Sorry for the Very Long Pause . . .

I apologize for the very long pause here at fencepostsitter. Let’s just say it has been a hell of a spring-into-summer. Didn't want to push pause, but it just kind of happened.

I’ll bring everyone up to date soon.

But without giving too much away (after all, there is a touch of drama, scary narrative, heroes, a couple of villains, cheering, fantastic luck and a warm tale of redemption). Well, maybe that’s a bit much, but I have spent nearly three months in the hospital after suffering a serious health setback. All is better now and I’m getting some physical therapy, feeling good and starting to chomp at the bit to get home and re-establish my life. It has been a long and somewhat bumpy road . . .

I’ve spent some time putting together article ideas . . . some of which will follow a bit of my road to recovery and the second chance I’ve been giving after a health “crash.”

I appreciate your patience and I’ll start writing again soon . . .

The NRA Amps Up Its Fight and Steams Down the Wrong Path

The NRA knows exactly what it’s doing. But it is dead wrong.

By pandering to its most radical members, those who see the collapse of the government, black-ops government enforcers kicking down doors to take guns from law-abiding citizens and such, it has dug itself a hole from which it may not, over the long run, recover. They have damaged themselves and perhaps critically wounded themselves in the eyes of those who have believed they provided positive safety courses, education and training.

Ask Republicans if pandering to the radical fringe works. They lost the presidential election despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent and their best hard right turn efforts.

Though President Obama’s announcement of new gun regulation proposals as well as a slew of executive orders has been heralded by some and roundly criticized by others, a quick look show they really aren’t onerous or all that ground breaking. Let’s remember, too, that both Presidents Bush (elder) and Clinton used executive orders to limit the types of weapons imported and available in the U.S.

One question for the NRA should be, “Why not require background checks for all gun purchases?” That would close the so-called loophole that allows guns at most gun show to be purchased without a background check.

While the assault-rifle ban will probably bring the most political heat, the previous such ban years ago produced mixed results and certainly didn’t show a dramatic drop in shooting crimes with such weapons. Remember, too, that rifles are seldom used in murders compared with handguns. Handguns are used in more than 90 of violent crimes involving guns . . . with rifles less than 7 percent.

Only by enforcing current laws and increasing penalties on weapons used in crimes can we start to address the overall gun issues throughout the country. With more people killed in Chicago last year than soldiers killed in Afghanistan, it deserves a closer look.

Expand mental health funding and reporting . . . enforce current gun regulations with mandatory sentencing for those found guilty of lying to buy guns or sell guns . . . mandatory background checks for all sales except family transfers . . . limit maximum clip sizes . . .

We live in a wildly diverse nation . . .  A place where guns abound. A place where gunds are viewed differently in Montana or New Hampshire than in Chicago or New York City. A place where many of us grew up around guns and using guns. But the world has changed a lot since then. If the NRA continues on its current path, it risks becoming irrelevant to the majority of gun owners and embraced only by the radical fringe it appears to be pandering to now.

In Gun Debate, Let's Remember That Even Good Guys Miss

It’s a lazy argument, really: Give more good guys guns and they’ll stop the bad guys.

On the face of it, of course, it sounds reasonable. After all, shooting back at bad guys might not only stop them, but perhaps it would at least slow them down, or, since they know good guys have guns, they’d stay away all together.

Crazy kid shoots his way into a school and the headmaster unlocks his or her gun safe, pulls out the school weapon and engages said crazy kid.

Yep, sounds good. And surely there are situations when it might work. But I get a little chill when I think of my second-grade teacher packing a Glock and laying down cover fire while we all flee out the back door into the playground.

But let’s look at a couple of “what ifs.”

What if the good guy misses? The FBI keeps statistics on police-involved shooting that show just 26 percent of the bullets fired by police hit their (human) targets. Now, let’s remember that there are a number of factors that must be looked at . . . distance to target, movement, surroundings, and a bunch of other stuff, including a huge pump of adrenalin. The vast majority of cops and other law enforcement types never have to pull the trigger during a crime . . . they shoot targets at a range for training . . . but that street gunfight is a whole different animal.

There could be people around on a crowded street . . . kids running down a hallway . . . people screaming and filling up exits at a mall . . .

The 2002 edition of Injury Facts from the National Safety Council reports the following statistics :

•In 1999, 3,385 children and youth ages 0-19 years were killed with a gun. This includes homicides, suicides, and unintentional injuries.

