Compromise, What a Novel Idea

Last night President Biden delivered a passionate address to the nation on the issue of gun control in the wake of two highly publicized mass shootings and several other less publicized ones that have taken place over the last few weeks in our country. In the message he spelled out his plans to send before Congress: bills to raise the legal age for purchasing firearms, strengthening background checks, enacting safe storage and red flag laws, as well as repealing the immunity protecting gun manufacturers from liability for their deadly products, a privilege Biden pointed out, no other industry enjoys.

The president also expressed his desire that the assault weapon ban Republican members of Congress allowed to expire in 2004, be put back into effect, putting a cap on the number of bullets a single magazine can hold, as well as other measures he readily acknowledged were very unlikely to pass.

As predictable as flies on a pile of poop in summer, the ultra-MAGA troll Tucker Carlson weighed in on Biden's remarks as if they were a genuine affront to all good, God-fearing, law-abiding, patriotic Americans.

Biden had the nerve to address the nation during Carlson's prime time slot, so FOX "News", the network that broadcasts Carlson's nightly bile to his adoring fans, took the unusual step of broadcasting the president's speech in its entirely, all the while showing an inset of Carlson's trademarked, dumbfounded facial reactions to Biden's remarks in real time. Didn't watch that.

But I did give him his due by reading his rebuttal to Biden on FOX's website. If you can stand it, you can read it here.

Carlson analysed Biden's address this way:

So, to summarize the president's remarks tonight, your constitutional rights are not absolute. But in taking them away, we're not actually taking away your rights, we're protecting children. To which you might ask, am I a threat to children? That question is never answered by the president.

It would seem from this statement, that Tucker Carlson believes that constitutional rights ARE absolute, that it's perfectly OK for example to yell fire (when there isn't one), in a crowded theater or that there is no limit to the kind of weapons an individual can have at his disposal, machine guns, bazookas, nukes, you name it.

That's interesting because the president seemed to anticipate that response. He quoted the most revered of all Supreme Court Justices by members of the far right, Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion in the District of Columbia v. Heller case which overturned Washington DC's ban on handguns. In that opinion Scalia wrote this:

Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

 In other words, again Scalia's:

...like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. (emphasis mine)

And it is...

not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.

Of course our boy Tucker didn't mention any of that because it doesn't fit into his narrative.

Also not fitting into his narrative is that gun control should not be a political issue, but a common sense issue of public safety. The gun-nut crowd (as distinguished from reasonable and responsible gun owners), loves to complain that people who want to see the manufacture and sale of guns controlled in this country use mass shootings as an excuse to further their "political agenda" at a time when they should be mourning the victims.  

At the top of Carlson's piece he says this:

(Biden) decided to leverage the murder of 19 children in Texas last week for political advantage. 

That is moronic. A few days after I was born, there was a horrific fire in a school not far from where we lived. Many of the victims of that fire were brought to the hospital where my mother and I were still admitted. 92 children and 3 nuns died in that fire. Yes there was terrific grief in the days, months, and years that followed and even to this day. But there was also tremendous anger. People in the community and in fact all over the world said: "how the hell could something like this happen?"

That anger was put to good service as fire codes and design standards were completely overhauled to prevent another such disaster. Even though this involved expenditures of a good deal of tax money and proved a great inconvenience to many, to my knowledge, for the sake of saving the lives of children, no one whined about having to sacrifice or that their rights were being taken away.

Obviously I have no direct memory of the event but have a hard time believing those angry people were castigated for leveraging those deaths to advance a political agenda.

If it ended there, Tucker Carlson's response could be considered merely self-serving and idiotic. But as usual, he goes beyond that. Carlson is famous for distinguishing between his audience, whom he refers to in the collective, "you, the American people", and "them", the so-called political elite, presumably the Democrats, and by extension anybody who supports them.

Here are some chunks of Carlson's comments found in his piece:

The point of this, of course, is to disarm people who did not vote for Joe Biden.

Democrats in the House of Representatives spent the day debating ways to disarm you, Americans, who've committed no crime at all and want only to protect themselves and their families.

Anyone who tries to disarm you, by definition, considers you an enemy. That's what you do to your enemies, you disarm them. Your friends, your allies, your children, people you love. why would you want to prevent them from defending themselves? You never would. You certainly wouldn't scream at them from the podium about how they're killing children if they want to protect their own families. That's what you do to your enemies. 

If you think these quotes are not to be trusted because I've taken them out of context, please feel free to read the whole piece that I linked to above. 

First of all, it's ludicrous to say that Biden is proposing these new measures to effect only people who did not vote for him. Where is the evidence of that?* Law abiding Democrats as well as law abiding Republicans own guns. 

Secondly, "disarm" is a term bandied about quite liberally in this piece. Biden made it abundantly clear that he is not against guns and is not interested in disarming Americans, he simply proposes going back to a ban that already existed on very particular weapons, namely AR-15 style assault rifles which have been used in nearly all the mass shootings we've witnessed recently. 

