Tom Diaz

Archive for the ‘Ethics in Washington’ Category

THE MEWLING PUSSIES THAT WON’T AND CAN’T BARK–HOW “COMMON SENSE GUN SAFETY GROUPS” SURRENDER TO MORE GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA

In bad manners, Bushmaster assault rifle, Concealed Carry, Cultural assassination, Ethics in Washington, Expendable Youth, Glock, Glock Semiautomatic pistols, Guns, NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION, Obama, Police, politics, Running Fire Fight, self-defense, Semiautomatic assault rifles, Starbucks, The Great Stupid, The So-called "News Media", Turf Wars, Washington Bureaucracy on June 10, 2014 at 5:07 pm
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More Suckling Babies

Foundation babies

Foundation Babies on the Funding Nipples

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Remember that?

It was the core of the wisdom that NRA vice president Wayne LaPierre emitted from his remarkably flaccid orifice at his notorious press conference following the savage slaughter of the innocents at Sandy Hook school in 2012.  “N.R.A. Envisions ‘a Good Guy With a Gun’ in Every School,” The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/us/nra-calls-for-armed-guards-at-schools.html?_r=0.

Wayne LaPierre

Wayne LaPierre,The NRA’s Orifice-in-Chief, Emits What Has Become “Gun Safety” Wisdom: The “Right” to Carry Guns Concealed

This is the gospel of the concealed carry licensing school. It teaches that more guns–not less–will solve America’s beyond evident gun violence problem. See, if a “bad guy” starts something evil, well, a “good guy” will just stop him. Problem solved.

Only most Americans understand that the problem of gun violence is the guns themselves. More precisely, it is the shameful failure of our moral, political and civic will to directly engage and staunch the flood of guns in America that has created our modern Noahide law of senseless violence. It tortures our soul.

In your heart, you know, I know, and the American people know that more guns really means just another foot or so of steel, more burning lead, more shocking death, more horrifying, suppurating wounds, more mutilated children cut down as toddlers, more grieving families, more hospital stench, and more funerals.  Send out as many doves as you please, they will come back without hope so long as “more guns” is the answer.

Survivors of Gunshot Wounds Suffer Pain, Indignity, and Often a Life of Daily Horrors

Survivors of Gunshot Wounds Suffer Pain, Indignity, and Often a Life of Daily Horrors

The nation was properly shocked at LaPierre’s solution. The “gun safety and/or gun violence reduction and/or common sense gun laws” movement also effected to be shocked.

A substantial amount of argumentation ensued over the fine point of whether any armed citizen — other than a law enforcement officer or armed security guard — had ever stopped a mass shooting.

Well, well. This Sunday past in Las Vegas, America finally got an unequivocal, clear-cut, wonderfully shining moment of a “a good guy with a gun”–and his predictably tragic and fatal failure. After Jerad and Amanda Miller murdered two police officers, they scuttled over to a nearby Wal-Mart –not incidentally well known as one of America’s great gun emporiums. Here, in sad brief, is what happened:

Joseph Wilcox, 31, standing in line and armed with a concealed weapon, sees them and tells a friend he is going to confront them. He moves toward Jerad Miller, not realizing Amanda Miller is with him. As he starts to confront the man, Amanda Miller shoots him in the ribs. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/06/09/police-give-details-on-timeline-shootings-las-vegas-officers-wal-mart-shopper/

This is only one of a number of tactical problems known to infest the concealed carry issue: failure to properly integrate the tactical environment under stress.  Sometimes, even among trained law enforcement officers, the same “fog of combat” results in one good guy shooting another good guy.

In any case, one would have expected — I most certainly did — that the “gun violence please go away” groups would have reacted en masse and forcefully to this incident, slamming a concrete and steel vault over the idea that concealed carry actually works. Case closed.

Instead, nothing. Not a word. Not a single mewl from the contented cattykins, nozzled snugly onto the copious teats of the two great mothers of all funding, Their Royal Tabbies Missy Joyce and Mister Mike.

Literally, the sounds of silence. Okay, maybe a little sucking noise.

I will explain precisely why this passive anemia has infected what was once a feisty movement shortly.

But let us first go to the record and  see what actually has belched forth from the “movement” (as of the time of this writing).

The feckless direct-mail fund-raising group Brady For Something or Other posted a limp paragraph, “Brady’s Reaction to the Las Vegas Shooting”:

BREAKING — Another day, another tragic mass shooting in our nation. First and foremost our thoughts are with the victims and their families who have now joined the ranks of the hundreds of thousands of families directly impacted by gun violence every year. This nation has had three mass shootings in two weeks. Each day 90 Americans are killed by bullets. Today, two of those victims were police officers who too often find themselves in the line of fire, but today were just eating lunch at a pizza restaurant. This problem persists because of the influence of the corporate gun lobby and the irresponsible politicians who do its bidding. We know solutions to the problem exist, solutions that are supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans. We at Brady will not rest until we make this the safer nation we all want it to be. http://www.bradycampaign.org/bradys-reaction-to-the-las-vegas-shooting.

In short, cornets, teddy bears, and pabulum. Tell us something we didn’t know, please. Tell us something forceful to actually do!

The Violence Policy Center [full disclosure: a place where I labored for many years] freshened up and re-issued a report on the NRA’s violent rhetoric:

The Consequences of the NRA’s Violent Rhetoric–One of the NRA’s greatest successes has been its ability to create a disconnect between the potential for violence fostered by its words and the actual acts of violence committed by “lone wolves” and others facilitated by the organization’s validating rhetoric. http://www.vpc.org/index.htm.

VPC Cover

2010 VPC Report, “Lessons Unlearned”

This is a retread of a report that VPC originally issued in April 2010: “Lessons Unlearned: The Gun Lobby and the Siren Song of Anti-Government Rhetoric.” [That report has been taken down from the VPC website, but see cover at right].  See also, “NRA Once Again Embracing Anti-Government Rhetoric,” PR Newswire, April 15, 2010.

Former Mayor and Still Billionaire Activist Against Super Sized Drinks Big Mike Bloomberg’s group–named either “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” or “Everytown” (which might also be an HBO original series) issued  a deeply profound “Statement on Las Vegas Shooting” by the Mayor of Everytown:

“Once again random gun violence has struck our communities in the places we eat and shop — our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the three individuals who were killed today,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety. “We are still learning all of the details of what happened in Las Vegas, but we are particularly saddened that two of the people targeted in today’s shooting were law enforcement officers, the very people who serve and protect our communities. We also know that 39 percent fewer law enforcement officers are killed with handguns in states that require background checks on all handgun sales — which Nevada does not require. This event reminds us that gun violence can happen anywhere at anytime — and this is precisely why we are asking our political leaders to take action so that ‘not one more’ police officer, innocent bystander or even student on their way to class will be added to the daily toll of gun violence in America. http://everytown.org/press/everytown-for-gun-safety-statement-on-las-vegas-shootings/.

NLEOMF%20Logo

The Fraternal Order of Police Works Hand-in-Glove With the NRA to Block Strong Gun Control Laws. Guns Don’t Kill Cops…Bad Guys Do

Playing the “law enforcement card” is part of the “message” that the Gun Safety and Other Good Things Nubbins agreed upon during their “strategy” mass conference call.  It’s like being for apple pie. The only problem is that it has never worked before and it won’t work now.  Cops [see “Police, Fraternal Order of”] generally dislike gun control, and tend to blame such shootings on what everyone who is not a cop is known as in private, to wit, “assholes.” But…oh, well.

“Moms Demand Action”remains focused on its campaign to obliviate open carry demonstrations in big chain retail stores. Target is the target du jour.

Semi-automatic assault rifles don’t belong in the baby aisle—or anywhere else in Target. Yet gun extremists around the country have made it a point to bring their rifles into Target stores. Moms don’t want to feel unsafe and intimidated when we go shopping with our children. We’re asking Target to immediately end open carry in its stores. Target needs to follow in the footsteps of Starbucks, Chipotle, Chili’s, Sonic and Jack in the Box and put customer safety first. Nearly 90% of Target customers are women; they need to know we expect them to get gun sense. http://www.momsdemandaction.org/.

God bless ‘em, nothing wrong with this grass roots awareness campaigning, so go get ‘em, moms. Only a cranky cynic would note that to present knowledge, the open carry people have not actually shot anyone.  But…oh, never mind. It’s about negative branding.

Okay, now: why the studied silence on concealed carry from the Milling Groups Against Anything But Guns?

It puzzled me until I remembered an op-ed from last year written by two men well known behind the scenes–attorney and former gun industry lobbyist Richard Feldman (http://www.independentfirearmowners.org/2013/node/3) and the man generally recognized as the brains behind Bloomberg’s “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” (now possibly named “Everytown”), Arkadi Gerney, now gun guru in residence at the Center for American Progress. http://americanprogress.org/about/staff/gerney-arkadi/bio/. The two proposed a “grand bargain” on guns, sort of like the sale of Alaska, the Louisiana Purchase, or the Brooklyn Bridge.

