Let’s put this in perspective, now. Gun violence is a public health issue. Period. We reduced other public health threats by taking appropriate action. We can fix this one too.
From the Journal of the American Medical Association — information on how we reduced deaths from other causes and what we need to do to reduce deaths from this one:
(Mozaffarian D, Hemenway D, Ludwig DS. Curbing Gun Violence: Lessons From Public Health Successes. JAMA. 2013;():1-2. doi:10.1001/jama.2013.38.)
But of course, this shows the heart of the problem:
More guns aren’t the answer. Guns in schools and shopping malls and office buildings aren’t the answer. Fewer guns — and guns with smaller magazines that’s the ticket.
To contact your Congressional representative and Senators and ask them to help enact reasonable gun laws, follow these links:
It was not my fault. Really. I would admit it if I were responsible. But I was asleep. Snoozin’ in my bed. After all, it was 2 a.m.
The other night I sent an email out to everybody I know. Friends I correspond with a lot. Friends I haven’t corresponded with much lately and probably should have. Friends I really have lost touch with.
And then there were my clients. Yup. They were there too. Clients I deal with routinely, and those we do business with periodically. Some who haven’t needed help from my company in 7 or 8 years. Some who probably can’t quite recall who I am, and others who have changed jobs 3 or 4 times since the last time we chatted. My business is like that.
And last, there were my business contacts. Folks I might need to look up should I, say lose my job.
You know, if I were to devise a way to get back in touch with everyone I have ever known, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t do it by sending them a link to a miracle diet aid.
As a fake medical professional, well, I don’t recommend diet aids. Nope. “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” That’s my firm belief when I see recommendations for miracle pills that will let you lose weight while still stuffing your craw with McD’s.
[As a fake medical professional, though, I just love the idea of liposuction. Although I will never forgive the industry for not using the motto I developed when liposuction was brand new:
Liposuction!
Why diet when you can vacuum!
Still, I’m pretty sure I’ll never have liposuction, either.]
So the other day I woke up to an email by my nephew, sometimes commenter and friend Clinton. He was a little perplexed as to why I sent him a link to a diet website. Clinton is pretty trim, actually. If I were going to send diet recommendations to anyone, Clinton would not be tops on the list.
And then I noticed that there were lots of failure notices in my Yahoo account inbox. Lots of the emails that I had not even sent did not go through.
But a whole bunch of them did. Shit.
And in these emails, I apparently told my friends to visit a diet pill website. So that they would no longer be so damn fat.
I apparently told my clients and business contacts to visit a diet pill website. So that they would no longer be so damn fat.
I apparently told my boss to visit a diet pill website. So that she would no longer be so damn fat.
Do you think I can get into the Witness Protection Program?
When I wrote a post on the night of the shootings about the fact that members my family grew up in Newtown and went to Sandy Hook Elementary School, I was touched by the comments of most of you.
One commenter I’d never heard from before, took the opportunity to make my comments section into her platform for how very safe she feels because she packs a gun. I tolerated her for as long as I could, mostly trying not to vomit at the comments. She berated me for my opinions, telling me in bad grammar that I was ignorant.
I am not ignorant. I have done the research. I even put some of it into the comments that she found so ignorant. Here’s the post, although the comments, which were mostly answered in those damn Word Press bubbles, do not appear in the order they were received. And since some of them required me to breathe deeply into a paper bag filled with Xanax, they were answered fairly randomly.
*****
As a news junky I am constantly reading about the incredibly stupid things normal people do with guns. People who mean no harm, who only mean to keep themselves and their families safe.
There was the man I wrote about in my first piece on gun control, Gunsmoke. He shot himself in the femoral artery while unbuckling his seat belt in a grocery store parking lot. His wife was inside shopping, and their four kids watched their father die stupidly.
There was the guy who was hanging out with his friends and demonstrated the infallibility of his gun’s safety by putting the safety on, pointing the gun at his temple, and pulling the trigger. His friends were quite impressed, I’m quite sure. He will never know.
