gun control

I invite you to wade through the next few paragraphs as best you can. This is a collection of thoughts and conclusions, examples of a point of view held by many. These quotes come from a book I am reading for the second time. The author of the book researched it well. No doubt he found a vast cornucopia of similar statements, but this is what he presents in his book.  I couldn’t have summed up this philosophy any better than the bunch of experts quoted here:

To some, it is incomprehensible that America has not followed the lead of other democracies and sharply restricted civilian gun ownership. Writes the founding chair of Handgun Control, Inc, “The rest of the civilized world looks with horror at the lack of gun controls in the United States.” To essayist Garry Wills, gun control is the very essence of civilization: “Until we are willing to outlaw the very existence of civilian handguns, we have no right to call ourselves citizens or consider our behavior minimally civil.” He writes that “Every civilized society must disarm its citizens against each other.” Maryland’s former Senator, Joseph Tydings (a leading sponsor of gun control until his 1970 defeat, widely attributed to an NRA ad campaign) found it “tragic that in all of Western civilization the United States is the one country with an insane gun policy.” President Johnson decried “the insane traffic in guns” and called for national gun registration. As his attorney general Ramsey Clark put it, “Every civilized nation but one has acted to control guns…..In Britain, France, the Soviet Union, Italy, and West Germany, the ownership of a firearm is a strictly regulated privilege.” Former Massachusetts Congressman Robert Drinan calls for an “international commission against violence,” which would criticize nations with the worst handgun records. “This international agency has to civilize barbarous countries like the United States.” “In our kind of civilization, I can’t tolerate any kind of weapon,” writes a Harvard law professor. Former Screen Actors Guild President Edward Asner demands a handgun ban because “it is time to set the house of civilization in order.” Time Magazine asked, “How can America think of itself as a civilized society when day after day the bodies pile up amid the primitive crackle of gunfire across the land?”

Firearms advocates are sometimes seen as so far outside the paradigm of civilization that their very adherence to human or sane standard is questionable. A scientist calls America’s gun habits “simply beastly behavior.” “Gun Lunatics Silence the Sounds of Civilization,” writes the Miami Herald; the paper’s columnist finds NRA reasoning “difficult to understand from a civilized view.” The reason for the NRA’s failure to understand civilization? “Handgun Nuts Are Just That—Really Nuts.” To Atlanta newspaper columnist Lewis Grizzard, gun owners are simply “bulletbrains” Another columnist considers gun-control opponents “dolts” and “bumpersticker cretins.” The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence diagnoses gun ownership as a “national paranoia.”  A little more tactfully, Senator Edward Kennedy decries the “mindless proliferation of handguns.”

I borrowed this last bit from a book titled, “The Samurai, the Mountie and the Cowboy”—David B. Kopel. If you have not read this book, and you find yourself mired in arguing the value or harm of firearms with some rigid folks, you should read this book. And no, I’m not stating that any side of this argument is aligned against total morons. That clearly is accepted by one side of the argument, but it would be total hubris on my part. But you should read this book. Regardless whether you are a pro or a con person. Just read the book.

Kopel's book goes on to borrow this definition of firearms owners:

The typical firearms owner is a rural or smalltown (sic) Protestant male— no surprise to many prohibitionists. Science fiction author Harlan Ellison, in an editorial urging his readers to send donations to Handgun Control, recalled his first thought when he heard that Mark Chapman had murdered John Lennon. “You watch, he’ll turn out to be a Christer.” “Why should a civilized society tolerate 30 gun deaths every single day?” wondered New York City newspaper columnist Harriet Van Horne in a column where she sneered at “Backwater, Tenn.” and “the Gospel tent tradition of poor, backward, rural America.” Manhattan’s satire magazine Spry headlines its article about the rest of America, “Big Dumb White Guys with Guns.”

If gun owners may not comprehend a civilized society, in the view of control advocates, then certainly the National Rifle Association does not. Handgun Control, Inc’s Jeanne Schields calls NRA members “macho men who don’t understand the definition of a civilized society.”

I’ll spare you the bulk of the rest of this, but let me pick just a few random tidbits from the book….

Mario Cuomo: “NRA hunters who drink beer, don’t vote and lie to their wives about where they were all weekend.”

Anti-gun physicians advise the public that gun-ownership by law-abiding citizens is a public health disaster. Gun owners are portrayed as “ unstable, violent, and dangerous.” Garry Wills calls them “gun fetishists.” and “traitors, enemies of their own patriae,” They are an alien, infectious presence, in the words of a Miami Herald columnist, “thus, we find ourselves surrounded by gun-toting, psychopaths, druggie urban trash from the North, dangerous yokels from the South, van gypsies, half wits, and other losers of every stripe imaginable.”

Our cities are, “besieged by  an enemy within” the “sordid race of gunsels.”

I’ll bet you didn’t know this but according to D H Lawrence “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” American historian Richard Hofstadter traces the problem to American gun owners. “We were once again proven a savage, uncontrollable, unpredictable, gun-ridden, and murderous people.” lamented psychologist Robert Coles.

Violence is “as American as cherry pie.” claimed H Rap Brown.

And, apparently it is all our fault.

A little perspective is in order. These are selected quotes taken out of context. The motivation of those quoted is not mentioned. Some quotes are no doubt words from people trying to make a point. Certainly, some come from folks behaving like politicians and they might have sounded differently if the wind changed. Some are from people who get paid to spout these opinions, and money goes a long way toward shaping their ethics. And some come from people who simply like to hear themselves think. 