Here is the intriguing part:

…[S]trongly held positions suggest potential for crafting a grander bargain on guns, a new set of policies that would be premised on two complementary goals: protecting the rights of responsible, law-abiding gun owners and gun sellers, while giving law enforcement better tools to deter and prosecute criminal access to guns.

So, let’s address all these concerns and come up with a system that requires checks for all gun sales but exempts transfers among family members, temporary transfers and a small set of other transactions. And let’s devise a uniform set of intelligent standards, including training and clean criminal records, for a national concealed-carry system. Richard Feldman and Arkadi Gerney, “A grand bargain on guns? Here’s how: Advocates of stricter laws and gun owners could come together on some basic reforms,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/15/opinion/la-oe-feldman-gun-control-bargain-20131215.

Wow! This is major. A nation has lifted its lonely eyes to Tabbies Joyce and Mike, and those clever cats have given up and bought into a national concealed carry law! Now, that is American Progress!

Get your gun and start packing folks, if you truly want to stop the carnage. The NRA message trumps all.

Don’t expect a contrary message.

If there is one thing all those little foundation baby kitties know, it’s to “stay on message” and “get with the program.” Purrrrrrring.  Purrrrrring.

My serious suggestion is: invest in teddy bears, candle stores, and flower stands.  They are going to be a booming business in the “common sense gun safety” world.

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The Beatification of Saint Rahm Emanuel the Sometime Fierce Defender of the Innocent (When It Suits Him)

In bad manners, Bushmaster assault rifle, Concealed Carry, Ethics in Washington, Expendable Youth, Glock, Glock Semiautomatic pistols, Guns, Ignorance of History, Mexico, NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION, Obama, politics, Running Fire Fight, Semiautomatic assault rifles, The Great Stupid, The So-called "News Media", Washington Bureaucracy on May 30, 2014 at 4:49 pm
rahm-emanuel-is-having-a-really-bad-summer copy

In Nomine Gloria Mundi

 

Behold!

And so, it has begun, my children.

Midst thunder of drum and blast of  trumpet, the earthly corpus of Rahm Emanuel–political hit man, career politician, erstwhile firm plug athwart progress in the gun control pipeline–is being elevated while yet breathing to the Glorious Pantheon of Saints of the Gun Control Movement.

Behold!

Blessed by The Highest Priests and Priestesses of The Movement, Emanuel is raised up to Glory, swathed in Blinding Raiment of Mindless Adoration of the Fervidly Forgetful. Look away! Look away, sinner!

Hosanna! Hosanna in the Highest!

O, tremble ye Foundation Babies, for, yea verily, the slightest deviation in expression of True Belief and Adoration for He Who Dwells Among the Saints will dry up the honey from the rock. There shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth among the lepers of the Unfunded Great Ideas and the Deserving Grants Denied. Sing for your supper, O Babies, sing Hosanna, Hosanna!

As in the case of some select few before him–whom we could name, and yea might yet, but choose not to for the bye–the inconvenient facts of his past Blasphemous Trashing of Gun Control and Gun Control Activists shall be expunged, erased, sent down to the Eternal Fires of the Memory Hole.

Forgive him, for he has sinned most grievously.

Or not, as is your wont.

I personally choose not to. But, then, I can afford to. Now.

Rahm_Emanuel_Oval_Office_Barack_ObamaHere are the facts, as reported then by an ever-vigilant news media (not so much now, however):

This spring, President Obama promised Mexican President Felipe Calderon that he would work to deter gunrunning south of the border. Behind the scenes, White House officials were putting the brakes on a proposal to require gun dealers to report bulk sales of the high-powered semiautomatic rifles favored by drug cartels.

Justice Department officials had asked for White House approval to require thousands of gun dealers along the border to report the purchases to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. ATF investigators expected to get leads on suspected arms traffickers.

Senior law enforcement sources said the proposal from the ATF was held up by the White House in early summer. The sources, who asked to be anonymous because they were discussing internal deliberations, said that the effort was shelved by then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a veteran of battles with the gun lobby during the Clinton administration.

The plan – which officials knew would be strongly opposed by the National Rifle Association – was perceived as too volatile just before midterm elections, the sources said.

Sari Horwitz and James V. Grimaldi, “White House delayed rule on guns to Mexico,” The Washington Post, December 18, 2010.

The Hill (8/26, Cusack, 21K) reports, “Gun-control supporters are expressing frustration with the White House and the Democratic-controlled Congress for not standing up to groups like the National Rifle Association.” Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), who “succeeded now White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in the lower chamber, told The Hill, ‘I can’t even get a hearing [on gun control issues].'” Quigley added, “I’m not blaming the Republicans. I’m blaming [Democratic] leadership and the administration.” The Hill adds the “gun-control community is among several factions on the left that are upset with the White House and Democratic leaders in Congress.”

“Gun Control Backers Frustrated With Democratic Leaders,” The Frontrunner, August 27, 2010.

In the past, national political leaders might have raised troubling questions about how such an unstable character could obtain easy access to high-powered weapons. They might have been even more motivated given that Poplawski’s cop-killing spree was part of a near epidemic of mass homicides that have left 58 people dead over the past month. Or given that Mexico’s insanely violent drug cartels are arming themselves with high-powered assault weapons purchased at U.S. gun stores and later smuggled south of the border. Yet many past champions of stricter gun-control measures are silent. These include top Obama White House officials who have squelched any talk within the administration about pushing further gun-control measures. “It’s weird,” says Peter Hamm, the communications director for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “When you see people like [Attorney General] Eric Holder or Hillary Clinton or [White House chief of staff] Rahm Emanuel become muted on this issue, you feel like you want to call up a friend and say, ‘What’s up?’ “

But Obama and top White House aides have all but abandoned the issue. Emanuel helped orchestrate passage of the original assault-weapons ban when he worked in the Clinton White House. Now he and other White House strategists have decided they can’t afford to tangle with the National Rifle Association at a time when they’re pushing other priorities, like economic renewal and health-care reform, say congressional officials who have raised the matter.

The word didn’t get through to everyone in the administration, resulting in mixed messages–and blowback from the NRA. In February, Holder called for restoring the federal ban on assault guns to help curb the flow of weapons to the Mexican cartels…Within days, White House aides instructed Justice officials to stop talking about the assault-weapons issue, according to congressional and administration officials who asked not to be identified because of political sensitivities.

Michael Isikoff and Suzanne Smalley, “Obama Gets Gun-Shy; Despite a recent spate of killings, the president and fellow Democrats choose not to wage war on assault weapons,” Newsweek, April 20, 2009.

The Democratic Party, a slow learner but educable, has dropped the subject of gun control and welcomed candidates opposed to parts or even all of the abortion rights agenda. This vindicates the candidate recruitment by Rep. Rahm Emanuel and Sen. Chuck Schumer, chairmen of the Democratic House and Senate campaign committees, respectively.

John H. Fund, “Elbow Rahm,” The American Spectator, December 2008 – January 2009.

And so, my little puppy-eyed ones, this is how you have been betrayed in Washington. Over and over and over again.  The career politicians, you see, know how to get themselves re-elected…in order that they can…get re-elected again.

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Now that St. Rahm is mayor of Chicago, he is all about some goofy idea to video-tape gun sales. When he could have been a force, he was not. And now, he is just pathetic.

rahm1O, ye of too much faith, trust me, there is much unknown and unspoken deep beneath these waters. The unknown knowns, so to speak. And there are many in Washington, Chicago, California, New York, yea, “all over this land,” who know this truth. But they dare not call it what it is. They have mortgages, too.

I shall perhaps return of a sunny day to the political dynamics emanating with awesome wind power from Chicago that underlie the amazing grace Emanuel enjoys among the foundation babies and nubbins who effect to be advocates for gun control, or “common sense gun safety measures” as they prefer to call it.

EllenAlberdingCouncilOnFoundations

Hint: Present at the Creation

 

 

 

 

 

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Yes, Hillary Will Run: Hog Wallers, Fly-fishing, and The Wisdom of the Fireman’s Daughter

In bad manners, Ethics in Washington, Geezer Rants, Ignorance of History, NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION, politics, The Great Stupid, The So-called "News Media", Tired Old Republicans on March 22, 2014 at 8:13 pm

Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton

Is Hillary Clinton going to run for President?

Duh-uh. Once you grasp the deep meaning of the story of the Fireman’s Daughter, you know the answer.

Of course, she’s going to run.

The last people to understand this will be the “analysts” of the “news” media.

