A Sin Tax on Guns

To see how seriously the Trump administration takes school safety, consider this:

Two days before the school shooting in Florida that left 17 dead, the Trump administration proposed cutting millions in federal education programs meant to help prevent crime in schools and assist them in recovery from tragedies.

Funds targeted for reduction or elimination in the Trump administration's fiscal 2019 request have helped pay for counselors in schools and violence prevention programs. Such funds were used for mental health aid for students and teachers in the Newtown, Conn., school district following the deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012.

These funding cuts would have hit the very mental health programs that Donald Trump now says are needed to stop school shootings. If this isn't evidence of Trump's total cluelessness, what is?

Now Trump and the NRA are proposing training teachers to be armed guards and hardening school facilities and turning them into prisons. Okay, fine. But it'll cost a lot of money. How are we going to pay for all that?

Gun violence is a serious health problem, as deadly as cigarettes, and should be treated as such.

Research has shown that one of the most effective ways of curtailing cigarette and alcohol use (which can also be quite deadly) is to raise taxes on things that cause societal problems -- so-called sin taxes.

Since murder is a cardinal sin, the instruments of death should be highly taxed. If Congress won't ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, then they have to do something to keep them out of the hands of kids.

A hefty sales tax should be levied on all firearms and ammunition to pay for increasing security at schools and other places of business. The deadlier the weapon, the higher the tax. The larger the magazine capacity, the higher the tax.

In addition -- just as there is for cars and other property, including homes -- there should be an annual licensing fee for each weapon owned to recoup the ongoing social costs of so many guns circulating in society.

It's clearly constitutional to tax guns -- we've been doing it for centuries. Now gun owners need to start paying full freight for the social costs of their hobby.

Surprise! Companies Use Tax Cuts to Buy Back Stock!

When Republicans sold the giant tax cut for corporations they promised that all the money would go to workers in the form of raises. I predicted that the tax savings would be almost exclusively used to buy back stock and pay dividends to investors. Guess who was right?

Almost 100 American corporations have trumpeted [plans to buy back shares] in the past month. American companies have announced more than $178 billion in planned buybacks — the largest amount unveiled in a single quarter, according to Birinyi Associates, a market research firm.

A small number of companies have announced plans to increase wages or pay bonuses, with bonuses being preferred because they have no lasting effect -- they're a one-time publicity stunt to make Donald Trump look good.

In effect, bonuses are just donations to Republican political campaigns.

Money going to workers is dwarfed by stock buybacks:

S&P 500 companies have devoted about $5.6 billion to bonuses and wage hikes because of the tax law, according to research from academics Rick Wartzman and William Lazonick as well as the Academic-Industry Research Network. The group added up commitments from the 50 companies in the S&P 500 that had announced plans to reward workers through February 15.

And it's just the beginning:

Bank of America recently predicted that S&P 500 companies will use repatriated foreign profits to buy back about $450 billion of stock.

CEOs are judged by the performance of the company's stock, not by the company's performance in the marketplace (they're not the same). CEOs are more frequently compensated by receiving additional stock rather than higher salaries because salaries are taxed at higher rates.

Investing in capital equipment, raising wages and increasing production aren't rewarded by the stock market. Stock prices increase most when there are rumors of acquisitions and moves to reduce expenses (i.e., firing workers). Companies that raise wages are hammered by the market, as witnessed by American Airlines' plan to raise pilots' wages last year.

Thus, the incentives for American companies are perverse and destructive. Even worse, companies whose products mostly waste people's time -- Facebook and Apple -- have sky-high stock prices, while stock prices of companies in sectors that people need to survive -- food, transportation, housing -- are moribund.

The stock market simply does not reflect the real economy, and it's insane that CEOs are compensated based on rumors and fantasy.

Archie Bunker on Gun Control

The above was 45 years ago and supposed to be a parody. Look at what's happened today...

