Sunday, June 22, 2014

The folley that a gun has but one purpose

"A gun has but one purpose...to kill" is highly simplistic and in many cases wrong. First in most cases guns that are aimed at people are designed to stop a threat, not to kill; the Hague Convention of 1899 prohibits the use of bullets that expand when fired into a body, hence only full metal Jacket bullets are used in warfare. A full metal jacket bullet makes it less likely a person will be killed; it's also well known that a wounded soldier takes more resources that a killed soldier. There is also the fact that guns are used as a deterrent much more than they are used to shoot people; hence the saying that carrying a concealed weapon gives the carrier more options than those that don't. There are also many firearms specifically used for target shooting that are so job specific (the majority of competition/target shooters do not hunt), they don't translate well to handling/aiming hunting firearms and certainly would be impractical to use hunting or in a deadly force scenario. Yes, the purpose of a gun used to hunt is to kill, but if a police officer wounds a bad guy and that wounding stops the threat, it would be a homicide for the police officer resume shooting to make sure the bad guy was dead. Certainly if a person uses deadly force, for clarity sake there needs to always be the justification to take a life. But one can't ignore that the rate of fatal firearms injures in the US is 10 per 100,000 but the number of non-fatal wounded is 25 per 100,000. So if "a gun has one purpose; to kill" it would seem the gun is not accomplishing it's purpose very well.

Sunday, June 1, 2014

The Democrats Problem with Obama's New Deal

What is  becoming more and more difficult is the Democrat left differentiating Obama's policies and Bush (43's) legacy. There is practically no Bush policy that candidate Obama ran against, that he has not now embraced (with the exception of an official policy allowing toture).  The liberal bloggers that blame conservatives for the concentration of wealth, and the middle class losing ground seem to have forgotten that it is now year 5 of President Obama's policies. Even the liberal Mother Jones has to question what happened to the Obama promises From Guantanamo to Limitless War, Obama's Failure to Live Up to His Own Five Commandments

Below is a portion of a post from a liberal blogger (WS) that is almost comical in it's hubris that they are not describing their own President.
(WS)  Modern conservatives have much in common with Fascism, they are for a strong military police type state where everyone is monitored and controlled as well as concentrating power and wealth at the top. Republicans championed the Patriot Act and are responsible for reducing many of Americans personal freedoms. Income disparity is a direct result of conservatives deregulating the financial markets and weakening unions.*
As far as fascism, very few understood what candidate Obama meant when he called for a “civilian national security force being just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded as the U.S. military"; we now know it was his intention to expand Homeland Security as a federal police force. While Bush may have championed the Patriot act, the vote in 2001 and the subsequent reauthorizations under President Obama; the Patriot Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 and the Patriot Sunsets Extension Act of 2011 all received bipartisan approval with a majority of both parties. Then you have President Obama signing the NDAA law with its provision allowing him to indefinitely detain citizens and self derived power allowing his killing of an American citizen overseas, who are deemed terrorist without due process along with non-American citizens (he says has a list where he personally gives a gladiatorial contest thumbs down when the drone has the victim in it's sight ; and now the lawyer that wrote the law brief saying it is legal to kill American citizen terrorists has been nominated by Obama to a federal appellate court. You may remember how Obama castigated Bush and the Iraq war for invading a country and overthrowing it's leadership when the country did not constitute a national security threat, yet now Obama has been part and parcel of the overthrow of Libya, Egypt and the attempted overthrow of Syria; all three not approaching anything close to a national security threat and are now more unstable and dangerous than before.

*(continued) Make no mistake about it as discontent grows there will be a correction just as there was after the great depression which ushered in several decades of progressive power including the New Deal policies that benefit working people to this day.

Is this really the correction the Democrats are championing? Do you really think that President Obama is offering the American people anything that reeks of a new Deal? FDR put people to work, Obama has lowered unemployment by discouraged workers dropping out of  the labor force; FDR built and re-build the national infrastructure; the Obama Stimulus couldn't find any shovel ready jobs (which Obama later admitted never existed to begin with). And while the President wants universal healthcare, all that has happened is millions of cancelled heathcare policies and new policies that have less coverage and are more expensive. And then there is promise about keeping your  health-plan and /or doctor if you like both or either;  funny, I don't remember FDR lying to the American people when he was championing the New Deal.