Friday, February 1, 2013

The Clock Is Ticking On The Dead End Of The Illegal Gun Debate?

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+ Trusted Police = Limited Lunacy?(CMF)
There are infinite reasons to protect everyone's right to bear arms and have the drop on bad guys, or even shoot a deer between the eyes. But as The New York Times revealed, concerning Wednesday's Capital Hill testimony, in Senate Hearing on Guns Suggests an Uphill Fight on New Limits, there's just so much to be made out of this emotional issue that there's no end to the animated posturing we should all recall has gone on ad nauseam since long before we were all born. Generations of hardly listening advocates accusing themselves of not having thought through gun control properly before.


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Time For Debate Beyond Cliché?(CMF)
When, at some point, so to speak, the gun team, and maybe even their lobbyists, probably generally agree, eventual laws could never actually stop this country's gun-loving citizens from carrying on their affairs. We don't have to actually remember Alcohol Prohibition to know over-controlling the public can be a wrong idea. But principles are at stake and the current legislative gun skirmish is not just about extra bullets, but sufficient fire power against opponents. While death happens every day as the result of an armed siege the country can't afford to survive with or without? 


But I don't want anyone's guns taken away. Nor does anyone with a political clue think that is a solution. Nor is blaming manufacturers, for crafting such fine products, worth bothering about. Except, in a sense, our extravagant cultivation of guns is similar to breeders breeding pets for profit when the country's animal shelters are packed with individuals needing homes. And pets, like guns, are only bad when people aim them wrong.  


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LOOPHOLES FOR SALE?(CMF)
Woefully, there just might not be an end to how far this gun issue can go. Because look how far the conversation has come? Yet the innocent still die such selfishly tragic ways. In our eccentric Old West of yore our myth is everyone used an equalizer, but when the sheriff had to enforce an element of social control, guns were turned in before you stepped up to the bar. This is a messy business trusting anyone with a gun. Because as every gun owner knows, the last person you need with a gun is an angry one. 


Maybe?
And that's it really. Society just has to control when people are loose in the head. Realizing guns used in criminal acts are confiscated, yet criminals never seem to run out of illegal guns, is, after a fashion, similar to immigration where there's probably nothing we'll ever be able to do about controlling the supply. Because, as with guns, in the end, what counts is not the quantity but the quality of the people and not our methods of numbering ourselves, or our guns. 


As the NRA's Mr. LaPierre essentially testified, enforcing existing laws and properly running the medical industrial complex has a better chance of perfecting the social system than interfering with peoples' choices in guns. Hasn't Congress something better to do than to keep sucking from this revenue stream? No probably not, it does pay the bills.

Yeah well, fact is, though, most every moment of the day, somewhere, someone can't be trusted with a gun. While our animated media age keeps us all painfully aware but numb to the constant dilemma of people ____ed-up on guns. So we're left with a wariness of paranoid enforcement, and an entanglement with our violently competitive cultural flaws.  

What would end this semi-conscious state of violent siege? Buy back? Is offering owners a million dollars per rapid-fire assault weapon going to solve their use in killings, even if they were all turned in? It's moot, of course, because that's not happening. The million dollars, or everyone turning their guns in. 
And so, it is us, not the guns themselves, and the difficulty is delusional people falling through the cracks feeling a weapon grants them the minute satisfaction of some remote revenge. Is it possible to even weigh and balance what everyone's interests are? What would be better anyway, a world where there were no guns or where everyone had one? Obviously this world where everyone can, if they're dead-set on having one, isn't the best of all possible worlds. No? Just please don't point them at me, please?
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MAYOR ED KOCH

Waking to the radio alarm clock, the first thing we heard this morning was Mayor Edward I. Koch died earlier at 2 AM in the hospital at age, 88. And already repeated, in an assortment of fashions, is it was thought the mayor was too stubborn to die. Despite the radio clip of him saying it was alright with him when his time came. 

None the less the public was told when he was released and readmitted to the hospital. So this was probably an instance when he was allowed to go home and say goodbye to where he lived. Then the mayor is quoted telling his publicist he was tired the last time he was carted to what doubtlessly, for him, had become endless procedures. He went home so he could then go about his business of dying in the hospital. Quite possibly, everything went as planned.

In the documentary, Fifth, Park and Madison, that took place in the Koch-era, there's a cute portion where "The Mayor" is satirized with a chant, "Koch can't ride. Koch can't ride." 

He could ride a bike, right? Yet I couldn't find a picture of the mayor on a bike. Huh? Still, all in all, a pretty good man for a politician. Unfortunately, as with all people, good ones can't just come from a mold?