What About the Children the Day After?

 

Sooner or later, and by now it most definitely will be sooner, there will come that day where the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School will find the media gone and their old lives returning to reawaken them to reality. Almost to the last one, there may be one or two kept around for future use such as David Hogg, the well-groomed argumentative and sharp-tongued youth who never met a gun owner he couldn’t hate, they will be ignored by the media and be left with homework and plain old and ordinary “School days, school days, Dear old golden rule days.” The days after, and let us admit it, there will be a lifetime ahead of them of days after, will be the day after the legislation is voted down in the House of Representatives or killed in the Senate and unceremoniously the Second Amendment debate will close for this round, or perhaps we will get another Weapons Ban which will do nothing to lower the death rate of inner city youth in Chicago, the real meat grinder killing children using firearms. The children who have been used as the tip of the spear, the sad faces nobody could deny and the argument killers claiming whomever is against them is against G0d. Once that spear has been used and thrown, it hits its mark or it misses, then the world travels on waiting for the next tragedy to be used, abused and thrown away to try and create more government in our lives. These children who have been coddled and cared for their every need as if they were the stars in a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza having their every wish catered to by a bevy of attentive leftists treating them as the media gold they are, for now, will wake up one morning back in sunny Florida waiting for their bus or slowly strolling to school and the cameras will be gone, the attentive leftists ready to meet their every whim will be nowhere to be seen, and their lives will return to normal and normal will feel so very empty.

 

 

Who will be there to pick up the pieces as the more fragile and susceptible realize that they really are just another school-child and the world no longer cares one whit about their mundane lives. It will not be their teachers, many of which are probably quite tired of having their students on the news spouting talking points while they sit in empty classrooms feeling unappreciated and left out. The few Second Amendment children will be carefully watching the fall of their classmates and they will be relieved that the circus has ended as they were spurned and vilified and are likely relieved to be done with their lives being twisted into monstrous things they are not. But the special children from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School will have to deal with their actual lack of specialness. These children will be left without grief councelors, without adoring media and fans cheering their every utterance and will be back in normal-ville feeling alone and many likely very depressed. Now they will have to come to grips with their emotions over the deaths of their friends in a community, which let them down when they had the power to prevent this crime and who were likely very uncomfortable with the scrutiny under which they were placed. We can only guess as to how much these children will be held responsible for the lives ruined as a result of their campaign for glory bringing the media in to inspect every angle of the story and grab anything they could and made it news-worthy. There was much not done from the school safety officer hiding in the parking lot to the police never charging this miscreant Nikolas Cruz with any of the numbers of crimes of which he was guilty and thus making his gun purchase impossible, to the FBI never following up on the reports of Nikolas Cruz making death threats on students and the entire litany from top to bottom which failed the seventeen dead and other victims of this heinous crime. These children will quite soon be facing the biggest letdown of their lives and for many these past few weeks will be the high point of their lives. That fact is maybe the saddest thing which will result from the child abuse being perpetrated in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School tragedy. Their school campus will seem rather small and lonely despite the school being quite a large complex (see image below). They will walk the quarter mile from their classes to gym and their four laps is a mile track or the tennis courts and then the halls where some will be filled with horrific memories and they will only have one another. This will be their reality until graduation, and then life will not become any easier or more glamorous.

 

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

 

