CARS and GUNS

Yeehaw, we sure do love our guns in Murica, right?!

 “Gun control” posts have been all over my facebook feed recently, as the recent UCC shooting that made national news Was only 2 hours away from my city. Posts like “Obama’s trying to take our guns! All these shootings happen while he’s in office because of a lack of leadership!” That’s right, shift the blame to the black guy, even when there’s no rational argument that mass shootings are being caused by the president who’s been calling for gun reform. But it always comes down to “leadership” that’s always the argument, no specifics, no solutions, just “leadership”. As if all the mass shootings would end if we had a different president with “leadership” in office. How bout we wear our grown up pants and focus on preventing senseless violence in our country? The other pro-gun argument is to solely blame mental health, “Obama’s driving everyone nuts!” 

I agree that mental health plays a large role, obviously, and everyone needs access to adequate mental healthcare, but we also need to prevent people with a history of instability from getting guns, whenever I see people oppose backround checks for fear they’ll “git” their guns taken away, I gotta assume they’re mentally ill, and make sure I never find myself in a classroom with them.

What about the media? I believe the media creates a huge incentive, and that is obvious now that multiple mass shooters have admittedly done it for fame, outlets like CNN repeat these shooters names over and over, even going on to tell their whole life story, and infamy has become an incentive to kill, the media needs to stop  covering these shooter’s names, stop showing their pictures, and stop telling their stories. But I don’t see much chance of that in a corporate media dominated by ratings.

So, how can we protect our kids, and what should gun reform look like? Here’s where people argue, we can’t have common sense regulation because of the second amendment, but the second amendment explicitly states that the states have a right to a “well regulated militia”, not that every American has a right to keep unlimited weapons of war in their house, and this was the interpretation, even among constitutional scholars for hundreds of years, I believe until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise in the seventies. I think Thom Hartmann’s idea to regulate guns the same way we regulate cars would be the best way to move forward and 100% constitutional. You have a constitutional right to drive, but you have to prove you can operate a car first, and I don’t even necessarily think you need an all out ban on assault weapons, but that, like with cars, you can have different classes of gun licenses permitting you to operate varying types of weapons, you also need liability insurance to drive a car, as you should to own and operate a gun. The sad thing is if the mass shooters had used cars to kill their victims, the victims’ families would all get a check from geico. Also, every car comes with an ID # that must stay on it til it’s destruction, and every time that car changes ownership, it must be registered with the state. I believe all these rules are constitutional, and, along with mental health backround checks, need to be applied to keep Americans safe, and prevent at least some of these now routine mass shootings.