HOW SOON THEY FORGET–IF THEY EVER KNEW

Many of these talking faces were still popping zits the last time Hillary ran for President. If they weren’t so damned pompous, frowning knowledgably into the Big Camera, and presuming to explain the meaning of it all to us—we, the great mass of the ignorant and unwashed intellectual proletariat—they might be forgiven their limp grasp of the salient facts.

It’s a bit like expecting today’s 40-something-and-under-year-olds to know where Iwo Jima is (“Umm, isn’t it in the Bahamas?”), or what the Korean War was all about (“Uh, so, like, the Koreans wanted their independence from England or something. Whatever.”).

The others, the banal and boring veterans—the producers, the hosts, and the expert guests—are all into the game of New Journalism in 140 Words or Less. They peer into the vast black hole of 24/7/365 media screen time—a  hole that has to be filled with something, anything—and vomit out their paycheck’s worth of smug bloviation.

The few among the gray hairs who actually get it know that “the HRC story” will collapse the minute the balloon of speculation about Clinton goes limp. Who then will need—or even want—their “informed” opinion? The very office of prognostication demands that they pump up the balloon at every chance.

Clinton Attends "Low Dollar" Fundraiser In New YorkBut, please, come on, the politics are plain and simple.

Hillary was Destiny’s Child in the run up to the 2008 Democratic nomination. It was hers to lose, and, as most of us know, she lost it. She was crushed by that upstart and thoroughly condescending enigma named Barack Hussein Obama.

The Clintons don’t like losing. They will do damned near anything to win back what they lose. Exhibit A, Bill Clinton’s flip-flop-and-flip-again on what used to be charmingly called “gun control.”

When Bill Clinton was trying to win back his Arkansas governor gig, he claimed that he was against gun control. When his writtecirque du soleil imagen answers to the NRA candidate questionnaire called that profession of libertarian faith into doubt, Clinton called The Man at the NRA and claimed that the answers on his questionnaire were wrong. Bill instantly changed them to the NRA’s liking. He blamed the unfortunate misunderstanding on some staff member.

Later, when he decided to run for President, Bill flipped again and backed the Brady Law and eventually the 1994 Assault Weapons “Ban,” both of which were passed and  signed into law on his watch. Since then, William Jefferson Clinton has been a virtual Cirque du Soleil on gun control. He flips left when it’s popular and right when it’s not. Sometime he just grins enigmatically, like a hound dog that just ate a McDonald’s ribs sandwich.

BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

By Any Means NecessaryIn other words, the Clintons win by any means necessary.

And the necessary means here is money, money, money.

Having stuffed all possible competition into the deep freezer and slammed the lid, Hillary is free to continue raising enough cash to crush any random community activist and/or  Constitutional Law professor who wanders into her path. (Joe Biden serves as comic relief, and possibly as a clinical model of self-delusion.)

Hillary could just come out and say it, “Yes, I’m running.” But Mother Wisdom counsels against such a premature climax.

First, there is the matter of her eventual Republican opponent.

THE GREAT REPUBLICAN HOG WALLER

While the Clinton money machine continues to vacuum up the big bucks, the Entity-Formerly-Known-as-the-Republican-Party is in the early stages of its quadrennial Clown Show. It pigsmay be a “fight for the base,” but it looks like a bunch of old white men swimming for the bottom of a mud wrestling pit.

Why would Hillary interrupt this spectacular hog waller?  By the time she has to get into play, these human slabs of pork will, in their efforts to out-demagogue each other, have provided hours of dumb, vicious statements for attack ads during the general campaign.

Second, there is the matter of motivating Hillary’s own base. And that brings us to the story of the Fireman’s Daughter.

THE FIREMAN’S DAUGHTER

lanternThis was my very favorite “practical joke” when I was a dissolute fraternity rat at the University of Florida, wasting my mind on toga parties and Gator football games.

It went like this. Football was (and is) very big in the Southeastern Conference. Florida home games attracted fans from other SEC schools. Thus, members of other chapters of my fraternity sometimes showed up at our house a day or so before the game, looking for traditional hospitality and a room.

These innocents we called our “fish.”

Friday evenings before the big game were usually quiet, the big parties being held Saturday after the game. Oftentimes, one or more of our visiting fraternal fish would wander into the chapter living room to join the perpetual Friday night bull session.

I, or another of my brothers, would flick a wrist and lay a casual line in the water.

“Hey, anybody been out to see Becky lately?”

This would elicit a few shrugs of studied indifference, and the conversation would be nudged in another direction.

But often enough one of the fish would go for the fly.

“Who’s Becky?”

Subtlety was everything at this crucial moment.

“Aw, nobody, really.”

“No, seriously, who is Becky?”

The conspirators would exchange a few reluctant grins and let the fish swim closer to the bait.

“Just some girl that lives out in the country.”

“Just some girl?”

“Well, okay, she really likes to do it.”

“You mean…?”

“Yep.”

Gentle reader, understand that this was in an era before the “hookup,” when men and women lived in separate dormitories, the women’s more guarded than a harem.

“Well, come on, how can we meet her?”

The hook was set.

While the rest of the conversation played out, a few brothers would casually slip out of the room. Their task was to  head out and set up the joke in a sandy rural wilderness area, filled with moss-strewn pin oaks and crisscrossed by a few rutted car trails.

“It’s not worth the effort.”

“No, come on, it’s worth it to me.”

“Well, all right. Okay. See, her father works on the railroad. He’s a fireman. “

By now the fish were firmly in the hook of their own libidinous imaginations.

“When he’s out on the road, she leaves a lantern out to signal that it’s okay to come in.”

“Can we go out there? Now?”

A few more shrugs. Long delay. Pained introspection. Finally, a sigh of the Good Host’s surrender.

“Okay. We got nothing else to do.”

At that, the fish would pile happily into a car or two, intoxicated by their good luck.

Sure enough, there would be a lantern out by one the trails. But, after we all walked a dozen yards or so in the supposed direction of Becky’s shack, a loud, gruff male voice would ring out.

“I knew I would catch you!” the voice shouted. “Now, I’m gonna’ kill you!”

BANG!  BANG!

Two bright flashes and two enormously loud shotgun blasts would ring out into the deep Florida night. All hands would turn, “haul ass” for the cars, and “escape” from the trap set by Becky’s irate father.

Safely back in the living room, the fish would be debriefed.

Many claimed to have seen Becky’s father. One insisted that he had been hit in the foot by a shotgun pellet. Another disappeared for hours, eventually making his way back to Gainesville and the fraternity house on foot, hiding in the roadside weeds from every passing car (including ours), convinced that Becky’s father was hunting him down.

Seeing Becky’s father and being hit by a pellet were both impossible conditions. The shotgun blasts were made by a Gator cheerleader’s noise-making apparatus. It did not and could not fire real shotgun shells, but it made a hell of a noise. It was set off by one of the advance party. Becky’s father, like Becky, was pure invention.

The most fun came when we finally announced the ruse.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY

The lesson?

Hillary has cast her fly out into the dark water of the Democratic base. She’ll take her time and control her hand until she has the hook set and the fish are left with nowhere to go but into her bag.

Go Gators!

Bass with moody damsel

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Cultural Change, Human Rights, and Gun Control in America

In Bushmaster assault rifle, Concealed Carry, Cultural assassination, Ethics in Washington, Expendable Youth, Glock, Glock Semiautomatic pistols, Guns, NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION, Obama, politics, Running Fire Fight, self-defense, Semiautomatic assault rifles, The Great Stupid, The So-called "News Media", Tired Old Republicans on December 17, 2013 at 5:41 pm
Melting Pot or Oil on Water?

The Future—Get Used to It

 

Cultural change may be solution to US gun crimes

 

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/Opinion/shanghai-daily-columnists/Cultural-change-may-be-solution-to-US-gun-crimes/shdaily.shtml

By Wang Yong | December 14, 2013, Saturday |  Print Edition

Editor’s note: The following is an exclusive interview of Shanghai Daily opinion writer Wang Yong with Tom Diaz, author of The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It.

Q: The September 16 shooting carnage at the Washington Navy Yard is the latest proof of what you call “a reign of terror” by gun activists who raise the false flag of constitutional rights. Will it push the US to better regulate guns?

A: It’s wishful thinking to suppose that any single incident – no matter how horrific – will inspire significant change in gun regulation in the US. No one in their right mind likes these incidents or accepts them as normal.  But, as in so many other areas, Americans are dramatically divided on what to do about it, and so we do nothing.

There are two strongly held and opposite points of view.

One side understands that the proliferation and types of guns available is the crux of the problem, not only of mass shootings but of daily “routine” shootings all over the country. Even “good” people with access to guns commit terrible crimes with them.

The other side is committed to the ideological and emotional view that the problem is “bad” people, not guns.

It so happens that these sides are in rough national political balance right now, which favors the pro-gun side because inertia makes change virtually impossible at the national level.

The hope is that, over a longer term, there will be real and widespread cultural change that will favor stricter gun control. In other words, we will reach a “tipping point” that will break the deadlock.

