Mea Culpa

Boy, do I be dumb!

Last column I referred to the sexual predator list of names and addresses as Angies List. My feeble brain later remembered that in California it is Megans list.

angies list simply lists whether you liked the sexual predator or wouldn't recommend him.

silly me

12/30/12

I’m not from New York. I do know where it is on the map atlas. I know there is that big city, and then the rest of the state. I’ve driven through parts of the rest of the state, and other than noting that the folks there drive much faster than me, it seemed almost pleasant. And I’ve driven past that big city, nicking one corner just long enough to sense the insanity endemic there, and that was close enough for me. As you no doubt recall, I don’t do big cities.

Because of the entertainment media and the news media I do know a fair amount about the big city. Large portions of the e&n media live and work there. From outside looking in it seems that the people who habituate there pretty much think it is the center of the world and the whole rest of this country is something else, something less, not worthy of attention. This is a view no doubt fostered by the e&n media, for they clearly act this way. And those of us who live elsewhere just kinda throw that whole lot who live in that big city into one big hopper, and we ignore that too.

I wouldn’t know a Bronx from a Queens if presented with one. This makes me something of an idiot to the people who live in their world, but then they might not know how to paddle a kayak down the Snake River. Maybe that makes us even. So when I heard about The Journal News it didn’t register with me. But I’m sure those folks living near the big city are familiar with it.

What little research I’ve done suggests The Journal News is an insignificant wannabe struggling to survive in the suburbs of the big city, in the shadow of the media giants, kinda like the paper I used to write for. They clearly have their point of view, which they endeavor to deliver to their readers. And I’ll venture they wouldn’t print my stuff either, for I stubbornly annoy editors who don’t tolerate the way I think.

Anyway, it was The Journal News that thought it important to print the names and home addresses of every handgun permit holder in some of those counties bordering the big city. Don’t know which counties, but for this discussion it really doesn’t matter. Some have asked of the paper why they might do such a thing, and their response seems to be that they think the folks in the area are interested in knowing who living among them might own a firearm. And since they are rabidly opposed to nice folks owning guns, this is no surprise.

One issue that pops up here is the simple reality that many such permit holders are judges, district attorneys, retired cops and others who might not want to let certain people know where they live, what with the fondness certain people might have for exacting revenge upon the civil servants and their families who did their job by putting said certain people away for a bit after certain people committed their various crimes.

It’s harder than heck to get a handgun permit in that area of the country. Ya practically have to be married to the mayor to get one. You certainly have to prove you might need one because your life is at risk without one. You can bet the permit holders have been vetted thoroughly before such permit was issued. In other words, it’s likely they are not a collective of dangerous criminals.

Maybe, just maybe, these people on the list whose lives have now been put at further risk…they might object to this list being published. 

But the way I see this, it doesn’t seem like The Journal News cares about this part. No, I expect they simply thought they could get some of the locals stirred up, have them mark those homes of their neighbors, maybe picket with signs, throw rocks through their windows, write letters to the editors, and of course nag their politicians for further gun control, for once this Amber’s List of gun owners gets out there, panic will spread through the community as those poor vulnerable people realize that they have been living under the unfathomable risk of a nearby firearm.

You remember Amber’s List. You can go on-line to that list and find out where the rapists, sexual predators, child molesters, and kiddie porn addicts live. You know, all those folks who shouldn’t be out in public but who are because like so many other violent and nasty folks, our system of justice likes to simply let them go to prey upon us at their leisure. Decent people like to know where such vermin live.

What you see happening here in New York is real simple. Law abiding upstanding un-threatening handgun permit people are now cast by the media into the same light as rapists, sexual predators, child molesters, and kiddie porn addicts. The Journal News appears to suggest that they are just as dangerous. So the paper is simply warning their neighbors of this horrible risk.

And…if you are even half as paranoid as me, don’t you wonder if this newspaper would be delighted if some judge or retired cop they outed gets murdered in his home, in his sleep, simply so they could say…”SEE! Keeping a gun in the house didn’t make him any safer!” For of course, like the vast mass of media in this country, this paper fervently believes it must teach the people that guns in the home are inherently evil, so the paper likely has systematically sensationalized criminal misuse of guns and yet has actively hidden any evidence of successful defense of one’s home and life with those nasty handguns kept in the good people’s houses.

