parotted shell casings

Where do I begin…? (Hahhh)

A joker is no jester when he’s packing heat; many, many, many heats.  Innocent citizens wait for their comic book hero’s next big adventure on a bigger screen.  Aurora is far from Gotham and much more real.     What happened at a midnight screening of the eagerly anticipated “Dark Knight Rises” on July 20^th?  James Holms was a doctoral student, but even those with the loftiest of academic pursuits can be derailed, perhaps even easier than the average college student. 

Condemned to repeat history

Columbine, Virginia Tech, Oklahoma City, Tucson…and the list continues.  Yes, the ability for human to manufacture weapons to kill other humans can never be eliminated.  It can be greatly encumbered though.  How many innocents have to die before there are no encumbrances to gun legislation?  How many killers will be tried and incarcerated; sent to death row perhaps where appeal after appeal could begin; all with years of taxpayers footing the bill. 

Constitutional paradox

“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”  There are no minute men.  Killers like Mark David Chapman, John Hinkley Jr., Terry Nichols and James Holms had months, maybe years, to plot and thoroughly execute their use of firearms.  In the last half of the 18^th century the deadliest weapon available, ostensibly, to the common man was the cannon.  The practicality of this as a weapon for mass murder is hard to imagine.

Incident on King Street

On a snowy March night in 1770 11 people were hit by musket fire from British soldiers.  Snowballs and other objects were thrown by American civilians provoking the occupying British.  5 were killed and 6 were injured.  These arms were in the hands of the militia; over a decade before the amendment was ratified though.  In almost every major war or “conflict” after that massacre, there have been incidents in which firearms were used by the militia against innocent, unarmed civilians.

“And nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’ but it’s free”

Is it a free state?  Does a trip through the labyrinth of the TSA’s devise leave a warm feeling of a free state?  I say no.  No, the world is less free with each passing year, month or trip to the airport (although on my last trip I did see that if you were born before 1937 you no longer have to remove your shoes).  On the contrary, the permissiveness of firearms, always  furthered by pathetically clinging to a 225 year old amendment, has worked to nudge us closer to something like…oh…the kind of freedom I saw when I visited East Berlin in 1983.  

Double talk

The NRA, God Bless ‘em.  They will die before giving up their firearms; yet they fight for the rights of the unborn.  The conservatives will do everything in their power to prevent the elimination of a life that may never be a life.  Still, they think nothing of making it easy to put guns in the hands of people who will eliminate the prosperous proven lives of innocents.

 Self-righteous hypocrisy often passes as politics.  It comes down to selfishness and a refusal to admit that the past is the past and times have changed.  They promise to keep a free state, not to lose their freedoms to arm themselves in order to protect their families.  I see problems with this idea; 1} they pay taxes to have the police (perhaps what should pass as the militia of the modern era) protect their families 2} the odds are that the gun either won’t be readily available or will be used against the owner, and 3} the gun could be found by a curious child.

The adage went “guns don’t kill people; people kill people”  or something like that.  In 2004 29,589 people were killed by guns in the U.S.  More than 100 million handguns are owned in the U.S. mostly for self-defense.  3.5 million of those gun owners have permits to carry them for protection.  The deaths came from homicides, suicides and unintentional shootings.

Wasted legislation

                Many Americans would appreciate the option of owning assault weapons.  It disturbs me that so much effort is put into preserving freedoms that, in the end, might just kill us.  James Holms bought 6,000 rounds of ammunition over the Internet with few legal barriers.  He easily purchased firearms of varying destructive capabilities without having gone through background checks.  The checks established by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 work only if the individual states release all of the data on individuals into the system.   Not all data is submitted and the result is that dangerous people purchase guns with few problems.  After the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech it was determined that Cho Seung-Hui was mentally ill and a danger to himself and others.  The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) is designed to prevent people like Cho from purchasing handguns.  In April of 2007, the month of the Virginia Tech massacre, there were only 22 states reporting mental health information to the NICS database; one of those states was Virginia.  The FBI identifies Virginia as the leading state in reporting mental defective entries to the NICS index.  Still, a 23-year old Asian student with a history of mental problems was able to buy 2 automatic handguns from a gun dealer with ease.

                In my research this post I came across the statement; “If an individual has made up their mind to commit such a heinous act [as mass murder] all the gun laws in the world won’t stop them.”  All right, go on believing  for and nothing will change and we will have the delusion that the world is a safer place.  However, one can imagine (ala John Lennon) that perhaps if laws and restrictions were heaped on individuals deemed dangerous and cited as having murderous intent they would abandon their plans out of frustration.  Also, the more laws and the more hoops one has to jump through to get a gun the more time there is to find the true nature of the individual.  People with guns kill people, people don’t kill people.