But all of these quotes have one thing in common. They are fully intended to convey somebody’s ernest opinion. They are all about anger. Heck, forget anger. They are all about hate. These quotes come from the hatred of the speakers, and they are expected to fuel the hatred in the people who listened to or read these statements. And they are fully intended to punish, to injure, the people they are insulting and attacking.

They hate people like me, and those other people who own firearms, or who merely support the right of people like me to own firearms. The folks quoted here, and that group who agree with everything these critics claim, believe that we have earned their hatred, and we have earned that whole bunch of nasty, insulting, demonizing pejoratives memorialized above. These folks will tell you, over and over and over again, that American gun owners and the people who support the 2nd Amendment are responsible for every crime committed with a firearm in this country. And shame on us.

Some of us consider the NRA to be the good guy. Who but the NRA has taught gun safety for 100 years. Who beside the NRA has argued that enforcing existing laws against criminals misusing guns actually be enforced. Who besides the NRA promotes self defense, which has stopped hundreds of thousand of violent crimes. The NRA supports our Constitution. The NRA is the oldest civil rights organization in this country. 

My favorite pejorative was laid on the NRA a while back. The NRA was referred to as “execrable”. If you look this up, it kinda translates into that which one flushes down the toilet. That is how they attempt to describe their vile hatred for the NRA.

I try not to let this bother me, but really…..I’m moronic scum? I’m not supposed to take this personally? I’m not moronic. A bit weird maybe, but clearly not moronic. And sorry, but I’m not scum. I’ve invested a lifetime into helping people. Scum? Excuse my irrational response to this, but I’ve never been a polite person…..Fuck you. 

OK back to civil discourse…

Eleven thousand homicides are committed with firearms each year in America. Plus or minus. Wow! According to some, such a number makes the US the worst place ever. But I ask you to pause for a moment to consider that the people who tend to repeat this comment over and over again are the very people who think the US is always the worst place ever. Whatever……

Folks argue over this number. Those people quoted above no doubt would say the number is much higher. But they like to include those homicides that happened when good people stopped bad people from doing bad things. This means the justified self defense shootings where good people stopped bad people who attacked them. And this includes the justified shootings when police defended themselves from criminal attack. Some think these justified homicides may exceed 2000. Those attackers died, and guns were used to stop them, but none of this is a crime. It is a response to crime, an appropriate response to violent crime. 

I suppose those folks who would disarm all of us would be happy if none of these people were able to defend themselves when attacked, and it would just be too bad that the criminals killed them. It’s not the criminals’ fault, after all. Never is. And the more people who are killed, the better supported is their argument to ban guns.

So those who hate gun owners would inflate the numbers of people killed when they were killed by someone with a firearm. Even with this, ah, subtle exaggeration….the number would still hover just a bit below eleven thousand a year. To keep the math simple, let’s settle on an even eleven thousand people killed by someone using a firearm. And let’s establish that there is a separate killer for each murder, which is not real but it is useful for this discussion because it keeps things simple. That leaves us with eleven thousand murderers who used firearms to kill eleven thousand people each year.

That is terrible. Eleven thousand murderers. The haters say we are the only nation on earth with such numbers, except for those other countries left unmentioned, and that all gun owners are happy to have eleven thousand murders each year. Let’s just take these numbers. And let’s introduce one other number.

Best guess is we have one hundred and ten million people in this country who own firearms. Could be more. But boy does this make the math easy. Eleven thousand murderers. One hundred and ten million gun owners. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but doesn’t that mean that 0.01% of gun owners will commit murder this year? And 99.99% will not? And if this is true, how is it that non-criminal gun owners are responsible for all those murders?

According to those quoted above, America is nothing but a war zone with random murders, shootings, chaos. Parts of America seem like this. But not all of America. I don’t trust my memory anymore, for good reason, but the numbers I remember go something like this. There are just over 3000 counties in America. Seventy percent of the murders each year take place in three percent of these counties. Something like 80% of the counties in any given year report zero murders. America is not a war zone. Ninety out of 3000 counties are war zones. Likely there are reasons for this, but 110,000,000 Americans who mostly don’t live in these counties are not the reason. Unless you believe what those quotes above state.

As we can see from above, this alone is ample justification to attack every gun owner because they say we all are the reason why we have so many murders in America. This on the surface appears to be a nonsensical statement. But go back and read those quotes that began this exercise. That we are responsible for all these murders is clearly stated there.   

Generally, the haters are saying that the non-criminal gun owners and those who support them stand in the way of our government’s efforts to prevent criminals getting guns to do their damage. You know, we stand in the way of common sense restrictions on guns. If it were not for us, criminals would not ever acquire guns. That is just common sense.

Yeah. You got me. I’m always against common sense. But if I was a proponent of common sense, I too would be proposing lots of new laws to end violence. Here is what I would suggest:

I would make it illegal to kill people with a gun. We should make it illegal to threaten to kill people with a gun. We should make it illegal to deliberately hurt someone with a gun, and also to threaten to hurt somebody with a gun. We should make it illegal to steal from someone, or some business by using a gun. We should even make it illegal to threaten to do this by using a gun. We should make it illegal for people with a criminal history to possess a gun. We should make it illegal for anybody to knowingly sell a gun to people with a criminal history. We should make it illegal to knowingly give a gun to a person with a criminal background. We should make it illegal to transport a gun across state lines to give or sell to a criminal. We should make it illegal to buy a gun for someone else who has a criminal background. We should make it illegal to buy a gun from any licensed dealer without a background check. We should make it illegal to lie when attempting to buy a gun from a licensed dealer. We should make it illegal for anyone to steal a gun. We should imprison people for longer and harsher times who commit crimes by using a gun.  

