I was blindsided by the shooting at the school in Sandy Hook Connecticut. I did not find out about it until I went to pick my wife up and found her talking about it, saying all guns should be banned, and the shooter should have been dragged out and drawn and quartered, and it was a shame he killed himself. As we have a 5 year old nephew, she was understandably upset, and so incoherent with rage that I had to go to the Internet for information, and listen to my local Liberal Progressive radio station next day. She simply would not converse with me on this, and we haven't talked about it since. Also, since I listen almost exclusively to a Liberal Progressive radio station, WPEK, The Revolution, I got a very solid left wing view, and the consensus among them was that we need gun laws, or we need an outright ban on guns, we need to amend, rewrite or repeal the  Second Amendment to the US Constitution, or re-interpret it in the light of modern firearms. The justices who dissented in the last couple of cases talked about placement of the comma, and whether, in the light of the absence of any state regulated militia, whether an ordinary citizen should have access to a firearm at all.

Now, folks, I am a Liberal, so much so that I sometimes see our current President as dangerously Conservative. I believe that the 2% should be taxed, purely because they are the ones that have the money, and as the society in which they live has made them rich, they owe a lot more to that society. I believe that the poor are also made so by that same society, so are owed a livable wage for the work they do, and support in hard times which the rich do not need. If we do not care for the poorest or unfortunate in our society as Governor Romney intimated when he said he didn't care about that 45, 46 or 47 percent who wouldn't vote for him, as they "don't matter", then we are a poor excuse for a society. Even the Mormon church disagreed with him, as they are very concerned about the poorest among them. Notice that nowhere did I say that anyone should not work if they are able; as any good Socialist, I do not believe in getting something and not working for it.

I am a Liberal, listen to Left Wing radio, belong to several Liberal and Progressive email lists, and I own guns, several of them. I have owned guns since old enough to do so legally, and have shot guns since a child. Don't worry, any guns I have are securely locked away. Many local gun shops allow you to store guns on premises for a small fee. Gun safes can be bought at Lowes that would take dynamite to get into. I have never shot anyone, never pointed a gun at anybody, and have no criminal record.  I feel that forcing me to turn in my guns because a mad man in Connecticut went into a poorly secured school and went berserk is simply unfair to me and to the millions of legal and honest American gun owners, and incidentally, is simply not going to solve the problem either.

To many people who have never been around guns, they are evil, and are for "only one purpose", which is a very facile and specious argument, and is simply not entirely true; I have shot many a gun that has never killed anything but tin cans, and oddly, that is their purpose, "plinking" (a type of target shooting). But even so, so what? To some, the very act of having a gun in proximity is going to turn an ordinary person into a stone killer, and having an assault weapon is an invitation to anyone nearby to go on a rampage in a school. I submit that nothing is further from the truth. And, addressing mental health, as most of the recent rampages have been perpetrated by the mentally ill, is only addressing part of the problem.

Yes, I submit that there is a problem, and it is not guns. Nor is it entirely mental health, though the people that have done the most recent crimes were demonstrably crazy. We have a social problem, one that causes people to snap, and some use guns, others use explosives, and still others use anything available.

The idea that having a gun around is going to cause a school shooting is simply silly. In my school years, from 1957 to 1969, there were few school shootings, and you could buy surplus M1 rifles and M1 Carbines at Sears.Until 1968 you could mail order a gun! We school kids would never have thought of bringing a gun to school, we did not have school security in the form of a "resource officer", and no one ever worried about getting shot at school. The country had just as many guns per capita as today, many of them semi-automatic (NONE of the weapons used in recent theater, mall or school shootings were "automatic"), and things like this just did not happen. Yes, people were killed, as Kennedy, King, and Malcolm X were, and this prompted the Gun Control Act of 1968, which, as many such laws, punished only the innocent and "law abiding", and did not touch the guilty. No, we have a social problem, and it is going  to take Sociologists and Psychologists to solve it, not guns; they are not the problem! The use of them in many crimes is  a symptom of an underlying disease, not the disease itself.