These children have been abused and there will be no assistance to assist them in dealing with the abuse nor will there be much waiting to help them cope with the let down and the tragedy of the shooting, they will have become deserted and feeling friendless and worthless, but do their abusers care, not likely as they will have served their purpose and that is what counts. This has been the story behind previous abuses of people’s lives just to make their cause celeb more real and placing a human to be sacrificed for the cause out in front as the picture person for the cause of the moment. If the problem is cutting Social Security, there will be grandma who cannot afford to have new dentures made and eating hurts her so badly she weights a mere ninety pounds, it does not matter she always weighed ninety pounds, just that now she does. There will be the old man with no shoes living in a ramshackle home whose power has been turned off because he cannot afford to pay the bills, and a whole parade of other seniors whose inability to budget has laced them in a bad way who will be the poster people to prevent any cuts, so what if the deficit is twenty one trillion, what’s a few billion more. Once the legislation for cutting the funds, which actually is cutting the rate of increase which is what has basically already been done, these unfortunates return to their bad dentures and cold homes none the better for the experience. Maybe grandma got some free dentures but even if the power bills were paid for our old gentleman and he got some slightly more telegenic clothes, his power will be off again within six months as nobody sat down and worked a budget for him and there was nobody to pay the overdue bill the next time. There are stories of the ones left behind after the deal was done which are almost never had a followed-up. From the story of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings, David Hogg would make an interesting follow-up where we look into how his life turned out. Little things like did he get into the college he felt he should have been accepted? Where is his life ten years later? How does he feel about the many things he was quoted for saying now that he has had a job and lives on his own? Does he live on his own or is he in his parent’s basement? Then again, after this is over in a few weeks, will anybody really care where the great spokesperson, David Hogg, happens to be or what he has become, unlikely. That is part of the tragedy which will result. Sure, David Hogg might make a career of stating the case before the media, but there are limited spaces for such people, what about the other three thousand plus students who the media have overexposed and then will drop like clippings in the darkroom. That is the story which needs the real follow-up if just to reveal the aftermath of leftists invading your life, using you for six weeks or so and then discarding you like an old pair of socks that have one too many holes to be comfortable. Will anyone do this story this time; we doubt it.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

The Unfortunate Truth About Gun Control

 

The media loves gun control just as leftist political forces because they support government control without the ability of the people to resist. What will never be told about the United States Second Amendment is that it was the right to protect all the other rights of the Bill of Rights. To quote George Mason, principle author behind the Bill of Rights, who advised defining the Second Amendment, “What is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials.” He added to this stating, “A well-regulated militia, composed of the Gentlemen, Freeholders, and other Freemen was necessary to protect our ancient laws and liberty from the standing army.” Mason wanted each man to suitably furnish for himself weaponry, supplies, training and armaments comparable to those of the military itself free of limitations as anything less could, and likely would, lead to a tyranny as the government would be unstoppable. For the definitive reason behind the Second Amendment, please allow us to quote James Madison from his writings in Federalist No. 46.

 

Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made. Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, are the ones to be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it.

 

The Second Amendment was never meant to protect hunting, skeet shooting, target plinking, or other sport or casual use; and in addition to the protection it provides the household and the general public, it was meant first and foremost to defend the people from the overreach of the government. The Founding Fathers believed that where the people are armed, the government is limited; but where only the government is armed, freedom will inevitably become limited. What your history teacher likely left out about the start of the Revolutionary War with the ambushes at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, was the reason that the British troops were marching on these towns. Their orders were simple and straightforward, find the cache of weapons held by the militias and confiscate all the weapons the colonists held. This was to be performed as a precaution and to defend the rule of the Crown of England over the colonies. The British were aware that armed colonists were a threat to their ability to continue to collect taxes and hold irresistible and uncontested power in the colonies. Their fears were apparently quite valid as the fact that England no longer rules the American colonies and that the United States subsequently declared and gained their independence in the ensuing war. This was also what was behind their writing of the Second Amendment such that a tyranny such as what they lived under before the revolution. But we will still argue over the trivial of hunting and sport shooting because the government would rather leave the people as ignorant of the real reasons as their public school education left them. Were the people to understand that they could end up living in a government imposed straightjacket where freedom of speech is limited to only approved speech and hate speech being made a crime where such speech is defined by the ruling elite. Imagine a preacher being arrested for quoting the Biblical rules on certain protected actions as has occurred in Canada. Imagine being required to apply for a travel permit from the government in order to leave your sector for a vacation. Travel limitations have often been considered another function for control over the population. Such is also the concept behind curfews. But by alerting the people to the that fact, they have the final say in their governance which those in government would prefer the people never understand. Thus, the conversation is steered to hunting, sport shooting and anything other than its actual intended use all with the careful guidance of the mainstream media.

