It gets tiresome doing the knee-jerk.
Like it’s some kind of dance craze akin to the twist that we can’t shake.
The MSM breaks news like an old man breaking wind and we salivate at the mixed metaphor bell. We get to our little social media niche and just type away our opines — liking and snarking our ways toward temporary relief of our overwrought feelings about. Anything.
So Michael Moore is calling for. Un-amending the Deuce.
He’s been down this path before with Bowling for Columbine back in 2002. He was sick and tired of the violence and the excuses. He went directly to the home of Moses aka George Taylor (Planet of the Apes) aka Detective Thorn (Soylent Green) aka Charlton Heston, president of the NRA. Moore said, No more! Thou Shalt kill, man!
And just to show he had no personal hard feelings toward Moses or gun owners, Moore told him that he was a member of the NRA. Check it out:
Moore was mostly about assault rifles and the mayhem they create, as evidenced when two students went on shooting spree at Columbine High School back in 1999, killing 12 students and a teacher. The IMDB storyline was/is familiar:
The United States of America is notorious for its astronomical number of people killed by firearms for a developed nation without a civil war. With his signature sense of angry humor, activist filmmaker Michael Moore sets out to explore the roots of this bloodshed. In doing so, he learns that the conventional answers of easy availability of guns, violent national history, violent entertainment and even poverty are inadequate to explain this violence when other cultures share those same factors without the equivalent carnage. In order to arrive at a possible explanation, Michael Moore takes on a deeper examination of America’s culture of fear, bigotry and violence in a nation with widespread gun ownership. Furthermore, he seeks to investigate and confront the powerful elite political and corporate interests fanning this culture for their own.
Some things never change, but, on the other hand, some things do. Funny old world.
On May 24, a young gunman walked into an elementary school in Texas and shot up the place, killing 19 kids and two teachers and wounding 17 others. It was like Newtown all over again. Hand-wringing anguish. More saturation coverage of our collective inability to control weapons of mass destruction at home. I was preparing to watch Game 5 of the NBA semi-finals, 10,000 miles away, when the pregame analysts took some time to talk about the Uvalde shooting. Stephen A. was spot on:
Indentured servants, indeed. Even when they get shot up, they kowtow to the moneybags. Like Stephen A. says, there’s an election coming up — get rid of them all! Okay, that’s a bit knee-jerkish. But it does press home the oft-thought desire that we institute term limits.As the late great Ed Asner said in his book about the Constitution and our so-called founding fathers, The Grouchy Historian: An Old-Time Lefty Defends Our Constitution Against Right-Wing Hypocrites and Nutjobs.
THEM: The Framers believed in term limits.
ME: I’m with you on this: I figure if a congressman can’t steal enough money in three terms, he’s too dumb to hold the job in the first place.
That’s it, we all seem to agree, the Bastards in Congress are in it for the money. They gotta go.
But having said that, and speaking of knee-jerk, I still had some shock in me, I discovered, when I heard Michael Moore tell that irritating prince of knee-jerks, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, that he feels that the 2nd Amendment should be pulled. Check this stuff out:
Well, my reaction is that Moore doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The Founding Fathers have been reified enough. As, again, Ed Asner puts it, they legalized slavery and saw Blacks as ⅔ of a person, and ignored women. Why’s that sound familiar? But more importantly he points out that the Bill of Rights, including guns, was an afterthought the Fathers had to be talked into at the last minute. Asner, quoting Charles Beard, reminds us that the Founders were anything but saints, but, more importantly, were composed of the following:
1) Plantation owners and slaveholders.
2) Those heavily invested in lands for speculation.
3) Bankers and money lenders.
4) Bond holders–those who held “paper”–i.e., creditors who owned government securities and military debt.
5) Wealthy merchants, manufacturers, and ship owners.
Look at that list. These are the guys we identify as the problem today. For “slaveholders” see debt slavery. Americans have stockpiled up to 425 million guns because of an intuitive fear of these guys above. We’ll need them when the shit launches fanward.
But what we don’t need anymore are AR-15s. Especially in the hands of disturbed children who can’t handle growing up absurd like the rest of us. We’ve had a kind of rein on the weapons in the past — HR3355 — which banned “assault weapons”, but Congress let the legislation lapse and die under a sunshine clause. Look at what was on the books:
Title XI-Firearms, Subtitle A-Assault Weapons, formally known as the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act but commonly known as the Federal Assault Weapons Ban or the Semi-Automatic Firearms Ban, barred the manufacture of 19 specific semi-automatic firearms, classified as “assault weapons”, as well as any semi-automatic rifle, pistol, or shotgun capable of accepting a detachable magazine that has two or more features considered characteristic of such weapons. The list of such features included telescoping or folding stocks, pistol grips, flash suppressors, grenade launchers, and bayonet lugs. [wiki]
Maybe our Colorado, Texas and New Jersey school shootings don’t happen with this legislation in place. Maybe the thing to do is to stop hand-wringing and make gun reform (not the rescinding the Amendment, which would probably bring about a civil war.) And read Ed Asner’s book. (Here’s my review of it.)
Short of using the law and the Bill of rights (see Amendment 1, also under threat), we remaining lefties will find ourselves having evil fantasies that see atrocious things happening to the youngsters of the elites holding us all back, such as depicted in the British film, many years back, If….
Or, maybe it’s time to Occupy Congress with a lefty Jan 6 event in July. Abbie afros instead of Viking horns.