At the Tavern with a Trump Supporter

It is easy to communicate with a Trump supporter, you just have imagine they have a gun pointed at your head, and listen, and don't forget to breathe. Breathe.

A double, below this: Trump Publicly Inciting Violence

This is a double weblog post. See below: Arrest him now! Trump inciting violence in early 2016; the outrage. 2019: Too late.

3/5/2016

I sat next to a Trump supporter the other night. He was past the time of several beers before coming to the bar. It showed in the noticeable head turn when the eyes follow the chin’s direction by a ¼ second. But he concluded our 15 or twenty minutes on politics with “I’ve never enjoyed talking politics with anyone before.”

I was patient with him because I knew how much he had drank. He was 33 years old. He had been truck driving for a long time.He had owned a nice Peterbilt until it was repossessed. He was driving oil deliveries up and down the east coast. He told of driving 24 hours plenty of times. He described a route from Connecticut to Florida that he made twice weekly.

When I asked him the obvious I was not surprised by his first response: “He’s tough on them all.”

When I let him elaborate he got to his own economics rather quickly.

“I drive a truck. We need better pay. You know much we have to pay?”

I empathised outwardly. “I’m a self retired Master Plumber (yada yada yada).”  My long tough and hard days of work and so on.

His first example after the obvious “How do you mean?” Was a bureaucratic snafus in which he had to annually report his health and sends that into a State office and it had failed twice according to their records. He was pissed at the injury. It was a slight. It was his analogy to government in general. That was clear. Objectively; his principal reference to analogize what was wrong with government was his experience with being delayed his licence registration by a small state managed bureau of code enforcement for long haul truck drivers.

I told how our government grows and gets better where it is allowed by congress.

I offered him the possibility that if Donald Trump gets in he might act on all of that angry talk at China and start our first international trade fight in a long time. I offered the question of “Do you think he’ll not want bills that restrict imports rather abruptly? He wants powerful change and he’ll want something does allot and faster than your average federal trade legislation. What would happen to all those trucking jobs when imported good slow down? Are you ready for that heavily impacting industry change that will probably effect you? How many trucker’s jobs do you think might be lost?”

I also offered the following and it was responded to with “I hadn’t thought about that like that.”:

“You know government should not be run like it were a corporation or a for profit business, because people have to come before profits and people are after shareholders and executive pay and sheer profits before people almost all of the time in a business.”

He agreed and was rubbing his chin and nodding.

It’s important to note that I was patiently aware of getting his goat. Anyone drinking and talking politics requires a careful touch. Use this advice please, guys.

By the end of that conversation I learned pretty much nothing new. I did validate that Trump’s supporters are the same people I met regularly as a professional plumbing and heating professional. Sometimes crawling on my belly up to them to meet for the first time underneath some old house in a city, next to a rat carcass while stirring up soil that had not been disturbed since DDT was in used in most household extermination. Beyond this story: I only watched a woman undress in clear view once in all those years. Your plumber is not getting lucky with people who are at home in the day. Well . . there was this young hispanic television reporter who I wished had  . . . I was married.

I let him know that by my information Donald Trump will never and did not ever have to begin under household economies like he and I did. He agreed and it was a thought he had never heard. He cashed out at the bar twice and stumbled out after about an hour. He had beautiful images of his red Peterbilt dumping aluminum at an Alcoa plant. Gorgeous.

Here’s the take:  If these guys were fought for with intents and even rhetoric that supported the very low income, say prior to talking about health insurance (complicated) back in 08’ then him and I would not have had much to talk about. I’m not casting backseat driver complaints about president Obama but and in defense of getting things done in D.C. I have ask everyone to consider; Doing that in 08 and even in 12 would have been very socialist of him. The opposition environment was throwing tea parties and talking about literally throwing the bums out. The health insurance industry was playing games while peeing their pants at the thought of nationalized health care financing. This president was almost lucky enough to get us long overdue health insurance policy as comprehensive as the Affordable Care Act was. Never mind drastic labor movements after about 400 years of adapting to overseas markets.

