STOCKING UP ON AMMO

I am happy that this time around a mass shooting has gotten some people in this country up and in protesting mode.  The VP gets to try again to get some sane gun control legislation going and maybe we can make it a little harder for people to get guns.

Of course, the other part of our society is running around like chickens getting gun permits and stocking up on ammo at gun shows and generally saying and doing all the stuff they have been forever.  "It's not the gun...Only criminals will have them...Out of my cold, dead hands..."

In San Francisco there was a record turn out at the gun show last week.  No one could walk away with a new gun because we have a 10 day waiting period here in CA. That is one of the proposals being taken to Congress.  Ten days - to check the records (hopefully they will get better at the record keeping) and to cool down from any incident which has sparked the desire for a gun.

NRA President David Keene said:  "The two people who are selling so-called assault rifles are Sen. Feinstein and President Obama - not us.  They're the ones that are scaring American gun owners. It isn't the NRA."


Harry Reid might find himself in the NRA cross hairs - he seems to be changing his stance on guns following Newtown:   "We need to accept the reality that we are not doing enough to protect our citizens,” Reid said on the Senate floor.

I commented on a few blogs after the last school shooting that it is too late to do anything about guns in this country.  There are too many of them, too much money behind them and too many ways to skirt the existing laws. But maybe things will change bit by bit,  child by child gunned down.

FRIDAY FAST ONES

1.)  The New York Post reports that plastic surgeons have seen a 30 percent increase in the demand for eyebrow transplants, Many requesting actress Megan Fox's bushy brows. The price for the procedure costs between $4,000 and $8,000.  No details about whether you can pay extra to be able to raise one at a time.


2.)  Once again, if there hadn't been a homeowner with a gun involved, a tragedy could have been avoided. In a Connecticut neighborhood a local high school teacher got a call from his sister that someone might be breaking into her house.  He went to investigate and found a masked person outside the house, when confronted, he claims the intruder lunged at him  with something in his hand, so he shot him.

Turns out he killed his own son.  They don't know why his son was masked and lurking around his aunt's house.  He was 15.  Teen aged boys are not the most logical creatures.  They are unpredicible and do stupid things. If his dad didn't have a gun, they might have found out what he was up to, what craziness was in his mind. Now they will never know and his dad has to live with that.

3.)  Some conservatives are voicing big doubts and conspiracy theories about recent polls that show President Obama pulling ahead both nationally and in key battleground states. They contend that pretty much everyone but the conservative pollsters over at Rasmussen are relying on "turnout models" that unfairly favor Democrats. If the turnout models were tweaked appropriately, they say, Romney would have a substantial lead coming down the home stretch.

Credible pollsters like Gallup have explained the methods used and the changes to the methods they have implemented due to land line/cell phone usage and just generally says - this isn't an exact science but we are doing it in a legitimate way.

Today the guy at unskewedpolls.com pretty much lost his conspiracy argument when when Fox News released its latest survey, which showed Obama up by 5 points, 48 percent to Romney's 43. 

4.)  This is a very serious subject to me as it comes close to my home.  This is the first time I have read anything on this subject that is so illuminating.  This links the whole article which is long but very well written and worthwhile. The point I had never known before is this:

New research suggests that pedophilia—the attraction to children, not the act of molesting them—is essentially impossible to change. James Cantor, a senior scientist at the Sexual Behaviors Clinic of the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, is at the forefront of neuroimaging studies of pedophiles and has described a kind of crossed wiring in their brains that they’re likely born with. He has expressed hopes that by pinpointing pedophilia’s neurological origins, it may someday lead to a course of prevention.

The reason this research and knowledge is important is that it smashes the myth that pedophiles are weird, scary guys we can recognise when we see them.  We can't.

ANOTHER GUN STORY

I've been there.  the kids are talking back, anger flares and  builds with each outburst. The Florida mom who shot her two teens for being "mouthy"  brought me back to a morning in the car when my son, not even a teen then, talked back to me.  I slapped him.  Not my finest moment as a person or a parent.  I still remember it after 15 years. 

The option between the slap and being shot in the head is obvious. That Florida mom was depressed.  She had told her mother that she was struggling.  During that struggle she went out and bought a gun.  In her struggle, frustration, or whatever was going on in her mind - she shot both her children. 

So what might have happened if there had been a waiting period of say 2 weeks before she could have gotten a gun in her hands?  Her husband would have been home from his trip out of the country.  Perhaps her mother would have come for a visit.

Is it so much to ask of all those people who are so rabid about their rights to have guns to have to wait a bit to put their hands on one?  If she lived in Illinois where she had to apply first for a gun owners permit before she could purchase a gun - her purchase would have been delayed by up to 35 days.  Think of all the help or other options she might have chosen in all that time.

Her family would be intact and perhaps, like me, she would only have a slap on her conscience.

GUNS IN THE HANDS OF THE UNSTABLE

I am so saddened by the shooting of Congresswoman Gaby Giffords, 13 others and the senseless deaths of 6 bystanders in Arizona.  It is apparent that the young man who caused all of this destruction is mentally ill and has been for some time.  Yet he was able to purchase the semi-automatic weapon  months in advance of the shootings.

Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik, who said Saturday at a news conference that “unbalanced people” could be affected by the vitriol, anger and hatred of anti government rhetoric.  That's a "Duh" statement if I ever heard one.  Yet they felt the need to analyse it on the Today Show.  Tom Brokaw pointed out that we are all at the drug store buying tiny bottles of shampoo and this paranoid young man was out buying a gun. Thank you Tom Brokaw!

Because this young man didn't have anything "on record" that he was mentally disturbed, he was good to go on the gun.  All the rest of us are still out buying tiny shampoo bottles - no matter how clean our "records" are.  Didn't this same thing happen in Virginia?  Unstable young man buys a gun and shoots a bunch of people.  In the effort to spare anyone from having a bad record haunting them, we don't report these aberrant behaviours (or make the reports available) which should prohibit the purchase of a gun and perhaps stop or at least make more difficult these attacks.

A cynical person might think that the shooting of more members of Congress might be what it takes to make some changes in these laws.