So arming teachers is the way forwards. Just as armed (and trained) “officers” who hesitated is (are?) “cowards”. Armed and trained “good guys” much more familiar with confronting armed “bad guys”. And because they hesitated they are cowards.
And because “Wayne, Chris, and the folks who work so hard at the @NRA are Great People and Great American Patriots.” The same Wayne who said “opportunists” were using the 14 February tragedy, in which 17 people were killed, to expand gun control and abolish US gun rights.
The convoluted logic on display – whose only purpose is to protect vested interests rather than lives – is your culture at its worst.
I guess that here in the UK we have – in percentage terms – as many angry young men as you, as many with “mental issues” as you. But you are alone in your repeated hand-wringing of inertia each time these needless tragedies take more young lives.
You are alone in having this inane “right” – written at a different time and in a different place – that has become inviolate and enshrined in a mental illness of “Fuck you, I have rights!”
Dear USA your paranoia keeps showing. Your cultural insecurities are on display again and again. Paranoia and insecurities? Any “background checks” would determine no enshrined absolutes at all when it comes to “good guy OR bad guy” guns. Any background check would determine you have no “Fuck you, I have rights” at all. The world stage on which you parade your paranoia and insecurities sees that for what it is.
And, in the case of a country whose culture also defines itself the global policeman of right and wrong … that might be classed as a country-wide mental illness on a planetary scale.
We want to love you. It’s just stuff like this means we are never sure when the FYIHR gets in the way of other “world stage stuff”. When this enshrined paranoia and insecurity will be your motivation for acting a certain way. When your “money talks”, your “no one looks after me, I look after me.” When your cocktail of so much weird stuff means you drag our country into stuff we should not be dragged into (but go along with because we have our own insecurities).
It’s just we don’t have the plethora of armed assault rifles and the FYIHR or the constitution that says it’s all ok. It’s just that if armed officers hesitate, then arming teachers is not the solution.
God bless America? Please remove your head from up your ass.
Thank you.
Paul
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Just me being curious 
Hi Paul,
Was having this conversationion on our interfaith bridge, but this is erudite, nothing like the cross nation,cross religious shuttering of ours. But I think we agreed, “Rights” my posterior
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“Rights” my posterior.”
Says it all, I think.
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Thanks for the British perspective. I am sure the rest of the world looks at this and says “What’s wrong with your country?”. I wonder that myself sometimes. This is a wild stage we are going through with all these shootings. On problem is that these shooters have not seen what happens to the shooter after they die. There is no fear of anything for these people. Those that do liver – their court cases drag on for years. Those that kill themselves, others don’t see the hell they have entered, nor do many believe in it. So they feel they can get away with murder.
As far as gun rights, I think the automatic weapons should be banned along with the ammo. Better background checks should be enacted. And current laws should be better enforced. It is obvious something needs to be done. Our politicians are a group of morons most of the time unfortunately!
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There is a thought that says we get the politicians we deserve.
My hope is that “we” find the will to force politicians to be the politicians we want.
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Unfortunately those who do not vote give us the Politicians they deserve
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🙂🙂
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What doesn’t appear in the history of the NRA is the frustration felt that even after a civil war and the vast experience of shooting collected by the US rifle teams could never match the Canadians and lost shooting competition after competition. Wiki makes it sound as if the rifle were to blame but the fact is that they lost same-weapon competition repeatedly against the Canadians.
Why?
The gun culture in Canada was ubiquitous. Almost every boy owned his own gun – certainly almost every family – or had fired one many times. It was an essential part of childhood for the largely rural population in Canada. In fact, academies like high schools and universities into the mid part of the last century – the 1960s – were built with shooting ranges and used as part of the physical education curriculum. Canadians were – and still are – world renowned for their very high degree of marksmanship and sniping. Yet we don’t find this hew and cry against gun control even though the previous population handled and shot them from an early age. That is what’s so strange about the US, whose northern population was so similar to the ‘southern’ Canadian (with families to this day living with a border between them): using rifles and learning how to shoot were not a part of the American culture of our more urbanized cousins! My father had a summer job shooting the heads off free range chickens, for example, and on many dates with my urban mother took her to the local dump to shoot rats and teach her to use the weapon against live targets. He later became a tail gunner with some success in WWII because shooting was considered part of a person’s nature.
The NRA attempted to address this discrepancy because shooting well it turns out – especially in war – is a rather important component. But it has morphed into this second amendment juggernaut divorced from reality. This was never the intent.
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tildeb, that is a take on this whole horror story I never knew. “This was never the intent.”
Yet the intent – as you describe concisely – does seem (from here as well) “divorced from reality.”
Thank you.
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You are dead right and too many are dead. We’ve got to get our heads out of our collective ass and figure this out.
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It is also bullshit that mental illness is the problem. The first problem are guns. Screw our 2nd amendment rights, we don’t need those damn guns. However, with over 300 million of them out there which are legal, and the others which are not, no law is going to help. The entire driving force behind this: is yep, you got it: MONEY. Those guns are expensive. I guess in American this is simply another good day to die. There are no rights: only dead people. and those who think they have a right for a grievance because they are spoiled brats.
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Tom, from this side of the Atlantic is seems that way too.
