Several March For Our Lives leaders, including some current and former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students, held a panel on gun violence at Saturday’s town hall.
They discussed how young people can push for gun-control measures like universal background checks and bans on high-capacity magazines and semi-automatic assault rifles, among other reforms.
OK then . . .
If Congress were the only culprit, one might turn from the legislative to the executive branch to reverse the nation’s path. Sadly, our president has the same spineless position when it comes to reducing gun violence in America. At first he seemed to support banning assault-style weapons and instituting universal background checks. However, all it took was one meeting with the NRA to move him from increased gun controls to arming teachers and a federal commission on school safety that is not dealing with guns. In the shadow of NRA demands, this brash bully cowers as a child in school praying the shooter will not find him.
Unfortunately, turning to our judicial system has been another dead end.
When the District of Columbia sought to reduce inner-city gun violence by restricting the ownership of handguns and requiring legally owned rifles and shotguns to be kept unloaded or locked, the Supreme Court found these requirements violated the Second Amendment of the Constitution. This, although the Second Amendment, adopted in 1791, was passed to facilitate the formation of a fighting force if invasion or insurrection threatened. Such misreading of the amendment has doomed similar efforts to bring sanity to the availability of guns in America’s high-crime areas.
courtesy patch.com Our irresponsible gun owners of the day . . .
A handgun owner in Marietta will be shopping for some new pants — and is lucky to have avoided a real tragedy, according to police.
Sunday morning, the man accidentally discharged his handgun at a Marietta hotel, shooting a hole in his pants and striking a woman and child with shrapnel, according to the Marietta Police Department.
In a Facebook post, police shared a photo of the man’s jeans, which appear to be shredded in a line from the right back pocket all the way down to the knee area. The man told police he was leaving the hotel and had tucked his handgun into the waistband of his pants.
Here’s a big shocker . . .
Between June 1 and June 13 Gallup conducted a poll about the National Rifle Association to determine how Americans felt about the pro-gun group about about gun laws in America.
One of the key takeaways that Gallup came to: Republicans are far more likely to view the NRA favorably, opposed to Democrats who frequently oppose the pro-gun group. The polling company also says that the party gap as more than quadrupled since they began asking questions about the NRA in 1989.
“Republicans and Democrats are more divided in their views of the National Rifle Association than at any other time in Gallup’s 29-year trend. Eighty-eight percent of self-identified Republicans say they have very or mostly favorable views of the NRA, compared with 24% of Democrats, a 64-percentage-point gap in positive opinions of the organization,” the poll revealed.
courtesy thedailybeast.com It’s always instructive when the Daily Beast dabbles in national psychoanalysis . . .
One answer is suggested by two notable features of U.S. culture. First, this remains a remarkably Christian country. It has the largest Christian population in the world, with some 70 to 83 percent of Americans identifying as Christian.
Second, the U.S. has a uniquely robust gun culture, as well as the world’s highest rates of gun ownership and extraordinary levels of gun violence.
Put these national characteristics together – the religion and the guns – and it’s not hard to see the appeal of figures, both real and fictional, that combine the two.
Consider the real-life example of the “pistol-packing pastor” – a Pentecostal preacher, named James McAbee, from Beaumont, Texas. McAbee has earned a reputation for offering firearm training in his own church.
