Apr 27 1999

Like Fish In A Barrel – Take Your Guns, Save Your Soul?

Wisdom

In the wake of the horrible tragedy in Littleton, Colorado that claimed the lives of thirteen innocents, many old issues have crept back to the surface of political and social debate. The first and foremost of these, and one that was all to obvious and inevitable in its return, is the gun control debate. It’s all too common, in the aftermath of any tragedy, for gun control advocates to once again come crawling out of their surrealistic existences and demand that the citizens of these United States give up their constitutional right to bear arms.

Why? Because, they believe, an unarmed society is a peaceful society. Why? Because, without guns, peaceful citizens could walk the streets of the inner city and not fear for their safety. Why? Because, without guns, people could pull over to help a stranded motorist without fearing for their safety. Why? Because, without guns, people could stay in the city park until after dark without fearing for their safety. Why? Because, without guns, our children could go to school without the fear that they could get killed by a couple of obviously deranged and off balanced teenagers who had a hard time coping with the real world.

But wait! Would asking the citizens of this country to give up their second amendment rights really make our country safer? Hmm, interesting question. To answer it, I think we need to explain it from a few different directions.

First, does the possession of weapons by citizens cause people to be more violent? Does having weapons in our homes make our children more violent? I live in a community where nearly every adult owns a gun, and thereby, almost every child’s parent has a gun in their home. Ever since I can remember, I have known how to load, unload, clean and shoot a gun. Almost everyone I know, personally, was raised in the same manner. My Dad, and my friends’ Dads, always had guns in our homes. Handgun, rifles, shotguns, assault rifles, black-powder rifles, and any other type of gun you can think of, I have seen in my or my friends homes. And do you know what? I’m pushing thirty now and, as far as I can remember, I haven’t killed anyone. And no, it’s not because I missed. In fact, none of my friends have shot at anyone either. Even with all of the guns that are in my community, I can walk the streets at night. I can pull over and help a stranded motorist. I can stay in the park until after dark, and most importantly I can send my kids to school everyday. All without fear.

Second, is a community where guns are illegal safer? Well, I think two examples come to mind. In both Los Angeles and New York City, it is pretty mush illegal to own a gun. Tell, would you walk New York Streets at night? Would you pull over to help a stranded motorist in Los Angeles? Would you stay at a park till after dark in either city? Are children safe in their schools in these two metropolises? Obviously, gun control has done its job in these two cities.

Finally, do crime rates have anything at all to do with the reason we have a right to bear arms? Rosie O’Donnell, before commenting that she wishes she could get rid of the second amendment, said she just didn’t understand why people need to have guns. Well, to answer this one, we have to go right to the source. As it reads, the second amendment tells us: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” When asked to explain what a well regulated militia consisted of, Thomas Jefferson answered, “All free men, except a few politicians.” Our forefathers, who had lived under the oppressive thumb of an uncontrolled government, knew that two things were true. The first truth, one that someone like Rosie O’Donnell, someone who makes her living talking to the public, should understand, is that freedom of speech is imperative to a free state. The second truth, which she obviously doesn’t understand, is that the only way to guarantee freedom of speech, is to have and armed citizenry. They believed, as I do, that a time could come when our government will become too powerful, and will no longer be of the people, by the people, and for the people. They believed that a time could come when the citizens of the United States would be forced to take up arms, once again, against an oppressive uncontrolled government. They also knew that it would be impossible if the citizenry was not armed. We would be like fish in a barrel.

What happened in Littleton was no less than a grave tragedy, but it was not a tragedy that gun control could have averted. Gun control does not make safer streets. Guns do not cause violence. And most importantly, an unarmed society is an enslaved society. Simple truths. If we are to make our country a safer place, maybe we need to find out why our children are killing each other. That’s a problem taking guns away from law abiding citizens won’t solve. If we do solve it, we don’t need to take away any guns.

Peace.

Wisdom


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Apr 21 1999

The Question is WHY?

Eric

written by Eric Tune

I’m sitting looking out the window to my office. It’s an absolutely cloudless sky, with only a very slight breeze. The sun is starting to dip behind the mountains to the West. It’s a beautiful day. I can see several neighborhood children outside riding their bicycles up and down the street. It’s reasonably safe since the street is not a through street. I wonder as I watch these kids if any of them might end up so mentally degraded that they might someday contemplate doing what these 2 kids in Littleton, Colorado have done, and I just cannot fathom it.

