A Young Girl Learns Nothing.

I love the caption: "A young girl learns how to hold an airsoft gun during Youth Day at the NRA's annual meeting in Houston on May 5, 2013."

If anyone were paying attention, they would notice that the little girl is probably not learning anything; she's completely distracted by the things on the table.


Pretty much sums up the NRA and its vaunted training programs.

Some thoughts on guns and 2nd Amendment.

I responded to a friend the other day on Facebook.

The NBC link is about a murder in Texas with a chainsaw. So now in theory because they look evil and are dangerous they should be banned right. According to how politician’s look at things they should. Let’s not look at the human factor, just the tool that was used. I never said we don’t need some form of gun control, we do. What I am saying with this is that with tool no matter what its designed to do, whether it’s a car, chainsaw, hammer, screwdriver, gun, power tool, it can be and has been used to injure and or kill another human being. The gentleman in China that killed multiple people used a knife. So accordingly too the arguments over gun control, guns are dangerous in untrained hands or in the hands of the criminal, that being said this is true for all other tools out there .So it could be argued that all tools are dangerous and should be controlled. The hammer was the cause of many deaths here in the US, so we should ban them or how about cars. This is not about apples or oranges, a tool is tool no matter what its designed to do, but in the hands of HUMAN a tool can be used, whether they are untrained, a criminal, mentally incapable, to hurt other living beings. The main point being no matter the tool It takes a HUMAN to the do the deed, so why aren't we working on that instead. Why aren't they working on the human?

"They" are, but it's a tough row to hoe.

Meanwhile, various groups and hospitals are working on domestic abuse (and trying to help women out of bad situations in which they are threatened with guns daily), and police and ATF are trying to get the ability to track guns back to the store and close down the TINY % of stores that seem to be providing the 99% of guns in crime, and the background check legislation is to prevent those "flawed" humans from acquiring more guns easily, and the legislators are trying to identify the "bad" ones and pass laws to prevent them from owning a gun.

While some of these tactics may not suit you, remember that almost all of them (with the exception of the magazine limit - which is silly) were proposed by the NRA in the first place because they stood a very good chance of working to lower the gun violence, take guns out of the hands of idiots and crazies, and take some heat out of the situation and let us all breathe easier.

Back to the chainsaw - I don't care about the weapon: this man should be stripped of all rights to ever own a gun or any kind of dangerous tool. and be in Jail. Using him as a strawman doesn't help either side of the argument.

And for all of the 2nd amendment absolutists: the "original intent" was that Protestant white men were citizens, Catholic white men were tolerated, and pretty much everyone else: women, Blacks, children, Asians, Original-Americans (Indians), etc., were expected to follow orders, shut up, and be servile.

Over the last few centuries, we have interpreted, altered and re-configured the Constitution many times. If we can pass Prohibition and then come to our senses a few years later, then we have to agree that nothing is certain in this country. If we can pretend that a corporation has personal free-speech rights instead of simply being the owner's free speech rights, then we are very far from "original intent".

We have spent the last 230 years trying to improve this country and sometimes need to fix our improvements ... so what fix do you propose? What method do you have for identifying the idiots and crazies who are the "real problem"? What process do you propose to use for removing the guns of those the courts (for it will have to be they) determine shouldn't be allowed to have guns? What checks and balances will we install to make sure that no one who ISN'T on the banned list ever loses a gun?

Take guns away from the Crazy Ones.

Fortunately, they've self-identified:

"Some survivors of the mass shooting in the Aurora, Colo., movie theater last year have been "relentlessly" harassed by conspiracy theorists who believe the shooting never happened, according to a court document."

Yeah, we could start there.

If you are so badly out of touch with reality that you believe that Aurora didn't happen, that Newtown didn't happen, you need to be disarmed.

If you are so badly out of touch with reality that you believe that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, perhaps by the Obama administration, designed to stir demand for gun control, you need to be disarmed.

Belief in FoxNews is not evidence of craziness, so don't even go there.

No Cops in Schools - Admin, Do Your Jobs

Admin + Cop = Idiot

"A story about one 5-year-old particularly stands out. The little boy was required to wear black shoes to school. Because he didn't have black shoes, his mom used a marker to cover up his white and red sneakers. A bit of red and white was still noticeable, so the child was taken home by the cops. The child was escorted out of school so he and his mother would be taught a lesson."

Really?

"Students playfully throwing peanuts at one another on a school bus ended in five black male high school students being arrested for felony assault after one of the peanuts hit the white female bus driver."

Well, that IS a problem.

I guess.

