Upper West Side, NYC: Beautiful Day. Very Crowded subway. Very crowded streets. Cheerful people with babies, children, signs; as well as veterans of many marches. Good organization, especially it seems the police with good crowd control to expedite movement. Police also cheerful, even witty.
Will this and hundreds of other marches do anything? Don't know. But November elections beckon and these people will vote, in some places even the children.
AND...Loyola is going to the Final Four!!! Jerry Harkness from the '63 team in the front row! Bravo....
Good to know! Boy and Girl are at sime rally. Nothing in the rural areas. Completely different ideas about guns out here in Nowheresville.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that frustrates me is the constant refrain that putting reasonable and rational gun control measures into place is revoking second amendment rights. Not.
DeleteControls are not the same as rescinding the 2nd amendment. Hunters could still by rifles to hunt. Homeowners could still have a handgun if they foolishly believe they will be able to get the bad guy before he gets them, skeet shooters could shoot skeet balls, or whatever those things are.
Young adults who cannot legally buy alcohol can buy a gun. In some states, kids who have to take extensive driver training, and pass tests, drive under supervision of an adult for a year or two before they have unrestricted driving privileges can buy a gun without any of those same controls. Those of you who live in gun country, who know hunters, should be able to point this out. How do they react?
As far as limitations on Constitutional rights - we limit the First Amendment rights to free speech (no libel, slander or yelling fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire), and Freedom of Religion - we make it illegal for Jehovah's Witnesses to refuse lifesaving medical care for their minor children, etc.
I doubt most of these marchers begrudge the citizens of Yoursville their hunting rifles...Enough of them have had Lyme Disease from deer ticks to appreciate a reasonable decline in the number of deer and of ticks.
ReplyDeleteEdna Lizbeth Chavez, a South LA teen, made the point that “...Arming teachers will not work,...“More security in our schools does not work. Zero tolerance policies do not work. They make us feel like criminals. We should feel empowered and supported in our schools.”
ReplyDeleteIt is worth looking at the new Sandy Hook school to see a plan that addresses security and also provides a supportive and compassionate environment for the students.
There are places where it would behoove one to carry a firearm, places where there are grizzly bears and alligators. Farmers need them to control predators and pests. And then there's hunting which I find legitimate. In none of these cases is an AR-15 either necessary or even practical. AR-15 type weapons should be outlawed for everyone. And there should be more stringent filtering of gun buyers. No one will lose the right to firearms they need, except for crazy people. I would repeal the strangely and ambiguously worded 2nd amendment and replace it with something that clearly spells out the place of guns in a 21st century US. Certainly the rules for a rural area can and should be different from that of a densely populated city. Suburbs should follow the same restrictions as a city. It also help to produce a less stressed out society. Gun control is not enough.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I agree.
DeleteAssinine Facebook share of the day: "Why are schools acting like they own our children? We are not sending them to school to be indoctrinated! They are there to learn...we want history, math, and grammatr, not walkouts, gun control, and hatred toward our president."
ReplyDeleteKind of hard to concentrate on history, math, and grammar when you are getting shot at.
This is an adult comment, but I liked it when I heard the tape on WBUR. This is from the Bay State Banner:
ReplyDeleteGraciela Mohamedi, a physics teacher at Rockland High School also spoke at the rally, recalling the moment when she served for the U.S. Marine Corps and she understood that her rifle was a weapon of war, with the singular purpose of killing enemy combatants as quickly as possible.
Mohamedi said that as a teacher and veteran, she does not want to be armed.
“If you want to arm teachers, arm us with science equipment...with books that aren’t missing pages...arm us with equitable funding throughout all school districts,” she said.
And there are some days when politicians would be better off keeping their mouths shut. Marco Rubio had to get in his two cents worth: Rubio said in a Saturday statement that there are “...many other Americans who do not support a gun ban” because they view it as a threat to the Second Amendment."
ReplyDeleteAnd, "Those against gun bans “want to prevent mass shootings” too, Rubio continued, but they “view banning guns as an infringement on the Second Amendment rights of law abiding citizens that ultimately will not prevent these tragedies.”
At a town hall talk in February “The influence of these groups comes not from money,” Rubio said at the time, speaking to students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. “The influence comes from the millions of people that agree with the agenda, the millions of Americans that support the NRA.” He is correct that it is primarily about the agenda of the NRA (and why wouldn't that be problematic?). But when somebody says it isn't about the money, it is usually also about money.
