Get Your Dance On, Congress!

This is a terrific video done by teenagers.  If you thought they don't care about what's happening in their country, think again!  And, Congress, some of these kids are already old enough to vote - and the rest will be soon.  Pay attention.

Do I Need a Gun?

Do I need a gun?  Do you?  I don't live in a dangerous neighborhood, but I do have two little children that are in my home about 9 hours a day.  I don't hunt.  I don't enjoy target shooting as a hobby.  I am not afraid that the government is going to come take all our guns (if we have them) and round us all up and put us in camps.  And I have seen "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."  I know what 2 against 300 looks like - and it's not pretty.  I don't need a gun. 

I don't think Adam Lanza's mother needed those guns she had in her house.  If she was an avid target shooter, she could have stored the guns outside her home.  If she had not had those guns, she might still be alive and perhaps all those who died in Newtown a year ago might still be with us.  And Adam might have been able to get the help he most desperately needed.

Who Needs a Gun?
By GARY GUTTING
writing for The Stone
Published by the NY Times, Wednesday, December 11, 2013

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

In September, Navy Yard; in November, a racially fraught shooting in Michigan and a proposed “stand-your-ground law” in Ohio; now the first anniversary of the Newtown massacre — there’s no avoiding the brutal reality of guns in America. Once again, we feel the need to say something, but we know the old arguments will get us nowhere. What’s the point of another impassioned plea or a new subtlety of constitutional law or further complex analyses of statistical data?

Even when a gun makes sense in principle as a means of self-defense, it may do more harm than good.
Our discussions typically start from the right to own a gun, go on to ask how, if at all, that right should be limited, and wind up with intractable disputes about the balance between the right and the harm that can come from exercising it. I suggest that we could make more progress if each of us asked a more direct and personal question: Should I own a gun?

A gun is a tool, and we choose tools based on their function. The primary function of a gun is to kill or injure people or animals. In the case of people, the only reason I might have to shoot them — or threaten to do so — is that they are immediately threatening serious harm. So a first question about owning a gun is whether I’m likely to be in a position to need one to protect human life. A closely related question is whether, if I were in such a position, the gun would be available and I would be able to use it effectively.

Unless you live in (or frequent) dangerous neighborhoods or have family or friends likely to threaten you, it’s very unlikely that you’ll need a gun for self-defense. Further, counterbalancing any such need is the fact that guns are dangerous. If I have one loaded and readily accessible in an emergency (and what good is it if I don’t?), then there’s a non-negligible chance that it will lead to great harm. A gun at hand can easily push a family quarrel, a wave of depression or a child’s curiosity in a fatal direction.

Even when a gun makes sense in principle as a means of self-defense, it may do more harm than good if I’m not trained to use it well. I may panic and shoot a family member coming home late, fumble around and allow an unarmed burglar to take my gun, have a cleaning or loading accident. The N.R.A. rightly sets high standards for gun safety. If those unable or unwilling to meet these standards gave up their guns, there might well be a lot fewer gun owners.

Guns do have uses other than defense against attackers. There may, for example, still be a few people who actually need to hunt to feed their families. But most hunting now is recreational and does not require keeping weapons at home. Hunters and their families would be much safer if the guns and ammunition were securely stored away from their homes and available only to those with licenses during the appropriate season. Target shooting, likewise, does not require keeping guns at home.

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Finally, there’s the idea that citizens need guns so they can, if need be, oppose the force of a repressive government. Those who think there are current (or likely future) government actions in this country that would require armed resistance are living a paranoid fantasy. The idea that armed American citizens could stand up to our military is beyond fantasy.

Once we balance the potential harms and goods, most of us — including many current gun owners — don’t have a good reason to keep guns in their homes. This conclusion follows quite apart from whether we have a right to own guns or what restrictions should be put on this right. Also, the conclusion derives from what makes sense for each of us as individuals and so doesn’t require support from contested interpretations of statistical data.

I entirely realize that this line of thought will not convince the most impassioned gun supporters, who see owning guns as fundamental to their way of life. But about 70 million Americans own guns and only about four million belong to the N.R.A., which must include a large number of the most impassioned. So there’s reason to think that many gun owners would be open to reconsidering the dangers their weapons pose. Also, almost 30 percent of gun owners don’t think that guns make a household safer, and only 48 percent cite protection (rather than hunting, target shooting, etc.) as their main reason for having a gun.

It’s one thing to be horrified at gun violence. It’s something else to see it as a meaningful threat to your own existence. Our periodic shock at mass shootings and gang wars has little effect on our gun culture because most people don’t see guns as a particular threat to them. This is why opposition to gun violence has lacked the intense personal commitment of those who see guns as essential to their safety — or even their self-identity.

