Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 88

Can Trump Use The Gun Issue To Win The Presidential Campaign? I’m Not Sure He Can’t.

Before you begin reading my precious prose, go to 270towin.com and set the electoral map as a toss-up. The bottom line is that 10 states with 130 total electoral votes hold the key to who will sit in the Oval Office next year.  Now there could always be a catastrophe or a calamity – Hillary could fall down a flight of stairs and bash her head in, Trump’s jet could miss the runway and everyone’s wiped out.  And neither candidate is yet an actual candidate.

But this electoral map isn’t cut from whole cloth.  It’s about the best guess at this point that anyone can come up with in terms of where the fight for the White House will really take place.  And guess what?  All of those 10 toss-up states have one thing in common, namely, these are states with lots of people who own guns.

           The problem with the surveys that show only one-third of American households containing legal firearms is that a national survey understates gun ownership on a state-by-state basis because the two most populous states – California and New York – are states where guns are heavily regulated and this regulatory environment is a function of the relative lack of legally-owned guns. Taken together, these two states alone count 60 million, or 19% of the country’s population as a whole.  Add four more states – Illinois, Michigan, Joisey and Massachusetts and you’re adding nearly another 40 million.   In other words, 6 states count for one-third of the entire population and none of these states have a lot of residents owning a lot of guns.

Gun-rich states, on the other hand, particularly in the South and the West, have lots of guns per resident but in many cases have more cows than people, and the cows can’t vote.  But when we get into those swing states, while none of them have the kind of gun numbers that you find in red states like Idaho, Wyoming, Kansas or Nebraska, they certainly have a higher percentage of gun-owning residents than states that normally vote blue.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that Trump has actually thought through a single statement that he has made about anything when it comes to planning or managing a national campaign.  What I am saying is that, like it or not, his pandering and lying about the 2nd Amendment may resonate very well in the toss-up states.

The problem with using the gun issue to motivate voters is that there has never been a survey which shows that the gun issue makes any real difference in terms of how people vote.  At best it usually registers 1% – 2% when people are asked to list the most important issue when they go to the polls.  But let’s remember that Trump ties guns to self-defense, and he ties self-defense to all that street violence being committed by “illegals,” and he ties illegals to his promise to build a wall.

And this is exactly what is so dangerous about Trump’s candidacy, because what he has done with the gun issue is use it to bolster what psychiatrists call an ‘overvalued idea,’ namely, an idea that can be channeled into anti-social, violent behavior because the means justify the ends.  The Ku Klux Klan took the anger of marginal whites who felt threatened by free blacks and channeled their anger into organized acts of violence which were seen as a way to keep blacks ‘in their place.’

When Trump exhorts his followers to ‘knock the crap’ out of protestors he is taking the anger that some feel towards people of color or people who communicate in different languages, and channeling that anger into an organized effort to win a political campaign.  And make no mistake: promoting and approving anger leads to violent behavior which leads to promoting and approving the use of guns. And if you think that believing in the 2nd Amendment hasn’t become a code-word for justifying anger and violence, think again.

Introducing My Get It? Campaign.

        

 

In the interests of full disclosure let me first say that I am a card-carrying Yellow Dog Democrat, and I’m the most Yellow Dog you’ll ever meet.  I also don’t believe there is any contradiction between being a Yellow Dog and a Gun Nut – I happen to be both.  Right now I only own about 60 guns which is kind of light.

I have also never been a Single Issue voter.  So when I go to vote in my state’s primary election (because in the general election I just yank the Democratic lever and walk out) I vote based on how the candidates measure up along various lines.

But this year is different.  This year I am a single-issue voter, and the issue has to do with guns.  So why does a bone-fide Gun Nut believe that he has to vote the gun issue which means voting against Trump?  Because Trump’s embrace of the gun culture is not really just about guns.  It’s a menacing and dangerous effort to validate violence as a way to conduct human affairs.  And I am opposed to violence – personal violence, state-sponsored violence, any and all kinds of violence, so I am determined to do what I can to stop Donald Trump.

With this column I am starting my Get It? Campaign, and every day I will send out a new Get It? post with the number of days left until we vote on November 8th.  Right now we are at Day 149 which seems like a lot of time, but its’ going to dwindle down fast.  So I am hoping that my daily posting with a number that keeps getting smaller will spur everyone in GVP-land to respond.  And I don’t need anyone to respond to me – but we all need to do what we can.

