Monday, September 23, 2013

"My gun right is more important than your dead."



Aaron Weiss, thank you for your service.

In the same breath, I mourn how common sense has left the building. The ability of a growing segment to see beyond rigid black and white seems to be gone. We apparently no longer understand how "my (gun) right is more important than your dead" is apples/oranges because we don't exist to own guns.  We exist to survive. All we really have is our skin, bones, organs and brain, and when they no longer function, we’re finished.  A gun is just a lifeless piece of metal, no more, no less.

I simply can't relate to those who prioritize an inanimate object over a life.  Any society that fosters such priorities will soon be represented by an epitaph.  I can't help but think that if Jesus were alive today, he'd blow a gasket.  Guns just weren't his thing.

If the first minute or so of this speech weren't enough to lose me, that moment came when he compared the imprisonment of an entire race of Americans to a state law that can be changed at the ballot box.  Such a jagged break from reality is hard to fathom.

Mr. Weiss' dramatic suggestion that legislators be forced to enter a crime scene before law enforcement officers leads me to believe he isn't even really a cop.  Legislators don’t enforce laws.  Further, police don’t have the luxury of enforcing only the laws they agree with.

Aaron Weiss is being paraded as a hero for 'telling it like it is.'  I believe he's probably more like a decent guy who is wildly misled. The Constitution protects our right to bear arms, but common sense dictates that we qualify that protection the same way we qualify many other rights.  I believe our Forefathers had no clue what kind of firearms we would eventually invent.

If someone said “my right to freedom from religion in schools and government buildings is more important than your dead family”, I suspect that those who gobble up this gun rights candy would bring out the pitchforks.  But remember, both rights are enumerated in the Bill of Rights.

Lately it seems my blog has become a repository for essays about our lack of social conscience and the ignorance of many who are charged with the responsibility of voting.  Count Mr. Weiss as another example.  Meanwhile, it would serve all Americans to remember that there is a word that comes before “liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.

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As I was writing this, my mother-in-law was staring down the business end of a shotgun in her own neighborhood, at the hands of a psycho who lost his mind over a group of pranking kids.  When she tried to escape, he shot.  He's now in jail and she's trying to regain her sanity and get the damage to her car fixed.  She's very lucky his aim was off.

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