Very Little Left in Their Body or Soul Worth Protecting

Jim Carey leapt into the gun controversy with a couple of tweets that are worth repeating here.

Any1 who would run out to buy an assault rifle after the Newtown massacre has very little left in their body or soul worth protecting. ;^\
— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) February 2, 2013

Yes, i agree with the ppl who argue that cars can be as deadly as guns but a car is a lot harder to get through the door of a classroom. ;^]
— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) February 5, 2013

I love it when famous people have the balls to speak up.

I briefly met Jim Carey once, when he had taken a bunch of kids from the Make a Wish Foundation to see Lion King, and he brought them backstage after the show for a tour. All I could think to say as I shook his hand was, "What a great thing to do."

Ezra Klein Should Know Our Roads Are Killing People

Ezra Klein has a commendable piece on facts about guns and mass murders, but I'm shocked that he doesn't realize that we also have an epidemic of death in this country from poor road conditions. Here's Ezra:

If roads were collapsing all across the United States, killing dozens of drivers, we would surely see that as a moment to talk about what we could do to keep roads from collapsing. If terrorists were detonating bombs in port after port, you can be sure Congress would be working to upgrade the nation’s security measures. If a plague was ripping through communities, public-health officials would be working feverishly to contain it.  

Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. “Too soon,” howl supporters of loose gun laws. But as others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn’t “too soon.” It’s much too late.

Actually, the American Society of Civil Engineers says roadway conditions are a significant factor in 1/3 of all traffic fatalities.

Americans spend 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic at a cost of $78.2 billion a year--$710 per motorist. Roadway conditions are a significant factor in about one-third of traffic fatalities. Poor road conditions cost U.S. motorists $67 billion a year in repairs and operating costs--$333 per motorist; 33% of America's major roads are in poor or mediocre condition and 36% of the nation's major urban highways are congested. The current spending level of $70.3 billion for highway capital improvements is well below the estimated $186 billion needed annually to substantially improve the nation's highways.

US traffic fatalities average over 30,000 per year, so we have over 10,000 deaths due to road conditions, and many billions of dollars wasted, every year. Seems like we learned to ignore our deadly infrastructure and our epidemic of gun violence. Maybe Americans are ignoring all kinds of things that are literally killing people? Pollution, Climate Change, Budget Cuts, Inadequate Health Care, Wars...

If terrorists were killing 10,000 Americans every year, I wonder how much we'd spend on war and security? The ASCE says we need to spend $2.2 trillion over the next five years to fix our crumbling infrastructure and make ourselves safer, more productive, and more competitive. So, a little over $400 billion a year (which we can borrow at negative interest and buy cheap materials with) seems like a real bargain.

More fun with Glenn Beck quotes

Via KingOneEye, here's another Beck quote that cannot be explained away as a metaphor. This is a call to arms:

"Tea parties believe in small government. We believe in returning to the principles of our Founding Fathers. We respect them. We revere them. Shoot me in the head before I stop talking about the Founders. Shoot me in the head if you try to change our government.

I will stand against you and so will millions of others. We believe in something. You in the media and most in Washington don't. The radicals that you and Washington have co-opted and brought in wearing sheep's clothing — change the pose. You will get the ends.

You've been using them? They believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You're going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.

They are dangerous because they believe. Karl Marx is their George Washington. You will never change their mind."

Got that, teabaggers?  You're going to have to shoot the commies in the head. And before you Beck apologists say to yourself, well, no one has ever taken Beck up on this proposition, here's Byron Williams, who got into a shoot-out with cops in California while on his way to kill commies.

"Beck is gonna deny everything about violent approach and deny everything about conspiracies, but he'll give you every reason to believe it. He's protecting himself, and you can't blame him for that. So, I understand what he's doing."

I'm sure plenty of other people with guns and ammo know exactly what Beck is doing, too. How many of them are out there now, cleaning their weapons, getting ready to shoot some commie in the head?

And this guy's not the only one who was inspired to commit violence by Beck.

Indeed, in each of the three examples Brock cited -- Gregory Giusti, Charles Wilson, and Byron Williams -- the incendiary and often violent rhetoric spewed by the Fox News host and elsewhere on the network was said to be a motivating factor, if not the inspiring factor, in the men's actions.