That’s how you influence public opinion if you own a newspaper, you know. By manipulating that which you choose to report. And I’m betting that like most of the media, they don’t want the opposition to be able to answer back when attacked about gun ownership. They might paraphrase and then ridicule the opposition point of view, but they rarely allow anything approaching equal time to rebut their attacks.

I’ve told this story before, but it is illustrative. Picture the arid desolation of Nevada. I was with a small group of desert aficionados camped amid the quiet beauty, and the subject of guns came up. That NRA decal on the window of my pickup sometimes does this. It’s kinda the red cloak in front of the liberal bull.

One woman asked if I had brought any firearms along on this trip and I assured her that I had, and that they were securely stored out of harm’s way.  She admonished me, “Keep your guns away from my car, for I don’t want my car to blow up.”

I didn’t want to let on that I didn’t figure my firearms were going to climb out of their cases in my truck and start shooting her car when I wasn’t looking. But I did mention that the only time people firing guns cause cars to blow up in massive fireballs, flying in slow motion through the air, was in the movies. Many things happen in movies that are not real, or even possible. But maybe this lends some insight into the minds of those movie stars who think our benevolent government should confiscate all the guns. It certainly was well ingrained into this woman’s mind by the entertainment media.

Another well programmed woman on another desert trip ran away screaming when she saw the cartridge case from a fifty caliber Browning machine gun that we found in the Mojave Desert in an area where Gen. Patton had exercised his troops before they left to battle the Nazis in North Africa. That sixty year old piece of expended brass was no more dangerous than an empty coffee cup, but it had something to do with guns, and thus it terrified this poor woman. Not sure what level of indoctrination had so modified this woman’s brain, but it certainly worked. No doubt the media had a hand in this too.

And there is no question whatsoever how fervently these two women would want to see our caring politicians clear the country of the menace of citizens owning firearms.

I can remember well the wind up to the last “assault weapons” ban. Every TV network had their input. They’d do a voice over about the horrors of these mythical weapons, and then they’d show a video of a machinegun firing a few hundred rounds on full automatic. I believe this is where the fanciful notion of “assault weapons” spraying bullets came from. Or maybe it was those movies where the guy with an Uzi fires off a few thousand rounds from a thirty round magazine, and he never has to reload. You know, kinda like a garden hose. None of this had the remotest relevance to any discussion of the guns our government eventually “banned”, but it did influence a lot of people to favor the ban.

I’ve yet to discuss the “assault weapon” issue with anyone who didn’t ask me why I thought people needed a machine gun. (Machine guns have been illegal since 1934. None of the firearms these folks now classify as an “assault weapon” are machine guns. That’s just one of those little lies the media, and certain politicians need to resort to in order to sway public opinion.)

The media has also spread false notions about “Saturday Night Specials, Cop Killer Bullets, Sniper Rifles, Plastic Guns, High Powered Military Style Weapons”. Such vacuous titles are designed to demonize firearms, to make them seem far more dangerous, and to single out each class of firearms in turn in the incremental process intended to disarm the nation.

In the wake of the Newtown tragedy, a fresh media attack on the 100 million firearms owners who are not criminals has surfaced. Now, according to the media, the blame for the slaughter of innocent children by a madman belongs to every law-abiding firearm owner in America. It’s time to demonize you and me. We are on the new Amber’s List for gun owners.

The last “assault weapon ban” lasted ten years. It was so cleverly worded that it did not take a single weapon off “the street”. All those “assault weapons” were still out there, not killing anybody. Because of the “ban” a handful of firearms could no longer be sold to supplant those already out there, but they had previously been purchased in such small numbers that this hardly mattered. Many other manufacturers simply changed one or two cosmetic features that did not affect their firearms’ function, and these remade no-longer-assault-weapons continued to flow into the marketplace due to their popularity with the decent law abiding folks. 

Senator Feinstein likes to claim that the former ban lowered murder rates, but her logic is a mite flawed. Hard to imagine how no reduction whatsoever in the number of firearms that she would call “assault weapons” might lower the murder numbers, but I’ll take that as a fail on her part. In reality, the cosmetically legal firearms that continued to be sold by the thousands, to law abiding enthusiasts, didn’t mess at all with the murder rates that had been falling before the “ban” and continued to fall despite the addition of thousands of these guns to the population.