There are roughly 240 million Americans who are of voting age, of whom probably 160 million don’t own guns.  Let’s be honest – the gun-owning population, particularly gun owners who really like owning guns, are inundated every day by massive and endless media from the other side.  Take a look at the map of battleground states. They are all gun-rich states where just a slight shift of votes can determine who will sit in the Oval Office for the next four years. This is why doing something every day to stop Trump is of utmost importance for GVP.  This is why I’m going to remind GVP every day of how many days remain.

Get it?  If you don’t, you can kiss GVP goodbye in just 149 more days.

Trump May Think That Liberty University Is No Longer A Gun-Free Zone, But He’s Wrong.

Because repetition is the key to good teaching, I’ll say it again.  Donald Trump represents the single, biggest and most menacing threat to GVP since there was a GVP.  And if you don’t believe me (which of course you do), take a look at the current newsstand issue of Time Magazine, which contains an article about how Trump is making inroads into the Evangelical community, using as his point-man, Jerry Falwell, Jr.  And the article states that after Falwell declared that Liberty University students could carry guns on campus, he received a personal phone call from Trump who congratulated him on the new policy and told him not to “apologize” for it to anyone.

            Now in fact the Liberty University policy is not quite as broad as the campus-crazy crazies would like.  It ‘amends’ the long-standing prohibition against guns on the LU campus, and replaces it with a new policy which vests responsibility for deciding whether students over the age of 21 can bring a gun onto campus with the University police.  The operative phrase from the new policy is: “members of the University community that are over 21 with concealed weapons permits can seek permission from LUPD to carry concealed weapons ON CAMPUS and store them in their locked vehicles.”

Oops!  This is exactly what the CCW movement is against. It’s a “may issue” policy, which means that the cops determine who carries and who does not.  And it goes further because the policy expressly forbids students from carrying or storing weapons in dorms and ‘residence halls.’  So unless I don’t know how to read English, and the last time I checked I believe I do know how to read English, the report from NBC News and other media which stated that Liberty University students could bring guns into their dorms is simply not true.  And if you want to double-check what I just said, you can download the LU gun policy here and pay particular attention to Section 3D.

Why?  Because even a student who holds a valid CCW license is prohibited from bringing a gun into a dormitory and there are no exceptions to this rule. And note one other issue about the LU guns-on-campus policy: it applies only to individuals who possess a CCW issued by the Commonwealth of Virginia, and no exceptions here either, including that phony state-reciprocity nonsense that scam websites all over the country advertise as being the next best thing to a national, CCW law.  The University doesn’t break down its on-campus enrollment on a state-by-state basis, but it does claim that its residential population represents all 50 states as well as 85 countries worldwide. Which means that under the ‘revised’ guns-on-campus policy, none of these students can bring a gun onto campus at all.

There’s one aspect of the policy that deserves mention.  Here’s the University’s official response to the following question:  What Should I Do If I Notice Someone Carrying a Weapon? “You are encouraged to call the University Police, give a description of the individual, and location. You may remain anonymous. A police officer will be dispatched to locate and contact the person to confirm that they are lawfully carrying the weapon.”  In other words, anyone who brings a gun onto the LU campus could, at any time, be challenged by the University police. Let me break it to you gently folks, this is hardly what the campus-carry gang has in mind.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that the Liberty University policy on campus guns is either enlightened or benign.  What I am saying is that we have someone running for President who is trying to gain an electoral advantage by taking the most extreme positions on guns that have ever been injected into a national election and, in the process, trying to make people believe that concealed-carry of guns is a new normal that needs to be invoked at every turn.

And that’s why Trump is the biggest menace to GVP of all time.

We Have 154 Days Until An Election That Will Make Or Break GVP.

Last week I sent out a message to the GVP community basically saying that: a) Trump was a menace to GVP; and b) that I felt that the entire GVP community needed to sit down and come up with an organized plan to defeat him that would involve everyone who wants to see an end to violence caused by guns.  I also said I would donate $1,000 to the favorite charity of the person who came up with the best campaign slogan that GVP could use to dump the Trump on November 8th.

