Thoughts and Prayers

Those words are hollow following the seventh school shooting of 2018, and by far the deadliest. But, rather than have a debate on gun control, conservative pundits are busy pointing out a flawed story by an advocacy group called Everytown for Gun Safety that cited 18 school shootings so far this year. Like it really matters whether there were 7 or 18. One is too many.

We have received the response we expected from the NRA-sponsored Republican Party. The gun rights advocacy group spent $30 million alone on Donald Trump in 2016 and has bankrolled just about every Republican in Congress. They're the ones who got Republicans to let the federal assault weapons ban expire in 2004 after retaking Congress once again. Since then the proliferation of assault weapons has skyrocketed with the AR-15 by far the most popular weapon on the market. There are over 5 million in circulation and no doubt there will be another stampede at Walmart and other suppliers now that the cry for gun control has been raised yet again.

Even more disconcerting is that a kid like Nikolas Cruz can legally buy an assault rifle at 19. He can't even buy alcohol yet. The kid also had a history of mental problems that should have come up on a background check. But, gun advocates will tell you that if Nick hadn't been able to buy his rifle at a gun store, he would have gotten it some other way. Fact is that when the assault weapons ban was in place there were far fewer mass shootings because such weapons were harder to get.

The only way to get Congress and state legislatures to act is to vote out conservative legislators backed by the NRA. Until that happens, these "lawmakers" will continue to play dumb on gun control because they think that is what their constituency wants. Listen to Marco Rubio and ask yourself, Floridians, why you voted for this mindless idiot?

Of course, we can argue that it takes an unstable person to go on such a shooting spree, but why should we make it easy for them. Stephen Paddock also legally acquired his arsenal, which he used to great effect in Las Vegas last year. Nevada, like Florida, and like many other states for that matter, provides very few limits, and what few they do they do so begrudgingly.

Until there is a will to fight gun violence at the state and federal level, we will continue to hear conservative politicians and pundits go on about second amendment rights. Judge Nap gets a lot of things wrong in his Fox News screed. The most blatant being the second amendment was never about personal self-defense, but rather the rights of states to form militias after the federal government had disbanded the Continental Army. It's judges like him who over the decades interpreted this amendment to be about individual rights.

The first amendment allows pundits like Judge Nap and Laura Ingraham to voice their opinions despite their glaring inaccuracies. Yet, these same folks will take Everytown for Gun Safety to task for overstating the number of school shootings this year. Conservative talking heads would rather deflect attention away from the root cause of this violence rather than confront it, offering their thoughts and prayers instead.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

TripplerFebruary 19, 2018 at 7:12 AM
When idiot Bush was in the White House, his only solution to society's problems was to always "cut taxes" for the wealthy.

Today, right winger's exclusive solution to all problems is "thoughts and prayers".

None of these imbeciles have any concrete solutions to the mess they always create.
James FergusonFebruary 20, 2018 at 9:59 PM
It almost seems the GOP is being shamed into something more than thoughts and prayers. Even the NRA has given Trump the green light to expand background checks, but it will take more than that to satisfy angry parents. We may have finally reached the tipping point. Just think of how many kids have had to die since Newtown for Congress to finally act!

Dispatches from Vilnius

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