 Oh, and when the “assault weapons” ban expired in 2004, nothing changed. The predicted bloodbath out there in the streets has not happened.

So of course, Senator Feinstein is ready with her new “assault weapons” ban. This one, among other nonsense, will turn my little 22LR target rifle into an assault rifle, because of the way it looks. When I stop laughing, I’ll have to fight her on this one. My rifle hasn’t even been fired on the range yet, but she is out to get it.

Because of the way it looks.

The media will support this. They always do. They support this with distortion and outright lies, and by stifling any notion that firearms in the hands of the decent people do far more to suppress crime and violence than they do to foster it. There is considerable evidence to support this statement, but you won’t see any sign of this evidence in the e&n media. You have to search out this truth on your own.

All this is in the shadow of the horrible tragedy in Connecticut. The media doesn’t care that none of the gun control laws they support to date would have stopped this mad man. The media doesn’t care that this mad man could have used any number of common household tools to kill 6 year old children trapped in a room in the ten to twenty minutes he had to play with before the police could arrive to stop him. The media doesn’t care that had one teacher broken a stupid law and had carried a firearm to work that day, she might have stopped this pathetic loser before he could carry out his heinous task. Such has happened before, but of course most have not heard of this. The media suppresses almost all of these notions. They refuse to report it.

“Whenever there is a shooting, somebody always wants to punish the people who didn’t do it.” I didn’t make this up. Don’t know off hand who did. I merely stole it because it is so very true.

No, the media views its job here to be fanning the fear and loathing of people beyond any reason so that when the politicians try to disarm the citizens of this country, the well indoctrinated sheep will urge them on. Which explains why The Journal News is printing the Angie’s List of the names and addresses of legitimate gun owners. Like the individual classes of firearms, this newspaper is attempting to demonize all of these people.

I’m at a loss for words here. I guess if you want to see lies and distortion drive this country, then you will reap that which you sow. I’ll be arguing the other way if you need to ask. For most every gun control law that has come into being in my lifetime has either done absolutely nothing to inconvenience criminals, or it has actually raised crime numbers. “Reasonable Gun Control” does nothing to deter or render harmless a criminal. It simply punishes the good folks.

Don’t know how you feel about this, but I don’t see it as a good thing. The media, on the other hand, is trying its hardest so you don’t find out about how often they distort reality. If you are interested in the truth, perhaps you should seek out other sources of information that are not as corrupt as our mass media.

By the way…the “journalist” responsible for publishing that list of gun permit owners is a fellow named Dwight R. Worley. Somebody dug up his address and posted it on line. I won’t be doing that, for that would be a despicable thing to do.

Oh, and some have reported that ole Dwight owns a 357 magnum revolver, with a gun permit. Presumably for his own protection. No fool here, but if this is true….

Can you spell hypocrite? 

I’m sending this to The Journal News. Not that they will appreciate it, but because if you are going to take a shot at somebody, they have a right to know. I like to think this involves a degree of integrity. I don’t know what they might consider integrity.

12/23/12

Welcome to my nightmare. Names have been changed to protect the innocent, if you can find any innocent.

Prohibition. You remember Prohibition. Demon Rum was destroying America, ruining lives, wrecking families. Wasn’t just plain ole rum. Nope, had to be Demon Rum. Demonize rum to make it seem worse than reality. So said a vocal minority. Squeaky wheels. To save America we had to ban the alcoholic beverage. 

One by one the loudest noises bent states to their way of thinking. A Constitutional amendment written, and soon the War on Booze was the law of the land. They didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was. 

People woke up one day to find that a freedom they had taken for granted had been rescinded by fiat. And by this I don’t mean junk cars.

Naturally, when faced with such a rule, folks still wanted to drink.  Once confounded with stupid rules who isn’t tempted to run contrary to them?

Breweries, distilleries, wineries shut down. Taverns closed. Stores ceased the sale of alcoholic beverages. Local cops and Feds closed down the occasional illegal seller or smuggler. Supply dried up. Demand however remained inelastic. Thus, the price of alcoholic beverage rose. Econ 101.

