6/12/2016 1:02 pm -5:
The Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida; our worse mass shooting to date. It was only a matter of time! Disgusting HATE was LIKELY the causality of the shooter's anger. We can all be angry about something. But we are surrounded by EASY tools designed to kill people. GO FIGURE!
Our behavior of anger must be expressed peacefully ALWAYS.* Monkeys with tools that can be pointed at any other monkey then just push a monkey button. This is not a CIVILIZED society. Thanks allot NRA #assholes. You share responsibility for this madness.
A mad stabber would have likely only wounded a few. Our gun madness makes this possible, unfortunately. Very sad.
We are crying today. I thought this was going to be a happy Sunday. Wrong. - James~~~~
Essay from the days after the San Bernardino massacre:
From: December, *after the San Bernardino, California shooting: From the Gun Control Discussion page on G+: Relevant EVERY DAY in the United States of Guns.*
14 lives very easily wiped-out in minutes in California yesterday. Shocked? In disbelief? I’m not. That event in California yesterday was the second mass shooting yesterday. It was one of more than 80 shooting deaths that occurred yesterday in *the United States of Guns.* We won’t hear of the others because they died singly and not with many others in one place at one horrific time.
22 years ago I was fighting hard and risking my life while receiving death threats on an almost regular basis as I had the only pro-gun control website on the world wide web for several years, beginning in 1994. [The image below this post is left-over from those days.] I would drive around a working class city in California with a Handgun Control Inc. bumper sticker on the back of my truck. Gun lovers would get angry and follow me around town, cornering me in front of shopping centers and engage in angry debates with me for up to an hour while security guards would get nervous and merchants would chase us off. For years *“Watch your back Mason!”* was a common line of threat in my email inbox. The FBI would not help me, “We really don’t have any method of dealing with digital media at this time, Mr. Mason, so sorry.” I had no Secret Service protection, no alarm system at home, nothing but my clear knowledge that I was dealing with men who are paranoid cowards at heart, to keep me going as a matter of a gamble of a sacrifice of my own safety for advocacy we were (and still are) greatly lacking.
The beginning of that advocacy was approximately 2 years prior to the sudden surprise of learning my sister had been murdered by her jealous ex-boyfriend who blasted a hole in her head, in her bedroom, with his father’s .38 caliber revolver, that he and his dad and grown up with, having fun a few times a year shooting it at the range together and bonding around the firearm. The little bastard had acted impulsively and used a tool that was very effective and was easily within his reach and snuffed out the life of a beautiful 19-year-old girl, then shot himself dead (thankfully).
I was lucky in that misfortune. I had only just learned I had a sister I had never even met, prior to minutes later, over the phone long distance with my never met father that she had been ripped away from my father’s and her mother and her family’s lives. Because of this forced detachment from the time I was an infant I was more angry than heartbroken. I would never know her. I would learn of her from stories about her and family video tapes and old pictures. My abandonment by my biological father had spared me great heartbreak. Hearing from my father that he had to scrape the remains of her brain matter off of her bedroom wall is the most shocking and grounding image I have to carry. Many hundreds of thousands of my fellow Americans have to carry imagery like that around with them daily, with clearer and more lasting emotional effect than I have to.
Tina. Shot dead at 19 years old. The sister I never got to meet.
A jealous ex boyfriend killed her while he was experiencing a very typical emotion and had access to a tool designed to kill people and used that tool in a manner this IS CONSISTENT with the design of that tool.
Coincidentally, learning of her death occurred nearly one year after I had become an online advocate for gun control in my community - the United States of America. Prior to learning of her death, It was online debates on the Prodigy Network where I learned the most about the opposition to gun control. I learned about their psychology. I learned the real reasons they selfishly protect themselves at the expense of all of us while immersed in utter deniability of the mass effect upon us all of their continuing defense of a mythology of a modern interpretation of the politically and very purposefully and vaguely written 2nd amendment to our U.S. Constitution. It was on those early internet online discussion boards where the asshole who later wrote and published a best seller called *More Guns Less Crime,* lost public debate after debate in text exchanges with me. He had learned exactly what not to write in that book and that allowed it to be a big-seller among American gun-nuts. I get no credit of course for teaching him what not to write. What he left-out in that diatribe of denial is what made that book sell.