In my feeble mind these would be common sense restrictions on the sale, exchange of, possession and use of a firearm to commit a crime of violence. Let’s take guns away from the criminals and let’s attempt to deter criminals from using guns to commit violence. I really don’t know of any gun owners, or supporters of law abiding gun owners, or even the execrable NRA, who wouldn’t support these common sense restrictions on guns. Heck, I would. 

But still the haters will condemn us, because we are against common sense restrictions on guns….. They demand far more restrictions on gun owners because they say we want it to be easy for criminals to get guns.

OK, what do the haters consider common sense restriction on guns…..

Consider the end point of all the arguments against good people having arms. Common sense eventually demands a total ban on civilian possession of firearms. Let’s get after those nefarious bastards who own guns. You cannot trust them, because they don’t care about crime and violence. Order a complete and total ban, and demand that everyone turn in in every gun…or else. Call out the national guard and the military, go door to door, invade and search every home, confiscate every weapon and imprison every gun owner who doesn’t willingly surrender every firearm. Pay the neighbors to inform on their friends. Build the camps to house those many that the prisons cannot hold, when they refuse to turn in their guns. Disarm those one hundred and ten million people. Confiscate three hundred million firearms. Common sense dictates this.

This solution has often been suggested, but those nasty folks without common sense consistently oppose this, and clearly there are too many of these people getting in the way to accomplish this. So often, the people with common sense want to ban all guns, but they pretend they do not. They say this often, to fool us. And their propaganda machine, the mainstream media feeds the lies.

Over the years they have tried to ban a few guns at a time, but only the most evil guns. So far, they have only tried to ban revolvers and pistols, semi-automatic firearms, scoped hunting rifles, plastic guns, expensive guns, inexpensive handguns, imported firearms, standard capacity magazines, high-powered firearms, large caliber guns, pump action rifles and shotguns, semi-automatic shotguns, lever action rifles, air powered guns, any weapon with cosmetic features that are evil, military style firearms, any weapon invented after the Revolutionary War, virtually every type of ammunition, and any firearm that can’t only be used when you have the key.

So see, they don’t really want to ban all guns. 

America should ban guns incrementally. Mandate a few more laws restricting guns. One at a time. Maybe those dolts won’t notice. They are moronic scum after all. Put the frog in the water and set the stove knob on low. Done well, this will end violence in America. They promise….

Who promised? Well, politicians mostly. Politicians from one political party. This one political party is virulently eager to disarm America. They are so eager that they will say most anything to get this job done. Over the last few decades they have been caught exaggerating so many times, lying so many times, cooking statistics to condemn the good guys, and hiding the truth so they can convince us to ban guns. And they are the ones with the vile assaults on the integrity of gun owners. They are the ones who deny any benefit to owning guns, and they deny that law abiding people ever defend themselves from criminal attack by using guns. 

Oh, and they are the ones who scoff at the notion that a free citizenry might someday prevent tyranny from taking over our government. Perhaps this is why this one party tries so very hard to disarm the people who might try to prevent their tyranny from taking over our government.

Well, they didn’t actually promise that banning guns will end violence. They only implied…. After all, if guns are the reason we have violence, if guns cause people to be violent, common sense implies…..

That bunch of laws I proposed a few paragraphs ago…well we already have those laws. All of them. We’ve had them for decades. So far, they haven’t stopped the criminal misuse of firearms. Likely they have done a little to slow down this violence, but they haven’t stopped it. Yet I still support these laws. I support these laws because they are intended to impact criminals.

That bunch who claim common sense dictate that this is not enough. They proposed dozens of new laws, but every single anti-firearms law that has been proposed for the last 20 or so years has not been intended to inconvenience criminals. Nope, the folks with common sense have given up on laws aimed at criminals. In fact, they have done so little to enforce those existing laws that are intended to stop criminal violence that they leave some of us thinking they truly want more criminal violence committed with guns, so they can attack the gun owners even more virulently. 

These days, all the laws they would impose upon us are intended to make it more difficult, and eventually impossible, for the people who are not criminals to own firearms. See start of this essay.

These laws would include far more bans on certain evil guns, mostly based upon the popularity of these guns but also their cosmetic features, demands for intrusive background checks, mandatory licenses to own firearms or to purchase or trade or inherit firearms, registration of all firearms, taxes on the good people to pay the cost to society caused by criminals, taxes on ammunition, licenses to purchase ammunition, ballistic fingerprinting of guns, storage of guns to prevent their use in personal defense, limiting the number of guns one person can own, limiting the number of guns one person can purchase in a given time frame, waiting periods, prohibition of transporting or shipping firearms, penalties for using firearms for self defense. And more and more and more.

These have all been tried from time to time and place to place. Not one has reduced crime or violence, and some have actually increased crime and violence. All have impacted the law abiding people. As was the plan all along.

Every truly horrid tyrannical government in history on this planet has disarmed its subjects. The worst mass murderers in all of history have been governments slaughtering their own people. Even the most cursory introduction to world history would demonstrate this again and again. That’s why we no longer teach much history to our children, and what we do teach has been thoroughly scrubbed. 