One More Time, with Feeling: Guns are Not Protection

There are reports, as yet still unverified, that more than one Broward County deputy failed to confront the Parkland shooter:

The Broward County Sheriff’s Office said it is investigating allegations that multiple deputies failed to enter Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., after the shooting rampage there, adding to the mounting internal probes examining the department’s response to the attack and its prior interactions with the suspect.

Donald Trump and others are casting this as cowardice. But what it really does is emphasize the fact that guns are not protection.

These deputies were probably armed with handguns and shotguns. I would wager that they could tell that the shooter was using an AR-15. They knew they would be outgunned, and they were probably waiting for SWAT to show up. SWAT has ballistic armor and weapons like the MP5/10 submachine gun, Colt M4 carbine, sniper rifles, etc.

It should be obvious by now that civilians have no business owning weapons that are more powerful than what the police carry. Civilians should not be allowed to own assault rifles like the AR-15, or ballistic armor, or silencers (which the NRA was still trying put into civilian hands, and into children's hands after the Vegas shooting!).

Gun nuts whine that many hunting rifles can be categorized as assault rifles. Read this article about what the AR-15 does when it goes through a human body.

Any weapon that purees your liver when its bullet goes through your body is a weapon of war. Such firearms should not be in civilian hands, any more than civilians should own machine guns, hand grenades or nuclear weapons.

What the...FUCK?

Guns + Classroom=Epic Fail

Former marine Anthony Swofford wrote an excellent piece on why having firearms in classrooms is really bad idea. Here are some highlights.

The military issue M-16 is the model for the AR-15 assault rifle that the accused shooter used to kill 17 people this month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The shooter bought the weapon lawfully. He received zero hours of mandated training. There is no reason that any civilian, of any age, should possess this rifle.

Yep. Based on the response to this shooting, I think the AR-15s days are numbered. In fact, I think anything beyond a single shot rifle/shotgun and a handgun aren't going to be in civilians hands much longer. If there is one more school shooting between now and the time they try to pass some kind of legislation, they are toast. The people that support them are going to be voted out of office.

This is absurd. More likely, had Mr. Feis been armed, he would not have been able to draw his weapon (a side arm, presumably) quickly enough to stop the shooter, who with an AR-15 would have had the coach outgunned. Even if the coach had been able to draw his weapon — from where? his athletic shorts? — any shots he managed to fire would have risked being errant, possibly injuring or killing additional students. As some studies have shown, even police officers have missed their targets more than 50 percent of the time. In firing a weapon, Mr. Feis would have only added to the carnage and confusion.

I have to wonder what goes through the head of a gun humper when they read this. Here's a guy who was trained with all sorts of weapons speaking the cold and logical truth. A handgun is no match for an AR 15. According to The Shooter's Log, "a properly configured AR-15 is easily capable of good performance at 500+ yards. Good performance means it can hit a 1-foot-square target all the time." Yet, most handguns average out at effective ranges of around 100 yards or less. So, do we arm all teachers with AR 15s?

Here is something I didn’t think about: I did not think about arming myself to protect my students. President Trump on Thursday specified that he wants only certain teachers — “highly adept people, people that understand weaponry” — to be armed. I will immodestly state that among professors in the United States, I am almost certainly one of the best shooters. But I would never bring a weapon into a classroom. The presence of a firearm is always an invitation to violence. Weapons have no place in a learning environment.

No, they do not.

But it's important to note that this debate is a purposeful distraction. The gun humpers are trying to shift the responsibility away from themselves and into a silly argument that will drive their opponents nuts. The focus should stay on voter registration, calling lawmakers out who support the NRA, and finding people to replace them who will change our gun laws forever.

Comparing Maps

Gun Humper Logic With The FBI

So, let me see if I follow this (ahem) logic correctly...

The FBI is to blame for the Florida shooting, not the loose gun laws that allowed Cruz to so easily obtain an AR-15.

The FBI...run by the guy they elected...Donald Trump...