It's simple. Combine stupid with racist, add in administration that is way too full of itself and stir with a ladle of cop-speak and you get this. Administrative Over-Reaction and a No-Tolerance/No-Intelligence Discipline policy.

Keep the police officers out of schools.  Call them in when you need to have someone arrested, certainly, but don't make them the first-response to student horseplay and childish antics.

Force the administration to do their jobs properly or fire them. Discipline should stay within the boundaries of the school building.

Don't even get started with the whole gun thing.

Link: lawsuit

If you're going to belittle people ...

it would be nice if you checked your math first.

Apparently, there are now 76 days in a year. Maybe he could ask one of the Useless Idiots if he could borrow a calculator.

We don't have a gun problem.

Usually cheaper than this.

We have an alcohol problem.
We have a drug problem.
We have a poverty problem.
We have a "Kids Being Stupid" problem.
We have a politics problem.
We have an anti-vaccine idiot problem.

We don't have a gun problem.

I'd really appreciate it if we could stop applying solutions that don't work to problems we don't have, creating new problems we didn't need.

I'm sure someone will claim I'm being obtuse and since few of you has my perspective, I'll be more clear.  I'm not being a pro-gun, pro-NRA stooge.  I'm not ignoring the real problems that many schools have. I'm not ignoring the problems that we do have.

And I'm not ignoring reality.

NOT one of my students, but I see
similar pictures all the time.

First, some information.  At least 50% of my students have guns in their homes. At least 25% of my students have their own guns (and a few are pink camoflage, too).  I know, because they've shown them to me. "Hey Mister, check this out.  I got this deer this weekend." (Shows me a cellphone picture of herself posing proudly with a 6-pointer and the rifle.) This is anyone from one of the seventh graders to one of the seniors.  First kill - they're typically thrilled out of their minds and showing everyone.

I won't say that everyone hunts in this state, but several schools just give up and cancel classes during the first days of hunting season. We don't, but I do get the requests for homework so they don't fall behind. I have friends who own multiple guns, some of which are loaded and lying on the windowsills of the home. It might be startling at first to see it, but the surprise quickly fades. In Brattleboro, you can see people walking down the street, naked except for boots and a hat, sometimes with a rifle over the shoulder.

The law in Vermont allows for adults to own, sell, carry a weapon with very few restrictions. Under 16 only need parental permission. It is legal to walk around with a weapon, concealed or not, except for a few places like schools and courthouses, etc.

Have we had a problem with guns in school? No.

Yes, there was a shooting in an Essex school (just outside of Burlington, the closest we can come to a city) in which a man came in during August work days to shoot his teacher girlfriend, but killed another teacher. A Jericho student killed himself. That's it, going back to the 1960s.

Have had a problem with guns, period? No.

There was a guy who shot at a tractor in the middle of a field and killed the farmer he couldn't see behind it. There was a drug dealer in Burlington. There are the occasional "hunting accidents" and other things, but nothing remotely like Adam Lanza. We have maybe five homicides a year. We DID have the farmer who was angry at the cops and crushed all eight cop cars with his tractor, though, but I don't figure that counts.

We have had more kids die from whooping cough than from school shootings. Can we shut up Jenny McCarthy instead?

Banning guns, getting all paranoid about locking doors, hiring cops, arming teachers, are all security theater .... worthless attempts to solve a problem that doesn't exist here by pretending to raise security. The problem is that they cost serious money while being worthless.

Governor Howard Dean was in favor of tighter gun control but got the NRA's A rating eight times because he refused to jump at shadows. A Canadian news program asked him why he never tried to pass any gun control laws.  He replied, "I would have, but I never found one that would work."

In the national campaign, he said,

"If I thought gun control would save lives in Vermont, I would support it. If you say “gun control” in Vermont or Tennessee, people think you want to take away their hunting rifle. If you say “gun control” New York or L.A., people are happy to see Uzi’s or illegal handguns taken off the streets. I think Vermont ought to be able to have a different set of laws than California. Let’s keep and enforce the federal gun laws we have, close the gun show loophole using Insta-check, and then let the states decide for themselves what if any gun control laws they want. We need to get guns off the national radar screen if Democrats are ever going to win again in the South and the West. Just as we resist attempts by President Bush to dictate to the states how we run our school systems and what kind of welfare programs to have, we need to resist attempts to tell states how to deal with guns beyond existing Federal law. Source: Campaign web site, DeanForAmerica.com, “On the Issues” , Nov 30, 2002

Let's spend our limited resources on applying solutions that will work to counter something that IS a problem.