Tag Archives: Gun politics

Oregon – 1 step forward & 2 steps back

Oregon is considering adding 2 items to the ballot this year.  1 is to allow non-heterosexual couples to marry, and the other is to allow bakers, florists, caterers, or any other business to discriminate against them under religious exemptions, in effect by stating that since their religious beliefs forbid gay & lesbian marriage, then they shouldn’t be forced to do business with them due to their religious beliefs.

If I were a retailer, couldn’t I use the same law to say that I don’t want gays & lesbians in my business?  If I were a developer or landlord, couldn’t I keep them out of my properties & neighborhoods?  And could a doctor refuse to treat them if they need emergency medical services?  What about keeping slaves, since the Bible, and therefore their religion condones slavery?  Acceptance of slavery is all over the Old Testaments & appears more than once in the New Testament as well.

If slavery is an antiquated Biblical idea that we’ve overcome, how about our negativity & discrimination toward gays & lesbians?

We can’t make laws to require everyone to come together as one in our society & care at least as much for each other as we do ourselves.  Besides being a hippie Utopian dream, we raise our young to be warlike, animalistic, reptilian-brained creatures who seem to have no compassion for anything but their own needs & desires, and we look at those ideas as being non-rewarding socialism unless we give it of our own volition in dribs & drabs of charity to make ourselves feel good, but we shouldn’t be making laws that continue to separate us from each other using standards applied unequally to segments within our society.  That is the definition of discrimination in a nutshell.

It’s hard to believe that in 2014, we’re still fighting that battle.  Besides, I’ve always said that gays & lesbians have the right to get married & be as miserable as the rest of us married people.

Armed school security doesn’t work well & isn’t the answer

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History shows us that armed school security didn’t work at Columbine HS, which had an armed security guard who was a 15-yr veteran of the Sheriff’s office there, yet it didn’t stop the infamous rampage there.  Virginia Tech had an entire armed campus police force, yet 32 people were killed by a lone gunman.  Eliminating access to “assault weapons” & expanded pistol clips is a start, and though it will do little in the long run, it’s still a must as every little bit of effort counts.

More importantly to the issue is proper parenting & proper education, and even more important is teaching our children (and our adult peers) not to exclude & bully people that seem different or weak to them, as these societal victims are the ones who invariably end up on the front page for these horrific crimes — after all, it’s not the Homecoming King/Queen or the BMOC perpetrating these crimes, it’s the downtrodden souls who don’t feel they fit in because our society treats many people as social outcasts, especially those who don’t support the status quo.

Unfortunately, a few of these ill-fitting outcasts decides in their deluded mind that the only answer for them is to go out in a blaze of notoriety/glory & they take out a bunch of poor innocent souls with them, and then we wonder why it happens.

We need to show more compassion & tolerance with others & learn to incorporate everyone into our inner circle & not ostracize people, and provide quick access to help, counseling & treatment for those who don’t/can’t fit in and ask ourselves why everyone must conform to certain standards and why we must exclude people in order to make ourselves feel superior, and why must we strive to feel superior in the first place? Maybe there will be a future where people respect and love each other without demands, where people feel accepted, wanted & loved, and can get free & good mental help (and get real help from those in control in our society, like teachers & school counselors) when they feel they don’t fit in.

Like all cops, armed school security can’t be in all places all the time.  We need figure out what does work most effectively in securing the schools until we can make changes in our society to help rid ourselves of this phenomenon by getting to the core of it.  Stricter gun laws will help, but they aren’t the foolproof answer either.

The best answer we have to prevent mass shootings like this is rooted deep within our society in how we treat each other.  The people who do this are typically those who are alienated from mainstream society by socio-political forces within it.  The more inclusive we become of everyone in our society, the faster we heal those mental wounds.  We also need people to act more responsibly in parental guidance & teach their children to respect everyone & be compassionate — like Jesus.  

Funny how the religious crowd and those who have the money & power in our society are typically the ones who don’t show compassion for those who have-not or are on the outside. Those are the folks who would’ve kept & ate the 2 fish & 5 loaves of bread themselves.