Tyranny invents enemies to put themselves into power, and to keep their subjects believing they must stay in power. From those quotes above, who might be the enemies this time?

Our Last Chance

Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived or so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a small portion of that field, as a final resting place, for those who here gave their lives that a nation might live. It is all together fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate…we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion, to that cause to which they gave their last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

—-A man named Lincoln

“This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the people of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the revolution in 1776; the freedom to govern themselves.”

——Antonin Scalia

“The Constitution is not a living organism. It is a legal document and it says what it says, and it doesn’t say what it doesn’t say.”

—— Antonin Scalia

A new friend, recently introduced to my silly penchant for writing down that of which I think, asked me recently if I had composed anything about what I’ve witnessed during this run up to the next presidential election. This reminded me that I have not. I’ve watched the circus, and noted the monkeys have gotten loose, and I’ve stated that these are not my monkeys and this is not my circus. But with the moment of contemplation raised by this friend’s question, I realized that I have in fact noted what is going on, and what is at stake, and how blessed terrified I am at the prospects. But no, I have written nothing.

In a moment of quiet contemplation, I realized that the main reason I had not written anything, anything I would place out there on the net, was because of the fear. Where once I could speak my mind, criticize to my heart’s content that nonsense which has become our government….I have now realized that this puts me at risk. Risk. Not from those who disagree. Not from those with other opinion. Nope. Not from my fellow citizen. I realized that I must now fear my own government. That which I say in public, that which I write and post on line, can very much end my freedom when the government finally gets around to me. 

Crazy, right? Ole doc has finally gone round the bend. Maybe so. But maybe not.

Way back in the late 1700’s those silly old white men, misogynist racist slave owners and land barons, rebelled against the rule of the king of England. And they won. Probably because the French helped and the militias didn’t. And certainly because they approved of slavery and white supremacy and the institutional oppression of women and they weren’t Christians. And thus the worst nation in the history of the world was born.

Oh wait, I’m relating the other version of history. The one they teach now. The version of history I was taught, that outdated pack of lies, was somewhat kinder to America, and somewhat different from what they now teach.

I remember learning that a group of exquisitely educated and motivated men argued over a whole bunch of notions, and then settled upon a Constitution that was specifically designed to limit the power of government, so they designed a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, rather than for the usual gaggle of monarchs and despots. 

They had seen the harm that ruling elites bring to those they ruled, and these men designed a Constitution that would resist the mendacity of governments, or more accurately those people who wished to be the government, to eventually end up with the unreasonable control of a few over the bulk of the people.

We are at a turning point. What we do next in America, in the next year or so, will determine if this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth. For the rule of a few over the bunch of us is standing by to take over, and they will not ever give back, our freedom.

Yeah, we are there again. WE ARE THERE AGAIN.

Wise men saw this coming. And the usual enemies of freedom around the world stand by, holding their breath, hoping for the demise of American freedom.

“In a democracy, every nation gets the government it deserves.”

———Joseph de Maistre, 1811

This notion has been repeated, reinvented, and recounted many times since. Most governments don’t give a choice. At all. Here is your government, and you are stuck with it. But yeah, in America we have a democracy (actually a republic) so we get to choose our government, i.e. THE PEOPLE (us) have a say in choosing those people who will rule us. Strange as this seems today, this was once considered a good thing. THE PEOPLE actually benefit from this deal, and they continue to benefit, if they don’t piss away this opportunity. 

History shows that most civilizations have eventually pissed away this opportunity. The rest lost this opportunity when they were conquered. 

“The American Republic will last until the politicians realize that they can bribe the public with the public’s money.” ——Attributed to many over the years.

Wise men saw this coming, a long while ago. And what they saw coming, that which destroyed all the other democracies one after another, and what is destroying our republic today…..well they saw this coming too. The lie that is socialism has destroyed nations time and again. It did this by inducing THE PEOPLE to sacrifice freedom for the false promise of security. It put into power the people who lied to THE PEOPLE, promising much but taking away more.

So these wise men argued and compromised and finally wrote a Constitution designed to organize a government, and limit a government, so that the power rested in THE PEOPLE and not in the government. For these men knew that a government is not an entity in itself, but it is a collection of people in the role of government. And these wise men knew what happens EVERY TIME people in government realize that they want to remain in control of government, and in control of THE PEOPLE. These wise men foresaw the corruption, and the dishonesty, and the eventual oppression of THE PEOPLE by that collection of people called government. 

The wise men predicted the inevitable. They predicted that the people who constitute government would eventually be the people who would oppress THE PEOPLE. And we are watching this happen now.

Confused enough?

The founding fathers who wrote our Constitution built in protection against the people who would strive to rule over THE PEOPLE. They built checks and balances into the Constitution. The executive branch can only do so much harm, but then the legislative branch will have its say to counter, and then finally the judicial branch will step in and assure that the Constitution will limit the harm that may be done. Good plan. But with one fatal flaw, as noted by the astute Justice Scalia. 

Turns out that the executive branch is to nominate an individual to the Supreme Court, and then the Senate will confirm, before a justice serves on the Court for a lifetime, so said justice should be immune from the corrupting influence of politics. This system works right up to the point where a ruling elite assumes control of both the executive and legislative branch. With such power, they can place on the Supreme Court drones who will do as they are told, and thus all control of the government, circumventing the checks and balances, the power over the PEOPLE, leaves in the possession of the few who are crooked enough to set this up in the first place. Control of the Supreme Court nets the ability to create law independent of the executive and legislative branch. From this we get a dictatorship.

