Lets Stop the Shooting And Start Making Sense

If you want a briefing on the Republican Party's response to school shootings, I point you to Robbie Republican's post-Virginia Tech article. To quote Robbie: "If everyone on the Virginia Tech campus was allowed to carry a gun, then the massacre would have never happened. Cho Chun Chi would have started shooting and somebody would have popped a cap in his ass. But nooooo. The teachers are too scared that if you allow guns on campus, some kid is going to go crazy and start shooting up the school. What are the chances of that???"

It's an argument made by right-wing-minded people every time a tragedy like the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School happens. If only those kindergarteners had weapons, THEY COULD HAVE DEFENDED THEMSELVES.

Of course, its an argument that inevitably swallows itself. If guns were even more prevalent in our society, it would stand to reason that the likelihood of them falling into the wrong hands would go up, not down.

With 26 dead (mostly children), plus the shooter, the question comes up, "What to do about gun control?" According to the nation's leaders during the Presidential campaign, there's nothing to do. Barack Obama made it clear he was too gutless to take on the issue, and Mitt Romney was so far in bed with the gun lobby that he practically spits ammunition when he brushes his teeth in the morning.

But hey, for shits and giggles and possibly saving lives, I'm going to attempt to propose a practical solution.

First, let us all, Democrats and Republicans, agree with the following statement:

"Law abiding, sane, responsible people should be allowed to own firearms. Crazy, criminal people should not."

All agreed? No? Well, then leave. The rest of you, lets move to step 2.

In order to reduce gun violence, we need to enact measures to keep guns out of the hands of those who might cause harm.

Here we get into our first tricky area. "Who might cause harm." How do we define these people? There are a lot of angry, wacky people out there who won't necessarily start shooting up schools or movie theaters. How do we distinguish the harmless crazy from the harmful crazy? And once we do, how do we make sure that legally purchased firearms don't find their way into the wrong hands?

My proposal:

1. First, you should be required to first apply for a permit, which then requires you to spend a number of hours at a licensed shooting range before you're allowed to have a gun of your own. Sort of like being a restricted driver with a learner's permit. At this point in the process, a background check is begun, looking at criminal database, homeland security databases, no fly lists, and a new database where psychiatrists and counselors can report potentially violent patients.

2. When the required hours are achieved, you must pass a written exam on gun safety. Like a driver's license written exam.

3. After passing the written exam, you must pass a "gun test," like a driver's test-- demonstrating mastery of gun safety and proper use at a licensed gun range.

4. If the background check clears, then a gun can be issued. In order to sell the gun, the title must be legally transferred to another licensed person.

None of this prevents a weapon from being owned. In fact, by focusing on gun safety, it assures that gun owners are more responsible. Just like there will always be drunk drivers, there will be people who pass the tests and still screw up. But imagine if no drivers' licenses were issued, and any person could drive with just a minimal background check and no training. How dangerous would our roadways be then?

What this does do is increase the time it takes to get a weapon. And in that time, a lot can happen. There are a lot of people brought in at different stages of the process who have the opportunity to shut it down if its clear a guy is intending something terrible.

Of course, the gun lobby doesn't want anybody to have the power to deny someone a gun. After all, a gun is a product that makes a lot of money for its manufacturers, and making it harder to obtain a weapon hits the business's bottom line.

If manufacturers were really serious about safety, they would include features like smart biometric triggers, a feasible technology that allows a gun to be fired only by it's registered owner. This kind of technology should be required.

And of course, you ban rapid fire killing machines like assault rifles, which have been banned before and should have never been allowed back into stores. Short of creating your own army, there's no reason for such a weapon.

You enact these measures, you reduce the risk. You won't end shootings altogether, but you make it much harder for the batshit crazy people to destroy lives.

Of course, for that to happen, the government has to step up to the gun lobby and focus on protecting its people. But as long as the NRA supplies the big bucks, the bullets will fly.

Who will they hit next?

Why The Republicans Are Losing

From the New York Times... August 28, 2012:

One party platform stated that Hispanics and others should not “be barred from education or employment opportunities because English is not their first language.” It highlighted the need for “dependable and affordable” mass transit in cities, noting that “mass transportation offers the prospect for significant energy conservation.” And it prefaced its plank on abortion by saying that “we recognize differing views on this question among Americans in general — and in our own party.”

The other party platform said that “we support English as the nation’s official language.” It chided the Democratic administration for “replacing civil engineering with social engineering as it pursues an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” And its abortion plank recognized no dissent, taking the position that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.”

No, they are not the platforms of the Democratic and Republican Parties. They are both Republican platforms: the first from 1980, at the dawn of the Reagan revolution, and the second the 2012 Republican platform that was approved on Tuesday afternoon in Tampa, Fla.

