Land of the Free, and Home of the Dead. The solution to gun violence is more guns. That is the lesson of the "Virginia Tech massacre", as it is now referred to, according to the Radical Right. Or is it the Always Wrong?
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Had bunches of Virginia Tech students been packing heat, say the pundits of the Lunatic Right, they could have stopped the "shooter" before he had killed so many. Sure they could, unless of course he saw them reach for their gun and shot them dead first, then taken their gun, with its ammo, to add to his firepower.
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I chanced to see the mayor of my city, Newark, NJ (the only Newark that counts) on MSNBC, speaking about illegal guns. But the problem is more than just illegally purchased guns. My older sister had a legally purchased gun that she learned to use well. She was a single woman living in a marginal area of Los Angeles, and felt the need for personal protection. But she kept her gun at home. One nite, when she was at work, someone broke into her house and stole, among other things, her gun. So a legal gun became an illegal gun. And if it were used in a crime, the name that would have attached to that gun's purchase would have been my sister's. The advocates of liberal gun laws forget, or trivialize, the fact that legal guns can turn into illegal guns in a matter of seconds. So why do so many Radical Rightists advocate absolutely unfettered access to firearms?
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Guns give stupid people a feeling of invulnerability. "Nothing can hurt me! I've got a gun!" Oh? That's what the other guy with a gun thinks too. You can't both be right, tho you can both be "Right".
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Media coverage of the VT tragedy has been at once too much and too little. Too much emphasis upon the human tragedy; too little emphasis on the public-policy aspects, tho such considerations are now, fortunately, asserting themselves. We have decried for decades the emotional toll caused by bullying in schoolyards and such, but done almost nothing about it. We rationalize away our inaction by assuring ourselves that dealing with bullies toughens our kids to "the real world", and teaches them to defend themselves, to fite back. Sure it does.
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In fact, most of us do stand up for ourselves, either by fiting back ourselves or appealing for protection from people who owe children a duty of defense against dangers of all kinds. But machismo and an insane social stigma against "snitching" have caused extreme distress to victims of bullying. Very few will buy a Glock and blow their enemies away. But many will suffer psychological damage that can impair their functioning in all aspects of life, for life.
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Indignation against giving the VT mass-murderer the media coverage his videos and pictures have recently received are stupid. Why mince words? We NEED as a society to understand why some people go nuts and kill people. We NEED to examine cases like Cho Seung-Hui's to see if there are signs we can detect in other people to keep them from doing the same. You don't want to listen? Turn to something else.
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Only the insane laws of the United States regarding firearms empowered that madman to kill so many people. Had he been unable to get guns, his rampage could not have been so deadly. A knife-wielding lunatic could be run from or fought. A chair thrown at him by one person trying to evade death could disable him at least momentarily. A dozen chairs, two dozen chairs thrown at him from every direction would have ended his rampage and permitted his capture before he had killed anyone, even himself. But no, we must have guns. This is Amurrika, and we love guns. The Founding Fathers intended us to be up to our eyeballs in guns. Why else would they have written the Second Amendment to the Bill of RIGHTS?
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Well, the Founding Fathers of this Republic were only human. They made mistakes. Three were doozies. One was corrected. The other two are causing us extreme damage even to this day, over 220 years later.
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The group known as the Framers of the Constitution included a substantial number of brilliant men (yes, that was "men", not today's obligatory "men and women" or, worse, "women and men"). But they made some terrible mistakes. One was corrected. The original Constitution, before amendments, provided that the person who receives the highest number of votes cast for President becomes President, and the person who receives the second-highest number becomes Vice President. Astounding in its stupidity, no?
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Had we kept that provision, George Bush would be President and John Kerry, Vice President, "a heartbeat away" from the Presidency. How many assassinations would we have had if that provision had remained in the Constitution? Fortunately, that error was realized pretty quickly, and amended away in 1804. The other two horrendous errors have remained with us for centuries.
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The Second Amendment is tied for first among the most horrendous and enduring of the Framers' mistakes. The other is their not having made plain the role of the courts in merely applying the generalities of the law to the specifics of a case. Since the Framers of the Constitution did not forbid the courts to void laws duly passed according to the procedure set out in the Constitution, the courts simply grabbed the power to say what the Constitution does and does not mean. Nowhere is that power granted to them by the Constitution itself. And the way the Constitution works is that any power not expressly granted is expressly denied — forbidden.
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Alas, neither the Congress nor the President has had the guts to say, "No way in the world do you have the right to void a law that Congress and the President have passed in full accord with the Constitution! Unhand that power. It was not granted to you by the Constitution, so you do not have it. And if you so much as attempt to void a law properly passed, you are in insurrection against the duly constituted legal authority of the United States and thus guilty of treason. The penalty for such insurrectionary treason is death." And then hang the bastards.
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The Supreme Court has done this country horrendous harm, even greater than the harm done by the lunatics who think that owning and using guns is a constitutionally protected right. Gun owners, after all, kill only some 30,000 people a year in this country. Abortionists unleashed by the Supreme Court kill well over a million each and every year.