I don't think Fox will fire Beck, not as long as he gets big ratings. And what better way to get violent fucks to watch your show than to have other violent fucks out there targeting liberals and crediting him for it? There are a lot of militia types out there, and eventually another Timothy McVeigh is going to listen to Beck say some shit like this, and that will be all it takes to put him over the edge.

Mix all this in with some crazy religious bullshit, like the Rapture, and these people will really think they have nothing to lose.

Fun with Mental Health, Guns, and Quotes from the Right

Hearing the endless loop of whining from Republicans that their violent rhetoric had nothing to do with the shooting yesterday in Arizona has made me want to review some of the rhetoric for the record. Never mind Palin's gun sight map, which they argue wasn't really gunsights, just cross-hairs.

''I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. ... No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out.'' —Glenn Beck

"I hope that's not where we're going, but you know if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out." —Sharon Angle

''Our nation was founded on violence. The option is on the table. I don't think that we should ever remove anything from the table as it relates to our liberties and our freedoms.''—Tea Party Texas GOP congressional candidate Stephen Broden

I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us 'having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,' and the people -- we the people -- are going to have to fight back hard if we're not going to lose our country." —Michele Backmann

"Don’t retreat. Instead — reload!" —Sarah Palin

Who knows how much these words had to do with the shooting, if any. But they're awfully close to yelling fire in a crowded theater. I don't care who the shooter was or what he thought, talk like this is dangerous and stupid. Anyone who wants to defend speech like that now is sick. It's indefensible.

Of course, combine Arizona's lax gun laws and cuts to mental health services and you get a real fun place to live:

Arizona has been considered a progressive state because it provides the vast majority of mental health services through cost-effective outpatient community programs. By slashing these programs, experts say the state will force more people to use emergency rooms or end up in the criminal justice system, which will cost the state more.

So, who knows what this particular shooter's mental state was. Who knows if he should have had a gun or not. Who knows if he watched Glen Beck. But you put all this together and it sounds pretty dangerous. Something is/was bound to go wrong.

Whiskey Fire In Binghamton

I've been reading the Whiskey Fire blog for quite a while now. Great snark. Plenty of insight. Always good wing-nut fun making. When a shooter killed 14 people in Binghamton last week, I was surprised to hear that this fun little blog I'd been reading is being written by folks just down the road from me. I felt a little tinge of memory from past tragedies that make us all feel closer together. In this case, we were pretty close already.

I was anxious this morning to see what they had to say about the tragedy, now that it's had some time to really sink in. The post is from Jake T. Snake: Why is the mine still open when the canaries keep expiring? It's a powerful post, and I recommend reading the whole thing, now, because I'm going to quote the end, which is where Robin and I wound up when we talked about this yesterday. Why, if this guy was pissed at people who fired him, or the rednecks (Binghamton is a city of 43,000, of which 80% are white) who made fun of his bad English, did he go shoot other immigrants like himself?

Finally, I think it is instructive that the shooter picked as his victims, not someone powerful like the people who had laid him off, but a group of the powerless like himself. This is the other dynamic that repeats itself over and over, don't attack those in power that are the root of the problem, but rather find someone weaker to victimize and perpetuate the cycle. This also explains the disdain people have for social workers. We help the weak and disenfranchised and in the united states that is a sign of weakness the unforgivable sin.

All the pitchforks and torches talk is a bunch of hot air fueled by psuedo-populists who will pat the back of the next CEO to donate to their election campaign. When the really angry people lash out with their firearms and satchels of ammo hanging around their necks, they don't go after the powerful. They go after the weak, the easy targets, those least able to protect themselves or fight back. Their self-loathing is exposed through their choice of targets.

Take the case of the Pittsburgh cop killer who was so certain that we were going to take his guns that he, whipped into a frenzy by the riot inciters in the GOP and Fox news, decided to take it out on some middle class, under paid cops who were just doing their job trying to keep their community safe from the likes of Wing Nuts like him. Maybe those cops were conservative 2nd amendment types too. He didn't know. He just started shooting at the first easy target to walk up to his house. He used an assault rifle. The cops were sitting ducks. Easy targets.

We're going to see a lot more of this. As Bushvilles sprout up all over the country, as the welfare roles and the unemployment lines get longer, as wages continue to fall, real income collapses, health care is lost, mental illness goes undiagnosed, we're going to see some very angry, heavily armed people lose it. And they won't lash out at Phil Gramm, George Bush, or Dick Cheney. In one of the final, ironic twists of the Bush era, they will take it out on the people who least deserve it.