THE PEOPLE have been living under this curse for some considerable time. Now. And our Constitution sits unused, over in the corner, not protecting us from our government as our freedom slowly sifts away. We watch our primaries, as the mob competes to become captain of the sinking ship. The more we tumble into socialism, the greater our debt and the worse we perform, so the ship sinks faster. These flawed people compete to be captain of a sinking ship, doing all they can to make things worse, instead of trying to avoid the ice berg in the first place. The elephant in the room is  socialism. 

We really need to get our Constitution back, intact, and in the role for which it was intended. And this I have concluded is the reason why this entire insane stumble up to the coming election is so important. And of course, this is why those folks who wish to be the ruling elite are trying so hard to disappoint us. They intend to disappoint us by promising us, THE PEOPLE uh, pretty much anything any fool might ask for, in order to get themselves elected, before they take away our freedom. Because they are lying sons-a-bitches.

Those who wish to be the ruling elite have been slow disassembling our Constitution for most of my adult life. They’ve tried when occupying the executive branch. They’ve tried while in the legislature. And particularly, they’ve done it whilst seated on the Supreme Court. Pretty much everything the founding fathers tried to protect us from, every abuse of power imaginable imposed at the expense of THE PEOPLE has resulted from this exercise.

Sadly, only a few intrepid individuals stand in their way. Justice Scalia endured this role for many years, squatting directly in the path of the evil ones. Lately, I cannot think of a single individual in that one political party who is so inclined to stand in the way. Virtually every member of that one political party is dedicated to dismembering the Constitution. This is not done out of malice toward the Constitution, but it is merely about opportunity. Everything this political party wishes to do to us is prohibited by the Constitution. So they have no choice but to dismember the Constitution if they wish to remain as the ruling elite.

A minority of the other major party would like to preserve the Constitution. Some of these individuals are competing in this primary, and they catch my interest. The rest of the lot are no different from their so called opponents in the other party. Ruling elites don’t care which political party elevates them to power. They only care about the power.

So yeah, this is an uphill fight.

Our enemies will tell us that the Constitution is outdated, that it must morph to blend in with progress, which of course is what the so-call progressives want. I contend that although times have indeed changed, human nature has not. 

That fellow Alexis de Tocqueville who wandered over from France to study those upstart Americans and their new Constitution marveled at the good job our ancestors had done. He appreciated democracy, and called socialism “a new form of slavery”.  He stated that democracy and socialism could not exist together. This was in the mid 19th century. Our Constitution as written made no mention of accommodating socialism. But a guy named Marx published his wishes about that same time. The struggle for our freedom began that long ago. Times have changed, but human nature has not.

Now we have an avowed socialist running for president against a socialist who lacks the honesty to admit this, and in fact only clings to it because of the votes it may yield. Nothing of consequence has changed since de Tocqueville railed against socialism and blessed the Constitution for resisting it in 1848. 

At the end of the 20th century, PJ O’Rourke again mentioned socialism, in words that our socialists today should recognize: “It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights- the right to education, the right to health care, the right to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery- hay and a barn for human cattle.” 

What I hear from that one political party, free college, free medical, free this and that, housing food clothing, the chance to rent from the government, the chance to work for the government, the chance to keep what we earn, minus what the government takes….well this sounds a whole lot like share cropping, or serfdom. If this is what ya want, vote for that party. I likely will go the other way.

Nothing has changed, with socialism or with the need for our Constitution to stop this perversion.

The enemies of our Constitution will mention the Bill of RIghts. They claim the first Amendment is outdated, until those who usurped the control of the Constitution to protect from the wishes of society, using the 1st to defend the fashioning of religious symbols from cattle dung, or the burning of our flag, or the most obscene perversions yet invented. 

The enemies of our Constitution claim the 2nd Amendment is outdated, yet anyone who is paying attention realizes that the freedoms protected by the 2nd are even more needed now than when written. Small wonder that one political party wishes to dismember the 2nd. 

Go down the bulk of the first ten Amendments, our Bill of Rights, and we need them all more now than ever before. 

Progressive folks are lining up, each claiming they will leave the country, move to one socialist workers’ paradise or that other, if the wrong person is elected president. They hate the very possibility that we might resist their race to mediocrity and oppression. They have lots of choices, countries that offer this or that in exchange for freedom and prosperity. 

You won’t find many advocates of the Constitution threatening to leave this country. Maybe this has to do with the serious absence of countries out there who offer any freedom and prosperity on a par with what’s left of ours. If you favor freedom, you have no place to go when this country goes down. No where. America is all that is left.

So yes, we need our Constitution, more now than ever before. And our Constitution is more at risk now than during the Civil War. 

The current president, a man who has done more harm to our Constitution than any other in our history, would hand pick an enemy of America to sit in the seat vacated by the late Justice Scalia. From that party, the two hoping to inherit the throne proclaimed by the pretender in chief, would do the same. This one chess move would lead us to the end of freedom in America. Yet it would be cheered by all of one political party, most of the other, and the bulk of our media, teachers, professors, and entertainers. In a democracy, such a majority would win…..they would win their own destruction, and not realize it until it is too late. By then the ruling elite would be completely in charge. History is filled by such mistakes.

Somehow, we must elect as president someone who will fight for the Constitution, rather than against it. This likely is our last chance.

“That this nation, under God, shall have another birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not vanish from this earth.”

Sometimes I learn things altogether different from that which I seek. This is not an original thought, but it can become a realization if you do this life thing long enough, and you are paying attention.

