It's time to take some of the guns out of their hands--cold and dead or otherwise

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/12/14/obama-briefed-on-connecticut-shooting/

President Obama:

If your heart is broken, and I do not doubt that it is, confront the National Rifle Association, the gun lobby, and congressional Republicans, and dare to demand new and tough gun control legislation immediately.

Another story of a mass shooting in the United States hits the news almost daily.  This cannot be allowed to continue.  Something must be done. You are in a unique position to do it.

You are in your second term and do not have to run for reelection.  Call for bipartisan support for sweeping new handgun and assault rifle bans.  Begin there.

Of course the NRA will demonize you.  They already do and you have never approached the gun control issue.  But do not permit the NRA to cower you.  You know what is needed and you know what is morally right.

Push for enactment of gun control laws that will curb gun ownership in the United States of America.  There is no other solution.  There are too many guns on the street and in the homes of Americans.  Period.

Call for legislation to be enacted in memory of the happy faced and innocent little children who died in Connecticut today at the hands of some mentally deranged nut with access to handguns.

D. Grant Haynes

Australian shock jock radio prank unforgivable

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20649816

 

Several observations from my perspective about the unfortunate prank call from Australian shock jocks that apparently led to the suicide of a British nurse.  (See news story at URL above.)

(1) Characterize me as "dour" or humorless, but I never found any practical joke to be remotely amusing.

(2) Shock jock radio programs in which DJ's make prank calls representing others should be against the law in any society.

(3) Only in Great Britain would a loyal subject of the Crown be so mortified for being the unwitting victim of this dumb, stupid, and not at all amusing practical joke as to have taken her life in the aftermath. I don't think any American would have been that upset. Perhaps the nurse's ethnicity caused her to feel greater humiliation than would have an Anglo nurse in Great Britain. Bless her heart. She had done nothing wrong and certainly nothing warranting suicide. The British are too much in awe (a "favourite" expression of theirs) of their Royal Family. Members of that family put their pants on one leg at a time too.

(4) The guilty parties in this matter are the two young Australian radio personalities involved and the managers of their station that established an atmosphere condoning such a prank as entertaining or amusing.  It was neither.

 

D. Grant Haynes