Back in 1979 I began studying for a Ham Radio license. I had been into Citizens Band Radio since 1976, but was convinced by a friend that Ham Radio had so much more, and he was right. I quickly made it to General class, and got myself a small low powered radio, only a couple of watts, and began looking for a linear amplifier to boost the signal to 100 or so, since as a Ham, I was licensed for 1000. I could not find one, as it was illegal to make one commercially. Since CB was created from a Ham Radio band in 1958, irritating Hams greatly, illegal use of linear amplifiers to boost CB signals from the legal 3 watts as set by the FCC to hundreds and even thousands of watts became common. This led to interference by high powered stations not only on the CB band, but to television reception, business and government radio, and many other problems caused by poorly operated high powered stations. Thus, the FCC, in typical bureaucratic fashion, passed a law that no one could build a linear amplifier that could tune to 11 meters, the band stolen from hams in 1958, so all linear amps (called by the CB crowd "lean-yers" or "lean-yars") had to be blocked from operation on 10 meters, it being so close to the CB band, which was 11 meters, and no amplifier could be made which required less than 50 watts drive, or would amplify a signal more than something like 10 db, which is like amplifying from 100 to 1000 watts. Therefore, I could not buy a commercially legally available linear amplifier for my little rig, even though I was a legally licensed ham Radio operator, legally licensed to operate my station at 100 or even 1000 watts. Oh, and did I mention that this did not at al lsolve the problem? A significant number of CB'ers continued to use old Ham linears, foreign made illegally (poorly made, I might add) obtained ones, badly constructed amps made by other CBers with some electronic abilities, and CB radio still had this problem, there was still interference (actually worse), the FCC still did nothing about it, and I still can't get an amp for a low powered station. And so it goes. The bad people break the law, a law is passed to stop it, and only the innocent and righteous are affected. The crooks, jerks and jacklegs go right on.

One woman who contributes to one of my Left Wing email lists wrote up a petition that said "I don't own a gun, I don't want a gun, and I don't need a gun, and nobody else should either", and was asking for signatures to this petition, saying that the Second Amendment was an antiquated and stupid law, and should be amended or repealed. I would not sign it, as, I said,  "I do, I do, and it matters not whether I need one, for now it is my right guaranteed under the Constitution". Never heard back. You see, this annoying Second Amendment is tied into a series of Amendments called The Bill of Rights, and the one my Liberal friends most defend is the First Amendment, most notably Free Speech and freedom of religion. My feelings are equally strong on these rights, but I fear that the Right Wing would happily take both those rights away from me too if they were able, and a dilution or repeal of the Second Amendment would play right into their hands.

You see, there are many people who would love to control the religious belief in our country today. This is in direct contradiction to the Founders idea of a country not controlled by any religion, and that was free, not only in religion, but in speech, the Press, and in assembly. If any part of that Bill of Rights is diminished, as perhaps a Supreme Court decision stating that the Second Amendment is wrong, antiquated, or repealed, I can see the rest of them falling like dominoes; think of a Court saying "well, the Second Amendment was found not to apply to a modern America, so the others can be revisited also". This is a function in law called a precedent, and this precedent of diluting, rewriting, or in some other way altering an Amendment in The Bill of Rights could establish a dangerous one.

Now, I would like to show you some numbers. Numbers of dead people from 2010.

Traffic       32,000
  Speeding  10,530
  Alcohol    10,228

Guns         31,513
  Homicide 11,105

 This is data from 2010. It shows that motor vehicles kill 32,000 Americans a year, a significant number of them children, but no sane person would suggest banning automobiles. However, notice that both speeding and alcohol each kill about the same as gun involved homicides (the rest of gun deaths are almost all suicides, and trust me, a suicide does NOT need a gun - availability would make little difference). There is absolutely no call for banning alcohol, though it was tried before autos were popular - that is where our organised crime was mostly born, the illegal liquor trade of Prohibition. Plus, I have not heard any cry for banning speeding, and there are even gadgets for helping people avoid a speeding ticket, and songs in popular culture glorifying speeding.
This just makes no sense to me. The need to punish people who are causing no problem (legal and honest gun owners), and giving people who are lawbreakers (speeders and drunks) a slap on the wrist for drunk driving, or a high five for beating a speeding ticket.

We have a social problem, not a gun problem. We have a war on drugs, which is a war on the poor, and that translates into gun violence. Until we solve our social problems, we will not solve our violence problem.

Religion, Politics, and my Yahoo groups

I was going to write this and post it on one of my Yahoo groups, but decided to post it here, and make a link to it, as my groups (Dragonflies and Damselflies of the Southeast, Water Turtles, Southeastern Insects, and others) have specific raison d'être, and I did not want to interject my rant on the group or groups.