There is good evidence that this may be happening, as younger and more culturally, racially, and ethnically diverse communities within the US “grow into” political power. Guns do not have the same emotional and ideological appeal to these groups as they do to the old line white male population, whose grip on American politics is clearly fading.

Q: What are Obama’s chances and challenges if he really wants to make the US a safer place?

A: I have not seen and do not expect to see substantial change under President Obama. He certainly has made powerful speeches. He would clearly like to go in the correct direction.

That said, however, two factors work against administration-driven change.

One is the reluctance of the political “experts” in the Democratic party to take on tough gun control legislation.

The influence of this view reaches to the highest levels in Congress and the White House, and includes those who might otherwise be thought to be “progressive” or “liberal.”

It’s safer to keep one’s head down. Mere politics prevents bold action, and ultimately empowers the National Rifle Association and the gun industry it represents.

The other is the stark national political division that I referred to earlier.

The president has only so much “political capital” to spend, as the recent budget and debt limit confrontation showed.

It took an enormously disciplined and steel-nerved will to face down those who had locked down the government.

Yes, the president (and for that matter, the Democratic leaders in Congress) could in theory decide to make gun control an all-or-nothing fight.

But given everything that needs to be done just to keep the US functioning, I doubt that this fight will be engaged.

Q: Do you campaign for an outright ban on individual gun rights, or for better regulated individual gun rights?

A: The facts of gun violence dictate certain answers. If we really want to reduce gun violence of all types, we must limit access to guns. So, yes, I favor strong restrictions on access to and possession of certain types of guns: high-capacity semiautomatic pistols, semiautomatic assault weapons, and very high caliber (armor-piercing) sniper rifles.

Unfortunately, the “gun control movement” in the US has bought into the idea of pursuing much more limited goals.

This is because, to a large extent, the Democratic political establishment does not want an abrasive fight. The phrase “gun safety” has come into political favor and “gun control” has lost favor.

There is nothing “wrong” with most of the incremental change being pursued.  Better background checks, trigger locks, and other hardware changes all would have some small effect on gun death and injury. The facts, however, are quite clear.

The preponderance of the hurricane of gun violence in the United States comes from so-called “legal” guns and is committed by people who won’t be deterred by gadgets like trigger locks.

In my view, the diversion of energy to these palliatives is a serious mistake.

The proliferation of assault weapons in the US could have been cut short as late as 1994 if the Congress and then-President Bill Clinton had acted forcefully and intelligently. Instead, they compromised on a weak law that has since expired. Now we see the results at elementary schools, movie theaters and other public places.

Q: You write: “Every year, more Americans are killed by guns in the United States than people of all nationalities are killed worldwide by terrorist attacks.” As terrorist attacks are threats to human rights, would you also call gun crimes an abuse of human rights, especially in the case of racial hatred toward non-white immigrants?

 A: I have no doubt that some of our domestic gun violence is driven by fear, anger and hatred that has its roots in some of the racial and ethnic theories that have stained our history. It certainly fuels the desire to own military-style guns.

However, one must be cautious and specific in how one articulates the case for calling gun violence a case of human rights abuse. To me, the key is the extent to which the government per se is complicit in the abuse, and I see little of that in our domestic problem.

The three greatest examples of human rights abuse within the United States that I would cite all involved overt government complicity: the genocide of the Native Americans, the institution of slavery and so-called “Jim Crow” laws that followed its formal end, and explicitly racist national laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and subsequent “quota” restrictions on immigration.

So far as domestic gun violence goes, governments in the United States can be faulted for passivity politically, but I can’t think of a case in which the government has overt responsibility for or encourages the violence. There is, however, a different case to be made for the gun violence that occurs in other countries because of our government’s lax controls on the export and smuggling of guns.

The citizens of Mexico, Canada and other countries all over the world have suffered because of these weak export and law enforcement policies and practices.

There are many things that the federal government in particular could have done and can do today to effectively prevent much of this traffic, but chooses not to do for pragmatic reasons. That is complicity.

Guns from the United States not only take lives and injure innocent people, they have provided infrastructures through which criminal and other non-government organizations can confront legitimate governments and deprive ordinary people of the free exercise of their human rights.

Frankly, it amazes me that none of these affected governments has made an aggressive case in international courts or elsewhere based on the theory that the United States is directly complicit in these abuses. Every now and then someone talks about it, but no one really does anything.

Q: You call for the creation of a comprehensive reporting system regarding gun crimes. Has there been progress to that effect since the publication of your book?

]A: I favor not only a comprehensive data system about gun “crimes,” but also about gun violence of all sorts, which would include suicides and incidents of “road rage” and “domestic violence,” which many people think is somehow different from cases in which someone sets out to use a gun to commit another crime and kills or injures a victim.

Only a little progress has been made, largely at the direction of the president. The NRA and the gun industry have a vested interest in preventing such information from being gathered, much less made public.

Ignorance, for them, is power.

 

 

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How Many Young Men and Women Have You (Yes, YOU) Sent to Die Today? War and Social Responsibility

In bad manners, Chicken Hawks and Other War Birds, Ethics in Washington, Expendable Youth, Ignorance of History, politics, The So-called "News Media", True Patriotism, War and Rumors of War on September 8, 2013 at 3:28 pm

Christmas Wreaths at ANC

Those Whose Opinions Will Not Be Counted

What shall I say? That it’s been damnable?

That all the time my soul was never my own?

That we’ve slaved hard at endless make-believe?

It isn’t only actual war that’s hell,

I’ll say. It’s spending youth and hope alone

Among pretences that have ceased to deceive.

Geoffrey Faber

The Great National Debate continues.

The President and the Vice-President glide through the city in armored convoys, exquisitely isolated, omniscience at their fingertips, more regal and self-important than any Louis of any reign. Their black processions scatter the masses like coveys of quail before the thresher.

Overhead, important generals, admirals, couriers, and contractor wealth-suckers thunder to and fro in the cocoons of their whomp-whomping armored helicopters.

War is swell, ain’t it?

Thumb-sucking journalistes, posturing “members” of Congress, and tanked thinkers furrow their brows, preen and opine, thrust and riposte, play at paper wars. The luckiest get audiences with the Even Greater, thence to regurgitate the latest talking points.

The August Madness of 1914 lives!  It has risen from the stench of its rotten grave and become the September Folly of 2013.

There is no escape to the Isle of Reason.  But there are occasional glimmers of light: sharp, scathing, cleansing, antiseptic to easily uttered cant.  Such might be found in Col. Andrew J. Bacevich’s latest book, Breach Of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers And Their Country (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company).

Here is an excerpt from a review in The New York Times by Rachel Maddow.  The message?  Do not send to know for whom the avenging harrow comes.  It comes for thee.

Andrew J. Bacevich starts from the assumption that our modern militarism is unsustainable and unwise. He then proceeds to assign blame, mercilessly: to the public (for our consumerist apathy); to the Pentagon (for its “generals who had slept undisturbed back when Warsaw Pact commanders had ostensibly been planning to launch World War III” but who “now fretted nervously over the prospect of their budget taking a hit”); to the contractors (whose profiteering steals honor from the soldiers they serve alongside); and, naturally, to the politicians. Even Fenway Park and the Red Sox come in for blame, for the staging of a sailor’s homecoming at a July 4 game that left Bacevich all but retching over the “convenient mechanism for voiding obligation, . . . a made-to-order opportunity for conscience-easing.”

Bacevich saves particular vitriol for pro-war writers of both the right and left: Christopher Hitchens, the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen and the New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier all get filleted and neatly stacked in the corner, to make room for the unleashing of all hell on David Brooks for his commentary before, during and after the Iraq war — followed by what Bacevich sees as an unconscionable repeat of the same mistakes in the late phases of the war in Afghanistan. Bacevich’s scorching litany of what he sums up as “grotesque and contemptible irresponsibility” is a bracing indictment of my profession, and how no one suffers consequences for even the most humiliating failures in prediction and analysis, as long as those failures favor the use of military force.

We teeter at the very razor’s edge of a precipice whose dark bottom we cannot know.  Drink this gall and eat this bit of responsibility that we all share.  It is the body of folly.

cheney at arlington

Draft Dodger Celebrating War at the Hallowed Ground of Arlington National Cemetery. He Had “Other Priorities” While His Peers Were Dying in Muck.

 

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Lee Daniels, Robert Schumann, and Thomas Westfall: An Intriguing Cultural Bank Shot in the Soundtrack of The Butler

In bad manners, Cultural assassination, Ethics in Washington, Geezer Rants, Ignorance of History, Mass Incarceration, Movies, politics, The Great Stupid, Tired Old Republicans on August 31, 2013 at 5:52 pm
clara-schumann-et-robert

Clara and Robert Schuman, Two Eminent Members of the Nobility of Western Culture

 One of the most elegant examples of director Lee Daniels’ powerful artistic sense comes in an early scene of his Oscar-bound film, The Butler.

