Fries don't kill people, or do they?

Guns don't kill people, they just lie there.

Hold my gun while I eat.

*Bad People with Guns can only be stopped by Good People with Guns.

*It’s the makers of violent video games that are to blame for the violence in America.

*Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.

*I call on congress to enact legislation that will put an armed policeman in every school in the country.

I didn’t hear the entire speech by the representative of the National Rifle Association (NRA) today, but the points I did pick up are summarized above. For anyone who has read my previous two blog posts or my review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, it will come as no surprise that I won’t be debating the points; others were doing this on radio and TV commentaries already; it’s a futile exercise.

The principal consideration of “liberal” morality is the harm/care paradigm, followed closely by fairness/cheating. Liberals are most likely to be critically offended when people (particularly innocent people) are harmed or the weak are scammed or taken advantage of, according to Haidt.

To assume, however, that the “republican” mind is blasé about harm-to-innocents or poverty is a mistake; the American citizen who was not moved and offended by the shooting of children and their teachers at Sandy Hook would be hard to find. For the NRA, there is something more fundamental than care/harm, though, namely individual rights, particularly the right to defend oneself as one sees fit. It sounds to me like there is in the republican mind an overwhelming fear that much more is at stake than the weapons they own, that to limit the number and kind permitted is a stage in the de-Americanization of the citizenry. This is repeatedly bolstered by reference to the 2^nd Amendment in the Constitution: A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Haidt points to evidence that says reason follows intuition, and it was not surprising today that the NRA sought to divert any complicity in the atrocity away from their agenda by taking aim at the liberal side with reasonable alternatives: violent videos, lack of security in schools, etc. We all grasp for—and generally find—the logical arguments that support our position. Where republican logic says “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” the liberal response is likely to be “Guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people,” and therefore to the liberal mind, gun control makes eminent sense (as if knives, clubs, poisons, bathtubs and balconies didn’t exist.)

There is something about the knee-jerk grope for remedies on the liberal side that needs to be considered more carefully. In an earlier post, I cited statistics that indicate the huge number of gun killings in the USA compared to a few countries that have strict gun controls. And yet, I don’t fully believe that even the removal of all but hunting weapons from the public in the US would achieve the desired result, although, granted, it would have cut down the toll of the killed in Sandy Hook or Columbine. If a person gets a headache every time it rains, it seems reasonable to assume that the rain caused the headache. However, it may be that a change in atmospheric pressure caused both the rain and the headache. Is it possible that the insistence on owning weapons, the prevalence of violence in the media and on the street, the rancorous politics and the existence of so much poverty in a wealthy nation are all caused by another, yet-unnamed villain? Or that if the USA could name and defeat that villain, that the violence would abate, guns or no guns?

        I wonder.

I recently read a report noting that the removal of lead from gasoline was coincidental with a reduction in mental disturbances of various kinds as well as incidents of violence among teens and young adults. Who would have guessed it?

Maybe we liberals should be looking at diet. Changing the minds of the gun lovers is a non-starter. Americans love burgers and pop; junk food may be the villain acting like lead, poisoning people’s chances of achieving mental health. 

Put down that bag of fries and coke and eat your vegetables, Clint Eastwood!

Annie register your gun

In my book, What I meant to say was . . ., I wrote an essay titled “Annie, register your gun.” In it, I wrote one line in bold type: personal liberty trumps social responsibility. Well, we’re back into the debate, and next week the retention or abolition of the long gun registry will be decided. My MP is insisting that he represents the constituents while the retentionist Bloc, Liberal and New Democrats don’t. I personally have doubts about whether or not he (or the other parties, for that matter) actually knows what the majority of his constituents think on this issue; we’ve never been asked.

 Obviously, the passionate ones urging abolition are the ones most directly affected. They’re the long gun owners.The majority of Canadians live in urban settings and own no long guns. They’ve been understandably silent. It doesn’t matter to them enough to raise a hue and cry about the issue like the gun lovers have. I doubt that most Canadians even understand the process of long gun registration.

I personally own no gun, but if long gun registration means that someone out there is safer from danger by gun fire, I’d vote for keeping it. I’ve been thinking about registration and licensing generally and have come up with the following list off the top of my head:

• Automobiles are registered and their drivers must prove themselves competent through training and testing because, we’re told, a car can be a dangerous weapon. There’s no protest about this, no assertion that it’s making criminals out of law-abiding citizens.
• Professionals must be registered in order to practice. Most would do their jobs conscientiously and within the law if they weren’t, but we accept this as necessary to protect us from incompetence.
• To participate in benefits like OAS, CPP, etc., we must be registered and must possess a Social Insurance Number.
• Our municipal government attempted to have us register our cat, which we didn’t do. This bylaw made criminals out of law-abiding cats and their owners.
• Airplanes can’t be flown unless they’re registered.
• Births, marriages and deaths are all registered by law.

That’s just a short list. In the world of registration, long gun registry doesn’t stick out as particularly onerous. What’s the fuss about? Are we going to end up being badgered by a gun lobby like the National Rifle Association in the USA? I sincerely hope not.

If you’d like to know what’s involved in registering a firearm, go to http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cfp-pcaf/form-formulaire/pdfs/998-eng.pdf. This form describes the different kinds of guns so you can fill in the line on the application that describes your weapon. The form has two parts: one part identifies you and the other identifies the weapon. The form might take as much as five minutes to fill out. You then need to get a “verifier” to sign the paper to ensure that you’ve identified the gun correctly. That’s it. You send it in and pay the fee and it’s done.

Annie, for Pete's sake, register your guns and quite whining.



