Well, as long as he doesn't outlaw the Beta-C 100-round mags....
Posted on 01/13/2011 9:41:48 AM PST by DCBryan1
Run-of-the-mill violence
Gene Lyons
Probably every decent American had the same emotional reaction as former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to the appalling events in her home state of Arizona.
“It sounds like something that might happen in some place like Afghanistan,” she told The New York Times. “It shouldn’t happen in Tucson.”
We keep saying that, but political assassinations and assassination attempts are more common in the United States than just about anywhere. During my adult life, lunatics with guns or bombs have changed American history more than any election: President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert Kennedy, Rev. Martin Luther King, Gov. George Wallace, President Ronald Reagan, 168 innocent victims in Oklahoma City.
Less successful attempts were made against others. Before the grievous wounding of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six innocent bystanders, the only member of Congress assassinated in office was U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan, in Guyana, in connection with the 1978 Jonestown suicides, an episode of mass psychosis unique in our lifetimes.
To be a high-profile politician or charismatic celebrity in the United States is to wear a target—with or without Sarah Palin’s help. That’s along with events like the Columbine, Virginia Tech and Fort Hood massacres.
Indeed, madmen with guns and obscure, often quasi-political, motives have become such a common feature of American life that it takes either a high-profile victim or a high body count to make national TV news—often the killer’s fervent ambition.
Atrocities occur so regularly that most of us know the post-traumatic debate almost by heart. What drove the killer around the bend? Why didn’t people who knew him do something? They often say nobody could have predicted, but often somebody did. Why was such a disturbed individual walking around untreated? Don’t we have hospitals for people like that? Finally, how can such a lone demento gain access to semi-automatic weapons?
Shouldn’t we keep deadly weapons out of the hands of crazy people? Goodness, we license dogs and motorcycles. We regulate fireworks and pain pills. Why not guns? Has America developed a collective death wish?
But never mind the Freudian claptrap. We already know the answers. In our fragmented society, the archetypal paranoid loner is often cut off from family or community. (This appears not so with Giffords’ alleged assailant, Jared Loughner, although much remains unknown.) Most people who glimpse their psychoses feel no responsibility. It’s safest to tiptoe away.
In most jurisdictions, it’s far too hard to have people committed to overcrowded, understaffed psychiatric hospitals. The college that expelled Loughner pending a mental health evaluation appears never to have considered stronger actions. They’d likely have been futile. Current law often reflects overblown fears evoked by popculture confections like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” in which romantic rebels are persecuted for being different.
The vast majority of people with brain diseases are actually less dangerous than the average man in the street. But partly because cases like Loughner’s get so much attention, American mental health care remains both less robust and compassionate than it should be.
As for guns, what’s left to say? It’s come to this: The big reform idea of Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., is to outlaw 30-round ammo clips. So instead of carrying, say, one Glock 9mm with three clips, a mad assassin would need to pack three Glocks for whacking congressmen, judges, senior citizens and little girls.
Alas, the argument over firearms has been lost to hairy-chested rightwingers for whom guns are totems, symbolic projections of manliness, virility and patriotism. What Palin—that name again—calls “real Americans.”
My own view is that what guns signify as political symbols, as opposed to tools, is a decidedly unmanly fear and lack of self-confidence. I’d cite a psychotic child playing cowboys at a suburban supermarket as Exhibit A. But the argument’s lost for the foreseeable future.
Which brings us back to Sarah Palin. No, it’s not her fault in any legal or moral sense, although if somebody shot Palin herself after, say, Michael Moore put Alaska in the cross hairs, there’d be hell to pay.
It’s not the fault of those yoyos swaggering around tea-party meetings carrying assault weapons, displaying “liberal hunting licenses” or listening to Glenn Beck’s delusional rants about President Obama’s imaginary concentration camps. It’s all just hijinks, satire, harmless joking. It’s also not Rush Limbaugh’s fault. Nor is it Newt Gingrich’s for writing that a Democratic president’s “secularsocialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”
But you know how we’re constantly being told that the Democrats are the party of no consequences, no personal responsibility and crippling moral relativism?
It turns out they’re not the only ones.
Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Houston, Ark., author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
Hillary has been trying to ban ammo for years. Then gun control won’t mean a thing.
Megaton barf alert.
I liked the line by Stuart Margolin in the first "Death Wish"...you're probably one o' them knee-jerk liberals who think our guns are extensions of our penises....but this here is gun country....criminals tryin' to operate out here just get their asses blown off!"
“We keep saying that, but political assassinations and assassination attempts are more common in the United States than just about anywhere... “
Wh-a-a-a-a-at? I call BS. Barf alert indeed.
Wh-a-a-a-a-at? I call BS. Barf alert indeed.
At least they have the political assassination thing right. Look how many times they've thrown Sarah Palin in the mud.
Agreed. Extraordinary claims require more than typical evidence and vetting. This particular claim was made with absolutely no evidence cited to support it.
If you recall, Gene Lyons was a weekly spearcatcher for Bill Clinton during the impeachment brouhaha.
Gene Lyons had a gig once as the ultimate Clinton buttboy during Monicagate. Not heard from much anymore.
But he inadvertently makes a point that political assassinations in America were nearly always the work of lone nutjobs. Not like in places like imperial Russia, Germany, and Japan, and in Latin America and Africa today, where assassinations (and terror) are well-planned operations carried out by organized political factions with specific goals in mind.
But here in the U.S. it’s nutjobs who assassinate Presidents, and don’t forget those who tried and failed. Lyons has to go clear back to Rep. Leo Ryan to cite a Congressperson in mortal danger, and he had chosen to travel to the evil Jonestown.
No, political factions in America mostly resort to character assassination rather than the real thing.
But it’s clear that Gene Lyons has this strange animus against guns and the people who defend gun rights. Really gets under his skin, they do.
And if things are so completely evil in this country to the exclusion of all others, why do he and Spike Lee not relocate? I’m sure they’ll reply that someone has to have the courage to go on living in the belly of the beast, and to “speak truth to power”.
(Give me a break..............)
But Spike Lee said on the TOADY Show yesterday that America was the most violent country on Earth . The same Spike Lee that said Charlton Heston should be shot.
Gene Lyons
And people wonder why we in Arkansas call him “Lieing Gene Lyons”.
***The big reform idea of Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., is to outlaw 30-round ammo clips. *****
Is this loon saying that all the victims were shot with bullets from the BOTTOM of the magazine and not the top 10 rounds?
Well, as long as he doesn't outlaw the Beta-C 100-round mags....
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