To this day my father has entertained one question more than most any other. And this from his peers….

“Why jump out of a perfectly good airplane?”

Dad joined the 11th Airborne as it formed during that large war laid on his generation. At some point during 1943 he learned how to jump out of perfectly good airplanes. On purpose. He also learned all that other how-to-make-war-upon-the-bad-guys-stuff while he was at it. These days some men pretend to not recognize the other stuff when Dad compares notes with that dwindling family of heroes who won that war, and they pose the question. This does in fact acknowledge Dad’s record, and yet still razzes him a bit. These men now have a sense of humor, honed from a Great Depression and the horror of World War. You must have done some shit in your time to even join in with this conversation. 

These men saved our American way of life from indescribable evil, and you and I have benefited beyond measure because of this. If you question this, I shall not listen to you, so don’t bother to read the rest of this thing. 

My daughter, Jody, followed me to many high places over the years of her development. She climbed with me the Grand Teton in Wyoming, some 13770 feet of real live mountain climbing. She followed me up Mt Whitney, the tallest bump in the lower 48, and a few others of substance. We thawed her near frozen fingers atop Mt Shasta. She would have followed me to hell and back, if you can believe my late friend Dan, who was wise and wonderful. Jody and I got high often.

So, many years ago, when we walked out of the clinic after we closed at noon on a Saturday, and we drove up to Lodi just to “check out that sky diving place”, and I decided that it was time for us to experience that ole jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, she just said, “Sure”. So we signed the papers, and climbed into the old C-47, that one that had once, uh, crashed, and they rebuilt it, and we sat on the aluminum floor as it circled the airport, rattling something awful as we climbed lazily up to 10K feet. And then, each strapped to someone whom we trusted to  know what they were doing, we jumped out of a perfectly good airplane.

This….was a life changing experience, in more ways than I can describe here. Somewhere another essay describes this event, but don’t ask me where. How this is relevant to today is that thing I learned that I didn’t expect to learn. And that has to do with thermals. And the scent of death.

These days, when you jump out of a perfectly good airplane, the goal generally is to have a good time. Free falling most of the distance back to earth, give or take seven thousand feet before opening the parachute, is entertaining. Take my word for this. And feeling the parachute finally open, suddenly slowing our transit back to earth, is comforting. And by the time our feet land gently upon firm earth the exhilaration will leave us thinking that our feet are not actually touching said earth for some considerable time after. 

Shortly after the rectangular nylon canopy opened above us, that device that slowed our fall and also propelled us forward so we could maneuver into the wind and toward our projected landing site, it also carried us over the four lane freeway. The four lanes of asphalt had been baking under the California summer sun for hours, and from its hot surface warm air rose, as warm air is want to do. We hit that column of warm air, that rising column of air, and for a brief moment we rose with it. And with that warm rising column of air, came some scents.

I smelled mowed grass, and diesel exhaust, and some other from the ground below. But this taught me something that I should have figured but hadn’t. I learned that those vultures circling high above the dead body in the desert in those old cowboy movies, were hanging on a rising column of air, and they were smelling dead body. I hadn’t planned on this part.

Carrion, which is not the same as carry on, is not luggage, but instead is dead bodies. Dead bodies emit certain scents, some 450 different dead odors if you look into this. Vultures live for these scents, for they eat the dead. Dead bodies represent lunch for vultures. The hint of dead, the odor, and soon several large dark birds are circling above, hanging on the rising warm air column and enjoying the odor. They look forward to this, for without carrion, they don’t eat. They wait patiently for death. Death for them is opportunity.

October brings to our area those big green-blue iridescent flies some call blow flies. These guys like carrion too. They smell the slowly rotting dead body upon which they lay their eggs, thousands of eggs, so that the hatch from those eggs, disgusting maggots, can feed on decaying flesh and thus become many more blow flies. On the dead body. Blow flies are also attracted by the scent of dead. 

When we had puppies sick from parvo virus in the infectious disease ward at the back of the clinic, the poor puppies who smelled dead before they actually were, laying there spewing bloody diarrhea with the half digested linings of their intestines flowing out the back of them, the flies knew. They came buzzing in through the front door, took a quick sniff of the air, and then they flew a bee line back to the parvo ward, hoping to let their baby maggots feed upon the poor puppies. Blow flies live for this. Death for them is opportunity.

Sorry about the gross part, but it leads to the point of all this.

The point is that some creatures, some of the most vile creatures, live for the smell of the dead. To them, death is opportunity.

So the other day a client came in, and as sometimes happens, our conversation wandered away from the cat’s minor problem, and into other stuff. From my client I learned that the cops are killing far too many unarmed young black men. And….nobody cares that unarmed young black men are getting killed.

Really?

OK, so such might happen on rare occasion. Young black men kill young black men many times, most every day. Hard to get anyone to even notice this. But lately we hear about young black men dying only when a cop is involved. Cops, all of them together are nothing more or less than a slice from the pie of people, with mostly good and a few bad. I get that, and the system does too, punishing those few bad police officers who overstep their authority. But what of those other times when a unarmed young black man was killed, those times that netted the obsessive assault from the media, the obsessive assault of the self-promoting reverends, the obsessive assault from the president? Do you remember all those times when the angry mobs filled the streets as a consequence, but when the cops actually did no wrong at all?