Also in defense; My new buddy had never ever voted in his life and was swearing he was going to this year. This can be assumed: he also has not expressed a political view as communication with government. Sure, he’s had to deal with those licensing agencies. He’s communicated, he has expressed this tavern viewpoint and venting many times before, I am sure. But this time he’ll have to do a municipal thing and deal with that bureaucracy again. So the Democrats on the left had not heard from him. In his past he has not communicated to government. No one from a news service poll has called him in all of his life. He has never held a protest sign. He does not like his relationships with bureaucracies.

The federal government really has no good public policy cheerleaders anymore. Back in the good old days, it made educational films for us to watch in school as a captive audience of learning minds in submission to authority. We saw great looking government employees doing great and pioneering things. We get enough of that now from private industry constantly showing off their pride at almost every commercial break. He’s not just a Trump supporters he the typically denied their fair shake. He’s a to be expected in any national political policy frequent visitor to history.

~~~~~~ A double: Trump Publicly Inciting Violence

Above: what they look like.

Update post February, 2019: Too late:

With a typo; typical. in 2016, he finally got my goat.

I do not know if he would use violence against someone else also angry about the behavior of businesses and bureaucrats if he were at a Trump rally. He might.

Trump image caption: “I would have kicked the hell out of him, I tell you.” And: “Back in the old days people as meetings like this would have . .  . him.”

James Gray Mason / End All Suffering

8/12/2016:

It has become far worse. The incitement of violence is multiple times now. The United States Justice Department seems to be allowing this continue. I am disgusted with him and every single person who finds him to be a solution.

#USSS #USAG ARREST HIM NOW!!!

Dearest Madam Attorney General, Mrs. Loretta Lynch,

How can you let this continue? This is the second clear incitement of violence from this man. If you think that no one will be harmed or killed from this public diatribe, that is wrong. Millions are listening. Someone today will likely hurt or kill someone else because of his incitement. Please do something. He must be arrested and lead from Trump Tower in handcuffs for all to see. Please allow justice to be an example for our young people. Please. 

" . . . and that would be a horrible day." That clinched it. Not a doubt he was talking about NRA assholes killing our president.

https://youtu.be/F5TtlHGm72Y

#endallsuffering #stopallsuffering #donaldJTrump #potus-shaft #IncitementofViolence #Justice4All #timetravelwish #UnitedStates #USJD #USAG #JamesGrayMason #Sol3 #JM A#1 #USAElections #diagnosetrump #ManyPeopleSay

This type of horrific crap is now all over the internet. Thanks Donald. If you had been a physician you would have violated the hippocratic oath, about a thousand times: Doing more harm than good for your constituents, your patients. 

A November, 2015 demonstration from a wise liberal: Cenk Uygur of the famed #theYoungTurks.

~~~~~

How disgusting are we? How ignorant and hateful are Americans at this time? Very disgusting. Very hateful and ignorance precedes that hate. A hateful lawn statue was addressed by a muslim neighbor with a request to instruct that hateful neighbor in what he may not know about Islam and Muslims. Jeez. But he got stabbed for his approach of communication offering education. Hate crimes and violence against Muslims is way up in the United States. That asshole Donald J. Trump shares responsibility for making it far more acceptable to publicly hate them. Because he wanted to earn votes.

From CAIR: http://www.cair.com/press-center/press-releases/13420-cair-chicago-invites-peoria-homeowner-with-anti-muslim-display-to-visit-mosque-learn-about-islam.html
#Hate #ignorance #StupidAmericans #UglyAmericans #Religiousintolerance #CAIR #endallsuffering

~~~~~~

5/28/2016

*Demagogue*: Straight out! But first: A question for us: Should we *now trust* the torch bearing mob? Answer this yourselves.

noun  dem·a·gogue \ˈde-mə-ˌgäg\

Simple Definition of demagogue:

: a political leader who tries to get support *by making false claims and promises and using arguments based on emotion rather than reason*

His opponent called him a bigoted demagogue.

<that politician is just a demagogue who preys upon people's fears and prejudices>

~~~~~

Para from The Atlantic's, Megan Garber:

"In Greece, the demagogue was not just a leader of people, but a leader who led, specifically, *by bullying/cajoling/converting charisma into influence.* He was a populist who appealed, in particular, to the lower classes."