The German Bund and the KKK represented the views of millions of americans. Perhaps they still do. It means nothing. The NRS is a tool of the gun industry with no stake in the safety of school kids. Now they busy their heartless little selves attacking the outspoken survivors if the Stoneham school shooting. How dare they be angry after being shot and terrorized? How dare they realize that older generations are not their friends? That, in a minute, they'll reduce the young's benefits to reduce their taxes while grandfathering in their own? Enough to make you throw a couple f-bombs at grandpa?
DeleteMarco is looking for the middle way. On one side, children's lives. On the other side, a "God-given Second Amendment right" (Madison and Mason should sue God.) So you "balance" those two things. Somehow, kids keep getting killed, BUT people get to keep their guns. And if not as many kids are killed as were killed before you balanced those two good things (lives and guns), it is what's called a win-win. And everybody should be happy.
DeleteAnd remember Marco Rubio after Mueller Time, which is what ALL of his comments are all about.
Do love that the pro-life Republicans are okay with school shootings. Guess they only care about kids before birth, not after.
Delete"Guess they only care about kids before birth, not after." Sometimes it seems that way. I think the "Seamless Garment" is the way to advocate for a true pro-life ethic.
DeleteOne of the signs carried yesterday, read "More regulations govern my uterus than govern guns." Got it, but did strike me a bit like apples and oranges. I am still trying to disaggrege it.
DeleteApples and oranges...kind of like the ones who say, "Yeah, kids getting killed by guns is terrible, but we kill way more with abortions." My thought is, work on both problems, it isn't mutually exclusive.
DeleteOh, Lord, no.
DeleteI guess it would depend on the age of the sign-carrier and the laws in her state governing access to abortion and birth control vs. guns ownership.
The implication is that that women's rights, if conflated with or reduced to reproductive issues as they so often are now, are more restricted than the rights of gun owners.
It'll get some pro-choice feminists on the left worked up.
But tactically, it's a terrible idea to get reproductive issues anywhere near this because conservatives can dismiss the gun control movement as merely another cause of the far left pro-abortion crazies. It narrows the base of support for gun control to see signs like that.
Dana Milbank says that the kids will save us. I find this overly hopeful. In 1972, when the voting age was 18 and more Boomers could vote, Richard Nixon was re-elected. By a landslide.
ReplyDeleteThe older Millennials were a large bloc in 2016. And Trump was elected.
Age and treachery will always overcome youth and idealism. Especially if age has a lot of money.
Still, Milbank has a nice thought.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-kids-have-come-to-save-us/2018/03/23/c5d0639a-2ead-11e8-8688-e053ba58f1e4_story.html
Well, if the Democrats capture one or both houses of Congress this November, I'm sure there will be a lot of pressure on them to pass some gun control legislation.
ReplyDeleteDepending on what's in gun-control legislation, there is at least a slim possibility that Trump would sign it. He has a habit of saying fairly rational things about guns, and then walking it back a few days later. Here's my take on that dynamic: in the shallow and not-very-well-thought-through way that he approaches virtually everything, I don't think he's a hard-line gun-rights doctrinal warrior. He's an aging guy, a grandfather, he probably likes kids as much as the next shallow, unthinking older guy does, and possibly he may even be mellowing a bit with age. So the Trump Party (consisting of him and his core supporters, with its party platform determined by his visceral and vacillating brain) is not necessarily anti-gun-control. But the Republican Party is; and the Republican Party is prevailing upon its coalition partners, the Trump Party, to toe the doctrinal line on gun control every time the brain strays from doctrinal orthodoxy.
But if the Republicans cease to be the majority party, especially if it happens in both houses this fall, then what will happen to the coalition of convenience between the Trump Party and the Republican Party? I suspect the coalition will fray and tear in many places, and there will be a few opportunities for Democrats to make deals with the Great Negotiator.
Pennsylvania's perennial statesman Rick Santorum has weighed in against the Parkland survivors by saying they should learn CPR instead of expecting laws to save them. The articulate David Hogg commented that it's hard to revive someone with a bullet through their head using CPR. It is easy to conclude that all prolife people are idiots given any association with the stunningly idiotic Santorum.
ReplyDeleteDid Santorum suggest that gun lovers should stop expecting laws to save them? They could, for instance, learn to shoot all the kids.
ReplyDeleteStanley, don't you know that David Hogg us just a dupe of the liberals? Some jackass Michigan legislator was quacking about how he was sick of seeing the kiddies get manipulated, and that they should stay in school and learn academic subjects. School isn't for learning about protests and defying authority.
ReplyDeleteI guess Thomas Paine and the American Revolution are gonna be hard to teach ...