[Despite a downturn in recent years] Using AGI [Planned Parenthood] figures through 2003, estimating 1,287,000 abortions for [each year] 2004-06, and factoring in the possible 3% undercount AGI estimates for its own figures, the total number of abortions performed in the U.S. since 1973 equals 48,589,993.

Horrendous but true. The enormity of that moral catastrophe is concealed by the fact that these deaths are invisible. Unborn children are pureed into shapeless slurpies flushed down sewage lines, or discarded in trash cans labeled "medical waste". Given the invisibility of our society's institutionalized mass murder, we can pretend to be decent people even as we make Hitler look like an amateurish incompetent when it comes to industrial murder.
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I don't think we even have a term for murder on the scale of abortion today. Hitler managed to kill 6 million Jews and a total of perhaps 11 or 13 million enemies of the New Order — Communists, gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, Russians, democrats, mental defectives, cripples, etc., etc. But Hitler didn't kill healthy German babies. No, Hitler targeted enemies of his perfect Aryan state. We kill our own. Hitler's mass murder was targeted; ours, blind. We kill the brilliant and fit as readily as the retarded and physically defective, without distinction. We are equal-opportunity killers. That, of course, makes us much better than Hitler. And much more efficient. Hitler was an inefficient piker compared to us. We could teach him a thing or three about genocide. We're experts. And we wear clean white lab coats when slaughtering the defenseless.
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The Supreme Court relented this week in its campaign of mass slaughter of innocents. It found that Congress does have the right to outlaw "partial birth abortion". Of course, it had no right even to rule on the issue, because the courts do NOT have the right to void laws. Read the Constitution. You will find no such power.
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Congress can, in fact, pass laws that say, expressly, "No court may review this law as to rule on its constitutionality", and the courts have to back off. That provision should be made a pro-forma part of every act of legislation Congress enacts. In actuality, it is an extremely unusual feature of legislation, reserved to only the tiniest number of bills, including, however, gay marriage (or some gay issue; I forget exactly which).
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Some way must be found to rein in the courts. We can as a society decide to permit the courts a say on the constitutionality of a given piece of legislation but also provide that Congress and/or the President can override any such decision, just as Congress can override a Presential veto. Such a measure, written into the Constitution, would complete the system of "checks and balances" that keeps one branch's aspirations to dictatorship under control. Today, we have no restraint upon judicial dictatorship, and suffer grievously for that.
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Such a change would not, however, address the other supremely stupid mistake of the Framers of the Constitution — well, of the amendments to the Constitution collectively known as the Bill of Rights: the infamous Second Amendment. As the Harvard University Gazette reports:

Every year, more than 30,000 people are shot to death in murders, suicides, and accidents. Another 65,000 suffer from gun injuries.

That appears to be a price we are willing to pay, because we allow the National Rifle Association (which is of course also the 'Unregulated Handgun Association') to buy the allegiance of gutless members of Congress and turn a blind eye to mass death from guns all across this country. They will pretend that the part of the Second Amendment that matters is this:

the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Never mind that something appears before those words, namely,

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,

That's just filler, excess verbiage of no meaning and no conceivable importance. It shouldn't even be there. The Framers were just whiling away the time by inserting meaningless phrases into the Bill of Rights.
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No sirree bob, the passage is not meaningless. It means something extremely important: members of a "well-regulated militia" have the right to keep and bear arms in the service of "the security of a free State". Not in the service of personal interests, nor settling a score, nor even defending their personal property against a thief, but in serving "the security of a free State".
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Every honest American knows that the introductory language at the beginning of the Second Amendment limits the right set out at the end. But gun nuts are not honest, and not American. They are not members of a well-regulated militia nor of a well-ordered society, but laws unto themselves who do not acknowledge that society has the right to limit their rights in any regard. They are antisocial, indeed, sociopathic. They are enemies of society and should be treated as such. They are Cho Seung-Hui writ large.
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When I first came up with the title for today's entry, I checked the Internet to see if it was already an established phrase, and found but a single reference, to a singer/group called "Carentin", whom I had never heard of and about whom I find no information but lyrics. Consider these lines from a song called "Character Charisma". Oddly, two entirely different sets of lyrics come up. The phrase "home of the dead", however, appears only in this one (typos corrected).