 

President Ronald Reagan

 

President Ronald Reagan stated the truth about the edict and responsibility which the heroes and valiant revolutionaries who fought for the independence and the Founding Fathers who crafted a Constitution and Bill of Rights which imbedded within it the means for the people to retain these freedoms. The precious words by President Ronald Reagan are below and a video of an excerpt further below but there is one thing required to be added, and that is that the Second Amendment is the promise keeper they handed down to the ensuing generations, and they prayed that it would never be forgotten, though it appears to have been exactly that by the majority of the people today.

 

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

 

 

We remember when we would mention the true reason for the Second Amendment to people during our run for office and generally the shocked, horrified and, yes, even hatred we received in return. We were called such honorable names meant as scorn such as revolutionaries, trouble-makers, rabble-rousers and insane-lunatics, and their accusations rang in our ears as the clanging of the chains of bondage awaiting the masses in the future. When President Ronald Reagan made his timely comments, there really were to be generations and those generations have passed and now the clock has ticked down to two or three elections. Should the people vote for government coddling and continue to demand protection from every imagined evil while seeking the warm arms of promises given for a perfect future while granting the promise-makers another restriction of freedoms after another believing that it really will make them safer to have the government hold that power rather than defend themselves, as that requires something from them and these are the times of retiring men and faded patriots. When the people seek political and government provided freedoms and surrenders their own responsibility to protect and defend their own freedoms, then freedom becomes a gift from the government and rights will evaporate faster than the morning dew at a desert’s edge. The American promise was freedom for as long as the people keep the responsibility for its protection in their own hands and with their own arms. Once they started down the slippery slope of reliance on the promises of those seeking power, that they were giving, to those whose will was to enslave them, the power to prevent their enslavement disappears. Now it will simply be time until they surrender their final resistive abilities to the very people regulating their freedoms into extinction. The American people are fighting a slow withdrawal from responsibility into slavery; the only question is how long can patriots slow the eventual loss of the American dream.

 

There are many in the United States who daily portend violent resistance to the elected President simply because he threatens their political views. These are largely the same people who scream that the Second Amendment be repealed because the police and government have sufficient weapons to protect the people. Do they realize what the government would be required to do in order to protect everybody in every situation taking place in any place throughout the nation? Well, consider knowing that wherever you went each and every day there was a law enforcement officer armed and close by to assure that all of your government protected freedoms were protected. This would require that a large percentage of the population be employed as law enforcement officers and be placed every fifty yards blanketing much of the land. This coverage would be required in every metropolitan area with the urban regions requiring a far lower level of coverage, but still significantly more than currently employed. Of course such a level of coverage would be impractical if not impossible. Still, to guard everyone as completely as has been the promise coming from the enemies of the Second Amendment and gun ownership would leave everyone guarded to a great extent by the government which would allow the government to be able to watch your every move, thought, personal interaction and action. But then, the government is already very close to having that exact capability with the resources they currently employ. This is something which has many already nervous but allows us to explain their current levels of overseeing every action you make outside of your house, or even inside if so desired. Baltimore City has cameras placed over most, well, honestly almost all of the city under surveillance presumably to prevent crimes (see image below).

 

Baltimore City Surveillance Cameras

 