Not so hard to see why Republicans may have lost Hispanics and women, no?

The Republicans' election day disaster wasn't a Mitt problem. In many ways, Mitt was the perfect Republican candidate for an election day that now hinges on a handful of swing states that demographically, geographically, and philosophically lean towards the Democratic party: A business-side moderate from a blue state. The problem was the rightward shift in the Republican party's platform, a shift brought on by the party's decision to rely on the evangelical vote, regarded as a key to victory in Bush's 2004 election.

The party's platform shift aimed to galvanize its supporters on the far right, a historically apathetic voting block that demonstrated what it could do in 2004. But it came at a cost the Republicans didn't seem to anticipate: alienating the socially liberal or moderate Republicans that made up a portion of their party. According to a 2012 PEW Research poll, 23% of Republicans FAVOR gay marriage, as do 58% of independents. 30% of Republicans and 60 percent of independents believe abortion SHOULD BE legal. And a majority of Republicans and Independents believe the government should invest in clean energy like wind and solar. These percentages are not insignificant--when your candidate fervently goes against all of these, you will ostracize voters who factor these issues into their decision. Someone who dislikes Obama tremendously, but loves their gay son will be hard-pressed to vote for the guy who's angling for the bigot vote.

According to exit polls, Obama beat Romney among the 41% of voters who identify themselves as "moderate"-- by 15 percentage points!

Abortion and gay marriage bans may help win local and state races--although Akin and Murdock found out the perils of being too far right--but at a national level, it's hard to see how an adherence to far right social views is beneficial. For the vast majority of Americans, putting these issues on the ballot is akin to putting out an opinion poll--they're not impacted by the results, but they make their voices heard. It's a cheap trick from Karl Rove's playbook that worked well in the past, but is starting to cost the Republicans--because the beliefs of Americans are changing as rapidly as our demographics, perhaps even faster. There was a time in this country when the majority of people thought owning slaves was okay, when people thought that denying women the vote was perfectly natural, when people believed that "separated but equal" was fair. The vast majority of Americans have "evolved" concerning these beliefs, and there's a clear trend future Americans will repudiate the ideas that gays shouldn't marry and abortion is murder: 56% of young Americans support abortion rights (compared to 30% who don't), 70% support gay marriage. Will these young voters change their minds when they get older? Doubtful. And their kids will be even more likely to resist the social conservative viewpoint.

The far-right's war is already lost. Fighting it will only hasten the Republican party's demise.

Voting Cheat Sheet

Who should you vote for?

Well, if you're still undecided, here's a handy cheat sheet:

VOTE FOR ROMNEY IF:
 -You think the economic crash that occurred less than a month into Obama's Presidency is Obama's fault.
-You believe the gays shouldn't be allowed to get married.
-You believe abortion should be banned, in pretty much all cases.
-You want us to go to war with Iran and/or Syria.
 -You believe that we should cut programs for the poor at a time when more Americans rely on them for survival than ever before, while giving tax breaks to rich people.

VOTE FOR OBAMA IF:
-You think the economic crash that occurred less than a month into Obama's Presidency is the result of eight years of Republican mismanagement.
 -You don't care if the gays can marry each other or not.
-You believe that abortion is a tragedy but you can't possibly know every woman's circumstances and as such, can't make the decision for them whether or not to abort a pregnancy.
-You'd prefer to avoid another costly war in the middle east.
-You believe in raising taxes on the wealthy to bolster the safety net for poor Americans during this financial crisis.

Refugees of Lower Manhattan

On satellite maps of the Korean peninsula at night, you can see a clear line. The place where the lights stop, and the world is plunged into darkness. A split caused by the madness of a reclusive dictatorship. 

Now that line exists somewhere else. The island of manhattan. Not caused by a madman but a mad storm. North of the line people dress as vampires and goblins like its any other Halloween. But its south of the line where everything resembles haunted houses. 

Ishaan Tharoor on Time.com wrote an excellent essay describing the eerie scene: 

"Each morning since the hurricane, I’ve woken up in Lower Manhattan not to an alarm or car horns on the street, but to the overwhelmingly weird silence of this alternate reality. I scrub myself clean after heating water atop a gas stove, sip from a lukewarm bottle of orange juice, and then trudge down pitch-black flights of stairs with the lantern that is my dying iPhone. By the time I’ve emerged into the sunlight, I’m ready, almost, to start running away from zombies. Yet, 20 minutes and a shared cab later—this new tradition, itself, a kind of surreal act of post-cataclysm New Yorker bonhomie—I’m in Midtown, where Sandy has become, like every other horrible natural disaster in the world, just something that happened somewhere else."