          I just sent the donation to Everytown, and I did so because I believe that the hashtag campaign Everytown started when Trump was speaking at the NRA – #makeamericasafe again – really does hit the veritable nail right on the veritable head, at least when it comes to making it perfectly clear what this election is all about from a GVP point of view.

Because here’s the bottom line: either you believe that a gun in your pocket or on your night table makes you safer or you don’t.  And if you believe you are safer, you are buying an argument the gun industry has been making for the last 30 years without a shred of evidence to back it up.  Yea, there’s an anecdote here and there about how this person or that person defended themselves with a gun; I’m not saying it can’t be done.  But what about the anecdotes about the 300 people who get shot every day – intentionally and unintentionally – with guns?  And these aren’t just anecdotes, this is a fact.

This is the problem with how Gun Nation and its putative Presidential candidate deal with the issue of gun violence – long on stories, short on facts. And his stories have become nastier and increasingly rely on calls for violence from what is often a very receptive crowd.  People don’t come to Trump rallies because they agree with his stand on the issues – he hasn’t made even the slightest attempt to define his position on the issues except to lead his audience in a chant: Build The Wall. And now that the PGA has announced they are moving Trump’s Doral tournament to Mexico, let’s see if he will make good on his blustering, stupid demand that would force every PGA golf pro pay a 20% tax on what they win in that tournament when they go to re-enter the United States.

On the other hand, to Hillary’s credit, she has not only made GVP a centerpiece of her campaign, she’s willing to stake her success on an issue that has been, more than any, symbolic of Washington’s inability to get things done. And let’s not forget what the other side is saying, namely, that the country is in such bad shape because government doesn’t work.

I don’t really care whether Hillary has grabbed the GVP issue because it’s smart politics or not; how it positions her against Bernie is of no concern of mine.  Let’s get selfish for a minute and ask what her stance on gun violence does for the GVP, namely, it gives the GVP community a presence and a platform that it otherwise wouldn’t have.  Was Hillary wearing orange yesterday?

But in challenging Trump over the gun issue Hillary is also challenging the GVP.  Because guess what folks?  Beginning Tuesday there are exactly 154 days until November 8th.  And either the entire GVP community is going to come together, get it together, work together, vote together, or it’s not.  And this isn’t something, I hate to admit it, that the GVP community has done so well in the past.  We tend to move in our own little circles, we usually talk only to our own little group of friends.

So let’s just put all that aside and agree that from now until November 8th there’s one thing that needs to be done.  And we all know what that is – defeat Donald Trump.

 

 

Does Orange Make Hunters Safe? It Does If They Also Take A Safety Course.

So it’s halfway through #wearorange day and a quick perusal of the wearorange twitter site finds Hillary, Gloria Steinem, Tommy Chong, Spike Lee, Kim and more than 17,000 ‘likers’ getting behind President Obama to raise awareness about the violence caused by guns.  You can get a quick history of this movement on the #wearorange website, and while the color was chosen because it’s bright and draws attention, as a gun guy I wanted to think some more about how and why more than 40 states mandate the wearing of orange clothing when hunters go out in the field.

           Laws requiring hunter or what is often referred to as ‘blaze’ orange clothing to be worn are of fairly recent vintage, although the practice of putting on an orange vest or orange jacket before going into the fields or woods has been around for a long time.  Practically speaking, how much difference has it made in terms of safety since orange clothing was legally put into effect?  The best estimates are that the accident rate has dropped from 4 or 5 per 100,000 hunters to somewhere around .08.  In Texas, for example, there were 116 hunting accidents and 15 hunting-related deaths between 2010 and 2015; back in the 1980’s that was the average number for each year!  In Maine the yearly average of hunting accidents was around 37 per year in the 1970’s, this decade it is running 5 incidents per year.

Part of the reason for the decline in hunting accidents is also the fact that less people are hunting every year, a decline that started in the 1960’s as the country’s population became more concentrated in cities and suburbs and rural areas were left behind.  In 1970 Americans purchased 40 million hunting licenses, and even with a slight uptick the last several years, the annual number of licenses now sold is around 15 million or less. So it’s not the wearing of orange clothing that’s making hunters safer per se; it’s the fact that blaze orange is worn by less hunters which means, by definition, fewer accidents will take place.