And: 

"And it is enabled not just by TV and Twitter and a cultural environment that converts human charisma into mass media, but by our political system itself."

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/12/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-demagogues/419514/

~~~~


Michael Gerson, Opinion, the Washington Post:

“They are applying Trump like a wrecking ball against the old political order. And it clearly does not matter to them if their instrument is *qualified, honest, stable, knowledgeable, ethical, consistent or honorable.”*


And:

“Democracy is producing a genuine threat to the American form of self-government. Trump imagines leadership as pure act, freed from reflection and restraint. He has expressed disdain for religious and ethnic minorities. He has proposed restrictions on press freedom and threatened political enemies with retribution. He offers himself as the embodiment of the national will, driven by an intuitive vision of greatness. None of this is hidden.”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-the-demagogue-that-our-founding-fathers-feared/2016/03/10/58584278-e6df-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html


December, 15, 2015: Opinion; the Washington Post; YAMICHE ALCINDOR:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/us/politics/donald-trump-bernie-sanders-debate.html?action=click&contentCollection=us&module=NextInCollection&region=Footer&pgtype=article&version=newsevent&rref=collection%2Fnews-event%2Felection-2016

BTW: I loathe the New York Times for instigating the #IraqWar. I feel they have never met justice for their behavior. The 1st Amendment is not an escape clause from civil responsibility.


“Democracy is producing a genuine threat to the American form of self-government. Trump imagines leadership as pure act, freed from reflection and restraint. He has expressed disdain for religious and ethnic minorities. He has proposed restrictions on press freedom and threatened political enemies with retribution. He offers himself as the embodiment of the national will, driven by an intuitive vision of greatness. None of this is hidden.”

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/demagogue


#DonaldJTrump #Demagougery #PoliticalOpinion #USAElections #UnitedStates #endallsuffering #stopallsuffering

All Rights Reserved; James Gray Mason / End All Suffering,, 2016.

#donaldtrump #trump2016 #Peterbilt #RepossedDreams #endallsuffering #stopallsuffering #UNIONTruckDriver #OilTruckDrivers #TruckDrivers #USATrucks

Complaining about Obamacare is Ignorance of United States Healthcare

Two questions that most Americans will still answer incorrectly based on their vast ignorance of what our so called “health care system,” in the United States was and what it mostly remains today despite the revolutionary changes made in the Affordable Care Act:

What is more economically more efficient and delivers better health care delivery to the most people at once?

1. For profit private health insurance companies.
2. Government managed health care delivery and financing.

Here is another question that most will get wrong based upon the psychology of denial:

Who would do a better job at economic efficiency and changes in health care financing and delivery to the most people at once?

1. Elected representatives who are accountable to taxpayers and all citizens.
2. Faceless for profit private health insurance company shareholders and executives.

If you hear someone complain about any aspect or any detail of current healthcare provided and blame it as the fault of “Obama Care” please ask them, “How was that particular situation before the Affordable Healthcare Act?” They won’t have an answer. They did not know how bad it was. They are learning just now of what they dislike. They are now hyper aware of the thousands of details of healthcare financing and delivery. They have developed this awareness because they have been eating the conservative and private health insurance company propaganda sandwiches.

The problems are not a causality of Obama Care they are a causality of being afraid of change for decades and of being afraid of facing complexity and of being afraid of admitting that the United States has failed at something.   

I predict that in 9 out of 10 of those complaints that that person will have no idea how that problem, or the problem that that aspect of delivery attempts to repair, was prior to the ACA. This a sure prediction because it seems very much that as we now scrutinize our health care delivery and payments in this country we do so with a new awareness, not an old awareness.

Those details of a vast and very confusing healthcare payment and delivery system (if calling was what before a “system” is even merited) are what most of this community is learning about now, at this time, after the ACA has been passed is new to a great many who cared not for understanding the mess that we had.

It was passed with no conservative support in this country as the best attempt liberals in this community could make to correct a tangled mishmash of disorder that was costing everyone of us an out of control fortune in precious life-saving money that we (liberals) knew could be better spent.

The healthcare system was out of control and costs knew no ceiling and tens of millions of people in our community had no access to even visit a doctor’s office. It was so out of control that all of my community (the United States) could expect that all health care costs would be at least 12% more expensive in the following year. It was an economic monster by any definition. It was literally killing us.