I’m not suggesting that opponents of gun violence abandon political action. We need to make it harder to buy guns (through background checks, waiting periods, etc.) both for those with criminal intentions and for law-abiding citizens who have no real need. But on the most basic level, much of our deadly violence occurs because we so often have guns readily available. Their mere presence makes suicide, domestic violence and accidents more likely. The fewer people with guns at hand, the less gun violence.

It’s easier to get people to see that they don’t want something than that they don’t have a right to it. Focusing on the need rather than the right to own a gun, many may well conclude that for them a gun is more a danger than a protection. Those fewer guns will make for a safer country.

What Country Am I Living In?

Above image was taken from Google Images, but appeared in the December, 2013 issue of Guns & Ammo.

Hard to know how many people read about this in the paper, or heard about it on the news, but I was appalled when I read this story.  I understand that the magazine Guns & Ammo is owned by InterMedia Outdoors and they have control over what's published in their publications.  But firing employees like Dick Metcalf and Jim Bequette because of suggesting that there may be some common ground for gun advocates and gun control proponents is unconscionable.  Is this the old Russia where no dissident speech can be tolerated?

Dick Metcalf is an example to all Americans.  Stand up for what you believe.  Put your job on the line when you are faced with an issue so important that, literally, lives are at stake.  Hey!  Maybe elect Dick Metcalf to Congress!

Here's Joe Nocera's blog post about the Guns & Ammo-gate.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

When a Gun Advocate Dissents

By JOE NOCERA

Published: November 8, 2013 in NY Times

It’s not as if Dick Metcalf was some kind of gun control fanatic.

On the contrary, he’s a gun guy through and through, such an unyielding defender of the Second Amendment that last year he led the charge to push through a law giving the residents of Pike County, Ill., where he lives, the right to carry concealed guns without a permit. He called the practice “constitutional carry” rather than “concealed carry.”

In the early 1980s, he and a handful of friends started a successful gun club, called the Pike Adams Sportsmen’s Alliance, which is located on Metcalf’s farm in Barry, Ill. A few years later, he played an important role in lobbying for the federal Firearm Owners Protection Act, which loosened many of the gun restrictions that had become law after the assassination of Robert Kennedy. A friend of his told me that Metcalf had even written some of the language in the bill.

Mostly, though, Metcalf, 67, was known as a writer for magazines owned by InterMedia Outdoors, a publisher of gun periodicals that include the industry bible, Guns & Ammo. He did videos on subjects like “Guns for Family Home Defense” and wrote articles with headlines like“Smith & Wesson’s 12 Most Important Guns.”

It is perfectly understandable, then, that the gun world might be a little taken aback by Metcalf’s opinion piece in the December issue of Guns & Ammo calling for some modest gun regulation. “I firmly believe that all U.S. citizens have a right to keep and bear arms,” he wrote, “but I do not believe that they have a right to use them irresponsibly.” The article went on to call for mandatory training for gun owners. That’s all. Such limited regulation, he argued, did not constitute an infringement on anyone’s constitutional rights.

When people like me read an article like that, it seems momentarily possible that gun advocates and gun control advocates might be able to find some common ground. Much in the way that many gun control activists have come to accept the legitimacy of the Second Amendment — something that hasn’t always been the case — here was a man on the other side of the divide saying that some sensible regulation didn’t necessarily lead down a “slippery slope” to confiscation. If we are ever to have a sane gun policy, we desperately need people from both camps to meet somewhere in the middle.

But when people like me see the reaction from gun advocates to Metcalf’s tame proposal, it all seems hopeless again. Robert Farago, who maintains a blog called The Truth About Guns, started the ball rolling by linking to — and denouncing — Metcalf’s “diatribe.” He went on to describe the article as a “bone-headed, uninformed, patently obvious misinterpretation of the Second Amendment.” Other bloggers piled on. On the Guns & Ammo Facebook page, subscribers demanded Metcalf’s head, even as they canceled their subscriptions.

Finally, according to a blog post Metcalf wrote, two major gun manufacturers told InterMedia Outdoors that they would pull all their advertising if something wasn’t done. That’s all it took. Within 24 hours, Metcalf was permanently banned from the company’s publications. And the longtime editor of Guns & Ammo, Jim Bequette, who was planning to retire at the end of the year, was pushed out as well.

Before departing, however, Bequette wrote a groveling apology, which ran on the magazine’s website. He described his decision to publish Metcalf’s article as “a mistake” and took pains to remind readers that Guns & Ammo had always been the hardest of hard-liners. “It is no accident that when others in the gun culture counseled compromise in the past, hard-core thinkers...found a place and a voice in these pages,” he wrote. With that, capitulation was complete.

If you want to understand why so few gun owners are willing to stand up to the National Rifle Association, even though the majority disagree with the N.R.A.’s most extreme positions, here was a vivid example. Straying from the party line leads to vilification and condemnation that would give anybody pause.

My guess is that Dick Metcalf always knew what he was in for — all the more reason writing his article took guts. In the aftermath, he was the only one who could still hold his head up high. On a blog called The Outdoor Wire, he wrote a lengthy response to his critics. He didn’t back down one iota. Describing himself as “disappointed” at the reaction to his article, he added, “If a respected editor can be forced to resign and a controversial writer’s voice be shut down by a one-sided social-media and Internet outcry, virtually overnight, simply because they dared to open a discussion or ask questions about a politically sensitive issue...then I fear for the future of our industry, and for our Cause.”

Maybe there’s hope yet.

Colorado Recall Doesn't Change the Law

EDITORIAL

Hard Lessons of the Colorado Recall

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: September 11, 2013

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The Colorado Legislature showed good sense when it voted in March to require universal background checks in the sale of firearms and limits on magazine clips to 15 rounds.

Related

• Colorado Lawmakers Ousted in Recall Vote Over Gun Law(September 11, 2013)

Today's Editorials

• Editorial: Diplomacy as Deterrent(September 12, 2013)

• Editorial: More Mistakes at the N.S.A. (September 12, 2013)

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For Op-Ed, follow@nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow@andyrNYT.

On Tuesday, two state senators who supported the gun control laws lost recall votes in two small districts in Colorado. Their ousters were a disgraceful low point in punitive single-issue politicking by the gun lobby.

The two lawmakers — the Senate president, John Morse, and Senator Angela Giron — are exemplary models of responsible public service. As members of a resolute Democratic statehouse majority, the two showed more political courage in facing up to the gun mayhem afflicting the nation than the Congress did in April in its shameful retreat from tightening gun laws that allow tens of thousands of deaths each year.

The recalled lawmakers knew the gun lobby would pounce on their votes, but they stood up for the badly needed laws that Congress ducked. Mr. Morse, a former police chief, helped lead the charge against the battlefield-styled weapons used in the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., and in Colorado’s own carnage last year at the Aurora movie theater.

The act of the Legislature and Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, represents an important transition in Colorado, long considered a bastion of rural gun rights. Urban interests and their politicians are more willing to push for sane gun controls; the background check law was supported by 80 percent of state residents polled. The task of the recall proponents, however, was made easier by a controversial ruling against mail balloting, normally heavily relied on by state voters.

The gun lobby is congratulating itself on this vote, aiming to use the recall as the ultimate warning against politicians who might abandon timorousness in the gun control debate. In truth, the recall fight showed that something sensible and stirring could emerge among politicians, at least in Colorado, even if two worthy incumbents were sacrificed. The state’s new laws survive, and Colorado residents are safer for them.

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Kudos to Obama

I am not a big fan of Presidents in general, believing that the Giant Amoeba we call the "U.S. Government" is where the power really is, but I have to give Obama credit for doing what he individually can to move our country from one with about the same number of homicides per year as Colombia and Russia, to one with laws more like other industrialized nations.  Without a big Special Report, the Obama administration quietly announced two new executive actions on gun control Thursday morning.

The first prevents those who are not eligible to purchase a gun (felons, for example) from registering firearms in a corporation's name.  Now, anyone associated with the corporation must undergo a background check.  Small progress, but I'll take it.

The second is a no-brainer.  It prevents anyone from bringing back into the U.S. military-grade weapons that have been given to U.S. allies (like the rebels in Syria).  We may not be able to protect Syrian citizens, but these guns won't be used to kill American kids.  

A majority of Americans are in favor of expanded background checks, and it will be interesting to see whether those in Congress who voted against any kind of sensible gun policy will be re-elected.

"The president's actions are definitely a good step toward keeping public attention that Congress hasn't acted yet," Hatalsky said. "They've done everything they can do without Congress, and the things that they can still do are pretty small."

She added that continuing incidents of gun violence also promise to keep the issue alive in the months to come, as Congress reconvenes.  The most recent, of course, being the teens who shot and killed the Australian baseball player. "With a motive that's both chilling and simple – to break up the boredom of an Oklahoma summer – three teenagers randomly targeted an Australian collegiate baseball player who was attending school in the U.S. and killed him for fun, prosecutors said Tuesday as they charged two of the boys with murder."