Well, it turns out that the vultures and those large flies who hope their darling baby maggots will feed upon dead bodies are not the only vile folks around who get all excited when they get the smell of a dead body. Sometimes dead bodies give the media, those reverends, and that president an opportunity to raise a fuss and thus they gain the excuse they need to demand that cops stop arresting criminals. They had to wait patiently for this opportunity, but finally they got their dead bodies.

This time it kinda started when young Trayvon Martin violently attacked a man, and died for his bad judgement. Later that year, one crazy evil young man accomplished something in his perverted mind by murdering a school room full of little children. And then, after an embarrassing long wait, it blew sky high with the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. Long before the facts were in, long before reality and much delayed honesty arrived, the outrage over these killings erupted, and this grew beyond all reason. The paid protestors had already trashed the city. Long before the vultures and the blow flies would have known, the president had already spoken of his outrage, and the media took this and ran with it. Oh, the horror. And oh, what a relief. Relief for the president and his political cronies. This was a crisis. This was opportunity. Never mind the facts. Never mind the truth. Never mind the collateral damage.

Now, in the spirit of truth in advertising, I will admit that I’ve been accused of promoting certain conspiracy theories, and I plead completely guilty on this one. This means I believe we can see  what happens when evil people take advantage of tragedy. I’ll just lay things out, and you can be the judge for yourself.

Each time that president of ours impatiently waited until rewarded with well publicized dead bodies, the greater the number, the better, and then he pled his case to the American public. He stated that he must do something to keep these murders from happening. According to him, we must do something to keep guns out of the hands of those criminals who couldn’t and wouldn’t kill people if they didn’t have firearms. His timing seemed perfect, always right after a fresh death. Who could argue with this? 

Sometimes he was so aggrieved that he cried just for the camera. He gets props for this. Reminds me of that old TV show, “Queen for a Day”, but I wander off. 

The president likes to fly in those families of the victims of murder, wrapping them around him before the cameras, shamelessly exploiting them, for that makes his performance seem more believable. Good for him, for these tricks do help his argument.

It is not a closely held secret that the president is obsessed with disarming the American people. He tries, and his supporters try, to keep this under a hat, but the truth has been out for years. Just don’t look for this truth in the New York Times or on the network news. These folks would just as soon not let this revelation cloud our thinking.

This president, while a representative for the public in the government of Illinois and in the US Senate, this guy voted for every gun control bill and every gun ban that offered up the opportunity. Except for that one time, when the retired chiefs of police promised him their support if he would vote to let them carry concealed weapons. For regular folks who couldn’t offer this guy a political boost, this wasn’t gonna happen.

This is in contrast to all those other times when he voted “present” on all those other regular bills, instead of actually voting yay or nay, so that he would seem to be working, but not choose wrong and carry any negative baggage forward in his political career. He only staked out a position for this one obsession of his. This left him with more wiggle room when he needed to con the public into voting for him later. 

So since this president wants to disarm the American people, he still needs to convince enough of us to follow his lead. And since the occasional murder that lends itself to the raging publicity he needs is a rare thing, he must wait between tragedies for the smell of carrion. Problem is, he is not a patient man, and since his time as president is soon to pass, he must speed things along a bit.

Since this president claims that he wants to keep guns out of the hands of murderers, logic would suggest that our government agencies under his control, those agencies responsible for keeping guns out of the hands of murderers, would be kinda busy. We do, after all, have lots of federal laws designed to keep guns out of the hands of murderers that should be enforced. 

You might not know this, but it actually is illegal to murder people. Now, this is not really just a gun thing, but it is worthy of mention. That president won’t mention this. He will instead tell us that we have no way to stop killers from killing because we don’t have enough laws to stop this annoyance.

More on topic….it is illegal for a convicted felon to possess a gun. It is illegal to give or sell a gun to a convicted felon. It is illegal to buy a gun to give to a felon. It is illegal to transport a gun across state lines to give or sell to a felon. There is a bigger list than this of rules, federal rules, that make it extremely illegal to arm felons, or for felons to be armed. And these are just the federal rules. 

We have a Justice Department in our federal government, and among all the other responsibilities of a Justice Department, they are supposed to enforce all of these laws. Why you might ask? Well, to keep murderers from murdering people with guns. Just in case you were wondering.

You would be thrilled, no doubt, to know that this president has made certain that his Federal Justice department is dedicated to arresting and prosecuting felons who break these laws. The president’s Justice Department is in fact setting records in this regard. Thank goodness for this, for this clearly is at the president’s urging. Think of the violence prevented, and the lives saved. Thank you president.

Uh, but wait…..

Remember the last president who tried to disarm the American people? That would be the two headed monster known as the Clintons. That would be good ole Slick and his tender wife, who always reminds me of Rasputin. Their Justice department set a record for such federal arrests and prosecutions of felons breaking the laws that prevent them from killing people with guns. They arrested and prosecuted so few of these criminals that they set a record. Presumably, they did this because they thought it would reduce violence and murder…. or more likely when they wanted to disarm Americans. And they needed some killing going on to justify trying to disarm America.

This current president, in charge of this Justice Department and his attorneys general, is setting a similar record. This president made damn sure he didn’t take too many likely murderers out of the neighborhood before they killed. Yep. This president has overseen an appalling record of not bothering to do any of this prevention stuff. This president cannot be bothered to uphold the multitude of laws specifically designed to stop criminals from killing people with guns. The rules already on the books….

Oh, and when questioned why those criminals, who were actually stopped from purchasing firearms by the mandated background check at points of purchase, are almost never prosecuted by our president’s justice department, the loyal vice president said, “We don’t have time for this”.