We had plenty of true systems to look at all over the world, but the conservatives among us thought that we were too different. Too good to learn from others. They thought that our so-called system was wonderful.

1996: What it looked like and what it still looks like. Except the ACA removed many of these lines and then allowed affordable health insurance for 17 million people, many who never had it before and more to come still. I made this abstract collage in 1996. If defines only in abstract what our current system still looks like. The ACA was an attempt to use what we had without greatly upsetting conservatives in our country and so maybe get a standard passed that insured millions and curbed the amazingly rising annual costs of delivery and health insurance premiums and also allow us to become more moral as a society.

It was the profits and it was greed and bottom dollar corporate healthcare industry out of control. It was the cost of doing business or so we accepted it as. We were ignorant and we were all naive. It felt better to be blind to the complexity of a very confused “system.” Barely one conservative representative in this nation knew about those complexities. Barely one of them thought it was “a mess.” They would say things like “the best healthcare system in the world.” They were as children not wanting any change. They had the best healthcare system in the world: it was Congressional healthcare, it was a fast trip to Bethesda Naval Hospital or Walter Reed Army Hospital to be cared for by multiple doctors and nurses and get the best diagnostic technology within an hour of any complaint. They saw what they thought was our healthcare and so postponed making changes that would have saved the lives and the suffering of millions of Americans.

Now they complain the loudest when change is before them. They are the conservatives. A label for a political opinion that dislikes changes that favors the blissful state of ignorance of avoiding complexity and so maintaining a status quo. They think in naivety that the change should be easy. They  remain blissfully ignorant. The conservatives in the United States have no better solution for the mess that they allowed to grow and fester for decades.  

In 1994, I fought for a Single Payer healthcare system for the state of California. The private industry that was steeped in money spent over $72 million to defeat the initiative and won. Californians lost-out on a great chance to show the rest of this country what could be. Here we are 20 years later and we finally have the first glimmer of a national program and we are hearing the voice of the ignorant who hate change once again. Now they want to repeal the ACA and “fix it,” but they have not a good plan to do so. They have learned what the dislike about changes that are really only the beginning.

There will be a unified and national program for providing our healthcare to a standard that surpasses all known standards of healthcare delivery and financing and payment known in the world. I know this because I have seen what the United States is capable of. I still have optimism we can do this after the all the ignorance and greed and disdain for changes that I have witnessed.  

We will likely call it “Medicare for All.” It will be an evolution of “Obama Care.” It will be the inevitable. Change is always wrought with complexities that often involve trial and error learning by large societies. If there was ever a change that we all had to bravely direct ourselves toward, in all the pain and through all the complaining, it is our healthcare financing and delivery “system.” We will one day be able to call it a genuine system of healthcare.

We will choose the current operations of the Medicare Insurance program because it already exists and provides health care financing and so the distribution of healthcare for over 73 million of us. So it makes sense that we should use it to be the most efficient method of financing and delivery of something every man and woman and child in our community will need through their whole lives.  

The next complaint you hear may come from someone who works closely with the complexities of management. They will likely blame it on “Obama Care.” It is the pain of doing what should have been done decades ago. It is the frustration with having change forced upon them. No one like changes that make us do work and causes us to be critical. That is human behavior. That is predictable.

All Rights Reserved:  End All Suffering / James Gray Mason, 2-2016.

Keywords: health insurance, affordable care act, obamacare, healthcare financing, healthcare delivery

#Obamacare #AffordableCareAct #Healthinsurance #Greed #Healhcaredelivery #Medicareforall #Medicare4All #singlepayerhealthcare #Insurancecompanies #ignorance #BarackObama

The Whirlpool of Socio Economic Despair and the Average Donald Trump Supporter

This image portrays a well documented social concept in metaphor, as a constantly churning cycle that feeds a liquid spiral of our population down into a dark pit at the bottom of an unstoppable whirlpool of socio-economic despair that continues as if a function of nature. I made this image more than 15 years ago and this cycle remains today and it must be broken. But few in our busy society have taken the time to understand it is representing a causality in reason that can be addressed.