But there’s another reason cited by experts as to why hunting has become safe, which happens to be the spread of hunter safety courses that are required before a first hunting license can be purchased and used for game or fowl.  Every single state requires some kind of hunter safety education, and by the way, in order to get a driver’s license you have to pass a brief driving test but you don’t have to present proof that you have taken a driver education course at all. Many states offer online hunter safety courses, others accept proof of a safety course taken in another state. But the bottom line is that if you want to go hunting anywhere in the United States besides your own back yard, you can’t do it unless you first have been educated on the laws and practices of hunter safety which means, by the way, safety laws and practices involving guns.

What’s most interesting about this universal safety education requirement, a requirement incidentally, that is mandated by government in every state, is that the NRA doesn’t seem to have a problem with these educational requirements at all.  Now you would think that the selfsame gun organization that blocks every attempt to mandate required safety courses for gun ownership would be consistent and try to undo safety courses that are imposed on anyone who wants to go out into the fields or woods with a gun.  After all, the whole point  of hunter safety instruction, the whole point of wearing orange, is the recognition that guns are extremely dangerous and nobody should be allowed to use them for hunting until they have been properly trained.

So would someone please explain to me how come it’s not dangerous to put a loaded pistol in your pocket and walk down the street?

 

 

What Can A Physician Do When A Patient Shows Up Carrying A Gun? In Some Places, Not Very Much

Can a physician make his office a gun-free zone?  That may seem like a question with an obvious answer but it’s not.  And the answer isn’t obvious because of a pending bill that would extend concealed-carry privileges on a reciprocal basis to all 50 states.  And the bill doesn’t carry an opt-out provision at the state level.  In other words, if I can carry a concealed weapon in my state of residence, I can basically carry it anywhere in the United States, even if the requirements for getting a concealed-carry license are different in my home state than in the state where I happen to be.

           I was drawn to this issue today because of an article published by a physician in who found herself confronted in her practice by a patient carrying a gun. Actually, he was carrying two handguns, both loaded, which he took off in order to be given an EKG.  And the existence of the guns didn’t particularly concern Dr. Becher per se, because she practices in West Virginia where, as she put it, everyone including herself owns guns. But she just didn’t feel comfortable around this guy and her discomfort became intense when he made a threatening remark about a subspecialist to whom Dr. Becher had referred him the previous week.

She then learned from contacting law enforcement that she could not prevent him from coming into her practice until and unless he was told to his face that he could show up with guns, even if there was a sign on the office door stating that the office was a gun-free zone.  She could send him a letter dismissing him as a patient but this still could not prevent him from simply walking through the front door.

The national concealed-carry reciprocity bill, which now has almost enough sponsors to guarantee that it will pass a House vote, actually makes Dr. Becher’s situation a national policy if it becomes law. Because the bill says that it does not ‘supersede or restrict’ any private property owner from denying access to their property by anyone carrying a gun.  But notice that in West Virginia the state law still requires a property-owner to confront the armed citizen face-to-face in order to maintain the property as a gun-free zone.

Now believe it or not, there actually are a few deranged individuals claiming to be physicians who believe that Dr. Becher and all physicians will be safer and more secure if they allow anyone and everyone to enter their practice carrying guns.  In fact, these fools actually take the position that physicians should encourage their patients to carry guns.  I am referring, of course, to the pathetic bunch known as Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership (DRGO) who have been parroting the NRA attacks against medicine since the AAP and other medical groups had the temerity, the unmitigated audacity to state the obvious, namely, that guns represent a health risk? How in God’s name could a quarter-ounce piece of lead that hits soft tissue faster than the speed of sound be a threat to good health? And yet on the same day that Dr. Becher raised her concerns about how to deal with the threatening patient carrying two weapons, an online medical blog that caters to a right-wing readership published a DRGO screed calling for doctors to avoid any discussion with patients about guns.

There are two problems here that need to be addressed.  First is the fact that physicians cannot act alone when it comes to protecting themselves and their patients from gun violence – they need help from law enforcement, from the public, and most of all, from reasonable and responsible politicians who draft and enact laws.  Second is the fact that the sponsors of the national CCW-reciprocity bill aren’t behaving responsibly at all.  They may believe they are making it easier for citizens to protect themselves, but what they are really doing is creating risk. Which has to stop – now.

