty (or more) cartridges in a matter of seconds when our military is well-funded every year as a matter of course.  The result of this situation is that we have the situation shown in the map below:

I think that the chart says it all: Three hundred twenty-eight dead in the sixteen worse “incidents” in the past decade.  Not mentioned, of course, are the hundreds of “not worst” ones which have occurred during the same period.  One can, of course, quibble about the exact data, but the fact is clear that this is a situation which is a great distance from the situation in ANY other advanced country.  The most common explanation for this situation by supportive politicians is that “the problem ISN’T guns, it’s mental health.”  

Of course it’s a “mental health” problem.  Anyone who obtains a weapon (Note: that weapon is usually one specifically designed for the purpose of killing the largest number of people possible in the shortest amount of time) and uses it to invade a school, church, synagogue, store, mosque, nightclub, or other gathering place, is clearly and obviously mentally disturbed.  We have DEFINED this to be a form of insanity.  Therefore, of course it’s a “mental health issue.”  We have DEFINED it to be so, apparently in order to not blame “the gun.”

By the way, strangely enough, I DO support the idea that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”  It is a fact that a gun, left alone, untouched will rust away to uselessness without some form of human interaction.  If such a gun isn’t cocked beforehand, it seems quite improbable that it would ever fire itself.  A person has to load and cock a gun for it to do anything.  But, one could suggest, that, under those circumstances, it isn’t really a weapon, it’s just a chunk of metal.  But, back to the “mental health” issue.

Citizens of OTHER countries are also subject to “mental health issues,” but ONLY in the USA is it so easy for any person to OBTAIN the commonly chosen type of weapon as well as the magazines and ammunition to engage in “mass shooting” behavior.  This seems relatively obvious when someone can LEGALLY obtain such a weapon, etc., today and have it simply sitting around until that person, or someone else, decides to use it for whatever purpose he/she desires. (Note: mass shooters seem to be almost exclusively young males.)  I would think it obvious that these do NOT seem to be appropriate weapons for hunting, or other (normal) uses, due to the damage they are designed to do when they strike a soft target, like flesh.
 
Even if it were legal, which I don’t think it is, anyone who needs a semi-automatic rife with multiple 30 round magazines and, perhaps a telescopic sight to hunt legal game seems a poor candidate for a hunting license.  Such a rig MIGHT be appropriate to hunt a group of grizzlies by yourself, but that suggests a mental “challenge” of a different sort, at least to me.  Our Founding Fathers granted the right to “… keep and bear arms…” in the day of single-shot, muzzle-loading flintlocks and made NO provision for a permanent “standing army.”  Applying the same rules for access to modern assault rifles with high capacity magazines is NOT constitutional “originalism,” it’s more of a “mental health” issue than the resulting mass shooting incidents.  It’s time that SANE people stepped up and proposed ideas and actions which might actually help solve the problem.  Playing word games with definitions doesn’t seem to be doing much good.

I’m not opposed to allowing people to have reasonable access to guns for personal protection, hunting and other, reasonable and regulated uses, provided that the owner takes complete responsibility for that firearm.  I do think that it’s not unreasonable to require some amount of regulation for gun ownership and use.  After all, currently, you have to get a license to go hunting, but you don’t need one to own the gun you use to hunt with!  Does THAT make much sense to anyone?  I tend to agree with the late Isaac Asimov when he said, “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.”  I think he is correct in implying that facts and logic make more sense than ignorance, and are more likely to enhance democracy.

I wish I had a solution to offer which people might accept, but I think some people simply don’t want the problem solved.  Apparently, they have bought into the classic American mythos that guns can, and do, SOLVE problems.  After all, the myth of the “American frontiersman” is based on the idea of the “noble American” taking his gun and “solving” whatever problem is at hand through the use of force, whether the problem is a lack of food (kill some animal) or danger from another human (kill the “bad” guy, the “Indian,” or somebody else).  Often, the “solution” also involves “solving” the problem at hand by forcing others to accept that they should all do what some, elite, few want.  Of course, that’s NOT anything resembling democracy, it’s actually Fascism (read the definition of that term), which can be on the “Left,” or the “Right.”  Personally, I tend to agree with Jason McCullough (in “Support Your Local Sheriff”) that throwing rocks is preferable to “throwing lead.”  The difficulty with that, as Forrest Gump pointed out is that “Sometimes, I guess there just aren’t enough rocks.”  

I’m tired of politicians’ insincere “thoughts and prayers.”  I’d like to see Congress actually take the words if the Preamble to the Constitution to heart and actually “… promote the general Welfare…” of the nation.  I’m tired of being the laughingstock of the civilized world.  It’s time to do something constructive while we haven’t yet killed, scarred, or just scared all of our children.  I really don’t care which political party anyone belongs to.  I’d just like to see our “leaders” actually lead.  I don’t think leadership is based on public opinion polls and who gave my campaign the most money.  I can’t think of anything more important than protecting our citizens from gun violence.  Yes, look into mental health issues, but, perhaps, keeping military weapons out of the hands of average citizens has its place, as well.
 
Or, maybe you think that “thoughts and prayers” will solve our problems.  I encourage Senators and Members of Congress to consider that I, and I hope many others, will be voting, now and forever, based, not on what they say, but on their actual behavior.  I suggest they give THAT some thought because some of them may not have a prayer after all the votes are counted.

🖖🏼 LLAP,

Dr. B

​“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”                       
                                                                                                  — Nelson Mandela
“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic; capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”                                                                        ― Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows