Tag: gun control

Had enough massacres yet?

Posted on by kathiemm
People at the Pearly Gates, noting NRA doesn’t allow for gun violence research. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Jmaaks.

First of all, perhaps we should stop harping on “gun control.” The hard-core right-wing NRA devotees will never stop fighting all kinds of control. That’s a dirty word to millions. It’s in their bible: “Don’t you dare try to control me you weak-kneed, government-pandering, lily-livered mother-lovers.”

It just doesn’t matter to them how many children are accidentally shot by their parents or each other  or wives by their husbands, or even …. men and women by their dogs.

Accidents happen, they pontificate.

What is important to these don’t-try-to-control-me-my-gun-is-my-life devotees is their freedom—their freedom to bully, to threaten, and to “defend” themselves against all the threats, known and unknown, that seem to lurk everywhere. You know, the freedom they are sacrificing every time they let some smooth-talking, race-baiting, fear-promoting tyrant tell them whom to fear and whom to hate, and what to do to feel better.

If we want to get real freedom from fear and danger, maybe we can start with an alternative term for “gun control.”

“Gun reform” probably appeals to a lot of progressives, but “reform” is sure to sound leftish to the hard-lined be-ready-to-kill-anybody-if-they-look-at-you-wrong advocates.   Not to mention its association with schools for delinquents.

Maybe we should talk about “gun sanity.” Maybe a gun sanity movement can remind people that nobody is perfect, that even gun-lovers who advocate gun-safety can end up accidentally shooting themselves.

Better yet, how about “gun sense”? or “gunsense”? Sounds like a no-nonsense expression, linked to commonsense, which should appeal to everyone.

And, actually, there is a grassroots gun sense movement emerging within several states, including Texas , Georgia , and Vermont , a movement that may succeed in promoting sanity at local levels while the U.S. government waffles under the control of the NRA.

Plus there are a whole lot of moms around the country demanding action against gun violence and who can argue against the power of moms?

For those who believe the nay-sayers claiming that you can’t legislate morality or even do anything to reduce violence, check out this study And this one

and think about what you can do to promote sanity, commonsense, and gunsense.

 

GUN CONTROL

Posted on by kathiemm

By Guest Author Tom Greening

March on Washington for Gun Control January 26, 2013.
Image by Slowking4 and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Our nation is awash in blood,

our violence become a flood.

I want to praise, applaud, extoll

attempts to have more gun control.

Those guns are getting out of hand,

so for our safety let’s demand

they all be made to comprehend

their rancor toward us now must end.

Another thing we ought to do:

Control those mad gun owners too.

Tom Greening was educated at Yale, the University of Vienna, and the University of Michigan. He has been a psychologist in private practice for over 50 years, and is a retired professor from Saybrook University, UCLA, and Pepperdine. He was Editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology for 35 years. He is a Fellow of five divisions of the American Psychological Association and Poet Laureate of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry.

The first American gun control law: the Second Amendment

Posted on by kathiemm

Second AmendmentThe arms manufacturers and the NRA lobbyists have it all backwards. The Second Amendment was not created to guarantee an individual right to bear and use arms for whatever purposes desired. Instead, the Amendment can be considered the nation’s first national gun control law, designed to keep arms out of the hands of insurrectionists.

The Second Amendment’s national gun control effort was preceded by state gun control laws. For example, in the 1750s, Georgia statutes required slave patrol militias to make monthly searches of “all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition,” that is, to keep guns out of the hands of slaves.

Although James Madison’s original wording of the Second Amendment stressed the importance of “a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country,” the word “country” was replaced by “state,” in order to win the approval of Virginia and other slave-owning states for the new Constitution.

In its final wording–“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”)–the Second Amendment:

  • Granted the federal government the right to use armed militias to protect the security of the new nation, and
  • Left untouched the state right to use militias to prevent slaves from obtaining and using weapons.

To learn more, read this article or watch this powerful interview with Thom Hartman.

For more than 100 years, the judgments of state and federal courts as well as the United States Supreme Court held sway: the Second Amendment did not guarantee an individual’s right to buy and use guns outside the context of a state-controlled militia.

Then as recently as 1977, at a meeting of the National Rifle Association, a concerted effort was undertaken by ultraconservatives to sell the country on a reframed version of the Second Amendment establishing those rights.

The arms industry has now gained control over enough of the government to usurp arms control, undermining the democratic processes by which ordinary citizens seek to reinstate reasonable restrictions on weapons sales.

So ask yourself, do you want arms manufacturers rewriting our history and our Constitution, especially when their lobbying has contributed to the U.S. having the world’s highest gun fatality rate?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Home to a safer land?

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Dr. Mike Corgan

We have now passed the 2,000th U.S. fatality in Afghanistan, but that war is winding down and we are bringing the troops home to a safer environment.

Or so we are supposed to think.

Rifle range
Photo by Camp Minsi-BSA, used under CC Attribution-Share Alike Unported 3.0 license.

The U.S. today is seeing a huge spike in gun sales stoked by fear of mass shooters and the possibility of more restrictive gun laws. The NRA has never been more active.

I was an NRA member when I was young. Boy Scout camp offered target shooting and I was proud of the skills that earned me “Expert Rifleman” qualification, so I stayed with the NRA after scouting.

But the era that responded to urbanization and loss of outdoor skills by spawning the NRA–and, for that matter, the Boy Scouts–has long passed.

Now the NRA is more about our rights to carry concealed handguns and to stockpile military-style weapons than it is about target shooting and hunting. It’s all about power politics and gun laws.

One of the so-called “third rail” issues that politicians dare not address head-on is gun control. A federal law restricting assault rifles has lapsed, and background checks on would-be owners vary widely. This year neither presidential candidate will go near the issue except to reaffirm that they will do nothing.

In a recent interview a mother maintained that she was teaching her teenage son and daughter how to use pistols and was planning to buy them each one “so they wouldn’t have to go into a theater unarmed.”

Can you imagine the chaos in that Colorado theater if members of the audience had had pistols? And then a gunman, dressed like a police SWAT team member, had started shooting? And the larger-than-life screen and blaring soundtrack had been filled with shootings and the sounds of shooting? Who would fire at whom?

Yes, we are bringing troops home from two of our longest wars. But are they coming home to a safer land?

Michael T. Corgan, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of International Relations, Boston University