The profit motive is a powerful thing. The most enterprising merchants on earth, criminals found a need and filled it. Monstrously powerful, wealthy criminal organizations grew out of this War on Booze. These were folks who liked money and power more than rules, mobsters and politicians, crooked cops, and a bunch of wannabees.  They brought booze into the country by the boatload and distributed it with remarkable efficiency. And people drank more than they did when it was legal. All of this is human nature.

Some people found themselves getting killed by the dark side of this phenomenon. All manner of murder and mayhem was the order of the day. And the mobsters who did these murders grew most wealthy and most powerful and they shared the wealth to corrupt the police and the politicians. 

Some, like the Kennedy patriarchy, eventually gained a degree of legitimacy and generations of political power, if not respectability. 

The Chicago mobs bought the entire government of that state and haven’t given it up to this day despite the routine arrest and conviction of most every politician in the state. 

Prohibition was eventually repealed, but we the people have been paying the price for the unintended consequences of the War on Booze ever since. Because the criminals who had prospered from delivering booze had lost their market, so they simply shifted to a new line of work. Drugs.

We didn’t really see much of a War on Drugs until the wealthy white folks discovered cocaine. Heroin had been around, but mostly poor and dark skinned people partook, and nobody cared about them. Marijuana was around for ages, but garnered little attention. Then suddenly, people who mattered were squandering tons of money on the white powder, and since money attracts those same unseemly criminal types, a problem arose. 

When the War on Drugs began in earnest, the price of cocaine of course went further up, and so the criminals got nastier, and wealthier, just like they did during Prohibition.

Laws against the transport, sale, and use of drugs in turn became far more stringent. The actual use of such drugs hardly killed anybody, but the driving of the commerce of drugs into the welcoming hands of the criminals eventually got scads of people killed. The mothers in the ‘hood watched their sons dying in the streets as the young men engaged in the commerce and competition surrounding drugs. The mothers blamed it on crack cocaine, and they demanded more stringent laws. Demon Crack Cocaine. It’s worse than the other, so go after it. 

Later, when those more stringent laws landed most of a generation of young men from the ‘hood in prison, these same mothers complained that the laws were institutional racism designed to hurt the young men. This left the do-gooders who had listened to the mothers and wrote the laws to please them shaking their heads in frustration. And the flow of drugs into the country continued unabated.

Massive wealthy organizations that supplied the drugs corrupted many of the politicians just like the mob did during Prohibition. Some things never change.  Media generated public outcry over the rising tide of murder in the ‘hood led to the laws becoming even more harsh. Mandatory sentencing for drug possession and sale put crowds of non-violent offenders into prisons already crowded by the violent vermin that had turned the ‘hood into a war zone in order to sell those drugs. 

The non-violent folks had been handed harsh sentences, in order to win the War on Drugs. When there was no more room in the prisons, their mandatory sentences meant they had to stay, so the violent criminals were let loose to make room. Logic was carried to its illogical extreme. The criminals resumed their work, and the murders added up, and pretty soon this country looked pretty bad. Wow, we had way more murders than anybody else. What a surprise.

The War on Drugs was a fail, but the murders continued to annoy the populace. What, oh what shall we do? Murders in the ‘hood marred most every night. Drive by shootings killed innocent babies as well as criminals and annoyed the Chamber of Commerce. Something must be done.

The car most in favor for drive by shootings was the Oldsmobile Cutlass. This was an established fact, but the Cutlass was a popular seller, so they couldn’t ban it to stop drive by shootings. But wait……

Why not ban guns?

The reprobates who went around without conscience, killing competitor and innocent alike, often used guns, didn’t they? Guns by their very nature are bad, right? Everything we’ve ever been taught by listening to movie stars, rock stars, and the 6 o’clock news tells us that guns are evil and the cause of murder. That’s all they are good for…because my senator says so. That’s why people keep voting for her.

Somebody came up with actual police statistics which stated that although murder was rampant in the ‘hood, the rules telling the murderers not to use guns didn’t work. Don’t listen to that reality. Guns scare us, so therefore all the guns must go. 

Many logical arguments arrived to debunk such irrational fears, but did not assuage the ragged emotion. No argument to the contrary is worth listening to, for emotion should rule over logic every time.

In spite of massive indoctrination intended to increase people’s fear of guns, too many people, most of the people, didn’t want the ban of guns. They had many reasons, some from logic and some also from emotion. Too many people stood in the way of ridding us of the guns. Must change their minds. Let’s demonize some guns. Heck it worked before.

