[Quincy Lehr]

Originally Posted by Rhina P. Espaillat

Quincy, you are even sillier than I remember.

Wow, a general-purpose ad hominem from someone whom I can't remember ever crossing. Boy! Look, I can see the other point of view. Indeed, I used to subscribe to it. But an insult's an insult. I could, I suppose, respond in kind, but it's perhaps best to let the above smell the place up a bit and leave it at that.

[Roger Slater]

Originally Posted by Tim Murphy

If we can force youngsters to buy overpriced health insurance, we should surely force all able bodied men to keep and bear arms.

Tim, I remember you posted a few years back about the excellent emergency medical care you received in Florida when you had no insurance, and how you ran up a $6,000 bill (as I recall), but you told them you didn't have the money so they simply absorbed the costs and you left with your health free of charge. As I recall, you were quite pleased, as you had every reason to be. But who do you think ended up paying for your medical care and your freedom not to be carry insurance? Do you think the hospital should have refused you care to save your life, or do you think you were owed free care paid for by your fellow citizens who carry insurance?

Forcing people to have insurance simply means forcing them not to pass the costs on to those who do. A very Republican notion, first conceived by the Heritage Foundation and later disavowed by conservatives only when Obama had the audacity to agree.

[Roger Slater]

Originally Posted by Rhina P. Espaillat

Fortunately Alfred, my husband, who is known to some of you as a world War II veteran and a rifle-bearing infantryman, has come up with the perfect solution. He says the second amendment must not be violated, and everyone who wants to arm himself should be permitted to do so, provided that the weapon he purchases is a flintlock from the Revolutionary War era, which is the weapon the Founding Fathers had in mind. That should satisfy everyone, right?

I've had that exact thought, Rhina. It's amazing how gun advocates seem to be strict constructionists when it comes to everything but guns, insisting that we limit the meaning of words in the Constitution to precisely the understanding of the Founding Fathers when it comes to words like "liberty" and "due process," but when it comes to "arms," they are willing to let the word evolve to cover any new technology that the English language adopts under the same general rubric. To say that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson envisioned such a thing as semi-automatic weapons, let alone meant to guarantee the freedom of every citizen to own one, is totally preposterous, yet the constitutional argument depends on accepting the notion.

[John Whitworth]

It occurs to me that in Switzerland every man is required by law to own a gun, or at least that used to be so. I don't know what the Swiss crime rate is, but, leaving out the crimes of the banks, which are undoubtedly legion, I think it is, by and large, a law-abiding place. So it's not just a matter of the availability of guns.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

We have this quickly growing demographic of children on the autistic spectrum, and an exploding population of children and adults with mental illness. They come of age in a nation infatuated with myth of redemptive violence disconnected from any substantial self examination of their own particular part in the global feature film. We are clueless as to how this myth is integrated with our children's imaginations and certainly have no little idea what to do with autism's problems or our exponentially malfunctioning neurotransmitters. We should like to figure it out but funding is tied up in national defense at the present moment. One solution might be to cut more mental health programs. We are fresh out of Manhattan Projects. We used ours to make a bomb we called Little Boy.

We have thousands of citizens coming out of the prison industrial complex after years of incarceration, some of them in isolated segregation units, many of them having been the victims of sexual or institutional violence inside.

We have thousands of vets, psychologically engineered to be comfortable with violence and experientially traumatized by their tours in insane situations coming back to these same neighborhoods because we try to fill our prisons and our military from the same families just to be fair handed.

We have no idea what prison accomplishes that is corrective. All we do know is that most of the individuals we run through this soul-cleaver will be returning to the same towns we were too afraid to share with them to begin with, but now they are coming back disconnected, disenfranchised, and broken.

We have no idea what our latest wars accomplish. We do know many Iraqis found the level of violence in their lives beneath occupation versus the Ba'ath party was a bit of a toss up. And that the reactions of Afghani parents to the death of child by well meaning airstrike look eerily similar to the reactions of parents on the news today.

The vets will come home knowing what they did, seeing the bullshit for what it is, feeling the weight of the sacrifices of their brothers and sisters and the weight of their own actions. They will weather this with little input from outside and little financial help from the government for "invisible" wounds. They will remain highly trained in the use of weaponry.

As this all unfolds all manners of programs are being cut for mental health, art, education, and social safety nets.

And we think this action is some crazy person thing. We test our medicines and cosmetics on sentient beings. To feed our populations we allow brutal slaughter houses to run day and night for our hamburgers to remain on the dollar menu. We are the weapons manufacturing complex of the globe. We are a violent society that funds violence, manufactures its instruments, relies on its practice to replace our failed imagination but is shocked by its public display outside of the normal sanctioned zones.

We have no idea what to do now that we are at this point, do we?

[Rick Mullin]

All true Andrew. A complex that comes down to the alienating influence of technocracy, which is the sickness of the 20th century. Eisenhower nailed it quite early in the game--the lethal triumvirate of government, science, and industry.

[David Rosenthal]

Originally Posted by Andrew Mandelbaum

We have no idea what to do now that we are at this point, do we?

Nope. And the problem goes beyond either violence or the U.S. We clever creatures have ingeniously created a world of relations and conditions that cannot sustain us. Hamartia.

David R.

[Michael Cantor]

Thanks, Rhina, for a thoughtful and well documented post. I'm too sad and angry to do the same thing. What we have to do is flood our Senators and Representatives with messages, demanding that they grow a backbone. A ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines, an utter insistence on thorough background checks before anybody can buy a firearm, and the same controls on gun shows would be a good start.

Tim, if you're going to put on your little militia tin hat and strut and posture, and point to Switzerland as an example - take a look at the statistics Chris posted - 34 handgun deaths in Switzerland last year, 10,728 in the USA. And before you shoot off your mouth again about the imaginary stud who's going to whip out his concealed carry weapon and gun down the next potential mass murderer (or innocent civilians, or a trick-or-treat-kid in his driveway, or somebody who pisses him off when HE KNOWS HE'S GOT A GUN) - check the link that Rhina provided.

We're not Switzerland. We're a country with a massive problem of too many guns and too many loonies having access to those guns - and a batshit pseudo-macho fringe that exults in guns, that brags about them, and that is obsessed with "protection" of their homes from imaginary enemies. That's our problem, and it's monumental. But let's at least define it and acknowledge it.

[Tim Murphy]

Roger, I paid the bill. I still don't have health insurance. Yes, Switzerland is a wonderfully law-abiding society, considering that every man is armed. Or is that BECAUSE every man is armed?

[Laura Heidy-Halberstein]

Originally Posted by Tim Murphy

Roger, I paid the bill. I still don't have health insurance. Yes, Switzerland is a wonderfully law-abiding society, considering that every man is armed. Or is that BECAUSE every man is armed?

http://www.businessinsider.com/switz...erring-2012-12