Gun Insanity

With the gun enthusiast showing up at town meetings with guns, automatic and otherwise, it seems pretty obvious that they are there to intimidate the crowd and the politicians. It also seems absolutely crazy that we in this country have let things go so far to allow such a mess. Where would the blame fall it the crowd panicked and a riot resulted?

I can not believe that these gun enthusiasts who claim their rights to posses such guns without sensible controls have anything between their ears but the need to intimidate and threaten. It is laughable that they feel Obama will take their toys away when it is just their miss use and their abusive threats that will hopefully make the rest of us know that is just what should happen. For the safety of decent people and the officers who have sworn to protect them, such inconsiderate psychopaths and thugs should not have guns.

A case in point--In my area in 2008 an 8-year old boy lost control of the 9mm micro submachine gun as it recoiled while he was firing at a pumpkin at a sportsman’s club machine gun shoot and fatally shot himself in the head. The gun was an Uzi made by and for the Israeli special forces with a fire rate of 1,700 rounds per minute, not a hunting or sport weapon. The boy’s father was ten feet behind him and reaching for his camera when the child fired the weapon. My heart goes out to the mother who, I understand, was not there at the time.

At that show there were at least four children who took part. Imagine what could have happened if one of those children in his panic had spun around and fired on the hundreds of spectators.

There were prosecutions as a result of that sad bit of stupidity, but I personally doubt that those empty headed gun-toting loons learned a thing. And they think they are threatened.

Where are the friendly police officers when we need them?

As a caucasian woman who has been on this planet for seventy some odd years, I thought I had seen everything, and honestly believed folks were a lot smarter than they seem to be these days. The incident in Cambridge between a police officer and a respected tenured professor from Harvard, a long time resident in that community, deserves some closer scrutiny. In the first place I have never lived in a town where the local police didn’t have a good idea who lived where in their area. From what I’ve seen, that has always been part of their job. And I can not believe the officer in question, with the career he has had with the department there, had no knowledge of who the professor was. It also seems very sad to me that the Cambridge police personnel have not been taught the basics of defusing such incidents without having them escalate like that one did.

I recall once when I lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, they had a problem with their police interaction with the people in that city, many who were African Americans too, and it was decided that to change that situation they had to change the attitudes of their police officers. So they not only switched the extremely military looking black uniforms and hats to something less threatening, white hats for instance, but they put their officers through training sessions that taught them how to say, Please--Thank you--I’m sorry, Sir, or Ma’am or Miss. Those simple changes helped defuse a whole city, for a while anyway, and I for one appreciated that a lot.

It seems we are back to being afraid of our officers with their tasers and their angry agendas. And since the Bush Patriot Act, they seem to demand that we be afraid. The stories we read about abuses are endless, and include taser use on woman and school children and confused men for reasons that seem things any good officer could have handled easily. And no one seems to be given a chance to explain without being deemed resisting arrest.

I resented the fact that the police officer was compelled to state that he did not vote for President Obama, as if we couldn’t have guessed that from his response. If I had been his superior I would have considered his attitude suspect at that time when there was so much at risk, and when our new young president has been working his butt off doing more in the short time he has been in office than any president has before him. Considering the desperate situation his predecessor left behind, this country on the verge of bankruptcy, etc. I think that police officer should be grateful that he still has a job. If it were not for the compassionate hard work of persons such as President Obama, trying to keep all our heads afloat, that officer could be inching his way along a bread line.

I know all the policemen and women out there are taking enormous risks to keep us all safe and I appreciate that. But rather than bullying confused and frightened people I would suggest they push to get the more lethal weapons off the streets, and especially away from town hall meetings. If I were a cop I would certainly be working hard toward that aim instead of encouraging people to buy up any weapons they can, the worst of the assault weapons on the market. I would bet that police officer who didn’t vote for Obama in the first place is one of the ones blocking any sane gun laws. But I could be wrong. As for our local officers to date, and as a graduate of their Citizen’s Police Academy, I have nothing but praise for them. Hopefully everyone feels that way in my town, as they should be able to feel in all other towns in this country.