There are about 270 million guns in America today. About 46 million of them can be used to wipe out a classroom of kids in under a minute. Because neither gun registration nor weapon training is mandatory, we don’t know which of those guns are in the hands of people with a violent history or which gun owners know how to safely use their weapons.
During the first decade of the new millennium, there were more than 140,000 homicides in America. More than half were shootings. There were more suicides than homicides each year and about half of those were committed with a gun. As the slogan says, guns didn’t, by themselves, kill those folks. But people with guns very definitely did.
The 1981 shooting that sent a bullet into President Reagan’s chest and another into Press Secretary Brady’s brain inspired the Brady Law. That’s the law that mandates background checks for gun purchases from licensed gun dealers — “private” sales are exempt from background checks. NRA-funded opposition stalled the law’s passage for more than 10 years. Although NRA-funded lawsuits weakened the law after it was passed, about 70,000 felons and fugitives from justice were prevented from buying a gun in 2007 alone.
The NRA’s message to senators and congressmen continues to be, “Don’t get between us and our weapons or you’ll never get elected again.” After the recent Connecticut disaster, NRA President David Keene added to that message. He wants to prevent similar tragedies with armed guards. And not just in schools. He wants to make America safe and free by turning it into an armed camp. Mr. Keene, it doesn’t work that way. The “War to End All Wars” didn’t. “Good guys with guns” won’t end all massacres. It wasn’t a good guy pointing a gun who immobilized the Tucson shooter in 2011.
While refusing to acknowledge the role played by easy access to lethal force, Keene blames violent media and mental health system failures for the tragedy. So let’s tell the NRA to put their money where David Keene’s mouth is. Keene says that deficiencies in our mental health systems cause murders. It does seem likely that if we were able to accurately identify folks who are very likely to be violent and to safely and responsibly divert them from violent behavior, we’d see fewer homicides and suicides. So instead of bribing candidates to vote against gun control laws to the tune of at least $2 million per year, the NRA can fix aSecond Amendment rights are no different from other rights — they come with responsibilities. Both speech and bearing arms are covered by the Bill of Rights. Even speakers, less lethal than shooters, are expected to be responsible.
When they aren’t and their speech becomes dangerous to the public, that speech can also become illegal — yelling “Fire!” when you know there is none comes to mind. When someone who poses a threat to their own safety or that of the public acquires a gun, that transaction demonstrates irresponsibility on the part of the gun’s recipient and sometimes the provider.
We need to have a conversation about insisting that all gun owners and gun sellers accept the responsibilities that come with their rights: learning how to safely use and care for weapons; preventing weapons from being stolen; and keeping weapons out of the hands of young children, of seriously depressed people and people with a history of violence. David Keene doesn’t want to participate in that conversation. That’s too bad. I have a hunch that many NRA members could make valuable contributions
With or without NRA money, we will continue to learn more about brain disease. While we’re doing that, public safety demands that we all accept our responsibilities. National mandatory gun registration, weapons training and background checks for all gun acquisitions will go a long way toward making that happen. That plan doesn’t remove the right to bear arms. It does protect other important rights: the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” problem identified by their leader: they can write an annual $2 million check to the National Institutes of Mental Health to fund research with two goals:learn how brains become so disordered that they direct people to take their own lives and the lives of others and learn how to short circuit that process.
Today, most people suffer under globalistic slavery: either wage slavery or physical, chattel slavery. There are currently more than 27 million people physically enslaved as chattel. 1 Approximately 95% of the 6.4 billion persons now living suffer under wage slavery at one time in their lives: 6.175 billion.
Note carefully your feelings when you read the word slavery, as though it couldn't possibly be that people are literally slaves today--slavery seems like an outmoded form of life from previous centuries. Whatever we feel, slavery is very much a fact of life for most people in the world today. A person is a slave if he has lost control over his life and is dominated by someone or something--whether he is aware of this or not. Wage slavery is the condition in which a person must sell his or her labor-power, submitting to the authority of an employer, in order to merely subsist.
At present we are suffering from the seizure of all branches of American government by a demonic cabal and its Obama puppet regime. Bush II was put into power with the connivance of the criminal acts of his brother Jeb in Florida and the coup d'etat perpetrated by the reactionary Supreme Court appointing Bush president in 2000. Under the cabal puppets such as Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama, America has become an imperialistic, militaristic banana republic.
The ravages of wage slavery are becoming clear for all Americans to see and feel. We either overthrow this new slavery or we will end up chattel slaves to a new capitalist class of criminal thugs. To help us re-establish our Constitutional freedoms, we must establish equitable economic principles. We can begin by working for the realization of the Second Bill of Rights as presented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his State of the Union Address in January, 1944.
During his State of the Union Address, Roosevelt declared that the nation had come to recognize, and should now implement, a second bill of rights. Roosevelt did not argue for any change to the United States Constitution; he believed that the second bill of rights should be implemented politically, not by federal judges. Roosevelt's stated justification was that the "political rights" granted by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights had "proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness." Roosevelt's remedy was to create an "economic bill of rights" which would guarantee.
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