And then along comes this guy, who gives a face and a voice to everything stupid about the crazy gun crowd.
In case you are on the fence on whether or not assault weapons should be banned, take a listen to someone who thinks they should not.
And then see if you can believe badly enough of George W. Bush, that you will go along with Alex Jones’ depiction of what happened on September 11, 2001, and therefore, why, really, we all need assault weapons.
*****
I’ve begun to believe that it is not necessarily mental health that needs to be evaluated before a person can purchase a gun.
We need to test their intelligence. Because there are way too many stupid fuckers out there with weapons.
In the spring and summer of 1986 random parts of my face started growing for no apparent reason. I would be at home, on the subway, or off working somewhere around DC.
First it was a swollen eyebrow. Then that would go away and a day or two later, my cheek would grow so that I couldn’t see well out of one eye.
Mostly it was my lips, though. They would grow, sometimes individually, sometimes together. I looked like a duck.
Did I mention I was also getting married in September? That September? And while John and I had a fairly small and simple wedding, I was unenthusiastic about going to the altar looking like a daisy. Especially this one.
Of course, John’s lips would have been normal. Mine? Not so much.
But work was so completely crazy that I ignored it. I was a lobbyist/flunky at the time, and was spending long days up on Capitol Hill working on the Tax Reform Act of 1986. (And it was the perfect assignment for me; I did my own taxes – on the U.S. Government 1040-EZ form. Tax Returns for Poor Dummies.) I was in over my head, didn’t have a clue what was going on, what was important, or which way was up. I was a wee bit stressed.
Plus that summer we decided to buy our first house just so we could send my stress level through the roof of my brand new adorable little house.
But back to my problem. My ever changing facial features.
People were looking at me strangely which I understood – I often and suddenly looked really odd. But even stranger, they stopped talking whenever I would approach. These were people I’d worked with for more than six years. Something weird was going on.
And I found out what that was early one morning as I stood talking in the front lobby to my boss, also (irritatingly) named John. He was giving me instructions on that day’s most important issues, when to pay especially close attention, when to call him immediately with an update.
At the beginning of the chat, my face was normal. But as we talked, my lips spontaneously grew larger and larger. More duck-like.
“Elyse,” my boss said, “what’s happening to your lips?”
“They’re growing. Spontaneously. I don’t know why. But you’ve seen me with a swollen face off and on for the last couple of months. Haven’t you noticed? And it keep on happening. Luckily, John has promised to marry me even if I look like Daisy Duck when I arrive at the church.”
The look of relief on his face was instantaneous – he joked with me about the fat lips, about stress, about what I might be allergic to. He’s a really nice guy, and he cared about me. But it wasn’t until much later when I realized just why he had looked so relieved.
He thought I was being abused by my husband-to-be. And he, a very powerful Washington DC lawyer, who knew/knows everybody in town, had no idea what to do. He didn’t ask me if anybody was hurting me. He didn’t threaten to report John, or try to find out discretely whether folks in John’s office thought John might be abusive. No, my boss talked to other folks who also cared about me and who also didn’t know what to do to save me from what, had it been true, would have been a huge mistake.
(In fairness, they didn’t know my John at all – it wasn’t a very social office.)
And once I made the connection, I remembered feeling similarly helpless once. I thought about a secretary named Kelly who had worked with us briefly a few years earlier. She and I had become a bit friendly, even though we worked on different floors and in totally different departments. We both loved to play softball. One day I saw Kelly with an enormous black eye.
“I was playing softball with my husband’s team,” she said, shaking her head. “I should have caught the damn ball.”
“I once caught one with my left thigh,” I responded to her, truthfully, but naively. “You could see the stitch marks on the bruise.”
The next day she was gone. Obviously to everyone else her husband had been beating her, and she got help and got away.
The image of her face has haunted me. What would I have done – would I have been able/willing to help her? Would I have ever figured out what was happening to her?
