And may I not be allowed to add to this gratifying spectacle that I shall read in the character of the American people, in their devotion to true liberty and to the Constitution which is its palladium, sure presages that the destined career of my country will exhibit a Government pursuing the public good as its sole object, and regulating its means by the great principles consecrated in its charger and by those moral principles to which they are so well allied; a Government which watches over the purity of elections, the freedom of speech and of the press, the trial by jury, and the equal interdict against encroachments and compacts between religion and the state; which maintains inviolably the maxims of public faith, the security of persons and property, and encourages in every authorized mode the general diffusion of knowledge which guarantees to public liberty its permanency and to those who possess the blessing the true enjoyment of it; a Government which avoids intrusions on the internal repose of other nations, and repels them from its own; which does justice to all nations with a readiness equal to the firmness with which it requires justice from them...
-- James Madison, Eighth Annual Message, December 3, 1816.
In April of 1999 13 people were killed by two gunmen; students at the school. Could they have been saved by that one guard that the NRA wants us to believe is the solution? Well, there was an armed guard; a 15 year veteran of the Sheriff’s department. He responded, and he returned fire. He called the Sheriff’s office for backup. Yet, with both an armed security guard on site and backup coming in by the minute the two shooters, who started their rampage at 11:19 a.m. and continued until THEY ended it at 12:08 p.m with their own suicides. They left 13 dead and 21 injured in the wake of that 49 minute attack.
In March of 2005 a 16 year old shooter killed his grandfather, a deputy sheriff, took his guns including two handguns and a shotgun and vest and went to Red Lake High School in his grandfather’s police vehicle. The first person he killed was one of the school’s two security guards at the door. He went on to kill five students and a teacher at the school, wounding at least a dozen more before ending his own life.
The NRA solution 100% in place with 100% failure.In the immortal words of St George (of Carlin): "What're ya, fuckin' stupid?"
First Moloch, horrid king, besmear’d with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears,
Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud
Their children’s cries unheard, that pass’d through fire
To his grim idol. (Paradise Lost 1.392-96)
Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains—“besmeared with blood” and “parents’ tears.” They give the real meaning of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning. That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).(hat tips = Daily KOS, Professional Left Podcast)
In 2011, guns were used to murder 8,583 people living in the U.S., according to the most recent FBI data available. Among those murdered by guns, there were 565 young people under the age of 18, and 119 children ages 12 or younger -- the latter number nearly equivalent to six Newtown mass shootings. And these figures include only homicides.8,583 gun-murdered Americans in a year = 9/11 every 3 months.
There was one thing that I regret not hitting as hard as I should have hit it during the presidential campaign recently concluded. And when I say I didn't hit it hard enough, I mean I didn't hit it like I was swinging Mjollnir at a bass drum the size of Lake Huron. The point was a simple one. There is no possible definition by which the Republicans can be considered an actual political party any more. They can be defined as a loose universe of inchoate hatreds, or a sprawling confederation of collected resentments, or an unwieldy conglomeration of self-negating orthodoxies, or an atonal choir of rabid complaint, or a cargo cult of quasi-religious politics and quasi-political religion, or simply the deafening abandoned YAWP of our bitter national Id. But they are not a political party because they have rendered themselves incapable of politics.