* * * Shall we try to search for an answer to the bounding questions
of our age
If only the Government expelled some more funds,
We could stop this rage
Instead they give to other countries
Just to impress
And use blatant cutbacks for the Homeward catastrophes
They should address
The Military Spawns on a foreign lawn
While people in the city, sleep on the corner
Or drink down their liquor, while unzipping their fly
So another baby can be born, and will be destined to die
Dying of starvation, or a drop on the head
In the Land of the free, and the home of the dead

Another raining Friday night
Little Wesley waits at home for his dad
Who is late because he lost another job
Michael greets his son at the broken door
gives his son a belt across the face....
Simply, because he's too damn drunk to love the boy
goes in, and rapes his wife
three bullets in the chamber
takes all their lives
In the richest of lands
Crime and Chaos trickle down from the melting pot
Politicians couldn't care until their terms are almost up
Then with a wink and a false smile
You're special and important, with all the meaningful words you
said
In the land of the free, and the home of the dead.

Hm.
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In my last post, I mentioned how my state seemed central or just off the center of many news stories of late. The tale continues. Of the 32 murdered students at Virginia Tech, two were from New Jersey, one from my hometown, Middletown. She attended Middletown North High School, which is the newer name for what was only Middletown Township High School when I attended. (We are due to have our 45th anniversary this year. I don't know about any reunion, however.)
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The gunman sent materials of explanation and rage to NBC News, which aired them on the Nightly News. NBC Nightly News is hosted by Brian Williams, from Middletown, New Jersey.
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Water Over the Bridge. The coverage of the VT massacre was over-the-top. The major broadcast networks expanded their evening news shows to an hour for the event. Shouldn't national news be devoted to things we can DO something about? not things we can do NOTHING about?
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Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's Daily Show (who is from Lawrenceville, New Jersey; and a "Giant Head of Brian Williams" (from Middletown) is sometimes seen over Stewart's left shoulder in the show's new set) interviewed Ali Allawi soon after the VT tragedy, on a day when nearly 200 Iraqis were killed in multiple bombings. Stewart said that we as a Nation (of 300 million) were devastated emotionally, and were in mourning over (a scant) 33 deaths. He then asked, how can Iraqis deal with the endless tragedy and mass death they suffer every day? Remember, folks, that Iraq is 1/12th our population. 198 Iraqis dead in a single day is equivalent to 2,376 Americans dead in a single day. 2,376, not 33.
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We had a nor'easter several days ago, in which over 7 inches of rain fell. I had rivulets running thru my basement to the drain in the corner. News footage of swollen local rivers showed water pouring over bridges. When I was a child, I conflated two expressions, "Water over the dam" and "Water under the bridge" into "Water over the bridge". Well, we had that this past week.
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We also had roaring white water pouring over the Great Falls of the Passaic in Paterson, where the Industrial Revolution in the United States began, powered by the Passaic. I have seen the Falls, 70 feet high, albeit at a lower water level. I should try to get there before the high water has subsided. If I do, I may post a foto or two here.
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But I have other things to do first. Today, 42,000 schoolchildren in my city are being let out of school early to clean up and beautify the city for the day. They aspire to plant a MILLION flowers, in one day. They also want to pick up litter all over the city, and create a new mindset of a clean Newark, and engage adults as well as children in making and keeping Newark clean. The name of the project is "Beautiful Newark". Outsiders will be surprised to learn that much of Newark is already beautiful, so the project speaks of making this an "even more Beautiful Newark". The media kickoff is in Branch Brook Park, which is the site of our Cherry Blossom Festival, now in full swing. It was delayed by unusually cold weather, but today is expected to be in the upper 60s, so blossoms heretofore delayed should pop today. I have a Newark fotoblog for which I want to take pix of this event, so must get to sleep now to be up on time.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,315 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:53 AM