Too soon to discuss unless your plan is to do nothing at all.

I had awoken early this morning because I had so little to do and so much time to get it done.  Wait a damn minute, scratch that and reverse it.  Much better.  My plan was to eat a healthy breakfast and exercise without feeling rushed.  I do not like to be rushed in the morning, so that means I have to wake up early or shelve my entire day.  What the hell, I’ll get all the sleep I need when I am riding the midnight train to slab city.  Today was an important day because it was the second inauguration of President Barack Obama.  I made sure to get my morning routine fully completed before the President was publicly sworn in so I could watch history being made and get my work done for the day at the same time.  Multitasking is a big part of life and the most successful people are the ones who can walk and chew gum at the same time.  This was a big day in history, beyond the obvious.  President Obama is the third consecutive President to be sworn in to a second term.  The only other time in history this has occurred is with the successive presidencies of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.  I mention this because there will be a quiz afterwards.

Today also happens to be Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  Today is a milestone day in history and this fact was not lost on me.  Nor did it appear to be lost on the President.  He choked up at the start of the oath of office and it was clear that the full magnitude of the moment had just hit him. His inauguration speech was a mix of solemnity and hope.  Change and Hope are no longer the watch words of this President, but, they are there.  They are underneath the surface but still the driving force of his agenda.  His speech talked about the progress we had made as a country and the progress we still need to make.  It was fitting for this day because it echoed the legacy of Dr. King, that we still have a ways to go but we can get there.  United we are stronger than divided and that if the lowest of us succeeds then we all succeed.  Out of many, one.  It was a king hell bastard of a speech. 

During the speech, the President discussed a recent event which shocked and outraged the entire nation and has brought forth more public discourse than any other event in recent history.  The President discussed the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary on December 14^th of last year.  Jesus.  Was it really just over a month ago that this happened?  The magnitude of what happened and the aftermath feels like it was much longer.  We’ve all heard how this individual (who shall rename nameless) killed his mother as she slept, then proceeded to the elementary school with an assault rifle and two pistols, and murdered 26 people before ending his own life.  The events that transpired are known to everyone and are too horrifying for me to recount in a detailed basis.  Besides, that is not the point.  The point is that this is now part of our political and societal discourse.  It has become the primary domestic policy issue for the Obama administration and will be outlined in his State of the Union address, according to more knowledgeable people than myself.  The problem with this point is at first, many people refused to discuss it because it was too soon.  What followed was even worse.  We can no longer have a discussion in this country without people harassing others or without threatening violence themselves. 

I have no desire to state my opinion on the events that transpired.  What I wish to convey is that we have not had a sane, logical discussion about options.  The public discourse on this tragedy ranges from logical to insane.  We can have discussions about public health, the state of mental healthcare in this country, and the influence of media and violent video games in our culture, but, when the topic moves to guns and gun control, look out!  You cannot utter the phrase gun control without being shouted down as a leftist pansy that should go back to Nazi Germany.  There has not been a debate about guns in our culture because one side is adamantly opposed to the idea of gun control.  It is very hard to have a debate when one side is constantly accusing the other of using the graves of dead children as a political tool.  Both sides use this tactic but it seems to be alright on one side if they are using it to destroy any conversation about gun control. 

Last Tuesday, the President outlined a series of proposals given to him by an advisory council, headed by Vice President Biden, on gun control.  The idea was to put forth reasonable steps that that can be taken to reduce gun violence in America.  The proposals ranged from executive actions the president can do on his own to actions that Congress would need to create legislation for.  The top three things the President proposed:

1.       Universal background checks on all gun sales

2.      Ban on high capacity magazines

3.      Congressional reinstatement of the assault weapons ban.

With these proposals, people went ape shit.  The sale of assault weapons has skyrocketed and try finding ammunition anywhere now.  Gun sales in general are up because nuts jobs like Alex Jones and the NRA are screaming that King Obama is going to try and take away all of your guns.  Obama is being referred to as a tyrant and that we all need to stand up to him and his army because they will take our guns.  The biggest supporters of our military and who proudly flash their bumper stickers to prove it are also the people who believe we need to be armed to kill them when they turn on us.  People have also been going on television and spouting historical revisionist nonsense such as, if Jews in the Ghettos had guns then would the Holocaust have happened?  I have several questions related to these statements:

1.       Who believes that we should not have background checks for all gun sales?

2.      How is the President a tyrant when one of his proposals is politely asking this country’s legislative body to pass a law?

3.      If it took the collective militaries of the world and six years of warfare to stop Hitler then what chance would a small minority of Jews had if they were armed?

4.      If our government and military declares war on its citizens and moves in to disarm us, what tactical advantage does your AR-15 assault rifle have against an Apache helicopter or a Predator Drone armed with hellfire missiles?

None of this makes sense.  We cannot have a polite and logical discussion on the topic.  The bottom line is that we no longer trust each other.  Today, the President put it eloquently when he stated, “Our journey is not complete”.  The President was talking about protecting our citizens from gun violence on a day commemorating the life and work of Dr. King, who died before he saw the completion of his journey more than forty years ago.  How much longer do we have to wait?

I just fed my dogs dinner and it is making my stomach grumble.  I am thinking about dinner while I am trying to think of an ending for this piece.  I have been staring at my computer for the last hour trying to think of a suitable ending, but, I am failing.  Maybe this is too big and too complex for me to finish alone.  I will let the last great American poet finish this for me.  He penned this more than thirty years ago.   The population numbers are dated but what he wrote will outlive all of us:

“This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and admit it-that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable”.  –Hunter Thompson, 1973.