Milk-another on gun control

night--moonlight, cool

 

This cartoon is inspired by Sandy Hook, also.  Our gun laws allow easy access to high powered weapons that are being used to kill innocent children. 

In general, I tend to think that America's role as a leader in the world is waning; we are morally corrupt (and no where more than in Saipan) and it's just a matter of time before our country completely collapses. And there is no real reason to be too upset because this is the nature of history and empires.

I realize that lead pots didn't cause the end of the Roman empire--but their fondness for cooking with lead pots and using lead pipes for their water couldn't help.  Lead poisoning causes deterioration of mental function.  The Romans succumbed to invasion by the Goths, Visigoths, Vandals and other tribes, and perhaps they were in fact weakened, or their leaders were weakened, by lead poisoning.

American society will not be done in by the single issue of lax laws that permit gun ownership, just as the Roman empire wasn't sunk by lead pots alone.  But it can't help our society that we allow weapons of great mass destruction, like semi-automatic bushmasters, to be purchased on a daily basis and owned and used by just anybody.  These weapons should be limited to the military and police--law enforcement.  And individuals should not be taking the law into their own hands.

Lead--as in the lead bullets and ammunition (and yes, I realize that not all ammo is now made of lead), is certainly a type of poison in our society, just as lead pots caused lead poisoning in Ancient Rome.

Marianas Milk-on gun control

hazy and humid

 

This cartoon is one of my thoughts about the effect of our second amendment, as interpreted by the Supreme Court.  They have held that it isn't just a right for ensuring state militia power against the federal government, but provides an individual right to gun ownership.  Our legislators are so cowed by NRA lobbyists that they have failed to legislate meaningful limits on gun ownership.  And so the combination of the 2nd amendment right and the lack of other countervailing restrictions has made our other rights the target of abuse.  The very life of citizens is at issue, as so terribly demonstrated by the murder of 20 innocent 6 and 7 year old school children at Sandy Hook.  Who can exercise liberty rights when it isn't safe to even attend school or go to a mall or otherwise live in America.  What pursuit of happiness exists, other than the happiness of a warm gun? For those of us who do not enjoy gun ownership, we are left without the same freedoms.

The very suggestion that everyone needs to own a gun, that schools should have armed guards, that more guns are the solution to the unacceptable gun violence is total insanity.  This opinion  by Fareed Zakaria does a good job of explaining.

20 little children killed in one morning, along with the 6 adults at the school, the very disturbed young man who was the shooter and his mother--so many senseless deaths.  We can only have them make sense if we now use this to fuel real debate and change.