We visited your country some years ago. My lasting memory is of a “confused nation” I never expected to find. One wherein the certainty presented on the news media bore little relation to the reality of individuals’ daily lives. As always that impression is based on “trivial details” but cumulatively seemed to be the reality.
I found the discrepancy quite scary..
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My dear friend Paul… I can’t begin to tell you how disappointing it is to read such vitriol and pent-up resentment in these pages which are usually filled with love – but you are not the only one. This is a very difficult moment in time, when emotions run raw… and in which real solutions need to be found. Yet the greatest deterrent to an honest discussion comes from pure, mindless emotionalism from whatever point of view… and there are many. Each of these many points of view has truth on their side, each has its blind spots, too. This issue is more complicated than most Americans realize, and I’m guessing that from outside, that would be even harder to see.
We have tried the knee-jerk, let’s feel better reactions several times now, and where has that gotten us?
Nowhere.
I hope and pray that this time will be different, but I must tell you that one more voice of emotion and vitriol isn’t going to help the process along.
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Don, thank you for a thoughtful answer. And you are right, I think, love is always the answer – and in this post too. Perhaps just a little harder to see.
Love of those who died, and who will die. Love for those who grieve and will grieve. Love for those whose right to life is sacred but less sacred than the FYIHR.
This post was one I did not want to write. Yet it wrote itself as usual. I make no biblical parallels. No theological right or wrong. Love treats each as sacred. Yet I see the grief of those who are coping with death cynically manipulated. I see the emotive status quo for no change reeled out by those who see their FYIHR taking precedence over those coping with love cut short.
Love is the answer. And I don’t see that on display (again).
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Paul, I’m very sorry. I shouldn’t have posted this comment in public. You know I love you to death… but I can’t quite see the love in the post, so overwhelmed is it by the weight of the contmpt in which it is couched… Skype Monday? 🙂
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Hey Don, you can say anything you want anytime. Your thoughts always come with affection and respect. And we have talked in the past about posts that do a different job than intended. Skype Monday sounds good! 😎
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I feel pretty much the same way, except that I think our Constitution has been misinterpreted by the greed of the gun lobby. The actual ‘right to bear arms’ was just one part of a phrase with the rest of it conveniently omitted by the NRA and their cronies.
“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
This was designed to empower ‘the people” to rise up against tyranny from the government, in the way that King George imposed his say on the American colonies, without their having representation. This was long before our military became massive and encompassing. One Federally maintained military ship or one squadron could overcome a local State militia, were it to rise up in resistance to the Federal government. Thus, the absurdity of the Second Amendment that says individuals have rights to bear arms has been skewed to omit the “well-regulated Militia, being necessary to a free State.”
I would submit that your calling us out is very astute. We are the only country, other than third world dictator states, that has this kind of ‘routine’ slaughter.
But I would counter that, currently, most Americans disagree with the way that the legislatures have neglected their jobs in not imposing stricter laws of gun control.
This administration, which doesn’t represent the majority of the country (that includes the President, the Congress, and the Supreme Court) has been voted into office–not by the will of the people and not by honest elections), is deconstructing our democracy at every turn. The President’s first bill last year was to rescind the law preventing severely mentally ill people from getting access to guns.
The NRA gun lobby has had a stranglehold on politicians, but I am encouraged by a group of students from Parkland Florida, who survived this massacre, speaking out eloquently and with passion, that they are going after politicians who receive money from the NRA and they are going to make a difference in this year’s election.
As a fellow Christian, who has made too many mistakes in her life to EVER judge someone else, I make the exception when it comes to people who choose to put themselves into the public service. I expect more from those who serve.
But this President, with his white-supremacist leanings, his subservience to Russian oligarchs and Putin, his misogynistic, self-proclaimed assaulting of women, and one, who lies with such stunning regularity, sets himself up to be judged and he will find himself judged when fully exposed. I am amazed at those of the Evangelical right, who would not only tolerate but give praise to this vile example as someone to be esteemed. Most of them don’t hear the truth because they are limited to watching Fox News, which was designed to promulgate propaganda of the right.
After President Reagan vetoed the renewal of the Fairness Doctrine, which required ALL MEDIA to present ‘both sides’ of controversial arguments, the cable news rose and radio talk shows rose, who spewed falsehoods and vitriol at ‘the other side,’ so now it is a challenge that each American must take upon his/herself to become truly informed, instead of accepting the one side as gospel truth.
This American President has become a mockery both inside and out of the U.S., but until we can overcome the Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression by the GOP,–Pennsylvania has even division of registered Democrats and Republicans, but the Democrats have 5 representatives and the GOP (Grand Ole’ Party is the nickname for Republican) has 13, because of gerrymandered districts. Fortunately, the courts have ruled it illegal and have ordered a new set of fair and balanced boundaries before the next election. This is also happening in other states, too.
This is a long answer to show support of your view and to affirm that maybe, just maybe this next election–if not sabotaged by Russia as the 2016 election was, may turn things around.
Most of the Americans I know–both Republican and Democrat–find the direction this President is taking abhorrent.
So keep up the great writings. More Americans agree with you (if the polls are accurate–between 65-80%).
Blessings on your speaking up truth to power.
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Like.
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