October 6

 

Lads in plaid:

Our celebrity guest, Harrison

Fresh pair:

 

Just because:

Australian Flying Fox Bat

And now, because you blogger can't keep his mouth shut...

Mitch McConnell: “It’s premature...”

Mitch McConnell on the aftermath
of Sunday’s Las Vegas massacre:
 
“...I think it’s premature to be discussing legislative solutions, if there are any.”
 
Could that be because he has accepted $26,300 in donations from the NRA? And Paul Ryan, in lockstep, with $39,750 of NRA’s tainted dollars hanging around his neck (or shoved up some other body part)? In total, the NRA has donated $3, 544,294* (nearly all of it to Republicans) to current members of congress.
We are stuck with being a nation of out of control gun violence.
We are the world’s number one country for firearms ownership, and, according to the National Observer, the U.S. rate of firearms homicides is more than 50 times that of the United Kingdom.

The Republicans are right about one thing. There is no legislation that will stop a madman from carrying out a mass murder. But what about the smaller instances, in which jealous lovers or family members murder each other? Maybe if there weren’t a gun at the ready, the lover’s spat or family tiff would not escalate to murder. Is that not worth something? The explanation for the United Kingdom’s statistic listed above is that so few Brits own guns. How about the children who accidently kill themselves or their siblings because their parents have loaded guns in their homes, where children can access them?

Gun manufacturers, who fund the NRA to insure their continued profits, naturally want us to be a gun crazy nation. And they’re wildly successful.  Not to mention that for over 20 years they have blocked gun violence research.
Why would that be, do you suppose?

Arthur Kellermann published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993. It found that “keeping a gun in the home was strongly and independently associated with an increased risk of homicide … by a family member or intimate acquaintance.” Even after controlling for such factors as illicit drug use, criminal records or a history of domestic violence, the risk was found to be almost three times higher than in homes without firearms. This research was a blow to the NRA, because it adversely affected their ability to sell more guns. Kellerman’s paper noted that “protection from crime” was the most commonly cited rationale for having guns in the home. Forced entry by an intruder accounted for just a tiny number of real cases, though it loomed large in the fears of homeowners, thanks to NRA propaganda efforts. “A gun kept in the home is far more likely to be involved in the death of a member of the household than it is to be used to kill in self-defense,” Kellermann wrote. “In the light of … our present findings, people should be strongly discouraged from keeping guns in their homes.”

Right. Hope I’m not offending those gun owners who are up at dawn to drill and muster in order to participate in a “well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state,” as put forth in our second amendment.

*Stats from the Washington Post. Click to see what members of congress from your state have accepted from the NRA.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/nra-donations/?hpid=hp_no-name_no-name%3Ahomepage%2Fstory