Sam Smith - The notable progress made on the gun issues thanks to high school student activism has just taken a turn for the worse. Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has called for the repeal of the Second Amendment. If this idea gains momentum, it will virtually assure the reelection of Donald Trump and his Republican backers.
The Review has argued for a long time that the way to approach the gun issue is for liberals to form an alliance with rational hunters and other sane gun owners. This would ease the issue away from the NRA and make sensible reform possible. Turning the cause into the abolition of the Second Amendment will just support the NRA's argument and significantly reduce gun owner support for sensible reforms.
6 comments:
It shocks me --maybe it shouldn't-- that Stevens would do that. I thought him one of the non-psychopaths.
That makes sense. The only Amendment the NRA supports is the 2nd, and that's conditional. Veterans and others who use Medicinal Marijuana, in states where it's legal, are forbidden from owning a gun -- it's a felony. The NRA's position on this issue is to ignore it.
All you had to do was look at the activism behind this march - and the organized efforts of the "Enough" crowd of telegenic rehearsed students from Parkland - to see it was all headed this way.
The FACT that nothing they are advocating would have stopped the incident at Parkland tells you all you need to know about the real agenda of this movement: Full registration and eventual confiscation.
Parkland was a complete and total failure of law enforcement and the Broward (and Dade) school counties policy of not arresting students for crimes - and that is exactly why this student Cruz was able to purchase his firearms. Background checks need to be improved in ALL states for sure - and that is one legitimate argument where the NRA has been wrong. But background checks won't work if there is no background to check - because of misguided policies designed to make us all feel good and ignore criminal behavior of young people who need to be on the record and CORRECTED!
Then there is the repeated failure of Broward County Sheriffs and police to prevent this situation by processing this kid and getting him help AND total failure on the day of the shooting by not trying to stop Cruz.
The schools need to be protected PERIOD! This has been allowed to fester for too long and we must act - and trying to ban guns and repeal the second amendment is not the way to do it.
Let's protect the schools NOW - and get the background checks improved applied to all states. Then we need to ENFORCE the laws we already have!
Background checks don't help except to spot the ones who've been addled for a long time but only now are trying to buy firearms. The ones who bought their firearms before they became noticeably addled --the majority of eventual actors-out-- won't be caught by background checks.
The only real solution is to re-open the asylums and implement public health laws that, with real and effective safeguards against malicious or self-interested tipoffs, allow people to be taken into care if they have, or are decompensating toward, one of the 2 psychological conditions that lead to violence: psychotic-level paranoia, and paranoid schizophrenia. Right now they have to go over the edge first, which is a truly egregious case of locking the door after the burglars have already visited.
It’s true that law enforcement failed to prevent this tragedy and they always will. This task is too big for them and we are increasingly asking our teachers to be police and our police to be social workers. One thing we could do is ban the sale and ownership of guns that are best suited to combat situations- semiautomatic rifles and high capacity magazines. I’m a gun owner with a concealed carry permit and I support such measures. The Wayne LaPierre and Dana Loache loonies don’t represent me at all.
What possible good could disarming the citizenry do, CCB? The owner class would probably get sexually excited, because there'd then be nothing to give them pause and curtail their psychopathic excesses.
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