A while back, a lady, seemingly a nice one, joined one of my scientific groups, and complemented me on being a generalist, and I replied that my desire in all my life has been to be an all around Naturalist like the old time greats like Ausubon, Alexander Wilson, John and William Bartram, and Charles Darwin. She, supposedly interested in science, wrote back that she did not know of any of those people (Audubon????? OMG!!!), but thought Darwin's thinking was sloppy and just plain wrong. Eh? Well, I kind of knew where this was going, but played along, saying that many people of the Enlightenment era had had such thoughts, and that Darwin was just voicing these ideas, and put them down in book form (before his contemporary and rival Alfred Russell Wallace could publish) so that they were in a coherent form. Well, she kept writing me, making sure she copied the whole group, telling me Darwin was wrong, and how "Creation Science" explained how the Earth was only 6000 or so years old, how Evolution could never have happened, and just going on with this "Creation Science" BS, and most of the group, responsible Biologists (I had started this group for Biologists, later opening it up to hobbyists at the behest of the Biologists) stayed silent, so I asked for some help with this woman, as I am only a lowly BS myself (Bachelor in Science), and there are several PhD's on the group who have seen these specious arguments, and can refute them in their sleep. They joined in, having a discussion of sorts, until she insulted a grand old man of Biology in a major university, and I had had enough, shutting off the discussion, and eventually moderating her posts, as she had begun "testifying", though she maintained (at first) that her "Creation Science" had nothing to do with religion (BULL COOKIES!!!). She finally left, taking a few other religious folks with her (good riddance!.

Now, a few weeks ago, a lady asked for a very simple ID that any Sunday duffer should be able to get out of any field manual. Not really a problem, but this was in tiny script, and her signature file was a diatribe about how Jesus had changed her life, how she was happy, and all this sort of thing, including, as I remember, a diatribe against public schooling (for some reason, they hate public school, and want to dismantle it, and give us vouchers to send our kids the THEIR religious schools - how curious). Well, this offended me, and I wrote a message to her saying this:

 "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion", plus see Amendment XIV.

"no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States" (US Constitution Article VI).

And "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their "legislature" should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties." (Thomas Jefferson)

Plus: "Adams at one point said that Christianity had originally been revelatory, but was being misinterpreted and misused in the service of superstition, fraud, and unscrupulous power. (!!!) (From Wikipedia, author cited in article.)

Oh, and for you "Christians" who like to (mis)quote founding Fathers, and who hate Public Education:
 "The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves." (Bold my doing.)
 – John Adams, September 10, 1785

And, just read this; too long to quote, all from Jefferson:

http://zenhell.com/GetEnlightened/FoundingFathers/

People keep trying to say that the Founders were "Christian", but in actuality, most were NOT (Deists and Humanists), and most feared the injection of religion into our Government (as happened yesterday here in NC). I find this in-your-face Christian proselytizing irritating and disturbing, and do not think such a signature really belongs on a list devoted to Dragonflies and kin. I do not try to inject religion into any list to which I belong, nor try to blast people with my beliefs; they are mine alone. If you are happy with your beliefs, wonderful! I, however, do not need to  know about it.

I respectfully ask that folks are polite, keep religious views off the list, and respect others. I am indeed a benevolent despot, but a despot nevertheless. Most people who think they are following Jesus are NOT.  I will direct you to Matthew 7: 22 & 23.





Now, as you can see, I do not like religion. That does not mean I am Atheist; I do not see how an intelligent person could espouse Atheism, at least not a Scientist; one cannot demonstrate the existence of an Almighty, nor can one demonstrate the absence by any empirical means. At most, a Scientist can be an Agnostic, but not an Atheist, and Atheist Scientists are espousing a religious "thing" too. No, I am intensely spiritual (I do believe in God, as I understand God, and follow much of Jesus teachings, along with some of Buddha's and others; my religion or spirituality is no one's business but mine own, or those with whom I choose to share it , and no, you so-called-Christians, I do not choose to share it with you!) Religion is responsible for the horrors of the Crusades, the Inquisition, 911, Oklahoma City, and a host of other things; sometimes the bad outweighs the good.
If you are a Christian, especially Right Wing, read this: http://www.right-wing-pseudo-christians.com/


So, what I am saying is, do not come on my lists, especially the scientific ones, and start up with religion; I will go after you. Do not come on a list and go on about Politics, as I will go after you too; I am on the Left of the spectrum, and believe the Right Wing is controlled by money and Satan (see above link), and when I look at some Right Wing politicians and preachers, I see Satan looking out their eyes. I do.
More later.....