News & Articles

Although we are living in West Fargo only for the winter months, Corky and I are considering returning to North Dakota to live permanently because of safety concerns. I see that only one person has been reported by North Dakota authorities to the federal database used for background checks by gun dealers. It’s amazing that North Dakota has only one person who has problems sufficient to warn others that she should be denied purchase of a firearm. No one was referred to the database because of substance abuse. Of course, we all know there are no drunks or druggies in North Dakota. No North Dakotans are known for exhibiting an exuberance for life.
   I understand that North Dakota’s population has just exceeded 680,000 since the inception of fracking. According to the American Psychiatric Association, six percent of the population of the United States has severe mental problems. Under ordinary circumstances, this estimate would mean that about 40,000 North Dakotans would qualify for mental tests, treatment, and supervision. The APA also estimates that only one percent with mental problems are violent. In other words, only 400 violent men and women would pick up a Bushmaster with a 100-round drum and fire 40,000 rounds in schools, theaters, malls, nursing homes, and the state capitol. There is a rumor that the only North Dakotan on the database is a Grassy Butte woman who occasionally howls at the moon—although it could be the Dickinson guy who sexually assaulted a horse. Evidently the other 399 possibles with violent urges have moved across the border. Minnesota has already reported many thousands to the database.  
   The feds gave North Dakota $300,000 to help establish electronic records for the database. In two and a half years, the state has reported only the howling mad woman from Grassy Butte. Therefore, North Dakota must be the safest state in the country. Does anyone have real estate for sale?

A Maxim: In Our Tiny Part Of The Universe,

What Goes Up Must Come Down

   The world has been blessed and damned with firearms for centuries, but there are scads of people who have not discovered physics yet. In Muslim countries, there is a tradition that when celebrating births, deaths, weddings, and almost anything else, rifles will be fired into the air. The bigger the celebration, the more rounds fired toward Allah. In Baghdad and Kabul celebrations, three or four innocent people are often killed and dozens wounded by falling bullets. We often hear, “Well, life is cheap in the Middle and Far East.”  
   We forget that facts show we are much worse. Eighty-seven percent of the children killed by firearms each year in the world lived in the United States. For each of the last 32 years, we have killed an average of 3,721 children by firearms. That total equals 4,763 classrooms we didn’t have to build or put a cop in. Just this category alone represents 119,079 children in 32 years. What does a six-year-old boy look like when hit by eleven bullets? We have had 1.3 million firearm deaths since the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968. That’s real math. And the bullets didn’t fall from the sky. They were fired horizontally. We kill a child every three hours and 15 minutes and wound one every 34 minutes. We have killed two and a half times more children in the same period than the total KIAs in the Vietnam and other wars through Afghanistan. We suffer 80 percent of the firearm deaths in the top 23 developed countries.

   People have to be taught that guns do kill. One-third of all U.S. households with children under 18 have a firearm. The problem? Forty percent of those households store their guns unlocked and loaded. What are the parents thinking? Recently a Minneapolis four-year-old boy blew his two-year-old brother’s head off because guns were left loaded and unlocked—in a house with eight other guns. Their parents lived in a strange cocoon of ignorance, stupidity, and paranoia. But so do some people who think they know something about guns.
                                                                                                                                      
