Thinking of Bringing a Gun into Your Home?

“We Should Not Have This In Common”

Actually, “THIS” has become so common, that we have become inured to the slow walk to nothing in response.  Santa Fe, Texas.

Number 45 promises that this will and must stop, but other than finding a moment to make it all about himself (remember Parkland: “I think I would have run in there and stopped the shooter, really, I do.”) : he’ll do nothing.

Sound cynical?  Read the messages from David Hogg and others from Parkland.  They’ve suffered and know already the cold reluctance of those in the thrall of the NRA to assist them or all of us in any way.  At my age, cynicism might be expected with the pains of aging.  At their young ages, living in our current America is just as debilitating for their souls.  God bless them for the fight.

“Prepare to watch the NRA boast about getting higher donations,” one Parkland student, Cameron Kasky, said on Twitter. “Prepare to see students rise up and be called ‘civil terrorists’ and crisis actors. Prepare for the right-wing media to attack the survivors.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/us/santa-fe-parkland-shooting.html

Usually after the mass shootings – Sandy Hook, Aurora, Las Vegas, Parkland – data indicates a quick jump in gun sales, but surprisingly that expected increase seems to be dropping off recently. 

It’s noticeable because “recently” can be tracked quickly from data and numbers of background checks and purchases of weapons (especially long guns) with the many mass shootings we have in 2018. 
After Sandy Hook, the terrifying image of a deranged child killing children with an AR15 and a sensible President disconnected from the political bridle of the NRA caused a tidal wave of anxious gun-wanters to purchase weapons they figured would rightfully be blocked from sales. Later with a new occupant in the White House, reactions to shootings no longer presents a fear of any ban whatsoever: not on bump stocks, not on refusing purchases for the mentally ill, not on age limits.   

“We're only 20 weeks into 2018, and there have already been 22 school shootings where someone was hurt or killed. That averages out to more than 1 shooting a week.” https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/02/us/school-shootings-2018-list-trnd/index.html

After the Parkland shooting, background checks for long guns like AR-15’s leaped up 12.6%.  I know that sounds amazing, but it’s way down from earlier numbers – when Obama was President.  After Sandy Hook, for example, the percentage increase for long gun purchases (again, assault weapons) was over 50%.  Now with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the fear of political or legal response to any mass shootings by those who want their long guns has noticeably decreased. 

 The graph below shows an arrow pointing to Trump's Inauguration and the drop in sales of one company (Smith & Wesson).  Other sales in other companies have dropped as well.

Quite opposite this national right-wing relaxation of fear and paranoia, local gun manufacturers in Illinois like Springfield Armory are going to the mat with a Democratically controlled General Assembly and their partner in Bruce Vincent Rauner.  The last messages sent out by the Geneseo based company demand everyone prepare to fight any attempt to override the Governor’s veto of a bill to demand Illinois gun retailers to become licensed. 

In addition, Springfield Armory wanted everyone to stop the following bills: (HB1467) banning bump stocks, etc., (HB1469) banning high capacity magazines, (HB1664) Hotlines for people to call in individuals who are demonstrating clear and dangerous behaviors who have guns, (HB1465) raising the age for gun purchases to 21.  But you can also get a special deal on the new “Saint” from Springfield Armory if you hurry:

And so, we stumble along as a nation playing this pattern of horror  è  surprise  è  thoughts and prayers  è  blame of mentally ill, students themselves, number of doors in a school  è  START OVER. 

BUT I JUST WANT A GUN…FOR PROTECTION?

Scientific American produced a careful exegesis/study of what guns specifically do in our country and how such weapons alter our lives.  It’s a very worthy and sobering read.

Since Wayne LaPierre and Grover Norquist and the K Street lobbyists have fallen like a hard rain on Washington’s willing swamp-dwellers, the numbers of Gun related deaths from increased ownership of guns have not changed in many ways – EXCEPT ONE.

Police interventions have by and large remained the same.  Accidental shootings have remained stable or decreasing.  Homicides have shown nothing significant in any increase, altho0ugh data used by Scientific American does not include this last year when we have been under the weight of 24 hour news reporting. 

The difference is suicides.   In 2014, according to Scientific American, nearly two-thirds of gun deaths occurring in the United States were suicides: 21,334 people. A jump of nearly 5000 people.

Bring a gun into the house, and you have changed the possible outcomes of your own or another’s life’s end in significant manner.  How?  You’ll never quite know, except that statistically, when you’re having that down moment, or that feeling of despair, there’s an ultimate outcome in a box next to your bed or on the shelf above your sweaters. 