Rhetoric about gun control appropriate? *Damn straight it is.* Rhetoric is an important tool of communication. Those who communicate well use accurate rhetoric to invoke emotion.
Know this accurate rhetoric: if having more guns in society would make us safer than *we should be the safest society on Earth right now because uniquely there is a legal firearm for every 88 out of 100 citizens in this country.* No other nation has this characteristic.
Know this accurate rhetoric: *If teaching people to handle their guns safely were to prevent them from ever using them wrongly, were any solution to gun violence in America then we should have no crisis of mass deaths by firearms and my sister would still be alive.* The feelings that cause us to use the nearest and most effective tools, to do what our brains in a temporary state of mind decide to do are key in those tools being used.
Know this accurate rhetoric: “Guns don’t kill people, people who use guns kill other people far more effectively and in far greater numbers, with less impulse control necessary and far quicker and so far more frequently than people without easy access to guns.”
Back in the years of the 1990’s I wanted the military style weapons eliminated from legal sale in the United States. I wanted realistic universal background checks throughout the whole country. I wanted electronic smart-gun technology mandated on all new firearms. I wanted gun locks distributed freely to all gun owners. I wanted the cost of all compounds for gunpowder to become very expensive. I wanted everyone to have to wait at least 6 days from the time of buying any gun to the time of physically receiving that gun (we called it back then “A cooling off period.”). I acted to close down traveling gun shows where many young men could buy $55 .25 caliber, small handguns without background checks in the State of California. I wanted all so called, “Gun Shows,” eliminated. Today we have watered-down waiting periods. We don’t seek a “cooling off period.” We have free right of travel from one state to another where millions of automobiles carry within them the legally purchased firearms from one state to another. We have idiots on the anti-gun control side who ignorantly point to cities and states with some (weak) gun control and say moronic things like “See, Chicago has gun control and it doesn’t work!” We have glorified the assault weapon far more than ever before and they reign in their popularity now. We still allow non-licensed (to sell) gun owners to sell their own used guns freely. We have a Supreme Court of the United States that had cast a very modernistic and political interpretation of an amendment that was originally written to protect the right of the States to keep their “Well regulated militias . . “ armed. That is the subject of the entire amendment. The end of that sentence is empty and political rhetoric that was cleverly designed to appeal to a hugely illiterate population in order to get the states to agree to ratify those first 10 amendments to our constitution. Look it up, please.
Is immediately after another one of many horrific acts of domestic terrorism by firearms an appropriate time for a gun control advocate to speak up loudly - *you’re damn straight it is because we are busy and selfish news consumers.* We move on too quickly. We mourn the lost very quickly and we cower from selfish assholes who put forth the idea that a badly written constitutional amendment is some kind of religious and so sacrosanct credo that cannot be violated. We wimp-out in denial and fear of political upset.
Those two idiots in California yesterday represent a horrible condition in the United States. Workplace anger? We all have that. Most of us don’t pack assault rifles in our homes and then fantasize about blowing-people-away.
Accurate rhetoric: Everyone of us, every man and woman and even children, are capable of experiencing a time in our lives when we would use any tool near us for it’s purpose. So singling out those most likely (statistically) to use a gun wrong is ridiculous. It doesn’t work. The mayhem continues. Far more of that every day gun violence occurs from those who have no record and no indication by those around them that they would kill another. That is a cold hard fact.
In a crowded and complex society the people cannot keep tools of death away from people who at sometime in their lives are going to experience nearly each and every one of the literal definitions of conditions described in the above collage. There are hundreds of other very typical conditions that are similar and each of us will have one or more of them, perhaps multiple times in our lifetimes.
All rights reserved: James G. Mason for End All Suffering, December, 2015, February, 2016.
http://EndAllSuffering.org
#guncontrol #2ndAmendment #EndAllSuffering #StopAllSuffering #Everytown #CPHV #Backgroundchecks #NRA #Guns #UnitedStates #JamesGMason
