May 30, 2013

I was born and raised in that state

and take it from me, nothing on this earth will keep some redneck from going home, getting a gun, and hunting you down with it. Whatever the law says and however it is interpreted will make no difference whatsoever. Even if they make it double secret illegal there will be guns in cars on employers parking lots.

The AG may or may not be full of shit, but they'll figure it out eventually. And the NRA will be there to litigate it with money they hoover out of people's pockets because of all the confusion.

I'll say it again: Your employer doesn't have the right to tell you what to have stored in your own property no matter where you park it. It may be legal to do so, but that doesn't make it right. I'm arguing the principle, not the law. The banksters didn't have the right to run the economy of the entire planet off a cliff either, but we wound up paying them to do it. This is a conflict of property rights issue. Can your employer tell what you can and cannot have in your car? Since you need a job, it's not right for them to use their power over your financial welfare to tell you what you can store on your own property. To do so is using the power of their property to trump your property rights and make you pay for it by compromising your time and security. Money wins again.

Here's an interesting book -

http://www.amazon.com/Going-Postal-Rebellion-Workplaces-Columbine/dp/1932360824/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369884881&sr=1-3&keywords=going+postal
An eye-opening look at the phenomenon of school and workplace shootings in America, Going Postal explores the rage-murder phenomenon that has plagued — and baffled — America for the last three decades, and offers some provocative answers to the oft-asked question, "Why?" By juxtaposing the historical place of rage in America with the social climate that has existed since the 1980s — when Reaganomics began to widen the gap between executive and average-worker earnings — the author crafts a convincing argument that these schoolyard and office massacres can be seen as modern-day slave rebellions. He presents many fascinating and unexpected cases in detail. Like slave rebellions, these massacres are doomed, gory, sometimes even inadvertently comic, and grossly misunderstood. Taking up where Bowling for Columbine left off, this book seeks to set these murders in their proper context and thereby reveal their meaning.

When some guy loses his shit and shoots up his office, there will be a million reasons for his actions, not one of which alone would cause him to snap. But the accumulated injustices, slights, insults, dirty deals, manipulations, and all around fucking over by the 1% causes a tiny percent of people to go apeshit and do something violent and bloody. And when it happens everybody asks why and in response entire industries make money providing easy answers to complex problems that do nothing but tell people what they want to hear. And those industries are owned by the 1% as well.

May 8, 2013

There are also many kinds of infuriation.

The usual kind are obvious. Nobody appreciates arrogance or condescension. But there is one type of infuriation that I don't think gets much of a mention. I don't like people feeding off of me.

It's not fair to use others as a foil to indulge in one's own feelings. If someone believes something, that's fine. If it's a good thing, so much the better. Faith offers an opportunity to inspire others. It's not faith that makes societies work, it's relationships borne of inspiration. Feeding off that basic human need is a pernicious evil and wrecks interpersonal relationships as well as entire cultures. And that's infuriating.

May 6, 2013

That's true.

But there are severe penalties for dealing and using cocaine at all. And generally speaking, those that deal cocaine are not upstanding citizens. The relationship between dealer and user is considered in this country, and for all I know most every other country in the world, to be inimical to the common good.

Should we consider the relationship between those who transfer a firearm to be universally corrosive to the public good as well?

Analogies regarding firearms are always hampered by the nature of the object itself. Every aspect of any gun facilitates its use for great harm or great good, depending on which way it's pointed, who's doing the pointing and why. So anti gunners frequently compare guns to prohibited substances and pro gunners compare them to safety equipment. The gun is the same, but the relationship between "pointer" and "pointee" is an endlessly fluctuating thing that defies easy definition. The same holds true for transfers of guns. The gun doesn't change, but the relationship between transferees depends on near uncounted factors that are beyond the control of those wishing to regulate them.

That's why exceptions are already understood for close family members and the Manchin/Toomey legislation focused on gun shows and internet sales. The underlying criteria was the nature of the relationship of transferees. If people know each other well enough to know whether or not one of them should have a gun, then it's none of the governments business what they transfer between themselves. But if it is just a chance meeting at a public event or an internet hookup, the assumption is that someone is trying to acquire a firearm for nefarious purposes. Unfortunately, people who know each other can transfer firearms for nefarious purposes, and people who would never dream of breaking the law can meet and complete a transfer who may have only met for five minutes. The law was trying to posit the potential for misuse based on intimacy without regard for the intent of the transferees, because it's impossible to do that. The issue always goes back to due process.

If the state wants to regulate the transfer of an object that has no universally understood inherent danger to the public good, it has to evaluate that danger using the intent of those possessing the object. That evaluation is very problematic without a previous record of malfeasance and due process to deny the transfer. Given the number of guns in the United States that are never used at all, much less the number of guns that are used for the wrong reasons, the infrastructure required to evaluate the relationships of people who transfer them seems to me to be an unnecessary invasion of privacy with almost non existent remedy for that invasion.