The Federal Government has every person under unbelievable levels of scrutiny beyond what most people are aware. If people were aware of the level of this intrusion into their lives and freedoms, they would be far more critical of who they elected and be demanding that they be freed from this overbearing intrusion by the government. They would effectively be telling them to butt out and leave them alone, though many might use stronger language. Every time you make a purchase using any form of credit, that information is given to the government. All of your online activity can be pulled up should the government decide you are a person of interest. Honestly, every electronic act; phone, ATM, FAX, e-mail, internet visits, searches and any other you can imagine, be assured that the NSA has the ability to store it for future reference. Then there is your daily movement. Ever bother to take notice of the number of Red Light cameras, traffic cameras, speed cameras or other city, county or state surveillance cameras you pass daily going to and from work? Probably not, as watching the cars on the road should be the main concern of your attention. Trust that the government could check their records and tell how often you were late to work. The LoJack in your vehicle or any other antitheft device is another electronic tracking signal which could be activated and used by law enforcement or other government organization who might have even the slightest interest. Crime cameras such as those in Baltimore, Chicago, London and cropping up all over the world along with directional microphones used to triangulate firearm shot are also used to gather needful information on persons of interest. They also double for eavesdropping on conversations on the street in order to track down drug trafficking and other conversations of suspected illegal activities. Should you ever actually become a person of interest to the government, especially the Federal Government, there is literally nowhere you can hide. The government has the ability to listen to and even watch most of things which occur in your own home. They can use little items such as see through walls cameras, laser hear through walls, and a whole bevy of different spyware which have the result that without taking specific and extensive precautions to keep your private life private. How much further does the governments have to intervene into your private lives before the people decided enough is enough. We can only hope that the Second Amendment is still in effect and sufficient people have decided that an armed individual is a free individual. When people get on you about how in Europe they do not allow guns and they do not have much gun crime, you can point to the one nations where violent crime has never been a problem and still there is absolutely no firearm crime simply because every male between the age of twenty to age thirty, thirty-four for officers, is required to have a government provided assault rifle in Switzerland with fifty rounds of ammunition for the defense of the nation. Imagine that, a nation where they are the people and they have no crime and no mass shootings. Switzerland is not the sole European nation with as made obvious by the list of the top ten nations outside the United States for gun ownership. Often there are presumed truths with no validity thrown around by the anti-gun lobby knowing that people are more likely to accept these lies if they are stated with authority rather than checking for themselves. Remember that the next time some fact presented sounds just a little fishy.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Let’s Make the World Safe for Everyone

 

We are hearing again from every direction the many varied means for making our schools safe and end these mass shootings. We are hearing suggestions from banning firearm ownership to arming teachers in the schools and everything in between. We thought that perhaps the real solution is to make the world safe for everyone and protest against all threats to injuries or worse. Obviously, the first step is to take every firearm, bomb and other military and civilian weapon and destroy them so that the means of war and violence are greatly reduced worldwide. So, now the opportunity for war would be taken from all nations as this only works if it is universal, not only this phase, but every phase of safety-proofing the world making it a safe place for everyone. Honest, if we can all get behind such a project, then we can make this happen. Get the United Nations and every individual nation on board and this can be accomplished. Just for fun, let’s see what it might take to make the world safe for everyone.

 

Well, after all the firearms are destroyed, and we do mean all, what do we do next? Well, we definitely need to take away all the sharp objects like swords, axes, knives, razor blades, carpet cutters, box cutters and other bladed items. Forks would have safety prongs with special rounded ends incapable of penetrating skin or they would be replaced with some form of safety spork. Electric shavers will still exist with safety shields so they will still shave but are incapable of cutting flesh. This will take away another major threat to public health. The next thing is to start addressing items by their number of fatalities they cause and find some way of making them non-lethal. This would place automobiles and other such vehicles that are one of the greatest threats to life on the list. If we demand that they are limited to a low enough speed such that they can stop almost immediately and have sensors, which would activate the brakes whenever they detected a potential for any impact, so they cannot even injure pedestrians. Their speed also must not exceed the safety rating of the bumpers, which probably makes ten miles an hour the fastest speed. There would need to be similar rules for ships within a set distance from any shoreline such that they too would be perfectly safe just as are motor vehicles. Remember, this is a completely improbable set of ideas, but if we were to live in an idiot-proofed planet, these would be the rules and this is something that there are people who would lead us there. These are the people who mourn every accidental death and demand that something be done to prevent such an eventuality from ever reoccurring. So, what would be next?