What To Know Why Trump Has To Be Stopped? Here’s Why.

On July 22, 2011, a home-grown Norwegian terrorist, Anders Breivik, shot and killed 69 people at a labor union retreat on the island of Utoya, having earlier that day killed 8 people by detonating a homemade bomb in downtown Oslo. The attack sent shockwaves through Norwegian society, especially when the first group of court-appointed psychiatrists declared Breivik mentally unfit to stand trial.  A second team of doctors then re-examined the prisoner, found him fully cognizant of what he had done, and the ensuing trial resulted in a guilty verdict and loss of liberty for the next twenty years.

           The conflicting medical opinions about Breivik inaugurated a heated debate in medical circles about the adequacy of psychiatric diagnoses in criminal cases which is still going on.  The most recent contributions appeared in March and raised once again the issue of whether Breivik was truly crazy or not.  And what I mean by ‘crazy’ was whether his decision to plan and execute the killings of more than 75 people was based on a rational series of decisions which he could have controlled.

As everyone is aware, the line between how well people understand what brings them to commit the most fiendish and savage acts of violence is often very thin and may or may not really exist at all.  But in case you didn’t know it, the United States has a true expert in this area who happens to be an almost-candidate for President named Donald Trump. Because it was back in August, 2015, that Trump assured us that the killing of two media reporters in Virginia could not have been prevented because it was caused by too many ‘mentally ill’ people wandering around in the streets.

Now you might believe that Trump’s incisive analysis of the connection between mental illness and gun violence is based on his thorough knowledge and profound understanding of something that the entire medical profession still hasn’t figured out.  But I’m going to let you in on a little secret: The real reason that Donald Trump is able to speak with such assurance and readiness about gun violence and mental illness is that he exhibits many of the self-same mental traits that both psychiatric teams observed when they examined the man who holds the record for shooting the most people in a single place.

Incidentally, I have not only read the forensic reports on Breivik, as well as the peer-reviewed studies that have subsequently appeared.  I have also read the 1,500-page prolegomenon explaining his political philosophy that Breivik sent to 700 people with whom he connected through his Facebook page. And there are aspects of his political philosophy and historical analysis that also parallel things that Trump has said. Stay tuned – that’s a subject for a separate blog.

The clinicians who evaluated Breivik agreed that he exhibited ‘pathological grandiosity.’  They also found that he had a ‘severe narcissistic personality disorder’ combined with ‘pathological lying.’  Are persons suffering from these disorders delusional?  No.  Are they able to distinguish between ‘right’ and ‘wrong?’  In most instances yes, but what drives them to commit their violent acts is the absolute conviction that their ideas and their state of mind must be defended at all times.

Now let’s take a dispassionate view of the behavior of one Donald Trump. Is he pathologically grandiose?  Is New York a city?  Is he severely narcissistic?  Have you ever seen another politician who spends so much time talking about himself? Is he a pathological liar? I mean, give me a break. And when was the last time Trump was caught defending his ideas in angry and aggressive ways?  The last time he opened his mouth.

This is a guy who bragged that he could test the loyalty of his supporters by shooting someone dead in the street.  What would drive Trump to conjure up the image of gun violence during a political campaign? The same demons that swirled inside Anders Breivik’s head.

Okay GVP – don’t forget what you have to do November 8th.

If The GVP Doesn’t Come Up With A Good Campaign Slogan, The NRA Will Come Up With One For Trump.

If you haven’t yet figured it out, let me break it to you gently:  I am going to do whatever I can do – energy-wise, financially-wise, every other way-wise – to keep that creep Trump out of the Oval Office in 2017.  The reason I am doing this is because Trump the Creep is basing his entire campaign on the idea that personal, face-to-face violence is a positive and acceptable way to conduct human affairs.  And I don’t agree.

            What this decision means, practically speaking, is that I am going to appeal to the one constituency that I know best, the GVP community, and I am going to continue to tell this community that Trump is a threat and a menace to the spread of GVP, and that I hope and expect that everyone in GVP-land will walk alongside me for the next five months.

