ERIC ZUESSE FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

The NRA argues, on the basis of two reasons, why everyone should be able to get assault-weapons: (1) It’s self-defense against law-breakers; and, (2) It’s self-defense against the United States Government if that becomes “tyrannical.”

Both reasons ignore that a democratic government is supposed to determine, according to its laws, what constitutes “self defense,” and also that in a democracy no individual citizen is supposed to have the final say in deciding that matter. Only the law can do that.

But what happens if the U.S. Government itself becomes “tyrannical” (such as the pro- “small government” NRA allege)? In a democracy, no individual citizen (regardless whether a member of the NRA) is supposed to have the final say in determining when and if the democracy has ended and tyranny has begun. That’s supposed to be determined instead by organized and overt revolutionaries, adhering to the existing duly passed laws, just as happened in the American Revolution. They were no mob. The American way is the rule of law, not the rule of any mob, not even rule by an organized mob. Because a mob can easily be taken over and led by demagogues.

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

On Friday, January 25, three days after the fortieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision -- which established a woman’s constitutional right to abortion -- tens of thousands of anti-abortion protesters will once again hold their annual March for Life rally in Washington D.C.

While there hasn’t been another assassination of a doctor performing abortions since the 2009 murder of Dr. George Tiller -- who performed abortions at his clinic in Wichita, Kansas -- incidents of anti-abortion violence against health  clinics have continued. In 2010, Molotove cocktails were thrown at Planned Parenthood clinics in Madera, California and in north Texas. In January 2012, the American Family Planning Clinic in Pensacola, Florida was firebombed, and in April a bomb exploded on the windowsill of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Grand Chute, Wisconsin.

Over the past few years, however, the anti-abortion movement has turned to friendly legislatures and has registered a string of policy victories – particularly in states with Republican governors and GOP-controlled state legislatures. These states have imposed severe restrictions on a woman’s right to an abortion. In four states – North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas and Mississippi – there is only one clinic that, along with providing a broad array of women’s health care services, performs abortions.

STEVEN JONAS MD, MPH FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

The GOP and National Planning, you say?  Hasn’t the GOP always been against planning, particularly against nation-wide planning to deal with nation-wide problems?  Well, actually not always.  In the immediate post-Civil War period the so-called “Radical” branch of what was then truly the Party of Lincoln was very much for national planning in dealing with the problem of how to integrate the freed slaves into the regular economic and political life of the nation.  They proposed to start with three central programmatic elements: universal co-equal education, land re-distribution which went under the slogan of “40 acres and a mule,” and the vote.  Well we all know what happened to that, as the GOP quickly transmogrified into the Party of the Emerging Corporate Power (which so ironically and quickly replaced the Slave Power as the principal reactionary force in the nation).  Planning for anything but imperial expansion (and sometimes not even that)?  Fuhgeddaboudit.

ANN DAVIDOW FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Aside from the terrible loss of life and excuse-laden barrage of nonsense put out by the NRA, the most insulting assault on public sensibility may be the shameless attempts by some on the right to suggest seemingly rational alternatives to sensible gun laws

Those who are incapable of grasping the gravity of what happened in Newtown or, like Rush Limbaugh, have the temerity to make light of it with ill-chosen attempts at humor, seem to have lost the capacity to think and feel like normal human beings, to imagine what it must be like to see your child so badly wounded as to be all but unrecognizable, a tiny little body riddled with bullets, missing a hand or foot.  It is impossible to underestimate the depravity of those in our society who are beyond the reach of decency, having given themselves over to the lowest impulses on the planet in a pornographic salute to money lenders and political savages. The fact that Limbaugh and others like him have grown rich spewing their hate-filled messages across the airwaves is a frightening indictment of the kind of behavior we have come to accept.

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

The first thing you should know about The Citadel is that it doesn’t really exist… yet. For now, it is an artist’s rendering of walls, towers, homes and arms factory; a website; and a developing story. The organizers-developers who are dreaming the dream, intend to build an intentional community – a gunner’s paradise if you will -- in the mountains of Northern Idaho. And, despite the rugged setting, the pathway to The Citadel is pretty straight and narrow; liberals of any size, shape or color, need not apply.