This kinda reminds me of how 9/11 was not Bush's fault but Benghazi was Obama's fault and Hillary's fault.

Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran=Fucking Moron

Like most US citizens, I've been very impressed with the young people from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who have galvanized the nation into acting on gun violence. They are relentless and will not stop until lawmakers like complete fucking moron Richard Corcoran, the Florida Republican House Speaker, are voted out of office. Check out what he said recently.

"All of these shooters have one thing in common — they are abject, absolute cowards,” Corcoran said. “Here’s what a coward doesn’t want to do — stare down a marshal with a gun the second he goes through a door.”

Seriously? What a dumb ass...

Cruz knew there was an armed security guard at the school. He didn't care. He was trying to be all stealth like and shit. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold weren't stopped at Columbine by an armed guard. Cookie Thornton shot a police officer, took his gun and then proceeded to shoot up Kirkwood City Hall. What kind of fantasy world do these people live in?

People who decide to shoot up a school are NOT RATIONAL. They also aren't cowards because they are NUTS.

I hope that all the new Florida voters will eject this asshat from the capsule come November.

Hypocrisy

I thought I'd beat Mark to the punch.

Time Again to Blame Movies and Games for School Shootings

Instead of blaming the NRA for the glorification of guns, Donald Trump is blaming the Internet, video games and the movies for mass shootings in the United States:

We have to look at the internet because a lot of bad things are happening to young kids and young minds and their minds are being formed, and we have to do something about maybe what they’re seeing and how they’re seeing it. And also video games. I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts. And you go the further step, and that’s the movies. You see these movies, and they’re so violent. And yet a kid is able to see the movie if sex isn’t involved, but killing is involved, and maybe they have to put a rating system for that.

A rating system? Gee, what a brilliant idea. Why didn't the MPAA (the organization that rates films) think of that? Wait -- they have! If Trump ever went to a movie like a real person, he would have seen the MPAA ad that runs during the previews that explains how the rating system works.

The movie Republicans really enjoy attacking these days is John Wick, a 2014 Keanu Reeves film about a former hitman who hit back at the mobsters who killed his dog. Its MPAA rating is “Rated R for strong and bloody violence throughout, language and brief drug use.”

Video games also have a rating system with the ESRB, something Trump would know if he paid any attention whatsoever to what his son Barron does. How can Trump run a country when he doesn't know anything about anything?

Incidentally, guess who the bad guys are in John Wick? The Russian mob! Imagine that! Republicans are attacking a movie where Russians are the bad guys! Where do Republicans get their talking points from? RT News? Sputnik? Pravda? Izvestia? Vladimir Putin?

The fact of the matter is, Hollywood movies like John Wick make as much overseas in countries like China, Great Britain, Germany, Japan and Russia as they do in the United States.

And the entire rest of the world doesn't have weekly school shootings like we do. Because they don't let any random idiot buy guns.

Trump Needs A Cheat Sheet To Be Human

Remember back in those days of Obama, Barack when the right used to foam at the mouth about his teleprompter? Check out Trump's cheat sheet that he had yesterday when he was talking with the families of victims of gun violence.

Really? He needs fucking crib notes to be a human being and say, "I hear you." He can't fucking remember to be a human being?

Completely. Unfit. For. President.

The Obvious Cowardice of Gun Humpers

Every gun humper with a whole bunch of firearms and a dream of being Jack Bauer will tell you that he can save the day should the need arise in a school shooting. President Trump himself has been touting arming schools since the the Florida shooting. Yet I have to wonder if these gun rights folks would actually jump in and save the day or would they just run?

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had an SRO (Security Resource Officer) so there was a good guy with a gun on site. Today, he resigned because he never went into the building. SRO's are police officers that are supposed to take bad guys out. He didn't. This was someone who was trained to do this shit and he failed. Do the gun humpers actually expect me to believe that they are going to rush in and save the day where the cops failed?