Yesterday I wrote a blog in which I pointed out what would happen if there was a President Trump in 2017. There would be a national CCW, no chance of CDC gun research, relaxation of all gun regulations, we all know the score.  But what I didn’t point out would be the worst result of a Trump victory, namely, that the GVP light which has been shining brighter and brighter since the terrible day at Sandy Hook would probably diminish or flicker out.  Yea, yea, I know – there’s nothing like adversity to spur advocacy demands.  But if you truly believe that GVP would have been just as strong with a Romney in the White House, you are lolling around in a self-made field of dreams.

So here is what I am going to do, in addition to continuing my writing about Trump and his crazy ideas (I have a wonderful, upcoming analysis of what his narcissistic personality means to GVP.)  I am going to first start by challenging the entire GVP movement to come up with a slogan that everyone can use to express the importance of electing someone other than Trump.  And the reason I want to start by building a slogan is that it occurred to me yesterday, Veteran’s Day, that when it comes to slogans, we simply don’t match up to the other side. Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People; The Only Thing That Stops A Bad Guy With A Gun Is A Good Guy With A Gun; The Second Amendment – America’s First Freedom.”  Want a few more?

Now in fact, these slogans happen to be lies.  There’s simply not an ounce of truth to any one of them or, for that matter, any of the other arguments that Gun Nation uses to avoid taking any responsibility for the 30,000+ Americans whose lives are ended each year because of guns.  Guns make you safe? That’s a lie.  Lots of Moms ‘getting into’ guns?  A lie.  Background checks violate gun ‘rights?’ Lie.

Yesterday I happened to pass a billboard which carries the following slogan every Veteran’s Day:  All Gave Some, Some Gave All.  It was used by Billy Ray Cyrus in a hit record back in 1992 although I’m not sure that it can be originally credited to him.  But it’s a wonderful slogan to describe military service because it’s short, it’s nifty, and it’s true.  I was lucky, I only gave up a brief period of time.  Two of my school classmates lost their lives.

We need a slogan to push out to everyone and anyone with whom we have had the slightest bit of contact regarding GVP. And we need to figure out how to make sure that the slogan appears in every possible medium that might be seen by anyone for whom gun violence is a lightning-rod issue in the 2016 campaign.  I’ll figure out the logistics of all this over the next couple of days but RIGHT NOW I will donate $1,000 bucks to the favorite charity of the person whose slogan we choose.  And note – I just said WE, not me.

 

Want To Know What Katie Left Out Of Her Film? Read It Here (With Some Additional Comments By You-Know-Who.)

No doubt on the advice of some lawyers or a studio bigshot, Katie Couric has once again felt compelled to apologize for rubbing out some brilliant and incisive comments from a bunch of gun owners that otherwise would have made her Under the Gun documentary and much more balanced, hence valid discussion about guns. But this time, just to make sure we realize the value and intelligence of what ended up on the cutting-room floor, Katie also appended the actual text of what these gun-owning pundits had to say.  So to make sure that everyone believes that I am concerned about truth and honesty on both sides (which I’m not, by the way,) I am going to reproduce the exact text of what the VCDL focus group said to Katie, with a brief response from me.  Here we go.

           Katie:   If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorists from walking into, say a licensed gun dealer and purchasing a gun?

Response #1: “Well, one, if you’re not in jail then you should still have your basic rights and you should go buy a gun.  If you’re a felon and you’ve done your time, you should have your rights.”

Mike the Gun Guy:  So now we have the latest twist on the ‘2nd Amendment gives me the right to own a gun’ nonsense, namely, that we don’t need background checks because, after all, if someone is a felon but has done their time, they should be able to pass a background check and own a gun.

Response #2: “What we’re really asking about is a question of prior restraint. How can we prevent future crime by identifying bad guys before they do anything bad? And, the simple answer is you can’t. And, particularly, under the legal system we have in the United States there are a lot of Supreme Court opinions that say, ‘No, prior restraint is something that the government does not have the authority to do.’ Until there is an overt act that allows us to say, ‘That’s a bad guy,’ then you can’t punish him.”

Mike The Gun Guy: And this windbag, by the way, was identified as an attorney and what he’s saying, of course, is that it doesn’t matter if you tell your ex-wife that she’s getting on your nerves, until you actually threaten to kill her, you can walk around with your gun.

