Fact-checkers note that the US president has lied publicly well over 10,000 times. It is ironic that this same fellow invented the term, “fake news” – a reprehensible concept that has given the world’s despots new cover while they lie even more unabashedly. It is bad enough that the internet has allowed a grey zone where lies can sound like news, but now our nation’s leader and its role model has turned lying into the status quo. So proud.
As we try to take Trump’s lies in stride, we should be aware that some lies are bigger than others. Two of the biggest lies served up to us are the proposition that coal can be clean (“clean coal”) and that “gun violence is a mental health problem.” There is no such thing a clean coal, period. Coal is dirty. Power plants burning coal in 2014 released into the atmosphere tons of carcinogenic particulates, 40 tons of lead, 40 tons of arsenic, 600,000 tons of carbon monoxide, and 22,000 tons of ozone-depleting chemicals, in addition to about 3 times its weight in greenhouse gases. At 12,000 BTU/lb (wood is about 6,400 BTU/lb), coal is an enticing energy source, but a large fraction of that energy is spent mining it, transporting it, and controlling its pollution for burning to make it cleaner (but not clean), leaving a net gain not really worth the pain.
Now on to the gun violence lie. First, anyone who kills another person clearly has a mental health problem – with or without guns. To say that the gun violence problem is about mental health and not guns is an overly simplistic attempt to shift attention to an already obvious paradigm. It’s like saying hands shoot guns, not people. The NRA and their government lackeys simply don’t want to admit that guns are the most integral part of gun violence. In reality, the problem is mental health AND guns. Mentally ill people without guns would have less opportunity for mass violence. Besides, if the government really believed the problem to be mental health, why wouldn’t they be doing more to fix mental health? Maybe the government is the problem.
Remove guns, particularly massively destructive ones, from the equation and there will be less gun violence. Period. There is a difference between the damage a crazy person can do with their hands, a knife, a gun, or an automatic weapon. No civilian should have a gun that can kill a dozen people in 30 seconds. In fact, we should question the sanity of any person who wants to own one, let alone those who use them.
But tolerating massive gun violence has somehow become an issue of patriotism because the Second Amendment has become so sacrosanct that any attempt to temper it under any condition is claimed to be simply un-American. But consider the origin of the Second Amendment. With an aversion to a standing army because of the Brits abuse of theirs against the colonials, our Founding Fathers tried to limit a US standing army by prohibiting its funding for longer than 2 years at a time (Article I, Section 8, Clause 12 of the Constitution) and instead promoted national protection by militias. And militias, whether by neighbor or state, needed guns so thus the Second Amendment was created.
Several things have changed since then, however. Somehow, we do now have a standing army and thus we no longer need militias. Besides, any militia no matter how well armed, wouldn’t stand a chance against the US Army if it ever came to that. As for protection against individual aggressors, of the 300 million guns in the US how many are actually used for the protection of family or property by good guys (not counting police)? Second Amendment-“ers” would argue this is a major reason for gun freedom but that scenario is actually minor. More often, people with guns in the house for protection have a gun death accident or kill someone they know during arguments. And the argument that banning guns wouldn’t keep them away from criminals is impotent without trying it. There are about 20,000 murders in the US per year with another 100,000-armed robberies. It must be easier for those bad guys to get their hands on a gun from a pool of 300 million than from a much smaller pool. Finally, it is difficult to believe the Founding Fathers intended the gun ownership “freedom” to allow mass murder by crazy people. Thus, the Second Amendment is either outdated, misconstrued (today), or both.
So, where does that leave us? With an evil NRA, a spineless Congress, and a generation of children afraid to go to school. Resistance to gun control is not patriotic, it’s just stupid.