Gosh, I wonder why.

Similar laws exist at state and local levels. And the numbers go up and down, the numbers of violent murdering criminals arrested and prosecuted for all those laws designed to stop them from committing “gun violence”. Take Chicago, for instance. Recently, the political party that runs Chicago has been so distressed by those 500 murders they enjoy each year, all that “gun violence”, that they are now prosecuting something like 7% of the known criminals caught with guns. For the rest I guess they just didn’t have time…..

Oh yeah, that president got his start conning (organizing) poor people into voting for that political party in Chicago, and the corruption running Chicago paid him back by helping him become president. Wash my back, and….

Everybody should know that the two things known to actually reduce violent crime, and murder, and presumably that more horrid thing called “gun violence”, involve arresting criminals, and locking them away. For although we haven’t often rehabilitated career criminals into useful citizens because of time spent incarcerated, at least while they are locked away they don’t hurt any of us. 

So of course, this president and his political party are doing everything they can to make it more difficult for police to arrest criminals, and they are releasing criminals from our jails and prisons by the thousands. Not sure why, but clearly they think we are going to be safer because of this. Gotta be that. Because they say they are trying to make things safer.

Just don’t ask any cops on the street about this. And don’t ask the victims of crime. They somehow harbor the silly notion that these career criminals are gonna, you know, behave like criminals. But since Michael Brown and the riots in Ferguson, the president’s political party has done all it can to prevent the police from doing their job, from arresting criminals.

I remember listening to that president claiming that the violence perpetrated by those vicious drug cartels in Mexico was the direct result of our local neighborhood gun shops greedily selling “assault weapons” to straw buyers, who in turn drove truckloads of weapons to their bosses in Mexico, because those insanely wealthy gangs couldn’t get weapons from their own country’s military, the Middle East, China, and all those other places from which they actually obtain their weapons.

This president merely wanted the excuse to close down our gun shops, not because (he says) he wants to disarm American citizens, but because he wants to end “gun violence”. What a nice guy. He is such a nice guy, that his Justice Department, and the ATF under them, just happened to run a game on those fools in the Mexican cartels. They planned to let a few known straw buyers obtain weapons illegally from gun stores in Arizona and Texas, and then they would track them into Mexico, and then they’d take back those guns and arrest all those drug cartels and that would be the end of that. And because those gun stores greedily sold to those straw buyers, well they’d just have to shut down all the gun stores, too. Great plan.

So…..they ordered a few gun stores to sell to known straw buyers. The gun stores objected, but they were forced into this deal. Only a few guns left for the border and the cartels. Only about 2000 guns. Oh, and nobody bothered to track them, any of them, and no cartels were arrested. But those guns, in the hands of some of the worst criminals of the 21st century, began killing folks. Lot’s of folks. Thousands of folks. Even more than in Chicago. And in keeping with the plan, some of those guns are now killing people in Chicago, too. 

The only guns the ATF got back were those recovered from crime scenes that had already killed people. They said they were going to get all of them back, but I guess they forgot.

No doubt the president was getting ready to pull the rug out from under all those horrible gun stores, because they clearly were responsible for all this killing. Shame on them. Until somebody noticed that a bunch of those guns were in Mexico BECAUSE of our ATF, because of our Justice Department, because of….our president (?). These were those very guns our own government sent to the cartels. Ya know, because of the plan.

If you ask any member of that one political party why we need all these new gun control laws they demand, the obvious steps in the direction of total disarmament of American citizens, you will get the same answer. This answer is very consistent. This answer is repeated endlessly by politicians of that one party at every level. It is repeated by all the gun ban organizations. It is repeated endlessly by our ever loyal mass media. 

There is an epidemic of shootings, a rising tide of violence. 

Repeated endlessly, by endless drones.

But this is why we need all these new gun control laws, which all seem aimed, not at criminals but at folks like you and me. Because of the epidemic and the rising tide. 

To these folks, this epidemic and rising tide is a crisis. And as any impartial observer might notice, one political party has vowed to not let any good crisis go to waste. They learned this from Saul Allinsky. In fact, more than one politician in this party has celebrated mass murder as a time to “make hay while the sun shines”.  These people love the smell of carrion. 

That crime rates and violence rates have been plummeting since the early 90’s, and now are down to the levels we witnessed way back in the 60’s, well, that seems to have slipped past the gun ban lobby. The 60’s were before the war on poverty and all those other social programs implemented by that one political party which managed to remodel some elements of our society into the “murder capital” of the world, if you missed that part.

This national reduction in crime is apparently a closely held secret. You won’t hear this mentioned by the rising tide and epidemic politicians or most of the media. Certainly you won’t hear it from that president. They need a bunch of violence and murder to make their case for disarming us. Reality gets in their way. Without the epidemic and rising tide, all they are able to argue with are their lies. With only lies, they will have a much more difficult time disarming America.

So let me be the first to admit that I am a conspiracy raving maniac. I cannot look at these last few paragraphs and not wonder about those two vultures in the tree. Growing tired of waiting for a dead body to turn up, one bird decides to take matters into his own hands. Kinda like that one political party, and those three, you know…..the current, the slick, and the wanna be. They need more dead bodies so they can disarm us. They need an epidemic and a rising tide. Because that is what they must do to remake our society to fit their agenda, to end our way of life.

Patience, my ass. I’m gonna kill something. 

And these folks are seeing to this.