 

Safety Dinnerware

 

There would be calls for proofing all the waterfalls after some crazy makes the next attempt to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Many sports would need to be made illegal, as they would be considered way too dangerous. Such sports as football, skiing, sky diving, cliff jumping, bungee jumping, just about all jumping higher than hopscotch, even jumping rope, ice hockey, actually any contact sport, paragliding, scuba diving, rodeo, bull fighting, running of the bulls, field hockey, jai alai, boxing, wrestling, kickboxing, full contact martial arts and probably countless other sports and hobbies which somebody, anybody somewhere believes that it is too dangerous, and it will end up being a nearly all inclusive list. And for those wondering, yes, spelunking would be banned. There would be people demanding all sorts of usually harmless activities be banned just because if something went terribly wrong, then somebody might be hurt seriously and might even die. Actions such as rappelling would eventually be banned as soon as an accident occurred and somebody was seriously injured or worse. Actually, beyond chess, checkers, bridge or other board and card games, but not card throwing, might escape the, what we lovingly like to call, the old biddy’s ax.

 

Sporting equipment would require rethinking in some of the most unexpected ways. As states, all sticks and bats would be illegal as they are also assault weapons. But even Olympic events and innocent games would also need to be changed. The discus would be performed with Frisbees and the javelin throw would no longer be permitted. Weight lifting would be performed with a new system using stress bands which would not cause injury should the lifter slip or be attempting too difficult a lift but would rather lose tension should any drop be registered. Skipping ropes would be made of a softer cotton material which would break upon feeling half a pound of resistance to prevent tripping jumpers. Basketball rims would be made of an easy bend metal with just sufficient stiffness to withstand the basketball but would bend if feeling more than ten pounds of weight for more than three seconds in case a dunking player got hung up on the rim and the nets would be made of the same material as jump ropes. Golf would be played with virtual clubs and a self-propelled ball which would respond to the virtual club. Baseball and cricket would have virtual balls and bats. Volleyballs would be made more face-friendly making them softer and also more resilient. Gymnastics would have padded everything with safety nets and other devices making injury nearly impossible. Pole-vaulting would no longer be an acceptable sport; the pole is too easily used as a weapon. The high jump would now be performed using a light beam and a detector to determine if a jump was successful. The same technology would be used for the hurdles, as we do not need to trip a person when we can just add one second to their time for every hurdle struck. Tennis would be replace with badminton with the shuttlecock made such that its terminal struck velocity would be halved while keeping its range when hit virtually unchanged. Bowling would have a virtual ball which would simulate the weight and the differing cores around which any ball is constructed. Computer simulations would be replacing many sports such that they would also be freeing up space and saving other resources in an increasingly urbanized world these sports such as golf and field sports can be safely played indoors with less space required and thus enjoyed by everyone and done so safely. Every sport and activity would be injury-proofed as much as possible.

 

But now we come to things around the house that we find to pose some degree of severe threat. Bathtubs would have their overflow drain set at two or three inches. Buckets would be limited to three inches in height. Just in case you are wondering, swimming pools would be made illegal by this point. Stairs would be replaced with gentle ramps. All sharp corners would be rounded off just to be safe. Coffee tables would have their edges rubberized to protect people walking in the dark going to the bathroom at 2:00 A.M. without turning on the lights. Gas stoves and ovens would be illegal and electric stoves and ovens would have so many sensors and other safety features that without the manual, it would be near impossible to figure out how to use one to boil water, that is if boiling water was still legal. Doors and their frames would be rounded at the top and they would have a gap in the hinges such that even a fat thumb would fit comfortably. Beds would be required to have automatic padded safety rails preventing anybody from accidently rolling out of bed during their sleep. Fireplaces would be those fake logs with the turning tube around a light bulb and no more real fire fireplaces. No more wood burning stoves. All of society would be pretty much about as boring and lacking in thrills as humanly possible. There would be one result that the protectionists would be unable to prevent, people dropping by being bored to death. Simply stated, there is no way that really getting the world completely safe-proofed simply because, as the saying goes, nothing can be fool-proofed as fools can be so ingenious.

 

Beyond the Cusp