As the movie opens, protagonist Cecil Gaines, the gray-haired White House butler, reminisces about his childhood.

Gaines’ thoughts drift to a deep south cotton field in the year 1926. Like other black “field hands,” young Cecil is picking cotton alongside his family.

The camera sets up the scene, pans the field, and eventually works its way in close to the eight-year Gaines. His father teaches him how to know when a boll is ready for picking. One can feel the heat, the humidity and the palpable oppression of the plantation owned by Thomas Westfall and his grandmother Annabeth.

Cotton plantattion

Way Down South in the Land of Cotton, Old Times There Are Not Forgotten…

Clearly, things in this cotton field have changed little since slave days.

But as this scene develops, it is what one does not hear that is so beautiful, so subtle.

One doesn’t hear the default music that 99 out of 100 directors would have plugged into the sound track here. There is no sorrowful blues guitar. No moaning spiritual.  No chorus of an unrepentant South.

Neither River Jordan nor Dixie echo in this “Land of Cotton.”

Rather, can you dig Robert Schuman’s Piano Concerto in A Minor?

Say what?

Schuman’s only piano concerto is one of the most beautiful examples of the serious music of the Romantic era. Dark, brooding, an always lovely interplay between piano and orchestra, it grips soul and heart.

What is it doing here?

Clearly, serious thought is given to such a choice. It is simply impossible that the finger of mere chance landed on this composer and this piece of music for this horrible moment.

One more or less obvious reason for the use of any such “cultured” music here is that the very contrast between the elegant music and the sordid cotton field paints in harsh strokes the gulf between the gentility embodied in the White House and the sweat and dirt of the cotton field. The famous Godfather christening scene raised (or, more properly, lowered) to cliché such contrast between action and music.

KKK1926

The Klan Marches in Washington, 1926, Upholding Western Values

In 1926, Calvin Coolidge sat in the White House. Some 35,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. In much of America the life of a black man (or a “Mexican” or an “Indian”) was worth just what the temper of a randomly encountered white man would bear.

But there is, I suggest, a deeper point, a more profound moral and historical scoring.

Consider first the evil plantation owner’s very family name: Westfall.

Then consider that Schuman and his piano concerto embodied what many consider to be the best of Western high culture: nobility of thought, an enlightened and idealistic view of humanity, and a reverence for beauty for beauty’s sake. These are indeed vauable artifacts of Western culture. They might even be the ones that white supremacists have in mind when they congratulate themselves for belonging to the factually non-existent category of the “white race.”

Yet all of these ideals have been precisely savaged—at best ignored—throughout the brutal centuries within which people of any color have had the fell misfortune of being visited by Western culture.

Schuman wrote his beautiful piece in 1845.  Let us examine a few signal events of the same year for some instructive contrasts

In May, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, was published by the Boston Anti-Slavery Society.

american-cities-085

Powdered, Perfumed, and Ready for Elegance

The powdered and perfumed elite who would later thrill to Clara Schuman’s performances of her mentally ill (and eventually institutionalized) husband were for the most part perfectly okay with—or at best indifferent to—the enslavement of other human beings, the treatment of others supposedly made in the image of God, as no better than and often worse than the lowest and dumbest of animals.

The horror of it is stunning.

There is more.

In the July-August issue of United States Magazine and Democratic Review editor John L. O’Sullivan opined that foreign powers were trying to prevent American annexation of Texas in order to impede “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” (O’Sullivan need not have worried so much. In December, Texas entered the Union…as a “slave state.”)

O’Sullivan’s was the first known use of the powerful phrase “manifest destiny.”

This odious concept taught that Western (the historically non-existent “Anglo-Saxon”) culture had been selected and, indeed, divinely charged with the duty to expand itself to the West (and anywhere else that it could ooze).

Human Trafficking

A Benefit of High Western Culture: Becoming the Subject of Human Trafficking

Manifest Destiny was the “white man’s” imperialist burden to violently conquer the hapless “little brown people” of the world. The generous conquerors would bestow upon these inferiors some few of the wonders of high Western culture (a patronage that usually amounted to little more than forced religious conversion, a mandatory change in dress, and a peonage equivalent in all but name to slavery).

Where in hell, my child, do you think America’s imperial holdings in Puerto Rico, Texas and the Great American Southwest, Panama, Hawaii, the Philippine Islands, and other hapless nooks and crannies came from?

klansmenIt is the outstanding warrant for this savage and violent betrayal of its own values that the West in general and the United States in particular have yet to fully account. Many seek to evade this ineluctable accounting in the smug cant of the Tea Party and the lies of the thinly disguised racist plutocracy that now controls the right wing in America.

It is this fall from the grace of noble ideas to the putrescence of racism and slavery that is embodied in the name of Thomas Westfall. Just another plantation owner, enjoying centuries of violent subsidization.

The shame.  The horror.

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Gun Colonialism and the Scramble for America

In bad manners, Concealed Carry, Ethics in Washington, Glock, Gun Colonialism, Guns, Ignorance of History, NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION, Running Fire Fight, Semiautomatic assault rifles, The Great Stupid, Tired Old Republicans, Washington Bureaucracy on July 26, 2013 at 5:41 pm
US Flag map

The Last Great Colony…of the World’s Gun Manufacturers

Africa1898

The “Great Powers” Scrambled to Carve Up Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the so-called “Great Powers” of the world–Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and a few other wannabes–competed to stake out their colonies in Africa.  The elbow-throwing, often violent competition became known as “The Scramble for Africa.”

The same powers had also competed for other colonies, including India and China.

The purpose of these colonies was simple–exploitation.  The Great Powers ripped off natural resources and valuable commodities from the colonies.  In return they forced their colonial subjects to buy goods from the imperial homeland or other colonies.

Opium Poppy Seedhead

The British Forced the Chinese to Become a Vast Market for Opium

The British, for example, saw great potential in selling opium to the huge population of China.  When the Chinese attempted to ban the flow of this drug, the British simply went to war (twice) and forced the defeated Chinese to take their opium.

The British and some other imperial powers (including the United States) preferred to rule “indirectly.”  This means they set up systems of “native” stooges and front men to “administer” their own country on behalf of their conquerors.

A great Scramble for America has been going on in the world’s gun markets for some time.  Foreign gun-makers have succeeded in carving out markets in the United States that they could never enjoy in their own countries, almost all of which have sensibly strict gun laws.  America has become the last great colony in the world of guns.

Just like the Great Powers, the gun imperialists have their local boot-lickers: the National Rifle Association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, and of course, Congress and the hive of lobbyists that buzz around it.

Just as the British succeeded in mass addiction of the Chinese to opium, the gun industry has pretty much succeeded in addicting a sizable number of Americans to guns.  And like drug addicts, gun buyers need a stronger “kick” after a while.  The gun industry has obliged by designing and selling increasingly lethal firearms.  These include assault weapons and high-capacity semiautomatic pistols.

Just as in other colonies, our indirect rule administrators are only rarely touched by the pestilence they fawningly help spread.  It’s good for you, they say.

Here’s a short video on point.

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Pity the Poor M1 Garand, Which Is Not and Never Has Been an Assault Rifle

In bad manners, Ethics in Washington, Guns, Ignorance of History, NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION, Running Fire Fight, Semiautomatic assault rifles, Semiautomatic Rifles on May 5, 2013 at 9:08 pm
M1GarandShooter_001

Empty Eight-round Clip Ejecting From M1 Garand Rifle.

They don’t make em like me no more; Matta fact they never made it like me before

Phone home, Weezy; Phone home, Weezy

Lil’ Wayne – Phone Home

Gosh, The Washington Post’s exercise on the import of the M1 Garand sounds pretty scary!

Why should I–who carry a certified NRA “Gun-Grabber” certificate–care?

MagicLantern

The M1 Garand As Projected By Some

Because shadow-lantern-projection hyperbole obscures real issues and feeds the beast of the gun lobby. Anyone who truly understands the M1 Garand rifle has the right to laugh at some of the fright wig stuff written and said about it.

Bad facts–or mere assertion of bad facts–do not make good policy.

Wayne LaPierre

Wayne LaPierre May..Or May Not…Have Had A Little Something Going on The Side.

The main thrust of the Washington Post piece may be fairly summed up as follows: “Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s mouthpiece, may have profited from a little side deal with a gun importing front. (Or maybe not.) That deal, combined with LaPierre’s lobbying, opened the gates to a flood of military weapons through a dangerous new loophole for “curios and relics.” The M1 rifle is one of those curios and relics and its import puts the world at mortal peril.”

Howard Kurtz

“Media Critic” And Personality Howard Kurtz Had His Fingers In A Lot Of Pies And Got Burned A Bit.