If the gun looks like this…it must be a Demon Gun. Tell a few lies. Tell a lot a lies. Tell them over and over again. Don’t even listen to any argument from the other side. The other side are all idiots. Everyone must think the same. Teach them to all think alike. The movie stars, the music stars, the media, the schools. Everyone teach the same. Demon Gun. Because a gun looks like this…

So one president got his law passed to rid us of dangerous looking guns. For ten years the law had no effect of the criminal use of guns. And when the law expired, again no change. But still some people harbored their irrational fear of guns. So when one horrible man used a dangerous looking gun to slaughter babies, the cry went out again. Let’s ban the guns. People knowing nothing about guns became experts overnight, all arguing against gun ownership. And the president saw the chance to disarm his subjects.

Ok. So let’s escalate the War on Guns. What do you suppose will happen?

After decades of the War on Guns, every single law restricting the law abiding people’s access or enjoyment of their firearm has failed to stop criminals from their nightly chores. Clearly more laws are needed to punish the good people for the crimes of the criminals. Now the president wants to deny every law abiding citizen their right to firearms. Yet he as actually assisted criminal access to firearms simply to make the law abiding people look bad.

Well, lots and lots of nice people have guns. They like them.  I suppose similar to that alcohol thing. Or even that marijuana thing. Maybe a hundred million citizens own guns. Now most are nice folks who follow laws, so when you compel them to surrender their guns for confiscation and destruction, lots will reluctantly comply. That bunch that doesn’t follow laws, the killers, rapists, and thieves won’t of course, but maybe someday it might filter down to them. The people who hate guns don’t much like filter down economics, but they really love filter down gun bans. Maybe eventually if they punish the innocent hard enough it will have some effect on the criminal.

Some folks will simply forget to turn in their guns. Ya know how you sometimes forget to do some things, like dentist appointments? The government will have to crack down on them. That’s what prisons are for, ya know. Fill the prisons with these miscreants, and others will be scared into turning in their guns. Getting the neighbors to turn in their neighbors to the government will become the new American way of life.

And if the prisons are too full, let loose some more murderers and rapists. Like before. I’m sure they will behave. Maybe the president will put them to work after they get out. He was a community organizer once, after all. He says he supports the Second Amendment. He will need a well-regulated militia to help keep order. Take those gang members, the murderers and such, give them nice uniforms and three weeks of training, and put them to work ferreting out the people’s guns. A constitutionally mandated militia. Who could argue with that?

That bunch that still won’t turn in their guns will be a problem. Probably need the military to smoke them out. We will need truckloads of soldiers pulling onto your street in the dark of night, house to house search for guns, families standing shivering in the streets while soldiers go through their homes, smoke filling the air from when the tear gas set the Smith’s house on fire. Nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide. March dad off in handcuffs to the concentration camps when the prisons are too full. Use the militia if the soldiers refuse to shoot their own people.

Some citizens will fight back, because the guns will make then do it. Kill a bunch of them because you have to. Martial law. Suspend the Constitution. Total government control… for our own good of course. Win the War on Guns. Make this a safer country.

Welcome to the future. I’m sure somebody will be happy about this. It seems to be the plan.

 

12/16/12

Sorry, but it hurts too much to just sit.

A friend of mine is an avid reader concerning religion and how it appeared deep in the history of the human race. From time to time he discovers some event or factoid that lends question to what he recalls learning when studying his own family’s faith as a child. Not willing to sit on these inconsistencies, he generally confronts his rabbi with questions at the earliest opportunity hoping to see some resolution to his frustration over this. He cannot help himself, and I’m certain his rabbi is amused and enthralled with his interest. 

Some several years ago, I happened to mention that moment back at the beginning of time when Cain slew Able by smacking him with a rock. Shows my ignorance. My friend hastily corrected me. Turns out, according to his reading, that Cain actually used a weapon known as a smiter (spelling unknown, at least to me). Now, you might wonder if anyone gives a care whether Cain used one or the other of these, and you would be right. 

The story of Cain and Able appears in several versions of the early writings penned by at least two major religions, as an object lesson presumably, to highlight one of the essential characteristics of the human. Many have used this as the second but most telling lesson we should learn about the human condition. 