•This is equivalent to about 9 deaths per day, a figure commonly used by journalists.

•The 3,385 firearms-related deaths for age group 0-19 years breaks down to:

•214 unintentional

•1,078 suicides

•1,990 homicides

•83 for which the intent could not be determined

•20 due to legal intervention

Of the total firearms-related deaths:

•73 were of children under five years old

•416 were children 5-14 years old

•2,896 were 15-19 years old

So, to me, several things are clear. One, if there are guns in a house, they are often not properly secured . . . two, when guns are involved, damage is severe (this holds true in an accident or a shooting in anger) . . .

Duh.

2010 saw fewer people killed in auto accidents than in any year since 1949. Cars are faster, but safe . . . air bags, anti-lock brakes, seatbelt and traction control to start . . . but nobody bitches about that. We may not be able make a bullet flying out of a gun safer, but should we not examine what might make non-sports/target shooting and improper ownership of weapons less likely? And while everyone is focused on so-called “assault rifles,” note that of the 12,664 murder victims last year, just 323 were killed with rifles, according to the FBI.

Information is information, whether or not one side or another spins it to suit that side’s arguments. But whether we like it or not, there are sensible and reasonable things that can and should be done to limit misuse of weapons. Time to take a couple of those steps.

 

 

 

Amazon Has Ruined Online Delivery for Every Other Company in the World

You know how you get on a Saturday when it gets dark, it’s snowing out and, well, it’s Saturday?

As something of a hermit, I tend to get all settled in a bit earlier than normal people, so I was well settled watching one of the 8 million college football bowl games that’ll be airing over the next 10 days, when there was  knock at the door.

Now who in the heck would be here on a snowy Saturday? (Remember that hermits don’t get a lot of visitors.) It’s the FedEx guy. It’s 5:30 Saturday evening and he’s delivering the case of cat food I ordered from Amazon earlier in the week (Thursday to be exact). Ok I used a coupon and I get a ton of stuff from Amazon, so as the overseer and inheritor of three rather unsocial cats, I need cat food. Don’t judge.

Two things hit me: One, it sucks to be a FedEx guy on a Saturday when it’s snowing out and some idiot wants food for his cats and, two, Amazon has ruined home delivery for nearly every other company on earth.

With Amazon Prime, I get “free” delivery two-day delivery from Amazon. Of course nothing is free . . . Prime costs around $80 a year, and includes a few other perks, like streaming videos.

Some other companies offer free delivery on most stuff, like LL Beans, but a bunch offer not much and still, in the face of Amazon’s delivery (which is often free regardless of Prime, but not as fast). Companies like Harry and David’s offer free delivery on some items, but continues to peg delivery costs to the final price of the order. And while I understand it costs companies money to pick, pack and ship, charging the shipping and handling add-on based on the price of the goods purchased creates an apples and oranges problem for potential customers. When shipping can add 20 or 30 percent to an order, customers look elsewhere. To its credit, Harry and David’s does offer free shipping on many more items than it used to . . . so you can get those great pears without paying a shipping premium.

By offering fixed-rate shipping, many companies pass on the costs at a reasonable rate. Lucero, my favorite olive oil producer, offers flat rate shipping for $8.95, and free shipping on orders over $100. That works just fine for me.

Yep, Amazon has spoiled me, and no doubt has spoiled millions of other online shoppers as well. It has also hurt smaller businesses unable to cut huge deals with FedEx, UPS or the Postal Service and can’t afford to compete on shipping costs.

So thanks to the people who slug through the snow and the companies who keep those delivery trucks full of all kinds of goodies . . . even if it’s for unsocial cats.

The NRA Misses a Chance to Join the Mainstream

Let’s say you were the face of the National Rifle Association and had to give a press conference a few days after a massacre in a school in which 20 kids and six teachers were killed. Thought about it a minute? Ok . . . could you have possibly given speech worse or less insightful than that given by NRA Vice Executive President Wayne LaPierre?

Look, there are all kinds of arguments for owning or not owning guns, but LaPierre blew it. Given the chance to either not offer any “solutions,” or perhaps offering a token gesture about “taking a look” at gun regulations, LaPierre continued the NRA’s often paranoid stance that any change is bad change, and while understanding slippery slopes exist all over the place on these politically charged issues, LaPierre fumbled the moment.