“Several studies now confirm that suicide is often a decision made suddenly. If the moment somehow passes safely, the evidence suggests, lives can be saved in the short and long term.

“There's a fair amount of research showing that the suicide crisis is time-limited,” says John Mann, a professor of translational neuroscience at Columbia University who studies suicide. Two thirds of those who survived a suicide attempt, according to one 1991 study, had started planning their course of action less than an hour beforehand. Another study notes that almost half of the 82 people who attempted suicide said they had started thinking about their current attempt less than 10 minutes earlier. Moreover, in the case of guns especially, an investigation by the New Hampshire medical examiner's office showed that nearly one in 10 suicides by firearm from 2007 to 2009 involved a weapon that was purchased or rented the preceding week—often within just a few hours.”   https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-plan-to-prevent-gun-suicides/

The danger to yourself from yourself or your family, therefore, is magnified once you purchase a weapon; more terribly, it is confirmed when you provide such agents of death for your children – returning their arms to them after confiscation, leaving them free to take and use, allowing them to purchase or hold them even as you know the mental angst of someone who needs intervention.  These are other issues facing the person who might jump at securing their Second Amendment right after Santa Fe…or the next catastrophe. 

Please consider what the NRA will never tell you.

I'll Gladly Pay You Tuesday

I’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday…

A person who does not pay his debts is considered one who welches in semantically correct England.  In America, where language is more, shall we surmise utilitarian; we favor the term deadbeat.  For Illinois Comptroller Susanna Mendoza, it’s neither: She hasn’t the funds to make all the payments in a back log of unpaid bills after years of no budget agreements between Rauner and the General Assembly.  Instead, it’s a matter of financial triage. 

On Mendoza’s website,  at the Illinois Office of Comptroller, she provides a daily amount for the backlog of unpaid bills as well as a graph-filled history of how we got HERE and just how bad HERE is. 

May 15^th: $6,557, 858,078. 

According to Mendoza, the collection of $6 billion in General Obligation Bonds alleviated some pressure from the budget impasses, but even though nearly $2 billion was paid into backlogged state healthcare bills, it was insufficient to meet all current needs.

https://illinoiscomptroller.gov/financial-data/backlog-voucher-report-bvr/

A message from Jim Bachman, Executive Director of IRTA, was issued today describing the Comptroller’s inability to provide quick payment for TRIP participants and the possible backlog of payment for medical procedures taking more than 200 days.  The last paragraph calls for some fact gathering and anecdotal information if IRTA is to proceed in a legal action to require payments by the state.  Thus far, my doctors have not dropped terms like welcher or deadbeat when I arrive in the office, and they have not asked for payments in advance because of the state’s being both.

Please read Mr. Bachman’s message and be informed:

Dear IRTA Members,

At a recent meeting of the TRIP Advisory Committee we were notified by the Department of Central Management Services (CMS), that the Comptroller had not made the State's payment to the Teachers Health Insurance Security fund since January 2017. The State's payment is approximately $10 million a month. Therefore, the State currently owes the fund approximately $170 million.

The fund is where all TRIP money is deposited. The fund has the following contributors: TRIP participants' premiums, Active teachers (percentage of payroll), School districts (percentage of payroll), State of Illinois (matches the active teachers' portion) and the federal government. Due to the lack of the State's payment insurance companies are not being paid on a timely basis as in the past. Therefore, if the insurance companies are not getting paid in a timely manner the doctors and hospitals are not receiving their payments in a timely manner either. CMS has told us some payments have been delayed as much as 200 days.

The IRTA's contract lobbyist and I met with the Comptroller's office recently to discuss the lack of payments to the fund. As we assumed, the Comptroller does not have enough revenue to make all required payments on a monthly basis. Therefore, she has decided to make the most necessary payments first and if money is available she will make payments to other needs.

In addition, I asked our law firm of Tabet, DiVito, and Rothstien to provide us an opinion on whether IRTA had standing to sue the Comptroller to compel her to make payments to the Teachers Health Insurance Security fund. In short, our law firm replied that the IRTA can bring a mandamus action to compel the Comptroller to pay TRIP payments.

A lawsuit would be a last resort. What we are asking you as TRIP participants is if you begin to experience your doctors or hospitals asking for payment up front for any procedure in lieu of them waiting for payment from the insurance company to notify the IRTA. At that time the IRTA Board of Directors will determine our course of action.

Sincerely,

James Bachman

IRTA Executive Director

  

My Pocahontas

My Pocahontas

I honestly believed my mother was Native American.  My brothers and I were proud of that. 