As if it’s not enough that we are on the brink of World War 3. The horrific tragedy in Littleton, Colorado is now the talk of the nation. People are asking a myriad of questions, but all these questions can be distilled down to WHY? Why did this happen? What made these kids become so hate-filled that they would meticulously plan to murder their classmates and teachers? Many theories have already been postulated. Some say it’s because of the endless violence kids have access to through television, movies, the Internet, and computer games. These people say that this has desensitized kids to violence and death to the point where it is no longer thought of as being the horrible thing it truly is. Maybe this is true, but maybe not. There are conflicting studies pointing both to and away from these things. In my opinion, I don’t think it is the root cause at all.

I believe that the root of all the violent behavior in our kids today stems from one simple thing: Today’s media and social environment have succeeded in making parenting a near impossible job. Today, a woman can swat her out-of-control 6 year old on the butt in a supermarket and be arrested. Today, if a parent tries to tell their kid what they will or will not do, that kid can say “fine, I’ll just call the cops or Child Protective Services and tell them that you abuse me”.

What kind of crap is this? What is this “it takes a village” BS?? Because of those people who believe they should stick their noses in private family matters, we have parents who have had their parental rights as well as responsibilities taken away. I personally have seen it. I have seen it happen on two separate occasions. One kid was 8 years old, and because he didn’t want to do something his mother asked him to do, he called the police and outright LIED to them, saying his mother beat him. Naturally, the police showed up at the door, but when the pressure was on, the kid recanted his story, telling the police that he was mad at his mom for asking him to do this thing, and had been told AT HIS SCHOOL that this was what you did if you parents did do things to hurt you.

These kids are told at school that their parents cannot hurt them or they will be in trouble with the police. Well, these kids don’t see the difference between being disciplined by being spanked or grounded and being truly beaten and abused. To them it’s all the same thing. As a matter of fact, to Child Protective Services, it’s the same thing too. Luckily for this parent, the police weren’t the mindless type that you so often see in these cases, and they gave the child a stern warning against doing this sort of thing in the future. The other child is my own 14 year-old son, who did this to his mother. She wanted him to do something he did not want to do, and he threatened her about calling the police and telling them that she beat him. She called me and was at the end of her rope. I love my son dearly, but I do not have custody of him, and as much of a point of contention that it was with my ex-wife and I, she was so fed up that she was ready to ship him out to me. As much as I would love to have my son, this was not the way I wanted it to happen. After a long talk with me, my son assured both me and his mother that he would never do this again (I’m VERY old fashioned, he got the point, crystal clear.)

For whatever reason, a section of our society has taken it upon themselves to take away our rights as parents. Now, disciplining your child may result in your arrest. The kids aren’t dumb. They get a hold of this like a dog with a bone, and they use it against their parents like a club. The parents are hopeless. The kids walk all over their parents. This creates kids like these 2 deranged “Goths” that murdered so many of their classmates and teachers in Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado.

The so-called “Trench Coat Mafia” came in to existence because parents are no longer allowed to be parents.

If a kid wants to wear certain disgusting cloths, pierce there body parts, dye their hair and walk around like a wannabe vampire, they can. They CAN because parents cannot say no. Parents cannot say no because we have agencies who will take these children away from their parents for any perceived wrong doing. I have the beginnings of a possible solution to the rising and horrible tide of violence and maladjustment in our young people:

1. These agencies help to cause this, and these agencies are completely worthless. They serve no purpose. They doubly serve in the same capacity that the police have always served. These agencies will INVENT issues in order to justify their own existence. It has been proven that this has happened innumberable times. We need to get rid of them completely.

2. Someone on the news last night postulated it, and it has been done on and off around the country for many decades, but I think we need to do it now: Simply enforce students in all schools, public or private, to wear uniforms, all the way through high school. In the military, your hair is part of your uniform. All boys must wear their hair off the collar and above the ears. No dyed hair, no pierced anything. Girls cannot dye their hair, cut it into weird shapes or pierce their body parts either. This takes away the tendency for kids with vastly different interests (or lack thereof) to group into like cliques. With this, you won’t be able to tell a jock from a nerd, or a Goth from a Prep. Neither will they.