Response #3: “I’ll ask you what crime or what law has ever stopped a crime? Tell me one law that has ever stopped a crime from happening.”

Mike The Gun Guy: Which is why we don’t need a law that compels us to pay our income tax on April 15th.  Because without such a law, we would all voluntarily pay our taxes anyway, right?

So that’s what you missed because Katie and Stephanie edited their film.  And by the way, these are the same folks who will lecture you at the drop of a hat about all their Constitutional ‘rights.’  And just in case you didn’t know it, the 2nd Amendment is what ‘guarantees’ all the other Constitutional rights.

I continue to find myself wholly unable to understand how people can walk around believing that such utterly, nonsensical drivel can be considered as worth even mentioning in a serious discussion about violence caused by guns.  Oops, there I go again, putting forth my own drivel because since when did anyone actually prove a connection between violence and guns?

Remember, it’s not the guns that are violent, it’s the people.  And in case you doubt that for one moment, the NRA has been saying it again and again for the last fifty years so it must be true. And if you don’t believe the NRA, then the least you can do is respect people like the group interviewed by Katie because, for sure, they are committed to a serious and thoughtful exchange of ideas.  And I’m committed to buying another gun.

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Trump Spells Danger For The GVP And That’s Not Up For Debate.

Every morning I receive an email from Chris Cox, warning me about the Armageddon facing gun owners if Hillary is elected. He also asks for dough.  When I say ‘every morning’ I mean every morning, okay? Of course the truth is that Hillary has absolutely no intention of taking away all the guns because even if she wanted to, she can’t. There’s something out there called the 2nd Amendment and running a few diplomatic emails through a private server is one thing, violating the Constitution is something else.

           Does it bother me that the increasingly shrill appeals for money by the NRA contain statements that simply aren’t true? Not really. After all, when you’re selling something that people don’t need, you do what you gotta do.  What does bother me is the degree to which NRA emails and messaging aren’t matched by the other side. And you would think that since the Gun Violence Prevention movement (or what we call ‘GVP’) finally has someone running for President who is talking loudly and continuously about the need to end gun violence, this would be enough of a reason to ramp things up and start responding to the NRA in kind. But I received no less than four emails today from national and state-level GVP groups and none of them mentioned the election at all.

I’m going to take a page from the NRA communications playbook and tell you what will happen if the Hill stays Republican and a certain New York City landlord is sitting in the Oval Office in 2017.  And this list isn’t based on some delusional fantasy that the NRA creates again and again to keep its members all riled up.  These things will happen and the only reason they haven’t happened yet is because there’s a guy named Obama still hanging around. Ready?

 

A national, 50-state concealed-carry license will be law of the land;
The ATF will no longer be able to prevent surplus military weapons from being imported from overseas;
The ban on CDC-funded gun research will be made permanent rather than having to be voted as a budget amendment every year;
Obama’s attempt to kick-start “smart gun” research will be dead before it arrives.

 

Leaving aside these specific issues for a moment, a Trump win in November foreshadows a much deeper and more profound problem for Team GVP, namely, the fact that he has openly embraced a culture of violence which will only strengthen the notion that we should all be walking around with guns. When Trump tells a rally that he’d like to punch a protestor in the face, when he says that his supporters would follow him even if he shot someone dead in the street, he’s not just pandering to the basest and most fearsome emotions we all sometimes feel; he’s telling America that violence is an approved way for individuals to interact.  And what’s the most efficient way to express violence? A gun.

Talking about using a gun, we now have a Presidential candidate who is willing to make gun violence a focal point of her campaign.  And yet for reasons that I don’t understand, my friends in GVP-land seem unwilling or unable to sit down and come up with an organized plan that will begin to focus everyone’s attention and energies on the task that lies ahead. And the task is very simply – Trump has to be stopped.  And I don’t think that such a discussion and such planning involving all the GVP constituencies has to wait until the Democratic primary campaign comes to an end.

Because the truth is that whether it’s Hillary or Bernie, the opposition and the threat isn’t going to change. So getting everyone together, sharing resources, reaching out to every last person who has ever expressed the slightest interest in any kind of GVP activity is something that should start today.  Not tomorrow – today.  And don’t think that you won’t hear this from me again.