She was also a very discreet and secretive mystery in our constantly questioning lives.  When we’d ask about her childhood and early life, she was often evasive and cautious to cover her answers with the frosting of anecdote rather than actual answers.  But in our minds we fantasized another truth.

"How’d you get that scar by your right eye?  Why is your nose bent and different than ours?  Why do you turn so much darker in the sun while we just burn?"

“Dog bite.”  “Thrown baseball bat.”  “Dunno, just do.”

She was born in Chickasha, Oklahoma, and I knew just enough about the Trail of Tears to believe my mother was definitely Cherokee.  My younger brother believed more romantically she was Apache and hopefully had carbines stored somewhere in a wall in the basement.  Whatever, we agreed that was no dog bite.   More likely from some ceremony of bravery, self-administered before a snapping fire against a purple sky. 

Our extended family helped fuel our belief.  They whispered to us when we were tightly pajamed in bed, “Just so you know, your Mother is a half-breed, you know.” 

“Really?” But they mistook the excitement in our mouthing voices for horror, not the ecstatic hope that Mom was something wild and beautiful and filled with a history of freedom and boundlessness. 

“Yes, really. And that’s just the beginning, I’m afraid.”

My mother and father eloped in 1946, just like Elizabeth Warren’s parents did over a decade earlier in 1932.  My father, having returned from a war which murdered his sleep for the rest of his life, blind-dated a dark-haired woman in Virginia, then returned to his Indiana home and dawdled one week before he left smitten back to Virginia to beg another chance.  Another chance forever.

His family and uncles and aunts never forgave him.

Unfortunately, we haven’t changed much since that time long ago when I suffered the hushed comments of my relatives.   In the Chicago Tribune, John Kaas described his glee at Senator Elizabeth Warren’s reluctance to undergo a DNA test to reveal whether or not she had any American Native DNA present in her genes.   Senator Warren, like my brothers and our family, fell prey to the allure of our family’s apparent narration and little scientific substance except for the manufactured tales of the unaccepting family.  “Isn’t it delicious that Fauxcahontas, aka Sen. Elizabeth Warren — the liberal Massachusetts Democrat toying with a 2020 presidential run — is refusing to take a DNA test to finally prove whether her self-serving claims of Cherokee heritage are true?

Actually, watching Warren squirm and Chuck Todd all but flagellate himself for having to ask about the DNA test on “Meet the Press” was more than delicious.”

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-elizabeth-warren-cherokee-kass-0314-story.html

Chickasha is in Grady County southwest of Oklahoma City, and my mother’s orphanage is no longer in operation, but in the early 1930’s it was populated by the unwanted offspring of Mexican laborers and Native Americans, as well as some Whites.  She was only three and her adopters chose her and my Uncle Jack, a darkly handsome Mexican boy nearly three years her elder. 

And it was just the beginning, I’m afraid.  Whenever the “family” arrived, my mother stayed present but retreated into a distant and perfunctory person who smiled little and talked less. I remember her receiving a gift for Christmas: a long, sharply honed butcher knife with two carefully cut notches in its handle.  Everyone laughed at this inside joke, but my mother’s mouth played a faint twist as if suppressing an unwanted memory.

When Trump derided Warren once more, using his usual pejorative word Pocahontas to describe her for the Native American Code Talkers of World War Two  standing before him, I was more than staggered. I was catapulted back to my own childhood bed, in my pajamas, listening to one part of the family whose susurrus of whispers derided another’s skin, another’s color, another’s refusal to accept and my own mother.

As a result, I embraced multi-ethnicity without knowing what it was; instead, just a seething resentment for those who would dismiss my mother with a judgmental and derogatory description: half-breed, Indian, Red, squaw.  And if and when they visited and came to tuck us in, I gorged my antipathy waiting for them to finish the Lord’s Prayer with some breathy, disdainful comment about my mother.

Yet, like Senator Warren, I was without any real proof, just a desire to know she was special and her blood was coursing through my veins with all the history and significance my small life lacked. 

Now, science has trumped the lure of romantic family lore.  No longer believe in your responsibility to your great-great grandmother’s legend.  Check the DNA stream. 

Kaas calls Senator Warren Fauxcahontas.  Inversely, as mean-spirited as anything I ever heard hushed to me while I drifted to sleep.  

In the end of his sad diatribe, Kaas reminds us all that we are just and more importantly all Americans.  But in this respect, he would reaffirm what his column already purports: that those honored code talkers can be insulted by an ignorant man in power (momentarily), that the honored memories of a family’s past responsibilities and  beliefs are worthless unless scientifically provable, that the Democrats’ politics of race and gender are nothing compared to what we have now, and it’s just acceptable now to make fun of a politician interested in the lives of those without advocacy.

