March 28

 Well, we started off this week with another school shooting--the 129th mass shooting this year which is less than 90days old. Three 9-year-olds and three school employees at a Christian school. I saw a snippet from a debate in the Tennessee legislature where the speaker told the rest of the members that no one wanted to take away anyone's hand gun, shotgun, or hunting rifle; that they didn't need more assault rifles endangering the police, the children or anyone else. He also told them to not tell him they were "pro-life" if they couldn't get up the courage to ban assault rifles. The speaker of the house called him out of order and insisted he had to continue under their "welcoming and honoring" standard of the body. I wonder what the hell that means. And why voting to restrict dangerous weapons requires "courage."

In his post this morning Robert Reich suggests that we "follow the money." He lays out why I suspected but hadn't yet researched: it isn't the NRA, which is merely a ghost of its former self, but the gun makers who have been busily selling military weapons to a civilian citizenry. They did so especially in the post 9/11 period and used extensive pictures of our "warriors" in Iraq and Afghanistan fully fitted out in body armor with those sexy guns.

An interesting point was made this morning that guns result in more children's deaths than car crashes and the drop in auto related deaths can be directly attributed to increased auto safety. The implication is that all we have to do is insist on laws to mandate gun safety. Well, I am not convinced. When auto safety was under debate it was mainly the Federal government against auto makers who feared a loss of revenue as customers wouldn't pay for the safety measures. But customers did pay. However, what change in individual behavior was really required? Absolutely none. Drunks still drive. People still speed. Drivers still cut each other off. They still roll through stop signs and run red lights. All the measures for gun safety require responsibility from gun owners: trigger locks, gun safes, sometimes classes to learn how to handle guns safely and maintain them. The problem is there is no way to make the guns themselves safe. You can't protect from stupid or egotistical or irresponsible.

I found this piece interesting. I hadn't considered that the Russian Federation might break up over the Ukraine war. But that is always a possibility in any complex society. Most such societies soon or later do break up because of the tensions inherent in such complexity. Some time last year after the first Russian assault failed and Putin wanted to mobilize a few hundred thousand more sort of soldiers he had a bit of difficulty with one of the ethnic peoples who felt they had already contributed more to the effort than they liked. I don't remember which group but they stopped sending "recruiters" into that area. And there are, as the article says, almost 200 such groups and many have little love for ethnic Russians. Take a look through history and see how often empires break apart. And regime change has been a very old tactic and one the U.S. has used frequently in the past with sometimes very adverse results.

Often, more often of late, the stupidity I hear and see makes me think I ought to add a bit of whiskey to my morning coffee as a bit of an anesthetic. One of the Tennessee state legislators said that we can't do anything about gun violence because criminals will commit crimes and often with guns. We, according to him, can't cure all of our problems with laws. You can't solve all problems with laws buy you can solve some of them and maybe make it a bit more difficult for malicious people to act out their malevolence. Just a bit more difficult. And when asked about how he feels about the safety of his own children in school he smugly notes that they are homeschooled.

This year is likely continue what came last year with much of Europe in drought and with reservoirs and rivers going dry and with glaciers melting.