So, I listened to the POTUS this morning while sitting in my car in my driveway. He was speaking at a press conference about those starving prisoners of Guantanamo and what to do, what to do. I don't really understand why this is such a problem for some -- the holding of hundreds of men prisoner in a dank place somewhere in Cuba without charging them with a crime for years and years and years -- and then I know why this is a problem. It's because we live in a country where it's more like do as I say than do as I do, a country where torture became legal and basic rights of due process were suspended because you don't mess with the United States, where even the most reasonable of the conservative justified crimes of war, absolving them and those who perpetrated them -- look, how cute the last POTUS looks with his new grandbaby! -- where those in power, backed by the inane, let drop the most basic of gun control objectives in the name of our Second Amendment rights and where, I'd say, fear rules the day. What if the Chechnyian American boy and his brother had opened fire at the Boston Marathon with machine guns legally obtained and killed scores of people that morning instead of packing pressure cookers with nails and metal and then setting them off as bombs? Would they have been charged with owning Weapons of Mass Destruction? Would the entire city of Boston been shut down as the National Guard roamed the streets searching for the killers? Would the NRA have come out and said People kill people, not guns! And would the politicians and the people that prop them up have bemoaned the lack of proper mental health treatment in this country in lieu of just removing or making more difficult the ability to buy and use Weapons of Mass Destruction?
Just wondering.
Perhaps what someone needs to do is manufacture and patent a pipe bomb used for hunting and then even these items won't qualify as weapons that terrorists employ. I mean, if someone can create a legitimate business out of it that creates jobs and lets folks get their jollies off killing wild animals, could it be wrong?
ReplyDeleteFear mongering from McCain on the radio today, and Bush should be tried as a war criminal. I try to live outside it all, it makes me too weary.
ReplyDeleteI wonder the same things, Elizabeth. POTUS said he was going to shut down GB. Right. Sure. Makes me mad as hell. Congress can't even pass basic gun safety legislation because the NRA has 'em by the short hairs. BTW, some of the representatives who voted against it are down in the polls in their home states. Good. Mark and Gaby Gifford's organization is going to stay on this like a rabid dog, and that's why I send them my money.
ReplyDeleteI like your question about what if the bombers had used machine guns instead? Would that have finally moved Congress to get on board with the vast majority of the US population? I can only shake my head.
I think fear and terror are the new bread and circuses.
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