Two of the main forces behind The Citadel, “a developing community of Patriots,” appear to be James L. Miller and Christian Kerodin, according to Politicker.com’s Hunter Walker.

ROBERT C. KOEHLER FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Finally, perhaps, this is bigger than personal safety. It’s about rescuing our humanity.

Two images compete for my attention as I write this, a month after Newtown, a week after the shooting at a high school in Taft, Calif., with hundreds of murders in between. One image is of Robbie Parker, father of slain 6-year-old Emilie, offering public condolences to the family of the shooter and pleading, through his tears, “Let it” — the murders of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School — “not turn into something that defines us, but something that inspires us to be more compassionate and humble people.”

The other image is of Americans flooding gun stores from coast to coast, buying semiautomatics and other weapons in the wake of feared new gun laws.

ANN DAVIDOW FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Well, here we are in a new year marked by many of the same old-year foibles that plagued the country in 2012. The House still maintains a healthy Republican majority pledged to further its narrow set of values, despite the president’s decisive win and because of a gerrymandered map that assures the minority party a majority role in the decision-making process.

It wouldn’t be so bad if conservatives didn’t continually haul out the same foolish bromides that continue to shape their policies and feed right-wing zealotry. They could actually float real ideas and give the country something worthwhile to debate. But with airheads like Marcia Blackburn stirring the pot endlessly and John Cornyn stepping up to bluster and fulminate in the cause of an exceedingly narrow vision, their intellectual horizons are so limited as to be almost invisible. Blackburn, among others, is bent on de-funding Planned Parenthood; one would think the organization could topple the underpinnings of the free world. Apparently taking a stand on PP is one sure way of winning re-election in certain districts, and what seems to be wasting the people’s time in some eyes is the prime mover in terms of political reality for others.

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

While Appreciation Days aren’t new, the use of them as a mash-up of the political and entrepreneurial is a recent phenomenon that appears to be working well: If conservative supporters of Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby were able to organize highly successful Appreciation Days for those franchises, then why not an Appreciation Day in support of gun rights?

That’s where Larry Ward’s Political Media, Inc. comes in. Team Ward‘s Gun Appreciation Day posse includes a passel of Obama haters and conspiracy theorists. And Ward is absolutely convinced that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have appreciated “Gun Appreciation Day.”

STEVEN JONAS MD, MPH FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

I used to think that the Teabaggers were a wholly-owned subsidiary of the GOP.  They were very convenient.  From the time they were first organized by old Republican hands like Dick Armey in 2009 to when they marched into the House of Representatives in 2011, their political agenda was in fact little different from that of “mainstream” (this is highly reactionary) Republicanism: tax-cuts forever (for Grover, in fact zero taxes would be nice except that the parts of the government they like, like the military- and prison-industrial complexes, do need to be paid for somehow), “small government” (except that getting into people’s beds and drug-use patterns and women’s vaginas and wombs is absolutely mandatory); guns are sacred (ever wonder what the proportion of Viagra/Cialis sales among male gun-owners is vs. that of male non-gun-owners); separation of church and state means keeping atheists like me out of the public square and certainly out of elected office; and so-on and so-forth. 

ROBERT C. KOEHLER FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

“But my instinct was that if someone is shooting at you, it is generally better to shoot back than to cower and pray.”

This is the hidden argument for guns as America’s primary peacekeepers — that the debate comes down to gun ownership vs. helplessness.

Jeffrey Goldberg’s 7,000-word essay, “The Case for More Guns (and More Gun Control),” which ran in the December issue of The Atlantic — just prior to the Newtown killings — came down, for me, to the above sentence.

He made a number of quasi-reasonable points, the main one being that there are 300 million guns in America right now and it’s simply too late for gun control to be effective: “. . . only the naive think that legislation will prevent more than a modest number of the criminally minded, and the mentally deranged, from acquiring a gun in a country absolutely inundated with weapons.”