The graphic metaphor in summary: In a wealthy society that has resources enough but does not recognize the best use of those resources, if large numbers of children receive a poor education they will very likely live a life of poverty and be unable to earn enough in any given year to escape the many facets of life that lead to a feeling of desperation as the ever constant emotion of despair. In their despair, many will turn to dishonesty as crime to cheat the life they are disgusted with living and cannot see a reasonable and viable methodology of escaping.  Impulsively, society will then spend a great deal of money locking them up. That spending becomes the liquid that pulls by gravity with equal force as the momentum of crime behind it pushes it along. That money is lost and can not be used to address the causality of that crime that is the inevitable result of poor education. Poor education continues. They spiral persists. Poverty follows.

It was a lack of formal and public education that in 1787 was not seen by our supposedly brilliant “founders,” as being necessary for the security of a free state of free people. It was decades before the first cities in the new United States chose to publicly fund a school system. It was longer than a century before we recognized that African Americans must have a legally enforced right to that education as well. We still suffer because of this lack of foresight by privileged landowners, and slave owners who had very economic reasons for wanting us to be free.

In this graphic there are two metaphors of two entwined concepts: it is only our perspective from a distance (a stand-off position) that causes the center of the spiral to appear to be smaller. That small size is the size of the issue to the general population. That small size is also a cause of our segregation of those caught in the spiral away from our better functioning members of society. If a society were a person it might say:

“If it appears small we won’t have to face it. We won’t feel constantly guilty for our inability to share the opportunity of education with all as equals.”

A liberal in the United States of America knows of this whirlpool. A liberal knows that it begins with a poor educational system that does not favor equality of opportunity for every single citizen child in our country. Too many of the wealthy deny it exists.

If we want to see a good example of the demographic of who those people are, then we not look any further than at the audience of angry people who feel they should support the empty rhetorical campaign for president of the United States of America of billionaire real estate mogul Donald J. Trump.

There are millions of Donald Trump supporters who, if locked inside of a room with a well informed  liberal activist and so forced to listen to the explanations of this metaphor  would eventually understand this well-documented concept. They won’t like that they are listening to bleeding heart liberal but they would eventually agree that this spiral begins with education.

Donald J. Trump got a great education even though for most of the years of his primary education he treated those years as if that education could be forsaken as if it were a natural part of life.

But it was a natural part of life for the spoiled brats of the greedy land owners and landlords living in white male metropolis privilege clicks, as was the environment that Donald Trump’s father was living in while he became a millionaire in the 1950’s.

In this context, it is no coincidence that the majority of Trump supporters do not have higher education. It fits the pattern of this metaphor and it fits that Donald Trump would deny this causality as one of the privileged participants of a forsaken as an expectation of life,  higher educational system.

What is Donald Trump’s answer to stopping this whirlpool? It does not exist. He would deny that this very liberal metaphor is a causality of the very anger that the minions who are enthused by his reasonless campaign for president of the United States express with shouts and yelling of vitriol at the many public campaign events he has held.

Readers: If you know a Trump supporter try to get them into that room and lock the door behind you. Appeal to their anger. Let them know you understand how they feel before explaining your opinion of why they feel the way they do. They are hard working people. They each know someone who is either vastly underemployed or still unemployed from the near depression we suffered beginning in the Bush year of 2007. Empathize with them first. Maintain that empathy during the expression of your opinion as to why they have that anger. Let them know some facts like the fact that immigration into the United States has turned around. That the rich have been getting richer for decades while people like they are have continued to grow poorer. If you have read this far into this essay, you know what to say because you were already an informed liberal with empathy and understanding of causality of our whirlpool of despair.

By James Gray Mason for End All Suffering.

All Rights Reserved: James Gray Mason / End All Suffering, 2016.

#DonaldTrump2016 #Economy #Education #PublicEducation #Kids #Society #essays #amwriters #endallsuffering #stopallsuffering #JamesGMason

Another Weekend in the United States of Guns

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