Monsters, Inc.
May 9, 2103 by Wright Salisbury
Monsters, Inc. was a very cute movie about collection of very un-scary monsters. But the really scary collection assembled a few days ago in Houston, Texas.
I watched Jon Stewart the other night when he played clips from the 142nd Convention of the NRA, where appeared such luminaries as Wayne Lapierre, president of the NRA. One fool said that "Obama wants to disregard the 10th amendment and is trying to implement Obamacare and take away our liberty."
If anyone can make any sense out of that, he's a better man than I am. The 10th amendment states that any rights not expressly delegated to the Federal government shall be reserved for the states.
I suppose he was stating the obvious, which is that the U.S. government would have to explicitly outlaw the sale of machine guns in the whole country and require the registration of all gun ownership before the law would become federal law and therefore not subject to the whims of state governments. But just out of curiosity, what does that have to do with Obamacare?
Anyway, any kind of break on the power of the NRA has proven impossible after the Senate rejected any measures that could possibly affect the NRA and the American obsession with guns.
That was followed by Rick Santorum, one of the Republican hopefuls who wanted to run for president, who asked "Why are they going after chaplains in the military saying they can't evangelize and proselytize?" Another non-sequitur. Then they showed a movie of Texas Governor Rick Perry shooting human-shaped targets.
Governor Perry had his say, bragging "We're creatin' jobs day in and day out in this state." John Bolton, the temporary representative to the U.N. under W. brought up the attack in Benghazi, conveniently forgetting that one reason the embassy there was not properly defended was that Republicans had cut the funding for defending U.S. embassies.
Sarah Palin got a lot of cheers by pointing out that the mayor of New York City now wants to prohibit public displays of tobacco products. I hadn't heard that, but it sounds like an eminently sensible idea to take down the billboards selling coffin tacks to children.
In other words, this ship of fools were assembled just to complain about the Democrats and their common sense proposals for making the country more livable.
How about a few simple facts, folks? More Americans have been killed by other Americans with guns than all the Americans killed on foreign soil by foreigners since 1950. Run the numbers and you'll see. The number of Americans killed in the Korean, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars totals 81,249, according to Wikipedia. The number of Americans murdered by other Americans since 1950 (the beginning of the Korean War) totals more than 500,000, which would seem to qualify the United States as a war zone.
Someone reading this article may challenge my figures and tell me that "only" 450,000 people have been murdered by gunfire since 1950.
I challenge the really scary monsters aggregated in Texas to do so.
[Wright Salisbury is a fellow member of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. When his son-in-law, Belmont resident Ted Hennessy Jr., perished on American Airlines Flight 11 on Sept. 11, Wright Salisbury and his wife packed up and moved from Irvington, N.Y. to Lexington to support his daughter and her children.
He remembers the day well . . . Read more at Peaceful Tomorrows.]
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