3. For those who think “oh my, how terrible, you want to take away their individuality, what about their rights?…” Etc, ad nauseam. You know something, my kid has no rights other than what I give him. That’s the way it used to be, and that’s they way it needs to be again. If parents can be held legally responsible for the acts committed by their progeny, well then the parents need to get THEIR rights back and be allowed to be parents again. My kid has not earned the rights other than what I allow him to have. As far as “stifling their individuality” so be it. This goes back to the rights thing.

4. Curfews need to make a reemergence. When I was a teenager, we had a curfew in town. If you were out past the curfew, the police could pull you over, fine you, and take you home to your parents where the real trouble would start. (Naturally some kids who worked were permitted around these curfews).

When I was a teenager, all the way up through high school, I never once heard of someone ever bringing a gun to school (I graduated in 1983). I was a jock and reasonably popular. If someone would have done it, I would have heard about it. It didn’t happen then (maybe in some inner city areas, but these are the exceptions to the rule). It was inconceivable for kids to say to their friends “hey, lets go to school and murder a bunch of people with guns and explosives”. But of course then, if I had gotten too out of line, my dad would have put his foot down, right on my neck if need be, and put an end to any such idiocy. Today, my dad could get arrested for a lot less than that.

Our kids are out of control because we have taken the control away from the parents. We need to give it back to them. Our kids need no rights other than what is deemed as acceptable by their parents. Mind you, I understand that there are people with no business being parents. This is a problem that has been around since man stood upright. We’ve been able to deal with this. There are those small percentage of kids whose parents do abuse them, and we must deal with this simultaneously as best we can. But just as we have the government taking away our rights to privacy in just about everything, we have the government taking away our rights as parents.

We as a society cannot deal with these kids today, and the only way to gain back the ground we’ve lost is to give back the power and responsibility of parenting to those it belongs to: Not the Child Protective Services, NOT “the village”, but the parents who are trying against all odds to raise their kids. Until we do, our kids will not be safe.

-Eric


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Apr 6 1999

Pass The Hate, Please! – I’ll Take Another Serving!

Wisdom

Three newspapers at the local newsstand this morning reported the same thing, “Russell Henderson Pleads Guilty In Matthew Shepard’s Death.” In one fell swoop, Cal Rerucha made deal with the defense that will put a savage murderer behind bars for the rest of his natural life, saved Albany County a fortune that it did not have to prosecute the case and, hopefully, provided some small sense of justice to the family of Matthew Shepard.

At the same time, it proves a point I made previously: That hate crimes legislation is not needed to provide justice. (see Hates Me, Hates Me Not!) Regardless of the fact that Wyoming does not consider hate crimes any differently than otherwise motivated crimes, Henderson will die in prison. Justice was served without the addition of new laws that would ultimately bog down our judicial system and serve no other purpose than to pacify a few people who are dismayed with their own lack of control over the world around them. His alleged accomplice, Aaron McKinney, will go on trial beginning August 9. I have no doubt that justice will persevere in his case also.

For the last couple paragraphs and the last article I wrote on the subject of this gruesome murder I have primarily focused on my opinions of hate crimes legislation. Now it’s time to refocus and take a look at those on the other side of the fence. Let’s concentrate on the idiots who are making hate crimes legislation more and more acceptable to the general public. Let’s talk about the bigots and hypocrits who continue to preach the hate and intolerance.

On the Casper Star Tribune (April 6,1999) there is a picture of a half dozen or so people, including children, holding signs that say things such as, “God Hates Fags”, “AIDS Cures “Fags”, “No Special Laws For Fags”, “Fags Doom Nations”, and the most belligerent, “Matt In Hell”. The kicker though was in the caption below the picture that tells who the ‘protesters’ are. Members of the Topeka, Kansas, Westboro Baptist Church. It’s sad that anyone could hate so much that they could spew that kind trash. It’s even more unfortunate that people, especially ones who claim to carry God’s message, would teach their children to spew that kind of trash.