Monday night, my wife and I were watching Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close while the storm raged outside. We had just reached the point of the movie when the child hears his father's last message from the Twin Towers on 9/11 when the power flickered. In the brief moment of darkness, the sky outside our window, visible just above the buildings across the street, lit up with a bright blue-green burst. We knew from the news reports we'd been watching for the past few hours that the flash wasn't lightning, but a transformer exploding. This flash was bright and massive. Which meant it was close. A few minutes later the power went out for good. 

We were prepared, to a degree. One benefit to the Hurricane Irene hype was that we had purchased two 2-gallon containers for water, dozens of candles and several flashlights. Years ago, my Uncle Moe shipped me a battery-operated radio, "just in case," and it soon became our only link to the outside world. 

My wife and I, curious to see the extent of the outage, went up to our rooftop. The wind blew so fiercely up there I thought we'd fly off. The city immediately around us was pitch black, save for a few emergency stairwells with battery power. The Empire State building and the city beyond tantalized with its luminescence, seeming even brighter contrasted with the ghostly foreground. To the south, the lights of the freedom tower still shined. In the distance, across the river in Jersey, more transformer explosions lit up the sky like firecrackers. 

We returned to our apartment and played cards by candlelight, drinking 2 buck chuck and listening to the ever-worsening news until we couldn't take it anymore, then turning to Z100 and 95.5 for some lighthearted pop music. I was never so thankful for Katy Perry. We went to bed to the sounds of kids screaming outside and police sirens. An occasional flash of red and blue from the cruisers patrolling the streets was the only thing illuminating our room after we snuffed the candles out.

We woke up to a different world. No electricity, still. Even more alarmingly, no cell service. Desperate for an outside world that didn't come through an AM/FM antenna, we mustered up our courage and descended the lightless stairwell to traverse the post-apocalyptic streets of a powerless East Village. 

It wasn't quite that bad. Not apocalyptic, but... Surreal. The bodega on the corner of 4th st. and 2nd avenue was open, even though its aisles were lit by flashlights. Two girls begged for a discount on Ben and Jerry's ice cream. "but it's going to melt!" they whined. 

The great recession of these past three years didn't bring back the bread lines of the 1920's, but Hurricane Sandy brought something much weirder: Pay phone lines, as everybody's precious iPhones had become little more than fancy paperweights. Lines also stretched down the block at the MUD coffee truck parked on 9th street. 

Northern Spy Food Co. was handing out free food, as much out of charity as emptying out their soon to be warm freezers. Other restaurants set up ramshackle operations, heating up food with portable stoves in front of their doors or using the gas in their dark kitchens. Pizza was the most popular... Hungry eyes following people carrying pizza boxes and long lines at Mozzerella Pizza on Avenue A spoke to that. 

The streets reminded me of the way they looked shortly after 9/11, with people gathered outside sharing stories of what they experienced during the storm. One guy we met worked at a clothing store on Bond Street. He told us his boss called him to make sure the store was okay... The store, not his employee, mind you. 

We stopped at the Con Ed plant on 14th street, where a large utility truck had broken down in the floodwaters. Driftwood was piled up in the street. A sharp line, a foot high on the side of a building showed how high the water had risen. A few people were wringing out what they could salvage from the sopping wet interiors of their parked vehicles. 

I asked one of the utilities guys outside the plant what the status was. "Man, I haven't even been inside yet," the guy said. I took that to mean they hadn't quite started repairs. 

Returning to our apartment, we packed a bag with our things and headed uptown to my sister's apartment, which thankfully had power. Leaving the darkness of the East Village and lower manhattan behind, I wondered, what about people not as fortunate as us? What about the people with no place else to go?

I have no doubt in the resiliency and resourcefulness of my fellow New Yorkers. The very fact that the first thing some people did was open up their doors and go about business as usual, even if it was in the dark, is a testament to that never say die attitude city-dwellers here share. 

Right now though, I know all us refugees of lower manhattan--and those throughout the northeast sitting in the dark--desire the same thing. 

For the lights to come back. For things to go back to normal. 

It'll be a harder road back for those outside the city. But I know we'll get there. We always do. 

New York City Sandy Survival Tips (based on every disaster movie I remember)

1. Avoid the Empire State Building. It'll be the first to go.
2. The Brooklyn Bridge is also not a good place to be.
3. The New York Public Library makes a great shelter because you can burn the books to keep warm.
4. Watch out for WOLVES.
5. The Statue of Liberty's torch is the safest place to be. It always survives.
6. Hang out with Bruce Willis. He will protect you.
7. Don't just stand there staring at the tidal wave, RUN.
8. Zombie-vampires are smarter than you think. Avoid their traps.
9. Government, police, and other authority figures will freak out, so follow the orders of the nerdy young scientist they all refuse to listen to.
10. If there's something strange in your neighborhood, don't call 911, call Ghostbusters.