100121_clinton_obama2_reuters_605

In 2011, Bill Clinton made a total of $13,434,000 for his 54 speeches, which works out to an average of $248,777.78 per speech. This is in addition to his $191,300 pension from the taxpayers of America.

LaPierre himself seems to have emerged from this piece of reporting relatively unscathed. The practice of making a personal profit in Washington from side deals is, of course, unheard of in the Metropole of the American Empire. Well, okay, maybe unheard of if you don’t count the Members of Congress whose wealth balloons over their tenures (from the steady acquisition of inside information and fawning deal-making  courtiers), the navel-gazing think tank “fellows” who charge hefty fees for “appearances,” the Presidents of the United States and their spouses who write best-selling books while they are oh-so marketable, the ex-Presidents, Senators, and Other High Potentates who cash in with six-figure speechifying fees, and the new media personalities who get their fingers in every pie in town, sometimes with a (gasp!) financial or ethical conflict.

But the oddest implication left hanging in the air by this piece is that the M1 Garand is an assault rifle or some kind of precursor assault rifle.

Josh Sugarmann of the Washington-based Violence Policy Center says the 200,000 rifles imported by Blue Sky were “basically the first of the military weapons marketed to the civilian population. If you were going to draw an ‘assault weapons timeline,’ it would start with the M-1 and eventually end up where we are today.”

By 2012, nearly 1 million of what gun advocates call “modern sporting rifles” were coming into the U.S. market from foreign and domestic sources in a single year.

Tom Hamburger and Sari Horwitz, “NRA lobbyist, arms dealer played key role in growth of civilian market for military-style guns,” The Washington Post, May 3, 2013.

Or, if not that, well, at least that the import of the M1 Garand, this horrible “military weapon,” marks the start of the “assault weapons timeline.” 

800px-WWII_M1_Carbine

The M1 Carbine Is A Completely Different Gun From The M1 Garand. Its Import IS A Problem.

Or, at the very, very least, the M1 Garand is a “bad” gun.  Allowing it into the country is bad policy, something on the order of importing portable mini-nukes or missiles full of sarin gas.

Time to take a deep breath about the M1 Garand, folks.

These three propositions are demonstrably not true. There are indeed problematic guns that fall under the complicated curios and relics rule, which essentially sanitizes many (but by no means all) guns that are at least 50 years old. But the M1 is not one of those problematic guns.

M1 Garand

The Scary M1: Basically, About the Same as Your Semiautomatic Hunting Rifle. Only Heavier and Harder to Load.

Let me disclose a conflict of interest here. As a young and foolish man in uniform, I was intimate with the M1 in … well … an almost Biblical sense. Yes, I slept with an M1 Garand every night for, as I recall, about one week.  That was the interval between one close rifle inspection–during which it was determined that I had cut corners and kept my rifle in “dry” condition (i.e., without oil, it seemed like a good idea at the time)–and the next. Worst than that, I’ve actually stripped an M1 down. All the way, baby. And more than once. I even just narrowly escaped “M1 thumb” a few times.

So, I guess I am a bit handicapped by actually knowing what the hell I am writing about here.

OK, people.  Listen up.  I am only going to write this once.

The M1 Garand is not by any stretch of fevered imagination an “assault rifle.” It is, in fact, a classic example of precisely the kind of “main battle rifle” that assault weapons were designed to replace. If you were going to draw a timeline of the demise of big, cumbersome, awkward military rifles, it would start with the M1 Garand in about 1944, when the Nazi army fielded the first true assault rifle, the STG-44.

The truth is that the M1 Garand is really no scarier, no more lethal, no worse than many popular semiautomatic hunting rifles sold today.

M1 Clip

Clip. Not Magazine. Eight Rounds.

The M1 Garand is a semiautomatic rifle. It is fed by means of an 8-round clip. (Note: The M1 Garand is not the M1 Carbine, which is an entirely different gun, with entirely different features, and is quite properly excluded from import.)

That’s eight rounds. Not 20 rounds.  Not 60 rounds.  Not even the 10 rounds of the “high capacity magazine” that was banned (sort of) by the puny political fiction of the 1994 federal “Assault Weapons Ban.” In fact, the M1’s design is such that it can only accept an 8-round clip!  And, yes, this is one time when the word “clip” (as opposed to “magazine”) correctly describes the ammunition feeding device.

So, what is an “assault rifle” and why isn’t the M1 one of them?

Well, Kristen Rand, of the Washington-based Violence Policy Center, quite correctly defined assault rifles in her statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 27, 2013 supporting Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s proposed assault weapons legislation.

Ms. Rand described assault rifles as weapons that “have incorporated into their design specific features that enable shooters to spray (‘hose down’) a large number of bullets over a broad killing zone, without having to aim at each individual target.” Wow, that is really good writing!

thumb3

Eight (not 10, not 20, not 60) Round Low Capacity Clip Ready to be Inserted into M1 Garand Rifle.

The specific design features, according to Ms. Rand’s perceptive statement, are:

m1-thumb-enbloc-clip-thumb2

The Exquisitely Imperiled Thumb.

It’s hard to find a better or more succinct statement of what makes an assault rifle an assault rifle!

The M1 has zero of these features. None. Zippo.

Unlike the AK-47 and the AR-15–which are assault rifles–the shooter cannot just pop in a 10, 20, 40, 60 round magazine, or 100 round drum. Loading the clip into an M1 is by comparison a cumbersome and slow process. The clip–into which eight rounds have been previously loaded by hand–has to be pushed down into the receiver. This requires more manual dexterity than simply shoving a high-capacity magazine up into a receiver, because once the M1 insertion is fully accomplished and pressure released, the M1’s bolt flies forward. It can give the inept shooter a vicious whack on the thumb if he (or she) hasn’t gotten it smartly out of the way. Hence, the phrase “M1 thumb.”

In fact, the five-round box magazine of a modern semiautomatic hunting rifle like the Remington Model 750 can be more easily and more quickly inserted into the rifle than the clips of the M1. Bonus: no chance of M1 thumb.

AK-47 Was Other Choice of MS-13 Gangsters

The AK-47 And Its Clones Are Truly Assault Weapons. Like the German STG-44 and the US AR-15, the AK Was Designed To Replace Cumbersome Low Capacity Main Battle Rifles Like the M1 With A Lighter Weight, High Capacity Bullet Hose Highly Effective At Close to Medium Range.

No, the M1 is simply not an assault rifle by anyone’s definition. Its eight rounds are scarcely more than a semiautomatic hunting rifle’s, and it cannot be reloaded as quickly and easily as the AK-47 and AR-15 (and others)  can be.

Nubbin’s question: Well, but, gosh, sir, doesn’t the M1 fire some of kind of really dangerous high-powered military ammunition? I mean (smirk) nobody would really want to shoot a deer with this thing, right?

Sarcastic Answer: What are you smoking, son?

M1 thumb 01

M1 Thumb.

30-06 ammo

Not Mini-Nuke. Not Sarin Gas. Just Plain Old Bambi-Killin’ Hunting Ammo.

The M1 fires basically the same round that millions of hunting rifles fire–the venerable .30-06 Springfield, which has been around for over 100 years.

 The M1 was not the “first of the military weapons marketed to the civilian population.” In fact, it was one of the last to be directly marketed to civilians from surplus stocks. The fact is that millions of surplus military rifles were imported into the United States in the years  following World War II.  The flow was cut off by the Gun Control Act of 1968 not because the M1, or any of equivalent rifles, were particularly deadly, but because the domestic gun industry was being hurt by competition from these relatively cheap imports. It persuaded Congress to stop them. The changes in the law in the mid-1980s were simply a reconquest, a victory of gun importers over domestic producers.

Military rifles have been part of the American sporting scene since the Revolution. The M1 Garand was no different. What has changed the situation dramatically and dangerously since the 1980s is the import and manufacture of the high-capacity magazines and the semiautomatic assault weapons for which they are designed. As explained above, the M1 Garand in no such creature by any definition.

Let’s examine a little relevant history here. I would say with all due modesty that the second-best book about the American gun industry and attempts at its regulation is Robert Sherrill’s 1973 masterpiece, The Saturday Night Special. Sherrill documented and cut through the preening hypocrisy of his era (very similar to ours) with scathing documentation. Here’s what he wrote about the history of the import of military weapons into the United States:

It’s estimated that between 1959—about the time the New England manufacturers really began to get their anti-import propaganda going—and 1963, 7 million foreign weapons, mostly military surplus, were imported into the United States.

 Robert Sherrill, The Saturday Night Special (New York: Charterhouse, 1973), p. 88.

Do the math and a timeline to figure out when military weapons were first marketed to civilians in large numbers.

