Guns

Many years ago, a woman sat in her car outside the apartment building where he ex-husband's parents lived.  Her only previous claim to fame was as president of an Engelbert Humperdinck fan club.  When the elderly couple emerges from the building, she ran them down, killing both.  It didn't occur to anybody to hold General Motors (nor Engelbert Humperdinck) responsible.

At around the same time, though, gun control advocates were suing gun makers because their products had been used to kill people.  It seemed illogical, but in the United States anybody is allowed to sue anybody about anything — and given the right juries, some of the suits might have been successful.  In 2005, Congress gave gun sellers immunity from most such lawsuits.

This does not provide total immunity.  If your gun, due to some manufacturing error, blows up in your hand when you are trying to kill somebody, you can sue the manufacturer.  If an individual goes to a gun dealer and says, "I want to buy a gun to kill my inlaws," the dealer is responsible.  Just lawfully providing a gun to somebody who later uses it to commit a crime is not punishable — and it seems to me that that is the way it should be.

Guns are designed to kill.  When a product does what it is designed to do, it's hard to fault the manufacturer or the seller.  If we want to eliminate gun deaths, the logical thing to do is eliminate guns —  but it's much too late to do that, if ever there was a time when it was possible.  It's probably too late, even, to reinstitute the expired ban on assault weapons.  Too many already are out there.

So what can be done?  I don't think background checks will do much good — but if all guns must be registered (including rifles and shotguns), and the last registered owner of the gun is held responsible for any crimes committed with that gun, people may be more careful with their weapons.  It also could help to limit the quantity of guns any individual can register, to reduce the problem of "straw buyers."

Of course, that won't ever happen.

Thank you, fucking NRA

The NRA probably will say that if those tiny dead children only had been armed with semi-automatic weapons, they would have wiped out the shooter before twenty of them were dead.

The children are dead.  The shooter is dead.  The NRA is alive.

Yes, the shooter was nuts.  A lot of people are nuts these days.  Why do so many of those fucking nuts have legal access to combat weapons?

(Answer: the second amendment, according to the NRA.  Hey, how are you supposed to overcome a socialist Muslim president without your fucking guns?  Before you know it, those commies will want our fucking pricks, and then what are we supposed to stroke if they take our fucking guns away?)

........

Yes, I'm angry... and I'm very sad.  Just like you, very, very sad.

Correction to the previous post

In yesterday's post, I said that liberals "don't believe in violence." What I should have said is that they "don't believe in violence at home." History shows us that they don't especially mind exporting violence to other countries, especially in the developing world, and especially if they can dream up some "moral imperative" for doing so — or can sign on with some conservative think tank's "moral imperative" so as to avoid appearing weak or unpatriotic.

If some of the yahoos who think they are "conservative" (because there's nobody to tell them they're just working class heroes co-opted by the corporate cabal) decide to go out shooting liberals, there would be little of value to mourn. If the liberals shot back with guns instead of columns in the Washington Post and interviews on MSNBC, I might hold them in slightly higher regard — not much higher, but slightly higher.

Maybe I've said this before, but here it is again, perhaps in a slightly different format:

• If you support the Republicans and you are not rich, you are an idiot. They've been promising you those socially conservative "reforms" for decades, but they never come through.
  
• If you support the Democrats and you're not on Chuck Schumer's speed-dial, you're wasting your time. They've been promising you those liberal "reforms" for decades, and they haven't come through since the Johnson administration.
• If you move your vote back and forth between the corporatist parties based on their policy pronouncements, I feel sorry for you. Policy pronouncements, even in the short run, mean nothing.
• If you move your vote back and forth based on your perception of the personality characteristics of the candidates, you're an idiot. They're all lying to you — not just words, but faces and body language as well. Haven't you figured that out yet?
  

I don't own a gun, mostly because I don't want to be tempted to blow out my own brains (and I haven't been a happy camper for quite a while, if ever.) Comes the revolution, though — if it ever comes — I guess I'll head out to a gun show in some NRA compliant state and buy myself some unregulated firearms. Probably I never could get anywhere near anybody I'd really like to shoot, but without the appropriate armaments there's no chance at all.

Where is the Class War?

We hear people on the right yelling "class war" with a boring regularity. Those of us who have been paying attention are inclined to believe the class war is over, and that the working and middle classes have lost.

There still are plenty of warriors out there, though, often quite well armed. There are hunters, rifle clubs, militias, street gangs, and no shortage of individual angry paranoids — many with combat experience. They could stir up some extremely severe civil unrest if they got it into their heads to just start shooting in a concerted way, but except for the drug gangs shooting each other and some of the paranoids shooting their families, co-workers, and the occasional abortion provider, things are unnaturally quiet.

To a large extent, the liberals have to take the blame. They have perpetuated the ridiculous belief that we can get what we want and need by voting, and that shooting our corporatist oppressors and their toadies is just not done. The ones most likely to shoot anyone for political and economic reasons don't even have a clue whom they should be shooting, and dream about taking potshots at immigrants and Democrats.

Okay, some Democrats might deserve it, but not for the reasons their assassins would have in mind.

The main thing that keeps a perfectly justifiable class war from happening is that there's nobody left to tell the people with the guns who they ought to be shooting. They won't get it from their corporatist media, their corporatist drug cartels, nor their supremely corporatist NRA. Organized labor — what remains of it — has been co-opted. "Progressive" campus groups were suckered into working for corporatist Obama, and now they've gone back to their keggers.

The so-called "left" has fragmented into feminists, environmentalists, "free speech" advocates, gay rights activists, anti-war activists, immigration reformers, and scores of other single-issue ax-grinders, incapable of recognizing that their common enemy is world corporatism — and that fascism, over six decades after World War II, has triumphed. The other problem with the "left" is that they're liberals, and "don't believe in violence." Where are the goddamned Communists when you need them? Is everybody who owns a gun and understands that "the man" is not his friend in prison on drug charges?

Oddly enough, I think the best chance for class warfare might be in China. New to capitalism, their elites haven't learned to hide their corruption as well as ours do.