Which Side Are You On

The candidate is a coward. He is afraid to stand up to the gun lobby.

"You're going to have these things happen and it's a horrible thing to behold, horrible.

"It's not politically correct to say that, but you're going to have difficulty and that will be for the next million years, there's going to be difficulty and people are going to slip through the cracks,What are you going to do, institutionalize everybody?"

Jeb Bush is a coward. He is afraid to stand up to the gun lobby.

"Look, stuff happens. There’s always a crisis and the impulse is always to do something and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do."

Ok, Jeb...What did we do in the years since Newtown? Or since Gabby Giffords was assaulted? Or after Virginia Tech? Or Fort Hood? Would a response to any of those atrocities also be a rash or impulsive move? Coward.

If I'm going to be fair, I have to say Bernie Sanders is a coward on guns also.  I plan to follow the President's advice and be a single issue voter in the next election. If Sanders does not make a clear and definitive policy statement in support of sane gun laws I will not consider voting for him in the Democratic primary in NY.

"I don’t know that anybody knows what the magic solution is. What we do know is the current situation is not tenable. It is clearly not working. And as the president indicated, we can and must do a lot better … You can sit there and say I think we should do this and do that. But you’ve got a whole lot of states in this country where people want virtually no gun control at all. And if we are going to have some success, we are going to have to start talking to each other."

80% of Americans believe a background check should be conducted before all gun purchases, regardless if the gun is purchased at a gun show or a retail outlet. Background checks have a proven record of success in reducing gun violence in states that have enacted them. So Sanders statement is factually inaccurate. He must know that, and he deserves no more tolerance or acceptance in his capitulation to the gun lobby than we would give any Republican.

Chicago's, a city with very strict gun laws, and its level of violence is often pointed to as a distorted example of the hopeless nature of legislation in a country with 300 million guns. But, in a study conducted in 2013 by the CPD, 15,000 out of a total of 50,000 guns tracked  were purchased in the exurbs which are a short driving distance from the city. 4,000 were traced to a single state, Mississippi. Studies by the NYC PD indicated a similar pattern of gun traffic from a few southern states with lax gun laws along the I-95 corridor.  Localized gun laws, while effective in saving some lives,will never be as effective as national legislation.

While I understand that gun safety legislation will have a limited effect on mass murders committed by people struggling with their sanity, there is ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT that gun safety laws enacted at the federal level will save thousands of lives, most especially in poor communities like those in Chicago racked by gun violence.

Politicians who point to mental health as the core of the problem, but then vote against legislation to require insurance companies to provide expanded mental health coverage  are playing voters for fools. Pro gun legislators have in the past few years blocked laws designed to limit access to guns by domestic abusers and a long list of people that any sane, or to put it more correctly, any uncompromised representative of the people would ever stand for. Sanders voting record is atrocious. The two Senators from NY, and the Representative from my CD all stand for gun safety laws, where do your political leaders stand?

The only candidate who has spoken without qualification of her intention to fight for sane gun laws is Hillary Clinton.

"It is just beyond my comprehension that we are seeing these mass murders happen again and again and again. And as I have said, we have got to get the political will to do everything we can to keep people safe."

This is the only acceptable response.

Of those that have spoken on the GOP side beyond Trump and Bush, almost all of offered their condolences and their meaningless "thoughts and prayers". Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. Coward. None of them, from the liberal Pataki to the libertarian Paul to the Conservative and the especially despicable Huckabee have any intention of standing up to the gun lobby. Without exception they stand in opposition to 80% of all Americans.

We must also note the racial hypocrisy of the gun zealots. Reagan enacted strict gun laws in direct response to the rise of the Black Panther Party. Now as we debate guns and police violence against people of color, we see a great divergence on the right. Guns are urged on us everywhere except in poor communities where a child like Tamir Rice is shot while playing with a toy gun and a man is shot in a Wal-Mart while in possession of a pellet gun. Do open carry advocates imagine this doctrine would have value in Baltimore? Easy access to guns is a policy built on fear. Directed mostly at whites, it has its roots in the racist law and order propaganda which was spawned in the 70's, a direct response to the Civil Rights movement.

While I am gratified to see a bipartisan consensus forming to address the the mass incarceration of a couple generations of African Americans, what Ta-Nehesi Coates called "the age of mass incarceration", it must be said that so long as America accepts this level of gun violence, any promise of reform will ring like a hollow bell on empty street.

I stand with my friends, like Dan Olmstead, and with the president. We are more than tired of the Newtowns and Umpquas, but we are just as appalled with the utter carnage in Chicago, New Orleans, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and poor communities in every state in the country. We find the advocacy  which claims safety can be found when more people open carry in church's, theaters, and schools to be morally bankrupt.

As we stand here today, we must understand that we may be years away from reform of our gun laws. A year from now 30,000 more Americans will be dead. In just two years more American lives will be lost to gun violence than were list in the whole of the Vietnam war. We mourn those lives in a solemn memorial in Washington, but the only logical honor we can bring to the folly of our addiction to guns is to say no more.

No more.

No more.

Which side are you on?