Sherrill also cuts through the hypocrisy and cant surrounding the ban on foreign guns that was put into place by the Gun Control Act of 1968.  (It is worth reading just to get perspective on how little things have changed: then and now the gun industry had great influence in Congress, and then and now many gun control nubbins really don’t know jack about guns. They just plain don’t like any of them.) For example, in 1958, then Senator John F. Kennedy offered a bill to restrict the import of military firearms:

…but he did so candidly, admitting that the bill he introduced to ban the importation of military arms was meant to keep the cash registers jingling in his home state…The imports, he said, “have helped spoil the domestic market,” and his bill was “of particular importance to five arms manufacturers in Massachusetts,” which was as close as any politician will come to telling the truth: the legislation was written by the interested parties.

 Robert Sherrill, The Saturday Night Special (New York: Charterhouse, 1973), p. 91.

Kennedy’s legislation went nowhere. Among the millions of  surplus military guns imported in the post-war era were about 125,000 Carcano M91 Italian army rifles. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, bought one of these by mail order from Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago. (“‘Cursed Gun’–The Track of C2766,” LIFE Magazine, August 27, 1965, p. 63.) “Within the context of the marketplace, Kennedy’s assassination came to the assistance of [Sen. Thomas J.] Dodd and the New England gun manufacturers.” (Robert Sherrill, The Saturday Night Special (New York: Charterhouse, 1973), p. 165.)

The rest is history.  Foreign guns–and guns manufactured in the United States for use by foreign armies, like the M1s Wayne LaPierre either did or did not have a hand in getting into the US–were to a large extent shut out of the U.S. domestic civilian market until the 1980s.

The M1 was very like an attractive woman in a very short skirt with an enormous purse slung over her shoulder, who just happened to be standing on a corner in a bad neighborhood when the cops came and made a sweep to keep the politicians happy. The M1 got caught in the roundup. Its reputation has never been the same since.

Pity.

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Congress, NRA Lobbyists, Cockroaches, and the Public Interest–Cockroaches Win

In bad manners, Bushmaster assault rifle, Corruption, Cultural assassination, Ethics in Washington, Fox News, Glock, Glock Semiautomatic pistols, Glock smeiautomatic pistols, Guns, Ignorance of History, NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION, politics, Running Fire Fight, Semiautomatic assault rifles, The Great Stupid, Tired Old Republicans, Washington Bureaucracy on April 25, 2013 at 4:59 pm

cockroaches

“Cockroaches are a pretty good reason to call the exterminator but voters might be even more concerned if their homes were infested with members of Congress: Cockroaches 45 Congress 43″

Congress somewhere below cockroaches, traffic jams, and Nickelback in Americans’ esteem

Here are the names of two people you probably never heard of: Jim Manley and Mark Lyttle.

The worlds of these two men are a universe apart. The void between their worlds is filled with the dark matter of political influence in Washington–blood money, revolving doors, and the self-interest of career politicians. That invisible political astrophysics is what defeated the public’s desire for comprehensive background checks in the Senate last week, is defeating public health and safety measures to reduce gun violence in Washington today, and will continue to thwart the will of the vast majority of Americans for a safer country tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Unless you get up, stand up, and do something about it, like the hundreds of Americans rallying today in Washington to shame the NRA’s lobbyists.

New Yorker

How can this happen, you may ask yourself? Think “lobbyists” and money. Lots of money. Your money.

Mark Lyttle is the subject of a frightening article by William Finnegan in the current issue of The New Yorker magazine. Lyttle is an American citizen who was arrested for a misdemeanor in North Carolina. From there–in a horrendously Kafkaesque series of arrogant mistakes and flawed decisions by nameless, faceless, and demonstrably incompetent  bureaucrats–Lyttle was thrown into the unrelenting machinery of the American Homeland-Security-Industrial-Complex. He was expelled from the United States and repeatedly arrested by Department of Homeland Security operatives.

Like Boston marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Lyttle fell through the cracks of the vastly flawed system of piously fearful pork upon which we, the taxpayers of America, have lavished at least $1.3 TRILLION since the horrible events of September 11, 2001.  Trillions for “homeland security,” but not one cent for keeping children safe from gun violence!

How can this be?  How can it be that the Congress of the United States can allow–indeed, encourage–waste and incompetence on such a scale for such a Byzantine structure, and yet not protect small children and the rest of us from the far greater danger of gun violence?

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Their business is none of your business. Insiders in Washington: professional politicians and lobbyists.

Enter Jim Manley, a long time aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, career Senate staffer, now turned lobbyist. Manley made the unfortunate decision to be interviewed by the brilliant John Oliver for The Daily Show on politics and guns.  He fairly made an ass of himself, but in the process revealed precisely the problem. Asked what makes a politician “successful,” Manley unblinkingly answered, “Getting reelected by his or her constituents.”

Not saving lives, but getting reelected.

Manley got the classic, patented John Oliver reaction to incredibly dumb statements.  As the light dawned on his smugly placid face, he began to squirm with a deer-in-the-headlights look.  Gosh, if only he could have rewound the tape and started over!  But see the whole revealing bit for yourself here.

So, who is this inadvertently revealing guy, Jim Manley? Here’s his official bio from QCA, the oh-so-cleverly named “public affairs” (Washington doublespeak for and Piano Players) firm for which he now works:

Jim most recently served as the senior communications advisor and spokesman for the Senate Majority Leader, where he spent six years at the nexus of communications, politics and policy for every issue facing the Senate.  As a strategist, he worked with the White House and the leadership in the House of Representatives to set the Democratic tone for legislative initiatives. As the Leader’s top spokesman, he dealt extensively with the national and regional media on a daily basis to advance the Democratic agenda.  He is a regarded as a top Democratic strategist in Washington and continues to serve as a trusted resource for many of the nation’s top reporters.

What neither Manley nor The Daily Show revealed about this “top Democratic strategist” and “trusted source” is that among his firm’s clients is the investment management company BlackRock.  New York City’s Public Advocate, Bill de Blasio recently named BlackRock as one of the Dirty Dozen investors in the gun industry.  In fact, BlackRock, with $342 million of its investors’ money invested in the killing machine business, tops de Blasio’s money manager dirty investor list.

Blood money.

Lucky Strike

Kill yourself if you got ‘em: the murderous tobacco and gun industries have lots of well-paid lobbyists in Washington and elsewhere to make sure that death is always politically safe.

In truth, there is nothing remarkable about Jim Manley and his pedestrian, let’s-all-go-along-to-get-reelected “strategical thinking.” He’s just another of the thousands of Capitol Hill staffers who rotate between high-paying Congressional jobs to cash in with even higher paying jobs whoring–oops, I meant “lobbying”–for one or another plutocratic or just plain evil special interest in Washington. They are only following their bosses’ example.  As The New York Times‘ inimitable Gail Collins recently noted:

Members of Congress regularly glom onto high-paying jobs in the private sector, none of which involve the use of their skills in computer technology. The Center for Responsive Politics counts 373 former House and Senate members who are currently working as lobbyists.

Steve Buyer

Buyer…and Seller.

Former Congressman Steve Buyer (what a deliciously appropriate name, and no wonder he pronounces it as if it were spelled “boy-er”!), for example, went to work flacking for the tobacco industry, the only other industry in town that even comes close to the murderous, blood-soaked, unconscionable greed of the gun industry and its lackey, the NRA.

The NRA, of course, has been throwing its money around Washington with an abandoned passion since the Moloch’s slaughter of precious, innocent, beautiful children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Not that the NRA and the gun industry need that much help with brilliant “strategists” like Jim Manley and the Third Way’s Jim Kessler advocating preemptive surrender on the gun control front. Still, every little bit helps when your business is death machines in a society of people who mostly want to live.

williamsme

NRA Mouthpiece at Greenberg, Taurig.

Among the hired guns the NRA has bought with the gun industry’s blood money is Michael E. Williams, a director in the firm of Greenberg, Taurig, another House of Piano Players in the Washington lobbying game. If Williams’ name sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because he was reported to be linked to convicted felon Jack Abramoff’s “Dream Team” of hucksters and specialists in the subornation of Congress. Here’s Williams’ official bio, which brags conspicuously about his skill at “derailing” gun control legislation, meaning the will of the American people:

Michael Williams focuses his practice on coalition building and integrating legislative, regulatory, grass tops, grass roots and public relations strategies on behalf of his clients to affect positive legislative and regulatory outcomes. Michael’s 25 years of experience on Capitol Hill has allowed him to develop a deep understanding of the interaction of policy issues and politics, as well as a wide-ranging bipartisan network of contacts within all areas of the federal government including Members of Congress, Congressional staff, the Administration and various governmental agencies.

Michael is a member of the Greenberg Political Contribution Committee which reviews and approves contributions and political activities of the Greenberg Traurig Political Action Committee. He also serves as a government affairs team representative to the Greenberg Traurig Commitment to Excellence Committee (CTE). The CTE works to ensure that the firm preserves and enhances the core values crucial to our brand: integrity, quality, service and accountability.