The NRA, which has long offered a variety of gun safety courses for all types of people, has now lost that good message. The NRA is now perceived by many as a group of wild-eyed crazies ranting about government confiscation of guns, a group advocating stock piling weapons for self-defense and the protection of our children, a group urging everyone to pack a pistol “just in case.” And on and on.

LaPierre to me sounded like a man completely closed to any sound but his. No discussion is needed for LaPierre because he can’t hear. By waving the flag over the 2^nd amendment, the NRA continually brings the NRA base into the fold by feeding the paranoia that the government is coming for your guns, that unless you carry a weapon bad things could happen to you, or that the only way to stop school massacres is to make sure a cop is in each and every school .

Lapierre had a chance to say, “I look forward to talking to legislators about meaningful gun controls.” He didn’t say anything like that, and he has continued to say that any restrictions won’t work and are merely an effort to take away every American’s patriotic right to own a gun.

The one thing Lapierre has gotten right is that the information about certain guns, notably assault rifles, is often wrong. They’re not automatic weapons or machine guns, they are not military weapons, they do not fire higher power bullets than other weapons (the .223 Bushmaster used in the Sandy Hook shooting is a visual copy of a military rifle, but is a semi-automatic weapon and its ammo, though thought to be among the widest used rifle caliber in the U.S. is largely used as a target round and is considered an unsuitable caliber for anything other than “varmit” hunting, though it has obviously been used with devastating  effect otherwise).

But besides blaming everyone from the media to video games for this violence, Lapierre declines to even hint that guns themselves are part of the issue. It sounds good to say the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a good guy with a gun. Sure that might work, but let’s also think that it might not . . . There were two armed guards (off-duty cops) at Columbine, both of which shot at one of the shooters, and there were armed security officers on the Virginia Tech campus.

Even well trained good guys don’t necessarily hit everything at which they shoot. Bullets miss, they fragment and they go through doors and walls. I’m thinking those aren’t good things, no matter how “good a guy” is when he’s shooting at a bad guy, who probably isn’t standing still and is shooting back and may be mixed into a crowd. One merely needs to look at records of police shootings . . . number of shots fired, missed etc. . . . to see that not everything aimed at gets hit. So now imagine an armed security guard trying to bring down a shooter running down a hallway lined with kid-filled classrooms. It all sounds great until a guard shoots a teacher. No offense, but these aren’t highly trained combat Delta Force guys.

All kinds of politically driven rhetoric will be flying through the air on this one. The questions remains: Are there reasonable legislative steps that might be taken to reduce (or possibly reduce) misuse of guns?

Close the gun-buying  loopholes, make sure the “can’t buy” lists include everyone who should be either mentally or legally (felons etc.) disqualified. Develop a rapid background check system. Limit extended round ammo clips. Enforce current laws. While our awareness, as well as policies and procedures, have changed dramatically since the Columbine shooting, clearly something more needs to be done. (Mental  health concerns have again popped up after Sandy Hook. The failures at Columbine, including the failure of law enforcement to pursue reported warnings about the shooters as well as to act on specific threats about one of the shooters (including carrying out a search warrant) raised the debate, but Sandy Hook should raise it again on multiple levels.

It’s a start, and the discussion needs to begin. Not on high-flying patriotic issues, but embracing practical and reasonable laws that have a chance of lowering gun violence and serve to preserve the rights of lawful gun owners. The NRA is on the wrong side of the wave, embracing its most radical members. The discussion will go on without them.

ESPN's Parker Digs a Deep Racist Pit for Himself

ESPN’s Rob Parker’s rant about the “blackness” of Washington quarterback Robert Griffin III was a disgusting, racist rant about something that may be a seldom outwardly spoken issue, but, frankly, one that I find appalling.

By questioning the rookie quarterback’s “blackness” Parker threw himself into the pit of racist rants everywhere . . . white or black. Can you imagine some white guy saying a bunch of other white guys aren’t “white” enough? Holy crap. The guy would be shredded in the press. He’d be encouraging white people to ignore everything else around them and act “whiter,” I suppose by throwing aside other cultural influences and only embracing that white is “white.” Maybe unbleached flour, segregation, white-only restaurants, ambrosia?

Who knows? Parker, of course, doesn’t get the fast and furious reaction to his comments, including, one supposes, his suspension by ESPN. He called his critics “uneducated” and “silly.”

"Is he a brother, or is he a cornball brother?" Parker asked.

"He's not real. OK, he's black, he kind of does the thing, but he's not really down with the cause. He's not one of us. He's kind of black, but he's not really, like, the guy you want to hang out with because he's off to something else.

