Send congratulations to the marketing gurus for upping their game; they've managed to move up the ladder. They couldn't be satisfied with figuring out more creative ways to market cigarettes, otherwise known as "coffin nails," to children and teens. They've decided to up the ante and go for bullets."Now there's something with real marketing appeal! Bet we'll make a fortune off this gig!"
This morning's New York Times carries an investigative article revealing how gun manufacturers, always in cahoots with the most radical fringe of the NRA, you know, that branch of an otherwise respectable organization that thinks it's perfectly acceptable to put an Uzi in the hands of a twelve year old and send her off to middle school with instructions to, "Remember sweetie, if you see a bad man with a gun, remember to squeeze rather than pull." But I digress. The article reveals how the gun manufacturers have chosen to market their wares to teens. According to the article, one ad even portrays a fifteen year old girl holding an assault rifle implying how great it would be to wake up Christmas morning to find good old Santa had brought you one of these!
This, when, as Nicholas Kristoff pointed out in his New York Times article of December 16, that Americans between the ages of five and fourteen are thirteen times, yea, thirteen times more likely to be killed with a firearm than their counterparts in countries. The only exception is countries where there is all out war. And as Ezra Kline of Newsweek pointed out only a couple of days before in his article, fifteen of the last twenty-five mass shootings in the US involved assault weapons.
The NRAs answer is more guns, and better mental health care. Okay, so better mental health care is a winning idea. Certainly a most needed improvement for our society. But how would we work this out? I mean, are we all supposed to be watching one another now? Which brings me to the question, "Where do you draw the line between thinking your neighbor a bit odd and reporting him or her to the local constabulary as a potential mass murderer?"
Just the other day my local paper carried yet another letter to the editor in favor of arming teachers so that "violence will be answered by violence." The couple had been on one of those evangelical mission trips to Guatemala and were praising the presence of armed troops in the streets on every corner. They felt much safer and hoped for the day that the US would catch up with Guatemala by arming teachers. So lets just turn our schools into free fire zones.
News flash. The troops in the streets of Guatemala are not there to protect the citizens but to suppress and intimidate citizens on behalf of the government. Great. So these yahoos want to turn the US into a third world dictatorship. That will solve a lot of our problems.
Senator Feinstein has proposed a bill banning assault weapons. Unlike the previous bill that has already expired, the Feinstein bill gets specific and bans more than one hundred types of these weapons of mass destruction. It's worthy of our support.
Limit the guns. Limit the slaughter of the innocents.
The Jawbone.