My mother died some ten years ago, and I wrote to the District Judge of Grady County for the records of her birth.  After determining that there would be no one left alive to argue against such a release, I was provided her records.  She was white and a ward of the state of Oklahoma.  White.  

As if that ever mattered.

Are You Walking Out of School Tomorrow?

Are You Walking Out of School on Wednesday?  A Basic Primer from the ALCU.

(https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/students-free-speech-rights-public-schools)

Across the nation on Wednesday at 10:00 a.m., students across the country will be making the decision to walk out out of classes for seventeen minutes to protest gun violence and remember the lives senselessly lost at Parkland, a minute for each lost life. 

The ACLU offers this advice, as does other sites and organizations.

How the First Amendment Protects Student Speech

If you’re a public school student, you don’t check your constitutional rights at the schoolhouse doors. But whether schools can punish you for speaking out depends on when, where, and how you decide to express yourself.


Do I Have First Amendment Rights in School?

Yes. You do not lose your right to free speech just by walking into school. You have the right to speak out, hand out flyers and petitions, and wear expressive clothing in school — as long as you don’t disrupt the functioning of the school or violate the school’s content-neutral policies.

What counts as “disruptive” will vary by context, but a school disagreeing with your position or thinking your speech is controversial or in “bad taste” is not enough to qualify. Courts have upheld students’ rights to wear things like an anti-war armband, an armband opposing the right to get an abortion, and a shirt supporting the LGBT community. And “content-neutral policies” means rules that have nothing to do with the message you’re expressing, like dress codes. So, for example, a school can prohibit you from wearing hats — because that rule is not based on what the hats say — but it can’t prohibit you from wearing only pink pussycat hats or pro-NRA hats.

Can My School Discipline Me for Participating in a Walkout?

Yes. Because the law in most places requires students to go to school, schools can discipline you for missing class. But what they can’t do is discipline you more harshly because of the political nature of or the message behind your action.

The exact punishment you could face will vary by your state, school district, and school. Find out more by reading the policies of your school and school district. If you’re planning to miss a class or two, look at the policy for unexcused absences. If you’re considering missing several days, read about truancy. And either way, take a look at the policy for suspensions. In some states and districts, suspension is not an available punishment for unexcused absences. And nationwide, if you are facing a suspension of 10 days or more, you have a right to a formal process and can be represented by a lawyer. Some states and school districts require a formal process for fewer days, too. Also, you should be given the same right to make up work just as any other student who missed classes.

Find out the rules so you can tell if they are being applied differently when it comes to your walkout.

What about Protesting Away from School?

Outside of school, you enjoy essentially the same rights to protest and speak out as anyone else. This means you’re likely to be most protected if you organize, protest, and advocate for your views off campus and outside of school hours.

What are My Rights on Social Media?

You have the right to speak your mind on social media. Your school cannot punish you for content you post off campus and outside of school hours that does not relate to school. Some schools have attempted to extend their power to punish students even for off-campus, online posts. While courts have differed on the constitutionality of those punishments, the ACLU has challenged such overreach.

Are My Rights Different Depending on What Grade I’m in?

They could be, because the test for whether speech is protected is based on whether what you’re doing can be considered “disruptive” to your school’s functioning. So, for example, the level of disruption caused by a certain message could be different in a high school classroom than in a middle school. Also, high school students are closer to being adults, so they are capable of hearing more provocative messages. Therefore, schools would likely have more leeway in restricting speech for younger students.

If I Participate in a Walk Out, Can the School Keep Me from Coming Back Inside Afterwards?

Locking out students is essentially the same thing as a suspension, so it depends on whether suspension is a possible punishment for missing class. If getting suspended is not a punishment for an unexcused absence at your school, then getting locked out after a walkout is not allowed.

How are My Rights Different at a Private School than a Public School?

The First Amendment applies to public schools’ actions, but not those of private schools, so unfortunately there is much less protection for students’ speech at a private school. This is because public schools are run by the government and private schools aren’t, and the First Amendment only controls what the government can and can’t do. That said, we hope that private schools will still allow students the leeway to express themselves and engage politically in the issues of the day.

Of course other questions come to mind.  Can a teacher schedule a test on the same day and moment?  Can I be asked to write or learn something before attending the walkout?  Can I be punished for participating? Can participation affect my application for college?  Another site dealing with these and other questions can be found on a CNN website:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/12/health/student-walkout-questions-trnd/index.html