I don't believe it for a minute. The first thing they would do is likely shit their pants because the only thing they have the courage to do is troll gun grabbers on the internet from the parent's basement. They've never been trained nor do they have the training to take out a live shooter. Playing Call of Duty doesn't count, by the way.

So, yeah...I think they would just run. They wouldn't save anyone but themselves.

And Yet Again: Guns Are Not Protection

Following the NRA's lead, Donald Trump is suggesting that teachers get paid more to carry guns in the classroom. Sharing the NRA's delusion that more guns make people safer, he thinks that armed teachers with Glock 17s in their purses or desk drawers will somehow stop "cowardly sickos" who bring AR-15s into the classroom.

How will Trump explain it when a teacher's gun is stolen and a dozen kids are dead?

Think about it: arming teachers and coaches makes it trivial for school shooters to get guns in schools: all a shooter needs to do is bash a coach with a baseball bat and now he's got a gun provided by Donald Trump and the NRA.

But let's pretend that students will never be able to take the gun from a teacher. Having a weapon does not protect you from gunfire. It just makes you target number one. When a gunman enters a room he will simply put six rounds in the teacher before firing on his ex-girlfriend or the bully who's been picking on him since sixth grade.

Look at Afghanistan. Sure, the Taliban carries out attacks on soft targets like markets and government ministries. But they more frequently attack police stations and military outposts where everyone has guns. A high percentage of school shooters are suicidal and know full well that they'll eventually meet armed resistance from security guards and the police. They are hoping to go down in a blaze of gunfire, glory and blood spatter. That's their endgame.

Armed teachers will not deter these shooters -- the idea of armed teachers may even excite them, making it an even bigger challenge. More shooters will wear Kevlar, something that is easily bought on the Internet because of its great popularity among the gun cult and conservative survivalist "preppers."

At best arming teachers will only reduce the number of victims. The shooter will enter a classroom by stealth, shoot the teacher and twenty or thirty students. If an armed teacher in another classroom hears the attack, he'll fetch his gun and seek out the shooter. Odds are basically 50-50 that the teacher will die, because his handgun will be less powerful and less accurate than the AR-15 the mass murderer is carrying, and the killer may even be wearing ballistic armor, since he came prepared.

For years the NRA has been lobbying for silencers, which will make school shootings even more deadly.

If the shooter has a silencer -- something the NRA has been lobbying actively for for years because they want kids to use them -- the shooter may not be detected for many minutes because no one can hear the gunfire.

Arming teachers will also kill many students who would not have otherwise died: teachers will shoot kids they think have guns, but don't -- cops do this all the time. Kids will take guns from hesitant teachers and shoot them. Shooters will use other students as cover and teachers will shoot innocent bystanders. Ricochets will hit innocents. Kids will be shot accidentally when guns fall out of waistbands in the hall.

This shows the hypocrisy of the NRA. They don't want to stop gun violence, they want to sell more guns and more gun accessories. They want to turn this country into an armed camp, where people live in walled neighborhoods patrolled by armed guards and a machine gun nest on every block. They want schools to be prisons in perpetual lockdown mode, where teachers are armed guards and principals are wardens.

For the NRA school shootings are a marketing opportunity to increase the prevalence of guns in American society. They like school shootings because they can use them to sell the delusion that more guns make us safer.

The NRA opposes any and all gun control measures because, they say, gun control won't stop all shootings, and the bad guys will be able to get guns "somehow." By that same logic, arming teachers is an even bigger waste of time and money, because it can't stop all shootings because bad guys fire first.

Why should the NRA's Second Amendment trump every other American right, including the right to life?

The Queen of Katwe

Everyone is talking about how great a film Black Panther is, and it's a fine superhero film for all the reasons others have stated. But there's another recent Disney film with an all-black cast, about a real person from a real African country who accomplished a truly superheroic feat: The Queen of Katwe.

