What’s up with gun rights

What’s the NRA’s big attachment to assault weapons? Why do we have to suffer the weapons of mass murder?

One NRA member from Texas told an NPR reporter, “As far as I’m concerned, if you can afford to buy a tank, you should be able to buy a tank.” He explained: “the Second Amendment was put in not to hunt, not to go plink at cans, not to shoot at targets. If and when tyranny tries to take over our country, we can fight it.” NRA President Porter, too, wants people to be “ready to fight tyranny.” Porter, told an audience last June, when he was NRA vice-president, that “We got the pads put on, we got our helmets strapped on, we’re cinched up, we’re ready to fight, we’re out there fighting every day.”

We Will Not Comply

Did you hear the demonstrators against New York’s new gun law chanting in unison “We will not comply!”

That’s the problem. Guns allow some of their owners to think that they can define right and wrong and everybody else has to comply. In the hands of some of their owners, guns puff up their sense of self-importance, their sense that laws are written for everybody else but that they are above the law.

Back from a trip – English and guns

I just got back from a trip abroad. We were treated everywhere with the greatest respect while visiting our former exchange student and her family in Serbia and Montenegro, and then in Spain for a meeting, People were happy to help us. We had no Serbian (though I learned how to say “thank you”) and little Spanish (though I studied in high school it’s virtually gone), but they were happy to use whatever English they had. When we couldn’t communicate it was still all smiles. Somehow, only in this country do people believe that English is under fire and all traces of foreign languages should be eliminated, despite the foreign policy disaster if some Americans weren’t conversant with other national languages. Of course there is one place where English really is under fire and has been for decades – Quebec. But I’ve never heard any suggestion that we ban the Quebecois.

That’s what I intended to talk about. But the news here on my return has been overwhelming. Another senseless mass killing of people the murderer didn’t know, had no grudge against, one a six year old child.

Gun control – because it’s necessary and proper

If winning is the only thing, there is no democracy. If winning is by murder and intimidation, there is only Darfur, Iraq, the Congo, what was once Yugoslavia, and scores of other killing fields around the globe.

The Threat to American Democracy

I’m angry and I’m not going to mince words. I fear for our republic.

Most Americans have little awareness of the violence in our past. But murder has been a feature of American politics since the Civil War, often making elections meaningless. Mass slaughter of Republicans after the Civil War allowed Southern Democrats to retake the South, by eliminating and terrorizing the opposition. Even the U.S. Supreme Court chose to look aside and let the South have its new “peculiar institution,”: substituting a reign of terror for legal slavery.

What Will the Gun Rights Decision Do?

 Yesterday, the Supreme Court handed down its opinion that the Second Amendment applies to the states and protects individuals’ rights to own guns for self-defense. That decided, the Court sent the case back to the lower courts to work out the implications of that basic holding. As those “details” are worked out, however, the stakes are enormous.

Lessons from Machiavelli and Clausewitz for the US and Israel

The world, and some of our friends in the peace movement, has an enormous double standard directed against Israel. Palestinians attack and their attacks are coordinated and serve as the avatars of foreign governments. For more than half a century they have inflicted seemingly random and unpredictable death and destruction on Israeli civilians. Most of the world ignores the damage. The Israelis strike back and suddenly everything is wrong. As George Orwell pointed out the world would choose sides based on perceptions of race.

But history cares not at all about justice. History marches to the beat of the stronger. And if people’s perceptions of justice figure in who will be stronger, history ratifies their judgment, And by that standard, it is all over.

Sarah Palin’s Irresponsible Rhetoric

Following the vote on health care, Sarah Palin put 20 congressmen in gun sights on her Facebook page. And she followed that up with “Don’t Retreat, Instead RELOAD!” She is unapologetic. According to Palin, violent language is just a fact of American life, part and parcel of our sports talk. Just how should we take that?

The Dangerous Game of All or Nothing

When the Republicans filibustered government to a standstill in the 90s, they took the hit for it.

Don’t talk back to the cops

While we were away, President Obama was forced to claim that he had the greatest respect for the policeman who arrested Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates after the latter had established that he was in fact the owner of the home he was in. Although I have read the statements, I’m not going to try to look through the statements to try to figure out what really happened. But the situation brings up a very important issue that goes beyond the racial profiling claim and denial.