You remember Adam and Eve. They were the first two humans on earth, placed in Eden by God in his image. Cain and Able were their two sons. Adam and Eve were driven from Eden and into the nasty real world when they disobeyed God over some silly apple. Life for these two went downhill after that. That disobeying God thing would have been lesson number one, and it does show something of the human condition. 

The murder of one son by the other gives some clue into the anger and inclination to murder that, along with all we do well, has to be included in mankind’s makeup, in the bad category. This is the second lesson. 

Others followed.

As an aside…when Adam tossed Cain out into the cold in his anger over the murder, Cain went to live with the bunch of other humans over there. You know, that bunch of humans those old stories never seem to account for. I figure those are the humans that descended from apes.  And yeah, they have the evil in some of them too. Which settles the old argument between the creationists and the Darwin folks. They are both right. So they can stop fighting among themselves.

Now, you all know that this is about the unfathomable tragedy last week. And probably you are wondering how I can make light of this. Am I that delusional? Do I not care? Should I in turn be taken out and shot?

For the record, I am sick, scared, enraged, confused, frustrated. Kinda like everybody else. That slaughter of tiny innocent children by one evil man has affected me more than any other malevolent act that I can remember. I didn’t live through most of the genocides afflicted by men upon humanity, but I know of them. I’ve seen many horrid things over the course of a lifetime. But right now I’m sitting here and I’m shaking and shaken. To the core. And like everybody else, I’m seeking some answers that might make it all better in my head and my heart. And I’m not finding all better. 

I am not making light of this. I merely hide in the writing.

I am trying to put some pieces together in my own head even if they don’t quite add up yet. I have reached some uncomforting conclusions. 

I am not going to get all better. This tragedy will stay with me forever, and only time will allow me to put it somewhere so that it doesn’t dwell always in the front of my brain. 

I am watching the people who we chose to be the leaders of this country, for better or worse, fall all over each other trying to appear most concerned while they plot to use this to further their own power. Spare me this, please.  Let the dead be put to rest at least before you start running for re-election. Don’t milk the anguish of so many for political gain, for in a piece written to talk of the faults of humanity, guess where you are placing yourself.  

I don’t wish to discuss the weapons used by a madman, for I see no reason to think I’d feel any better if he had used some other. When Cain murdered Able, the ground was littered with rocks and sharpened sticks, and boundless other methods of killing. His choice of a smiter over a rock could not be more irrelevant to the discussion. The action was the evil, not the tool.

I would like to know why this man did this thing. Everyone does. Somehow, if we knew why it could help. Perhaps such knowledge would prevent this horror from happening again. But of course it would not. This is wishful thinking only. Every evil murderer had a reason, and each reason was different.

I’d like to think that someone out there could act to prevent this from happening again. Perhaps we could outlaw something. That might work. Problem is… except for that notion in the ten commandments that thou should not commit murder, a rule that no one has ever violated, most rules we make to keep us safe are flaunted by the evil. Yeah, I know….

I considered asking the government to put uniformed armed guards in every school, on every street corner, walking behind every person to protect us. Somewhere safety lies, if we just put the government in charge of everything. We can trust the government to protect us if we just turn all of our freedom and convenience over to them.

Nah, I think I’ll steer away from this notion. It’s that who-knows-what-evil-lurks-in-the-hearts-of-men, thing. Evil too often lurks in the hearts of government.

I believe we have created a population of evil that has learned that the way to worldwide notoriety is to copy the mass murderer. Surely a way to report such news can be found which evil people won’t use to celebrate and magnify their acts. Right now the network news agencies are encouraging and milking the evil for profit.

I believe that the lesson found in the early writings, that Cain had anger and the willingness to murder, is still relevant. The human has not changed. All humans have anger, and some are capable of murder, and some thrive in this. This is a horror, but it is inescapable.

We all seek comfort and a solution so that children will never again be murdered by a madman. I’ll offer comfort, but I offer no solution. No one has changed the human since Cain. 

Too many who claim to offer solace and sure solution will be the next to deliver evil. Evil is opportunistic. So watch closely the most eager, which right now are the people hurrying before the cameras. History does not lie. 

Don’t know who said this but I’ll end with:

“You cannot hide from evil people. You can only confront them when they appear and strike them down before they do harm to others.”

We all must do our very best at this, for we are what stands in the way of evil.