The heroine, Phiona Mutesi, lives in a slum in Uganda. Despite her father dying of AIDS when she was three, despite her single mother being too poor to pay for school, despite not knowing how to read, despite being a girl who had to sell corn in the street and carry her family's water home in big plastic gas cans, she learns to play chess. And she's good at it.

She played at the 39th Chess Olympiad in Moscow in 2010, and in 2012, at the age of 16, she became a Woman Candidate Master at the 40th Olympiad in Istanbul. She currently has a rating of 1628, 300 points better than I ever was when I played chess.

She is now 21 and is attending college in Washington state.

As all movies that are based on real life do, the film exaggerates Phiona's skill level, which is described by chess journalist John Saunders as "a competent club player."

But considering that she started from absolutely nothing, supported only by a chess coach whose attention was divided between tutoring hundreds of other kids and playing soccer, her accomplishments are truly astounding.

Her story puts the lie to people like Donald Trump who call African countries shitholes (or shithouses, as Trump's defenders insist). Given the opportunity, people in every country can accomplish great things. And they work that much harder because they have nothing to fall back on.

The Queen of Katwe is available for streaming on Netflix.

Why Not Give Teachers Tasers?

Every time there's a shooting the NRA says the solution is more guns. Now they’re saying that every teacher needs to be armed. Many schools are seriously talking about doing it.

It's idiotic, of course. More guns means more deaths.

Teachers will drop their guns in the can and accidentally shoot themselves or the person in the next stall. Teachers will shoot their wives accidentally while cleaning their guns. Teachers will lose their guns and kids will get hold of them. And what happens when an armed teacher loses his cool and kills a student in class after the kid screams, “What are you gonna do? Shoot me?”

Most teachers don't like the idea of killing people, and would be hesitant to shoot someone, especially a former student. When guns are involved, any hesitation means your gun will just be added to the arsenal of the shooter.

But something the NRA never mentions is giving teachers tasers. Yeah, tasers aren’t perfect. You can still kill someone with a taser, but they're much less lethal.

And tasers could be an even greater deterrent than guns. The idea of going down in a hail of gunfire and blood spatter is attractive to gun nuts. But being shocked by a taser, collapsing like an old man, then drooling and jerking spasmodically on the floor is not romantic at all.

And it doesn't have to be just tasers. Tear gas and mace can be especially effective in enclosed areas like hallways and classrooms. If we put our minds to it, we can probably come up with a lot of non-lethal ways to deter gun violence, rather than surrender to the NRA’s guns everywhere, all-the-time mentality.

So why push for guns in schools when there's a non-lethal alternative that no one has even tried?

The "We Do It Too" Fallacy

Now that Robert Mueller has released his indictment of Russian nationals and companies for hacking the 2016 election, some conservatives have come to the defense of Russia. "We do it too," they say.

Yes, we have done it in the past. And it has cost us dearly. The 1979 Iranian Revolution was a direct outcome of CIA meddling in that country during the 1950s. Supporting Saddam in the 1980s backfired when he thought we gave him a green light to invade Kuwait, leading us into two wars. Our support for terrorists like Osama bin Laden and the Taliban during Russia's 1980s invasion of Afghanistan backfired when those same people turned against us in 2001.

Now we're the ones stuck in an eternal war in the desiccated mountains of Asia, and Russia is backing the Taliban (as well as North Korea, Iran, and Syria).

But, as former CIA Russia operations chief Steven Hall says, equating Russian and American activities “is like saying cops and bad guys are the same because they both have guns — the motivation matters.”

The United States has -- mostly -- tried to promote democracy and transparency with our actions. Our greatest failures have occurred when we let private concerns (mostly oil) interfere with our mission of democracy. We've promoted democracy with programs like the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which were often the only source of real news that communist countries had during the cold war.

Russia doesn't have  free and fair elections -- Putin files fake criminal charges against credible opponents and prevents them from even running. So the United States can't do what Russia did to us.