Third, protecting oneself and one's family is a valid concern, and it is also thrown about quite haphazardly in all the rhetoric of the gun-nut crowd. But is that what these people really and truly care about? Does anybody really need an AR-15 style gun to protect himself? Read on.

The gist of Carlson's rhetoric can be found in the next line that says "anyone who tries to disarm you considers you an enemy." Clearly Tucker Carlson is saying here that Joe Biden by "disarming" the American people, considers the American people his enemy. Therefore it follows that Joe Biden the president of the United States, and those who support him, are the enemy of the true American people.

So the American people, according to the gun-nut crowd, need weapons such as the AR-15 not to protect themselves from the miscreants, prowlers, burglars, and other run-of-the-mill criminals, but from a hostile government who wants to enslave its people. And as we all know, the very first thing that dictators have done from time immemorial, is disarm the people, or so they say.

This is the narrative that Tucker Carlson wants to convey to his audience: the Democrats, and the people who support them, are not your fellow Americans who happen to have a different point of view, but your enemy who wants to take from you everything you value. First it's your guns, next your religion, then what? A particularly nutty legislator from the great state of Georgia who shall remain nameless, recently suggested that the way things are going, straight people will soon be extinct. And when that happens, there's the end of the species. 

I've said before in this space that Tucker Carlson is not an idiot, he just plays one on TV. Frankly I don't think he believes half of the rubbish he tells his viewers. In a defamation case against Carlson and FOX, the network's defense (which was successful) was that no one in their right mind should take anything Tucker Carlson says seriously. 

We can laugh all we want at the nonsense, but a lot of his viewers believe him and what he tells them. Carlson is the most public advocate of "white replacement theory", the idea that the Democrats are purposefully increasing the number of illegal immigrants of color crossing our borders for the sole purpose of gaining votes at the ballot box. In a rambling creed written before his racist attack on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, the killer of ten, while not naming Carlson directly, attributed WRT  as the inspiration for his crime.

I've also heard Tucker Carlson say that if the Democrats try to take away our guns, there will be a Civil War. Is that pure hyperbole? Well maybe for him, if there is a war, rest assured that Carlson would stay as far away from the front lines as possible. But rumblings of a Civil War in our future are not too infrequent in the world of social media, a former president, can you guess which one, reposted one.

With this attitude, it's not surprising that the Republicans are so intransigent in trying to cooperate with the Democrats, after all, why cooperate with your enemy? As far as gun control goes, despite efforts on the table that no reasonable person should object to, it seems that the attitude of the gun-nut crowd is "give 'em an inch, and they'll take a mile." 

A democratic government doesn't work that way. You compromise.

I suppose if I were king of the United States, I'd get rid of the Second Amendment as I feel it has become obsolete in an era when we have a standing army and local and state police departments whose job it is to protect us. 

But here's the thing, I'm not king (thank God) and furthermore, I don't believe in kings. I believe in the rule of law and I believe in our constitution, imperfect as it is. Given that, as a citizen, I would not advocate for the repeal of the Second Amendment because I feel it would create a slippery slope which would weaken the constitution to the point where every one of our rights as American citizens could be in jeopardy of being revoked. 

As the president pointed out in his address, there are things he wants to accomplish that have a chance of succeeding, and others that won't. That's how negotiations work, each side brings to the table more than they know will be accepted, issues that can be given up in the interest of getting concessions from the other side. There's no way in hell that the assault weapon ban will be reinstated at this time, everybody knows that. But if it is brought to the table and the Democrats are hesitantly willing to give that up, perhaps, so the theory goes, the other side may be willing to accept other restrictions that could possibly save a few lives. 

Or maybe not; given the way things have been going, I'd give the Republicans making any concessions a less than a 50/50 chance. 

Fortunately there are reasonable people who believe in the Second Amendment with all their hearts.

By chance, yesterday morning I found an article by a Mississippi writer named Sid Salter. From all indications he is a conservative Republican who may (or may not) have voted for Donald Trump. The article is titled "Justice Scalia’s words on Second Amendment absolutism are true and prophetic" and it was published on a site called "Y'all Politics." Given all that, I opened up the article fully assuming the writer's opinions would be diametrically opposed to mine. 

It turned out that Salter focused on the words of Scalia that Joe Biden quoted later that day.

Here is a link to Sid Salter's piece. 

Much to my surprise, the article is spot on.

Sid Salter and I might have plenty to argue about, which is just fine, because at the root of it, we are both Americans who love our country and want to see it succeed. Because of that we both despise the division sewn by certain politicians and pundits like Carlson, who have plenty to gain for themselves and their pocketbooks as our country is torn apart limb by limb. 

As for the rest of us, the real American people, Republican, Democrat and Independent, we have nothing to gain but plenty to lose.

And right now, we're losing big time. 

* Carlson's "evidence" is that the proposed measures to limit the amount of bullets a magazine is capable of holding, would not apply to the bodyguards of politicians, therefore the politicians would have proper protection, but regular citizens would not. He seems to be implying this only applies to Democratic politicians not Republicans, which is of course, pure nonsense.