"We all know he has a white fiancée. There was all this talk about how he's a Republican ... Tiger Woods was like, 'I've got black skin, but don't call me black.'"

Wow. Unbelieveable. So now Griffin III isn’t only not black enough but, oh my God, he’s going to marry a white girl. So Parker, digging his racist butt even deeper, is against interracial marriage. Damn. T really can’t get any worse. Again, reverse the people talking, change their races in your head and imagine the same words. (“Sure he’s white, but he’s not white enough. After all, he’s marrying some black girl.”) Just appalling.

Why aren’t we past the point where we are supposed to live up to someone else’s narrow expectations for us? So not black enough . . . what’s next? Not gay enough? Not woman enough? Not man enough? Parker took a tumble down a path that makes my blood boil. I hope he stays in that pit he dug for himself. ESPN needs to cut the cord permanently. 

Let's Try to Find Some Middle Ground in the Gun Control Debate

A football player’s apparent murder/suicide in Kansas City has once again thrust guns and gun controls back into the spotlight.

And just as quickly, gun opponents and gun advocates jumped on the bandwagon. Bob Costas called for more controls of guns during Sunday night’s football game, and faded rocker Ted Nuggent called Costas a dope and “only fools blame the tools.” Unfortunately, two people are dead, for whatever reason, and Costas was right in saying they might not be if there wasn’t a gun lying around. The tragedy is that a 3-month-old kid now has no parents.

Look, I don’t want to take your guns, just make some regulations a touch more reasonable before you buy them. And while guns will be used by people in bad ways, it seems to me a few sensible regulations might limit that.

While the press frequently confuses the “automatic” vs. “semi-automatic” issue (automatic, hold the trigger and the weapon keeps firing . . . semi-automatic and each trigger pull fires the weapon), legal automatic weapons are not really the issue . . . you need a federal license to get one, and you ain’t gonna be able to get that.

So the issue generally falls to gun shops and gun shows, and to sensible laws that allow people to buy guns, but perhaps eliminates some of the fringe ammunition and gun designs.

Four ideas:

Limit magazine capacity. There no reason for a person to carry a weapon that boasts a 100-plus round magazine. Ok, it may be cool, but there’s no real-world reason for it. Buy two smaller clips, you cheap bastard.

Eliminate large ammunition purchases. Do you really need 10,000 rounds of ammo?

Eliminate body-armor-piercing bullets. Seems simple and logical, but it’s something the National Rifle Association has fought. Special hardened metal alloys were initially designed for police use to increase penetration of cars and windshields etc. since regular lead tend to deflect and fragment (note the people injured by police bullets in a recent New York City shooting). This ammo shouldn’t be available to civilians. Why on earth would anyone need ammo like this unless it’s to kill cops?

Mandate background checks at shops and gun shows. The gaps here are gun shows, where background checks are often not run. It takes but a few minutes, so why not? Make it a federal regulation. Cops run a check when they pull you over, or you go to get a driver’s license. Why should buying a gun be any different?

We can argue the Constitutional right (or not) to own guns until the cows come home and everyone will continue to agree to disagree. But limiting some types of guns or accessories has little to do with the Constitution  . . .

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said there’s a constitutional right to buy high-capacity clips and magazines. Others have made the same arguments. “You simply can't keep these weapons out of the hands of sick, demented individuals who want to do harm. And when you try and do it, you restrict our freedom," he argued recently on Fox News.

I’ll argue that freedom does not depend on 100-round magazines. I’ll also argue that at the time the Constitution was written, guns were a single-shot thing . . . reload . . . maybe four shots a minute.

Politicians of all types cringe when the NRA starts barking. But some polls have shown that that bark may actually be less than the ultimate bite. Hunters and other gun owners have said that some additional controls make sense. And many are starting to walk away from the NRA’s extreme positions. There should be common ground once each side stops yelling at each other.

In an excellent New York Times op-ed piece (April 2012 “I Hunt, but the N.R.A. Isn’t for me), Lily Raff McCaulou notes that while the NRA boasts 4 million members, some 90 percent of gun owners aren’t members. And as a gun owner and sportswoman, she owns guns, but argues against many of the NRA’s political positions and posturing.

There will always be sick and demented people who may wind up killing people, but let’s tighten a few of the loopholes a touch and make sure we make people, even good ones, responsible for their actions and their gun purchases. It shouldn’t be easier to get a gun than get a driver’s license.