Gun Shows And Living
Rooms Can Be Very Dangerous Places

   Anyone who has not gone through military rifle-range training should visit one to see how professional killers treat guns. They think guns are dangerous! If you are on the firing line and you move wrong, point muzzles at someone, load the weapon clumsily, or show reckless disregard for others, you may face a court-martial. As a member of a Marine court-martial board at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for a time, I was a participant in firing-range “reckless disregard” cases. We often followed through with the Marine Corps maxim of “Bring the guilty bastard in, give him a fair trial—and hang him.” Marines often lost 20-30 percent of their pay for six months for a range infraction.
   I was invited by KXJB-4 on January 17th to debate on “HOTBOX” the national organizer of Gun Appreciation Day (1/19/13), which was really a put-up job by the Republican Party and the NRA. My first response to that idiocy was the fact that on Gun Appreciation Day, 32 Americans would be murdered, 55 would be killed by accident or suicide, and 195 would be wounded—all by firearms. I asked the national organizer to tell me what the 282 families of the dead and wounded would say when he asked them how they appreciated Gun Appreciation Day. That’s when the fun started. I ended up saying the NRA and its gun lobby should be drowned in a small bathtub. We are drowning in so many guns people don’t even seem to miss the 500,000 that are stolen each year. The next day I was attacked for being “violent.” It happens I picked up the idea of drowning the NRA from a member of the NRA board of directors, anti-tax guru Grover Norquist, who has been suggesting for years that “government be drowned in a bathtub.”


Adults Playing Soldier
With Military-Style Assault Rifles

   I do understand that some underdeveloped adult males love to play soldier, snoopin’ and poopin’ in the woods playing “militia,” having Walter Mitty wet dreams over the all-black assault rifles with folding stocks, pistol-grip triggers, black cooling barrel shrouds, flash suppressors,  bayonet lugs, and large “banana” magazines. Guns do make people feel tough. Think Arnold Schwarzeneggergroper killing hundreds. But they are not a substitute for penis enhancement. Owning a gun is serious business. If you want to fire a 100-round drum, wear a uniform and go to Afghanistan.
   Besides the 282 dead and wounded on Gun Appreciation Day, several other adults were wounded that day—at gun shows. Emory Cozee of Indianapolis shot himself in the hand with his “unloaded” .45 cal. semi-automatic (they are tricky!) while attending the Indy 1500 Gun and Knife Show. In a Medina, Ohio, gun show, a gun dealer pulled the trigger on another “unloaded” semi-automatic handgun and shot a bystander in the leg and arm. In a North Carolina gun show, a seller was removing his “unloaded” 12-gauge shotgun from its case when it discharged, wounding a deputy sheriff and two bystanders. I am sure there were other accidents around the country that were kept quiet. One NRA gun lobbyist said after Newtown and the 20 first graders, “This is the price we pay for freedom.” Evidently the death of 20 children is just a minor distraction for those in the firearm business.

Been Muzzled At
A Gun Show Lately?

   By the way, on Gun Appreciation Day a 15-year-old boy in New Mexico killed five members of his family with a semi-automatic rifle. He later admitted he thought of going to Walmart to shoot more people.

   Joshua Holland on AlterNet wrote he received this email from a combat veteran and firearms instructor about attending gun shows: “One of the most disturbing things I found at gun shows is how many drooling morons think that they can cultivate an air of ‘knowing’ about guns by behaving casually with, and around them. One show I attended in Riverside was the shortest. Upon entering the door, and taking about 20 steps I had been “muzzle-flagged” at least three times by people waving s--- around. I backed out of the ... room ricky tick. The strongest lesson taught ... is muzzle discipline. [Bullets do come out of muzzles.] ... [In the military] countless drills were done with light pointers in the barrel instead of rounds so that the habit of awareness and attention was bored into the middle of our bones. Transgressions were given swift, physical, ruthless, and unforgettable attention [like court-martials]. When I am with, or around firearms every single thing I do is [on purpose]. That’s what I learned. That’s what I teach.”  
   Evidently he thinks guns are serious business. A Cincinnati church sponsored a buyback plan on Gun Appreciation Day, trading $100 gift certificates for guns. Some of the guns turned in were still loaded when checked by a cop. The buyback could have been very ugly.
   At last count, we have 129,817 federally registered firearm dealers in the “guntopia” United States selling out of 51,438 gun stores, 7,356 pawnshops, and hundreds of thousands of car trunks. We manufactured 5,459,240 firearms and imported 3,252,404 in 2010. Over 95 percent were for the American market. When is enough enough?
    
