Gun reform should be about guns; Cedar Rapids Gazette 12-15-22.
I have an advanced degree in applied foreign policy from the School of Marines, University of South Vietnam, 1969. I double majored in death and destruction, and real-time moral and ethical decision making. This was a school of very hard knocks.
My weapons were a 45 pistol, and an M-16 rifle. Some 3 million innocent Southeast Asians died in the US’ immoral and illegal war. We, mostly, don’t teach the true history of that war because, at least in Iowa school’s, it might make someone uncomfortable.
There is one common denominator in all mass gun deaths. Guns. If you think that you will solve the problem of mass shootings without banning most guns, and most people having guns, you are delusional.
If you are a getaway driver in a bank robbery where someone is killed, you are responsible for that death, too. If you are a corporation (which we say is a person), and what you sell is used to kill people, you are responsible for those deaths, too, and should be put in jail and no longer be able to do business.
If you are a hunter and you can’t kill an animal with a single shot shotgun or a single shot rifle, you are not much of a hunter. If you say you need a pistol for protection, no pistols for anyone is a better protection.
As long as corporations are (wrongly) considered people, and as long as money is (wrongly) considered speech (put a dollar bill on a table and ask it a question – you will receive no answer), we will never have the ability to tackle mass gun deaths, or any of the other critical problems that face the US and the world. Our politics will remain hamstrung from these two unwise and untrue definitions, hamstrung from gerrymandering, from negative campaigning and lying, hamstrung from the Electoral College, and from unlimited money instead of only publicly funded money spent on campaigns. If we don’t change our politics, we will be doomed to live in a country where at any time and at any place, some idiot will be shooting people.
Gun reform should be about guns and gun manufacturers and nothing else.
Bob Watson
Decorah