Prior to joining the firm in 2001, Michael Williams was a Senior Lobbyist for the National Rifle Association (NRA), the number one rated Association lobbyist team for 2001, according to Fortune magazine. For more than 11 years, as a Federal liaison for the NRA, he promoted legislative and political objectives on Capitol Hill. Michael was one of the major architects of the NRA legislative strategy to derail the 1997-1998 Clinton Gun Control legislation.

These inside ball, dark-of-the-moon, smoke-filled room operators are the mere tip of a rotting mound of corrupt influence in Washington.  For more information, go here.

These people have no shame.  And, by the way, there should be no place to hide for those who hire them. All of their clients are gun violence enablers, linked to the NRA and the gun industry in a frothing chain of blood money.

But who lobbies for the children of Newtown and the rest of us?

Newtown Kids

Never forget.

 

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Stop Blaming the NRA

In bad manners, Bushmaster assault rifle, Ethics in Washington, Guns, NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION, politics, Running Fire Fight, Semiautomatic assault rifles, Terrorism and counter-terrorism, The Great Stupid, Tired Old Republicans on April 19, 2013 at 9:07 pm
Austerlitz-baron-Pascal

Napoleon at Austerlitz

Debate has raged for two centuries about whether Napoleon Bonaparte was a self-serving egomaniac, or a supremely confident leader driven by concern for the rights of the common person.

There is universal agreement, however, that–when he was on his game–he was a brilliant strategist and a tactical genius. He chose when and where to fight, picking the ground and the time with care. He had an uncanny ability to recall in minute detail aspects of the terrain. His personal courage was unquestioned.

The textbook example is the battle of Austerlitz, fought in what is now the Czech Republic on December 2, 1805. Like all brilliant commanders, Napoleon imagined the winning fight plan. Then he stuck to it with iron nerve and cold will, even when his subordinates lost some of their will. He thrashed a larger, better-trained, better-armed coalition of forces.

There will be no such debate about the claque of professional politicians and hangers-on who now run the Democratic Party. The latest gun control debacle has proven beyond argument that these hollow men are shallow, self-serving, and unfit for battle on behalf of innocent children and other living things. They are fit only to swell a crowd at a lobbyist fund-raising reception, or fill out a scene at a mawkish media event…little more.

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“There Will Be Effective ‘Gun Safety’ Legislation in Our Time…Or Some Time. Maybe.” The Wisdom of the Third Way.

The only strategy they have imagined for two decades is appeasement and preemptive surrender. Like Oliver Twist, they hold up their contemptible little bowls and beg of the NRA and its right-wing allies, “Please, sir, I want some more.”

They have never, ever, not once, gotten more.

The saddest part of this ignominious disaster, this sadly inevitable thumping, is that everybody in professional political Washington wins. Only the rest of America–you, and I, and our children, and our children’s children–loses.

Harry Reid got to make a noble speech after decades–decades–of sabotaging serious gun control at the altar of the NRA and his own reelection. Pundits fawned over his “act of courage,” as if the man were only just born yesterday and had no record of perverse obstructionism.

Reid’s heir apparent, Chuck Schumer, played both ends against the middle, as is his canny wont. He avoided antagonizing the Senate’s “NRA Democrats,” yet got plenty of photo ops at weepy media events. So he’ll still get to be Senate Majority Leader.

Pat (“Brick”) Leahy got to muddle around in his peculiarly thick-witted and uninspiring public manner without doing much of anything to fulfill his public trust.

The list could and perhaps should go on.

There’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, who now professes to embrace gun control after years of cutting the throat of any Democrat–including the Attorney General of the United States–who dared raise the subject. Emanuel did as much as Wayne LaPierre to destroy the gun control movement. And Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose canonization is imminent after funding some puzzlingly bland Super Bowl commercials. Bloomberg showed up like a rich amateur in a pool hall. He had a million dollar suit and a wad of cash, and a slogan about so-called “illegal guns.”  But Bloomberg never really understood the game and he still doesn’t. So he got snookered.

“Leaders” (cf., Nancy Pelosi) in the House will get a pass because the Senate’s fumbles saved them the awful embarrassment of having to actually try to do something themselves. Whew!

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Senator Dianne Feinstein–The Only Living Profile in Courage in the United States Senate

The NRA will be roundly—and rightfully—blamed for masterminding the smoking field of shame that was the floor of the United States Senate when dusk fell on April 17, 2013. People who used to call themselves gun control advocates—but now prefer wimpier terms like “gun violence reduction advocate,” or even “gun health advocate”—are waving their rhetorical pitchforks at the senators who voted with the NRA, promising to exact vengeance. Perhaps they shall. Much remains to be seen. At the very least, they all got some nice meetings at the White House and on the Hill to put in their scrapbooks.

I say, stop blaming the NRA.

Start blaming your own leadership, the men and women who squandered, threw away, let slip out of their hands, the last, best opportunity to truly save lives that America is likely to see for a generation.

In military terms, the bumbling field marshals of “gun safety” chose to use their puniest weapon—the vanilla-lilac-scented, impenetrable bureaucratic doubletalk of “improved” background checks—and positioned themselves in a rhetorical swamp with a river to their back. Plan B did not exist.

The operatives of this army of incompetents actually set out to aggressively sabotage any talk of such dangerous things as assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in the inner councils of Washington Wisdom. Oh, no, you see, we can “respect gun rights” and find “common ground,” and that kind of talk … well, it just makes trouble in Happy Valley. Let our generals make parley with their generals in secret meetings. Like mommy and daddy, they know what to do. The polls will tell them.

Even had the NRA uncharacteristically ceded the field and allowed the pathetic Manchin-Toomey (and maybe -Schumer, who showed up at the press conference anyway) “compromise” (a weak compromise grafted onto on a weak compromise inscribed on a fig leaf) to pass, this scrivener’s curlicue on the arcane texts of the law would have had negligible effect on the blistering hurricane of gun violence that is America today.  Negligible, in spite of all the hype with which “gun health groups” have hypnotized not only themselves but also many of the outraged mothers and fathers who trust the “experts” to know what to do.

It’s the guns, stupid!

The Machin-Toomey-Maybe Schumer-Pabulum would have no effect whatever on the guns.  Nor would it have any effect whatsoever on the next Adam Lanza, who—mark my words—is out there right now and has, or will legally obtain, and would legally have obtained under Machin-Toomey-Maybe Schumer, his mass murder machine.

What would I have done, you may ask?

Well, I sketched out my ideas in an earlier post, here. Pick the high ground of the real world of American gun violence—the ruthless, greedy gun industry and its cynical mass-marketing of killing machines that have no place in a sane society–on which to do battle. Field a juggernaut of a bill, with the assault weapons and high-capacity magazine ban for starters, truly universal background check and waiting periods for enders, and a Draconian bed of tough regulation for the death merchants in between.

Starting with that proposal, I would have made the NRA and its minions fight their way up a long and difficult hill in the blazing sunlight, punctuated with hearing after hearing after hearing, evidential artillery pounding away at them with every step, its ammunition the bloody, sickening, graphic facts of what the industry and its products have done and are doing to our country.  Fact-based images abound that are a million times more persuasive and inspiring than the brief-cases full of opinion polls favoring obscure “background check” language that the Third Way and other geniuses tote around to persuade the professional politicians they can do good without doing anything too dangerous to their careers.

Yes, I favor war on the Napoleonic model. 

But “wiser” heads—the defeatists and appeasers of the Third Way and its ilk—prevailed, as they almost always do in Washington these days. The Senate leadership had, and no doubt still does not have, the stomach for a real fight. Heavens, it might cost them an election! The darling of this pusillanimously passive path, Chuck Schumer, smugly–smugly–called background checks the “sweet spot” of the legislative path. As if saving the lives of children were a baseball game.

Really? The “sweet spot?”  How droll. What a clever sound-bite! The media loved it!

Schumer's Bird

A Man Who Knows a “Sweet Spot” When He Sees … Or Holds …One.

The strategists of defeat will slink away now and point their nubbins’ fingers at the NRA and its herd of like-minded Senators, leaders for whom it must be said at least they stand up and fight for what they believe in.

But what do the denizens of the infamous “Third Way” believe in? The latest poll results. Nothing greater, or more noble, or more inspiring. Mere politics.

Because of decades of this flawed, cowardly and self-serving, merely political, arguably immoral, and certainly not moral strategy, more Americans will inevitably die preventable gun deaths, more terrorists and more criminals will easily get military-style guns, and the fabric of our society will be further rent by random gun violence from people who could pass any background check the minds of men like Michael Bloomberg or the Third Way’s operative Jim Kessler could ever dream up.

To those who are so deeply pained by this defeat, I say this.

Call your enemies to account, yes.  But hold to an even higher standard your supposed “friends.”

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Never Forget Them

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