My story ended well. I hadn’t had time to eat properly and subsisted pretty much on a diet of Milky Ways for two months. Woman cannot live on Milky Ways alone. Maybe ducks can. I stopped eating chocolate and looked OK at my wedding. Or at least, I didn’t look like a duck.
I don’t know how Kelly’s story ended. I never will.
* * *
Yesterday, the GOP in the U.S. House of Representatives allowed the Violence Against Women Act, which had been law since 1994, to expire. And they let it happen because it would have expanded coverage of the law to more women including immigrants and Native Americans.
Perhaps you don’t know what the Violence Against Women law does.
My bible, Wikipedia, says that it provide programs and services, including:
Community violence prevention programs
Protections for female victims who are evicted from their homes because of events related to domestic violence or stalking
Funding for female victim assistance services, like rape crisis centers and hotlines
Programs to meet the needs of immigrant women and women of different races or ethnicities
Programs and services for female victims with disabilities
Legal aid for female survivors of violence
But what it really does is help abused women. To let them know that they can get help. That they are not alone. And it can also give their families, friends and co-workers vital, life saving information about how to help. How to act. What to do besides wonder amongst everyone else but the person most impacted. Literally.
Now tell me, what’s not to like about this law? It gives vital assistance to vulnerable women – those who most need it. A place to go where they can take their kids, get help.
It gives folks who don’t know what to do or what to say a clue as to how to help women in need.
Where they don’t have to give up that last little bit of their heart.
I have stated this more often than I can stand, but the men in the GOP are not on the side of women, or on the side of men who respect women.
GET THEM OUT OF OUR LIVES
Then, Damn them to Hell where they belong
***
What you and I can do:
Contact your representatives in Congress and demand they pass the Violence Against Women Act as it stands today with expanded services: http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
You might have noticed, but I’ve been a bit, ummmm, opinionated lately. OK, so I’m always opinionated, but lately I’ve been opinionated about politics and I pretty much stopped writing about anything else. My bad.
In case you didn’t notice, I have reason to celebrate. So do you. Here in the US we re-elected President Obama and Vice President Biden. We elected intelligent folks to the US Senate over the “Rape Rappers.” Women had great success except for the one who made money off of scantily clad women rolling around in mud while wrestling in an undoubtedly dignified manner. Three of the stupidest Congressmen were defeated (Alan West, Todd Akin and Joe Walsh). And we still get to laugh at Michelle Bachmann.
My blog has reason to celebrate, too. Every Republican I made fun of, with the exception of my BFF Michelle, lost. Damn I’m good.
But I’m going to do you, and especially my international readers, a favor. I’m going to shut up about politics for a while.
Well, at least I will after I tell you that Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell has already let President Obama and the new Senate know that he won’t cooperate.
Portrait of an ASS
Now remember, Mitch is the guy who stated in 2008 that the Republican’s primary job was to make sure that President Obama was a one-term president.
How’d that work for you, Mitch?
But did Mitch learn his lesson? Nope. Here’s what he said today:
The American people did two things: they gave President Obama a second chance to fix the problems that even he admits he failed to solve during his first four years in office, and they preserved Republican control of the House of Representatives. The voters have not endorsed the failures or excesses of the President’s first term, they have simply given him more time to finish the job they asked him to do together with a Congress that restored balance to Washington after two years of one-party control. Now it’s time for the President to propose solutions that actually have a chance of passing the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a closely-divided Senate, step up to the plate on the challenges of the moment, and deliver in a way that he did not in his first four years in office. To the extent he wants to move to the political center, which is where the work gets done in a divided government, we’ll be there to meet him half way.
Ummm, excuse me Senator McConnell? You lost your chance of gaining control of the U.S. Senate in an election year when there were tons of vulnerable Democratic seats. You blew it. So shut up and learn how to get along. Stop stamping your feet. Cooperate. That’s what’s in the best interest of our country.
FiftyFourandAHalf 