Just three guys with guns, full of piss and vinegar

(http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/outdoor-activities-channel.htm and
www.nwk.usace.army.mil)



You know the story: three guys stop at a pond in Saskatchewan and for a lark, take pot shots at the swimming ducks and ducklings. One of them records the action with his digital camera set on “movie” and, for some reason, posts the event on You Tube. With millions of witnesses, they are quickly and thoroughly busted and given heavy fines, are featured on the front page of the StarPhoenix and admit through eager media that it had been a bit of “stupid fun.”


This fall, men in camouflage suits will spend hundreds of dollars on equipment, travel, etc. for the thrill of sitting around the same pond and blasting migrating ducks out of the air with shotguns. That will win nods of approval because hunting seasons and licences will have made this massacre “legal,” and the shooters in this case will be responsible “sportsmen,” not young men having a bit of fun.

So here’s a quiz. The “general public” and the humane societies were so outraged by the actions of the three young men at Cudworth because:

a) their stupidity in putting an illegal act on You Tube puts the general sanity of the human race in doubt,
b) ducks on the water (and particularly ducklings) make this shooting an unfair contest as opposed to firing at them from a blind as they fly overhead,
c) deep down, we find the slaughter of animals abhorrent, especially when we’re confronted visually with the actual event, or
d) we’re jealous of the three men because we’re frustrated and have been taught to curb our natural instinct to get relief by exercising the “patience,hell! I’m gonna kill me something!” prerogative.

And while we’re at it, let’s ponder this scenario. A group of men are sitting in an ocean-side restaurant eating freshly caught lobster when they’re excitedly informed that their help is needed to rescue a beached dolphin just below the restaurant. They rush out and with great effort, return the hapless creature to deeper water. They’re back before their lobster is cold and they finish their meal, lean back and revel in their humanitarian achievement.


Upshot: if you want sympathy, you’d better be a good-looking mammal, not an ugly marine crustacean. And if a mammal, try not to be a steer, pig or sheep; better a kitten, puppy or pony (canned Dalmatian would fill us with the same revulsion we displayed for the three men at the pond).

Finally, I applaud the progress we’ve made in protecting humans and animals from needless suffering. I’m told that abusive men often practice their need-to-inflict-pain (sadism) on animals before graduating to fellow humans. Action against cruelty to animals, neglect of animal needs, etc. may be a small step toward a society in which the blatant hypocrisies inherent in “legal sport hunting” may become a cruelty of the past.


(I really enjoyed the cedar-plank salmon at a friend’s place last weekend. I admit it. I don’t want to think about it. Let’s change the subject.)

Ever been to Grand Cache?^©

By George Epp

Maybe you’ve heard of Grand Cache, Alberta. It’s a coal-mining town north of Jasper, now working hard to be more of a tourist destination for hikers, canoeists, and other aficionados of rugged mountains and rushing rivers.

Some dozen years ago, Grand Cache’s coal mine closed down, the population fled for other employment and houses went on sale for $20,000 or so as the “last one to leave turn out the lights” syndrome kicked in.

Recently, a consortium of local entrepreneurs reopened the mine and are currently selling coal to China, mainly. The town is alive again and a lady told us this weekend that a mobile home in Grand Cache today sells for ca. $220,000.

We spent a few hours of daylight and a night in Grand Cache, not for any particular reason except that whimsy occasionally takes us to places we’ve never been before, and after a day and night in Edmonton at our kids’ place, we hit on Grand Cache as one of those places that hadn’t yet had the pleasure of our presence. Also, we needed to be near mountains for a few hours and away from telephones and email.

At breakfast in the motel, we chatted with a labourer who was on his way to Grand Prairie where the Manitoba steel-construction company for which he works was just starting a big project. He said he’d be working in southern Alberta next before going up to Yellowknife for another project that would take years to complete. I asked him if there wasn’t enough work in Manitoba and he said there wasn’t much going on there at all.

On the way back to Edmonton, we stopped for lunch at a grubby Smitty’s restaurant in Edson. A group of burly young men were feeding at the next table, apparently on their lunch break from work. The one with his back to us wore a T-shirt that read “I got a new gun for my wife yesterday; the best trade I ever made!” We reminded ourselves that we were in rural Alberta and—trying to be less judgmental—considered the possibility that the gentleman had picked up the shirt at a thrift store and that the message on it was not his message at all, but an accidental consequence of picking up a bunch of work shirts cheap.

What motivation would result in anyone buying a shirt with such a clearly misogynistic message on it—and wearing it blatantly in public? There must be men in this world whose association with women would no longer be necessary. . . if they could only find a way to have sex with their rifles.

Had we taken the time to scoot up to Grand Prairie and to drive back to Edmonton down the Alaska Highway, we would have passed Mayerthorpe, where a man with a bunch of guns and a festering rage killed four Mounties a few years ago.

We used to live and work in the Stony Plain/Spruce Grove area, and as we drove through these towns, we marveled at how what had been towns were now cities: construction of buildings, roads, overpasses everywhere, heavy traffic at midday; along the highway, car dealerships overflowing with sleek cars, pickup trucks, SUVs and RVs. Suburban sprawl as far as the eye can see. We wondered how life had changed for the people of the two bedroom communities.

Gas in Grand Cache sells for 123.9 today; Macs on 109^th Street and 61^st Ave in Edmonton was selling it for 120.4 and here in Rosthern, it’s 129.9. The president of Exxon-Mobil was asked by a senate committee hearing in Washington yesterday how much he earns in a year in salary and bonuses. He said he had earned $12,500,000 last year.

I can’t understand how Exxon expects him to live on that!