The Obama Family
Averages Thirty Death Threats A Day

  The NRA website identifies 58 people as members of the NRA board of directors. Their backgrounds range from law, law enforcement, entertainment, and politics to arms business owners and NRA lobbyists. Exactly half own firearm companies and sell guns or are employed as lobbyists by the NRA to purchase the Best Congress Money Can Buy. There are 48 men and 10 women on the board. There is one educator and one doctor. Thirteen are Republican politicians. All of the women work for the NRA in some capacity. There are 54 whites and four blacks. None are Democrats. It’s an interesting list. Take Ted Nugent, Karl Malone, and Tom Selleck. Their backgrounds do not change my opinion that the NRA staff and many members of the board of directors are psychopaths, defined by the American Psychiatric Association as ruthless, brutal, selfish, greedy people who totally lack empathy and sympathy. They really don’t care how many adults and children are killed by the gun culture as long as they can sell guns, ammo, and body armor on the open market.
   When “one-term” President Obama and his wife Michelle left their armored car to walk in their second inaugural parade, they knew that the family had received at least 30 death threats that day, with ten of them considered “very serious” by the Secret Service. Before the November 6th election, NRA board member Ted Nugent said he would be “dead or in jail” if Obama was elected to a second term. He then had a long talk with the Secret Service. While the Obamas were walking down Pennsylvania Avenue, Twitter was alive with the “fact” that he would be the nation’s first and last black president.

   Racism is still very much alive in this country, pushed by Southern Tea Parties and white supremacy groups that have increased tenfold since George W. Bush left office. In 2008 there were 149 right-wing wacko groups: militias, the Ku Klux Klan and derivatives, white supremacy groups, racist Tea Party groups, and racist white church groups such as Christian Identity. Now there are 1,274 such groups, tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which identifies extremist organizations in the U.S. This is the American Taliban, which equals the Muslim Taliban in treating women and minorities as second-class citizens. They yell “White Power!” and “Sieg Heil!” to Hitler. The blood-soaked Wayne LaPierre and the psychopaths in the NRA feed these groups when they talk about defending the Second Amendment from “those who will take all of your guns away” or say “We must keep all of our assault rifles with 100-round drums to protect us from a tyrannical government.”
    What is the government doing that “tyrannisizes” these Neanderthals? Is it the fact that in just a few years, whites will be a minority in the country? Is the government “tyrannical” because it collects taxes for Medicare and Social Security and makes indestructible morons wear seatbelts and motorcycle helmets? Are parking meters ruining your lives? Is it because our government conducts body searches at airports so you can’t board with a weapon? Are car and driver’s licenses “tyrannical”? Is that “tyrannical” government closing bars too early and making you work too late? Have you been picked up for a DWI? Are you angry the government restricts you to 70 mph instead of 100? Is it because women and minorities have equal rights? Why do some of the “tyrannized” evangelicals think blacks are “mud” people created by God to serve whites? Are they listening to prophets or the jawbones of asses? And what is “freedom”?

Will The NRA Buy $220 18” by 20” Bulletproof
White Boards For Every Student?

   This is one of the latest diabolical schemes to make money off the threat of 316.5 million guns in our society. The white bulletproof shield-board created specifically for children to carry by the Maryland armor manufacturer Hardwire is made of Dynema, the same material used in MRAP vehicles to reduce the damage from IEDs. It’s priced at $220. Teachers can also buy 10” by 13” bulletproof clipboards to hold in front of their vital parts. The large shield has three handles so students can take them from the classroom to the playground easily. Have we gone nuts?
   Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal recently said the Republican Party must stop doing stupid things or it’s toast. Hanging around the gun shows with the NRA gun culture, nestled in cocoons of ignorance and paranoia—in the end—will be a very stupid thing. Do we really want our first graders to say to their teacher (as in a Fargo Forum cartoon), “I need to go to the rest room. Cover me.”