Russia is attacking us to show their own people that freedom of speech and democracy are untenable and undesirable. The election of Donald Trump and the chaos, discord and corruption he sows are intended as much to weaken the United States as it is to prove to the Russian people that they're better off with a stable, autocratic dictator like Putin than whatever nutjob free and fair elections would put in power.

But saying that "we do it too" to excuse Russian attacks is tantamount to treason. It is condoning a foreign power's attempt to sabotage the basic exercise of our democracy.

Mueller's indictment didn't tell Donald Trump or his advisor anything they didn't already know. But Trump has declined to impose any new sanctions on the Russians, as required by a bill passed almost unanimously by Congress last year.

Why not?

Trump's actions sure do seem like a conspiracy: until last week he had constantly denied an attack had ever occurred, he has tried to cover up the attack by firing the FBI director and attempting to curtail the investigation, and he has refused to punish the foreigners behind the attack.

When Trump met with Russians in the Oval Office he said, “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Sure does sound like an admission of guilt, doesn't it?

Russia, the NRA and the Parkland Massacre

Donald Trump's other attempt to discredit the FBI is to suggest the investigation into Russia's hacking of the 2016 election is somehow diverting attention away from dangerous gun nuts who are shooting up our schools, concerts and nightclubs.

There is a connection between the Russia investigation and the shooting in Florida, but it's not the one Trump is suggesting: the NRA is colluding with Russia to turn America into a warzone where school kids are shot by the hundreds every year.

In recent years the NRA has become involved with Russian oligarchs (apparently receiving illegal contributions from Aleksandr Torshin), and phony Russian "gun rights" organizations.

As they frequently do, the Russians have set up a "honeypot" trap by having an attractive woman be the face of their "gun rights" group in the United States, in the person of Maria Butina.

Russia has reasonable gun laws, so any Russians coming to the United States to talk about gun rights are obvious liars. Their support of the NRA is yet another social engineering scam to divide public opinion in the US and set us at each others' throats.

As Trump would put it: Every time there's another school shooting in the United States the Russians are laughing their asses off.

Blame the State of Florida for Parkland, Not the FBI

Having now been forced to admit that the Russians hacked the 2016 election, Donald Trump and the Republicans are attacking the Mueller investigation by trying to discredit the FBI.  

Now they're attempting to use the massacre in Florida to their political advantage by blaming the FBI for not taking action against the shooter after receiving a tip. The problem is that the FBI gets thousands of tips like this, because there are so many unstable gun nuts out there who behave exactly the same way.

Republicans always complain about how libtards look to Washington to solve their problems. "Why don't they do something themselves?" conservatives whine.
Well, it turns out that several Florida agencies were well aware that the shooter was mentally ill, but did nothing to stop him:

A Florida social services agency conducted an in-home investigation of Nikolas Cruz after he exhibited troubling behavior nearly a year and a half before he shot and killed 17 people at his former high school in Florida, a state report shows.

The agency, the Florida Department of Children and Families, had been alerted to posts on Snapchat of Mr. Cruz cutting his arms and expressing interest in buying a gun, according to the report. But after visiting and questioning Mr. Cruz at his home, the department determined he was at low risk of harming himself or others.

The report is the latest indication that Mr. Cruz was repeatedly identified by local and federal agencies as a troubled young man with violent tendencies. The F.B.I. admitted on Friday that it had failed to investigate a tip called into a hotline last month by a person close to Mr. Cruz identifying him as a gun owner intent on killing people, possibly at a school. The local police were called to Mr. Cruz’s house many times for disturbances over several years.

The problem is not the FBI. The problem is that Florida knew this kid was bad news, and did nothing about it. The state of Florida let him buy an AR15 assault rifle! Why didn't they add this kid to the list of people who can't buy guns?


The deaths in Parkland are the fault of the NRA, the gun cult and Republican legislators in Florida.