The Arms Treaty, the NRA, and a little Common Sense

On April 2, the AP reported that “the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved an arms [trade] Treaty [ATT] intended to keep weapons out of the hands of ‘terrorists, insurgents, organized crime figures, and human rights violators.’”

Three countries voted against the Treaty (are you ready?): Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Uncounted was a fourth hegemony, the NRA, whose EVP, Wayne LaPierre, had addressed the Assembly’s drafting committee in July of 2011 in an attempt to abort the Treaty in utero.

The U.S. signed on to the Treaty after ensuring that -- among other things -- it would not be binding on any domestic arms trade, or in any way contravene the provisions of the Second Amendment. Now, it must go to the Senate for ratification, and the ether is already abuzz with negative static from the NRA and its abettors which will no doubt at some point devolve into sowing fear among conspiracy theorists about jackbooted U.N. mercenaries in black helicopters coming to take our guns away from us, like the British tried to do in 1775.

I write this as a lifetime long-gun owner, target shooter, hunter, and former member of the NRA, who hopes to persuade his fellow enthusiasts that the NRA is in thrall to constituencies other than its general membership, e.g., powerful economic interests like the National Shooting Sports Federation, a trade association that fronts for the firearms industry. How else to account for the fact that Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, found – in July of last year – that “most NRA members and gun owners support more restrictive measures on gun ownership,” including 74% of NRA members who support (among other “common sense” issues) background checks, a measure that the NRA leadership is currently fighting tooth and nail on Capitol Hill.

I wish I had more confidence that the background check issue about to be debated by the Senate will survive (undiluted) its passage through Congress, but one always hopes that common sense will in fact prevail, even against such formidable odds.

UPDATE: The Senate ratified my lack of confidence in its rationality by voting down enhanced background checks.

Fail of Biblical Proportions: Leviticus vs. Psalm 23

Arriving in good time to make it onto my  personal “Best Parodies of the 20th Century” list, came Ian Frazier’s incomparable 1997 Atlantic Monthly essay, “Lamentations of the Father”.

As Atlantic editor, Robert Vare, wrote, it is “a comedic tour de force -- a pitch-perfect application of the fire-and-brimstone injunctions of the Pentateuch to the mundane travails of middle-class parenting”.

One parodies the Bible at one’s peril. Any such effort had not only better be better than good, but must circumspectly navigate the narrow path between satire and sacrilege.  

Frazier aced those hurdles.

In stark contrast, we come to Mark Helprin’s jape in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, an attempt at biblical parody that gives new meaning to the phrase, heavy-handed.

Helprin is a gifted author whose arresting novelette, “Ellis Island”, and his luminous novel, “Winter’s Tale”, did much to inform my perception of the heights to which imaginative literature could aspire. But neither imagination nor gift for pasquinade is to be found in his op-ed piece, “Psalm 23, Newly Revised According to to Modern Principles”, an aimless hodgepodge of formulaic Obama bashing awkwardly interlaced with biblical locutions.

Helprin’s present-tense reference to Hillary Rodham [stet] as a member of “his [Obama’s] staff” leaves us wondering whether he’s been reading the papers or -- more likely -- whether his piece had been spiked by the editors awaiting a slow Saturday to foist it upon a less captious weekend readership. Furthermore, shoehorning the Amalekites between “the President” and “the EPA” as presumed fiscal profligates, fatally challenges one’s willingness to suspend belief for the sake of a good story.

I would respectfully remind Mr. Helprin and the editors that skewering the powerful is a skill best practiced with a rapier, not a cleaver.

Second Amendment Under Fire

The self-proclaimed “American Military’s Most-Trusted News Source”, The Duffle Blog, has scooped the MSM with its chilling revelation that the military has been drawing up plans for nation-wide gun confiscation.

Prominent Democratic gun-control opponents, senators Harry Reid, Joe Manchin and Mark Warner, issued a terse, but puissant, press release consisting of only three words: “We warned you!”, leaving the reader to guess whether they were referring to sequestration, jack-booted U.N. mercenaries, or global climate change.

NRA stalwart, Wayne LaPierre, had no comment, having gone into catatonic shock upon reading today’s (actual) story in the The New York Times that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit has ruled that “permits allowing people to carry concealed weapons are not protected by the Second Amendment”.

And the beat goes on…

There’ll Always Be An England

Is there anything more wryly British than that the remains of one of its most infamous (to Shakespeare, anyway) rulers, Richard III, the last English monarch to die in combat (in 1485), should have been found buried under a parking lot?

One For the Road(s)

If there is any sentient person out there who retains even the slightest illusions about the greed, cronyism, and self-interest of all too many of our politicians, he/she needs only to read this article in the McClatchy newspapers about the deplorable state of the nationwide roads and bridges infrastructure to be disabused of any such Panglossian view.

Civic planners have been beating their collective heads against the wall about this appalling neglect for a decade or more, but don’t seem able to attract much concern from Washington or the Statehouses.

If this ingrained kick-it-down-the-road attitude continues in the ascendency much longer, we won’t have to wait for climate change to bring down the social and economic order; we’ll have self-destructed long before.

Méritocratie Oblige

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/opinion/brooks-the-great-migration.html?

Howler of the Week (so far)

“…we’re expecting over the next 22 months to be the focus of this administration as they attempt to annihilate the Republican Party.
“And let me just tell you, I do believe that is their goal — to just shove us into the dustbin of history.”

                                          --John Boehner 1/23/13

Seems to this observer that the GOP is doing quite a good job of annihilating itself without any help from the Administration.
Let us not forget that this is the party whose Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, said early in 2012: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

To hear Boehner quoting Trotsky (!!!) on “the dustbin of history” can’t help but call to mind another political ideology that self-destructed in the late 20th Century.

TR and Abe, where are you when they need you?

Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/house/278881-boehner-obamas-goal-is-to-annihilate-the-gop#ixzz2Iq2HfLZh
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