What is wrong with these people?! Have they become so blinded by their own hate that they truly believe that God shares their same inadequate emotional shortcomings? Are they so insecure in their own little worlds that they would protest the trial of a murderer because the victim did not pass their moral litmus test? Are they so uneducated that they don’t realize that AIDS kills thousands of people who would pass their moral litmus tests? As usual, stupidity and hate go hand in hand.

The statement that contains the most irony is the one that claims “Fags Doom Nations”. I’ve yet to learn of a nation that has fallen due to sexual orientation. I do, however, know for a fact that there have been many in our history that have fallen due to religious intolerance. As many have also fallen due to hate.

The world is full of dogmatists who can’t accept what they don’t understand. It’s also full of zealots who continuously seek to twist the world around them so they can get it under their control. Put the two together and you have the one thing that I can’t tolerate. A bigot.

There is enough hate in the world without organized religion becoming a harbinger of more. There is enough hate in the world, period. Let’s not let the death of one innocent man be used as an impetus to create more.

Peace.

Wisdom

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Apr 4 1999

DOTCOM This! – A hypocritical view on the current WWW

cyber5

written by Cyber5

Before I start my rant and open myself up to public flaming, let me admit that this article is unfortunately hypocritical. It’s not by design, but forced due to my technological background and active involvement with all things computer-related including the World Wide Web as you know it today.

I’m going to bet that most of the people reading this article have no idea of who Tim Berners-Lee is, am I correct? Well then, what are you doing on the WWW anyway? It wasn’t meant for casual surfers, or homepages about your cat, or articles like this one for that matter! It was meant for physicists around the world to easily communicate information, ideas, and technical data amongst themselves. That’s what Tim designed it for back around 1990.

Tim, from what I understand, was awarded top honors in Physics while attending college in England. While working for CERN, a physics lab in Geneva, he invented the WWW that you are now surfing. I’m pretty sure he never meant for things like furby.com or santa.com to be eating up valuable bandwidth on a network that catered mainly to scientists and their supercomputers.

Of course, it’s been almost a full decade since then, and businesses (small and large) have given their stamp of approval on the refined model of the Internet – and are all rapidly gobbling up any dotcom address their highly-paid marketing gurus, secretaries, wives and friends can think up. That’s too bad.

About 5 years ago I stumbled onto the Internet while attending a technical college. I embraced it as a valuable research aid, allowing me to produce technical reports on a myriad of subjects for my classes. I found classmates, now good friends, which also shared my interest and excitement over the new landscape. We perceived our web browsers, gopher and FTP clients as tools that allowed us to “stand on the edge of a new universe and peer in with exacting precision.” Using 14.4k modems, and beta software we could access tons of valuable information on plenty of subjects. Now, we still can, but at the expense of spending huge amounts of time in search engines and wading thru a gazillion advertisements related to nothing we are looking for.

Why? Because the Internet is no longer about sharing information! It’s driven by dollars, not by people questing for and sharing knowledge. The discussions on upcoming protocols and what tools are useful or should be implemented are overshadowed by the never-ending deluge of banner advertisements, useless animated graphics, badly-written java applets, and idiotic meta-word inclusions on almost every web page available.

Mr. Berners-Lee has apparently moved on from his shock of the business-ad trash bin the web has become (or perhaps never cared) and is still trying to make the “most of it” for educational purposes over at MIT.

I, however, still hate the fact that I used to be able to get information from Switzerland, California, New York and Illinois in minutes while surfing at 14.4k, but am now forced to spend precious time downloading 10 stupid advertisements at 56k or even 1.5mbps (T1) to find out the page is useless or is cleverly hiding the entrance to a porn site – thereby making my average useful transfer time equal to about 100bps.

To sum it all up-businesses have ruined the “information age” that was dawning, and superimposed the advertisement age upon those who have modems and Internet access. The supercomputers of the world now spend valuable CPU time cataloging keywords in IBM and Ford ads, instead of calculating the probability of an asteroid impact and its effect on earth as we know it.

If I see one more cereal commercial with a web address on my TV, I’m going to scream! The WWW is for publishing and researching valuable information. If your business or organization has some good info to share with customers – then, by all means publish it! If not, QUIT USING OUR BANDWIDTH!

Now, if you’ll excuse me-I have to go download some recipes from the Food Network, register my new business website name with Internic and design some banner ads.

Cyber5

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