Too Soon?

The first thing I heard this morning was how inappropriate it was for the president of the United States to be talking about partisan politics while people at the Navy Ship Yard were still dying. Of course Joe Scarborough laid it on with both barrels saying that the left would have been outraged if George W. Bush would have done that. I can see people checking through the archives looking to see if they can find a similar circumstance.

In my opinion,we will no longer have a time out to reflect on the sadness of a situation because the last incident is still fresh on our minds and we don't have a way to control  the instant response from Twitter and Facebook.   We will just take up where we left off.

 I have to agree with Jeff Greenfield when he said that nothing could have be done to prevent the mass shooting yesterday.    He was talking about the laws and policies that we have in place today. Aaron Alexis did see a VA doctor about his mental problems,he was not charged in the two gun incidents he had, so he could legally buy a gun. He played a lot of violent video games  but we are not going to take steps to keep those games out the hands of adults. Finally,he legally bought a shot gun and apparently acquired the other weapons after he shot the first security office who approached him.All that's left is the lack of security at the base but since Mr. Alexis is dead, we will never know his motive.

Aaron Alexis did see someone at the VA about his mental problem but apparently there is not a way to force him to complete his sessions. His friends in Ft. Worth said he was likable fellow but  one friend said he was addicted to violent video games. He joined the Buddhist religion which is a pacifist group. Try and figure that out. 

I will note once again that the only good guy with a gun happened to be law enforcement. We all saw the chaos in looking for a second and the possibility of a third shooter. It might be just me, but I think an armed civilian might have gotten shot by the police yesterday. We still haven't found a way to control adrenalin in those situations. So much for the theory that shooters don't attack a facility where someone night be armed. 

As I was hearing  about the shooter's past ,I started thinking that there's got to be way to connect all those dots. I thought of a credit bureau type of system  that assigns points to different actions. A domestic violence will get a flag,treatment for PTSD another,violent games and so on and I'm sure NSA could tell us how. Yes,the credit bureau makes a lot of wrong entries,health information should be private and the NRA would be against it but someone -somewhere is collecting all that data right;why not put it to good use. We know the gun shops won't Google the potential buyer,so we've got to give them a tool they can use besides the instant background check. 

I think we can all agree that security needs to be beefed up at our military installations especially one where civilians outnumber the military personnel. 

We can Think Tank this to no end but until we change the culture of America,these shootings will continue.  

  

Stalemate

We’ll begin 2013 like we ended 2012; I think it now that Joe Biden has entered the picture, and we’ll do just enough to keep us from going over the fiscal cliff. The gun issue will be forgotten by the time Joe Biden’s Commission makes its report to the president because that’s the way we roll these days.

I feel sorry for Speaker Boehner, especially after listening to Amy Kremer, chairperson of the Tea Party Express. She said the Tea Party she represents will NEVER vote for a tax increase because we have a spending problem. She cited the numbers we all know by heart, yearly deficits over a trillion dollars and a 16 trillion-dollar debt. The host stunned her when he said allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire will fix the deficit because she obviously didn’t know that extra revenue or spending cuts will reduce the deficit. Amy Kremer then said that states with higher taxes have a higher unemployment rate. That’s true for right down but who thinks that Alabama will outdo California when the economy takes off? Growth, education, infrastructure repair, defense spending or energy investment is of no concern to the Tea Party. The word compromise is not in their vocabulary. After all, of the 234 GOP house seats, President Obama only won 15 of those districts. It will remain that way for least 10 more years because the 30 Republican governors have aligned their congressional district to favor their party. It will remain that way until the next census, which is seven years away.

It’s upsetting (although true) that a deal on January 4 will not affect the markets that much because they have built in an expectation of a non-adaptive government. If Congress does not pass the Farm bill, milk might go up to $7.00 a gallon, the payroll tax is gone, people will not get their unemployment checks, and new markets will finally be convinced that America has a dysfunctional government with no hope in sight. It’s funny how the GOP doesn’t think that allowing the payroll tax to expire is increasing taxes. Raising the Social Security (FICA) to its original 6.2% from the current 4.2% amounts to $1000 for those families making $50,000. I’m glad it expired because we need that extra revenue to fund Social Security during this time of high unemployment.

We’ll have to wait another 10 hours or so but is not as simple as “they knew all this seven months ago and chose not to do anything about it.” They ran into a human nature problem, both political parties that thought they were going to win the White House, so “why buy the cow when you think you can get the milk for free.”

Our hometown newspaper is trying to conjure up a discussion about having armed guards at our schools. I’m not totally against have an armed guard, but I don’t want armed teachers. How will we ever measure the effectiveness of an armed guard? How can you measure the effectiveness of protection against a random mass shooting? This morning’s paper gave an example of an armed teacher averting a potential school shooting, but we also know that Columbine and Virginia Tech had armed guards.

The pro- gun advocates are trying to divert the attention away from guns and put it all on video games, movies and mental illness. I think mental illness funding is a separate issue but I can’t help but think that gun manufacturers love seeing their guns being displayed in video games and movies. I think this issue is about high-capacity ammo clips and the ownership and the registration of semiautomatic weapons. I still think we can do something about 40% of the weapons that are sold without an instant background check.

I hate repeating the same-old topics, and I wish we were like the people in that scene from the movie “We bought a Zoo.” A big tree blew down overnight preventing people from entering the zoo in their cars. The owners of the zoo and its caretakers helped the people climb over the felled tree, thus doing what needed to be done for them to have a successful opening.

Happy New Year everyone.