NADA - New American Dark Ages

Confronting America’s unholy gun love – Leonard Pitts Jr.

Pitts: Confronting America’s unholy gun love – Leonard Pitts Jr. – MiamiHerald.com

The parameters of this argument have not changed for generations. On the one side are people who enjoy hunting for sport or sustenance and people who, when bad guys come through the door, want to have more in their hands than just hands. They are, by and large, decent and responsible individuals who know and respect guns and resent any suggestion that they are not trustworthy to own them.

On the other side are equally decent and responsible people who think we ought to take reasonable steps to ensure that children, emotionally disturbed individuals and violent felons have no access to guns, people who believe no hunter requires 30 rounds to bag a deer and no homeowner not expecting to be attacked by a band of ninjas has need of an AK-47 to protect her property.

There is, you will notice, nothing about one side of that argument that precludes the other. Reasonable people who had their country’s best interests at heart could have bridged the distance between the two many dead bodies ago.

Such people are, unfortunately, in woefully short supply.

Pitts: Confronting America’s unholy gun love – Leonard Pitts Jr. – MiamiHerald.com

NADA - New American Dark Ages

Australia has meaningful limits on automatic weapons

Gun control in America: the fierce urgency of now | Amy Goodman | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Amy Goodman, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 December 2012 12.23 EST

Since President Barack Obama took office, there have been at least 16 major mass shootings, after which he has offered somber words of condolence and called for national healing. But what is really needed is gun control, serious gun control – as was swiftly implemented in Australia in 1996, after another gunman went on a senseless shooting spree. That massacre occurred in Port Arthur, Tasmania, and the shooter was from nearby New Town.

On 28 April 1996, Martin Bryant, a troubled 28 year-old from New Town, Tasmania, took a Colt AR-15 semiautomatic rifle to the nearby tourist destination of Port Arthur. By the time he was arrested early the next day, he had killed 35 people and wounded 23. The reaction in Australia was profound, especially since it was a nation of gun lovers, target shooters and hunters.

The massacre provoked an immediate national debate over gun control. Strict laws were quickly put in place, banning semiautomatic weapons and placing serious controls on gun ownership. Since that time, there has not been one mass shooting in Australia.

Rebecca Peters took part in that debate. She is now an international arms control advocate, and led the campaign to reform Australia’s gun laws after the Port Arthur massacre. Days after the Newtown massacre, I asked Peters to explain how the gun laws changed in Australia in 1996:

"The new law banned semiautomatic rifles and shotguns, assault weapons, and not only new sales … we banned importation sales, we banned ownership, so currently owned weapons were prohibited. The government bought those guns back at a rate of about the retail price plus about 10%. You couldn’t get them repaired. You couldn’t sell them. It was a very comprehensive ban.

"The buyback ended up buying back and destroying more than about 650,000 of these weapons, which is the largest buyback and destruction program for guns anywhere in the world."

Like the United States, Australia’s gun laws were a patchwork of state laws. Prime Minister John Howard, from the center-right Liberal party, took leadership to put strong, national uniform standards into place. Howard wrote a reflection on the gun laws last August, immediately after the Aurora, Colorado, massacre. In his piece, titled "Brothers in arms, yes, but the US needs to get rid of its guns", Howard writes of a talk given at the George HW Bush presidential library in 2008:

"There was an audible gasp of amazement at my expressing pride in what Australia had done to limit the use of guns. I had been given a sharp reminder that, despite the many things we have in common with our American friends, there is a huge cultural divide when it comes to the free availability of firearms."

Likewise, in Britain, after the March 1996 school massacre in Dunblane, Scotland, which left 16 children aged 5 and 6 dead, along with two teachers, handguns were quickly banned. Statistics show that in both countries, gun violence, murders and successful suicides all are down.

What is possible here in the United States, as the nation collectively mourns this latest score of innocents murdered in a moment?

Gun control in America: the fierce urgency of now | Amy Goodman | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Brothers in arms, yes, but the US needs to get rid of its guns

John Howard, August 1, 2012

Australia was right to take a different path to the US and opt for gun control.

These national gun laws have proven beneficial. Research published in 2010 in the American Journal of Law and Economics found that firearm homicides, in Australia, dropped 59 per cent between 1995 and 2006. There was no offsetting increase in non-firearm-related murders. Researchers at Harvard University in 2011 revealed that in the 18 years prior to the 1996 Australian laws, there were 13 gun massacres (four or more fatalities) in Australia, resulting in 102 deaths. There have been none in that category since the Port Arthur laws.

A key component of the 1996 measure, which banned the sale, importation and possession of all automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, was a national buy-back scheme involving the compulsory forfeiture of newly illegal weapons. Between 1996 and 1998 more than 700,000 guns were removed and destroyed. This was one-fifth of Australia’s estimated stock of firearms. The equivalent in the US would have been 40 million guns. Australia’s action remains one of the largest destructions of civilian firearms.

Australia is a safer country as a result of what was done in 1996. It will be the continuing responsibility of current and future federal and state governments to ensure the effectiveness of those anti-gun laws is never weakened. The US is a country for which I have much affection. There are many American traits which we Australians could well emulate to our great benefit. But when it comes to guns we have been right to take a radically different path.

John Howard was prime minister from 1996 to 2007.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/brothers-in-arms-yes-but-the-us-needs-to-get-rid-of-its-guns-20120731-23ct7.html#ixzz2FnLZRcHB

Brothers in arms, yes, but the US needs to get rid of its guns

Brothers in arms, yes, but the US needs to get rid of its guns

The Second Amendment, crafted in the immediate post-revolutionary years, is more than 200 years old and was designed to protect the right of local communities to raise and maintain militia for use against external threats (including the newly formed national government!). It bears no relationship at all to the circumstances of everyday life in America today. Yet there is a near religious fervour about protecting the right of Americans to have their guns – and plenty of them. …

So deeply embedded is the gun culture of the US, that millions of law-abiding, Americans truly believe that it is safer to own a gun, based on the chilling logic that because there are so many guns in circulation, one’s own weapon is needed for self-protection. To put it another way, the situation is so far gone there can be no turning back.

The murder rate in the US is roughly four times that in each of Australia, New Zealand, and Britain. Even the most diehard supporter of guns must concede that America’s lax firearms laws are a major part of the explanation for such a disparity. …

Brothers in arms, yes, but the US needs to get rid of its guns

The Atheist's Pulpit

Time isn’t holding up. Time is an asterisk. Same as it ever was.

Our End of the World parties might be a good time to recall the downfall of the Maya and all indigenous peoples began a little more than a baktun ago. Great calendars and astronomical observations just don’t stand a chance against a brutal man with a gun. Perhaps the NRA will back an expedition to go back in time and arm the Maya.

I found the entire “end of the world” hubbub irritating. Did Y2K teach us nothing? How could anyone believe or even wonder if this would be the end of the world. Puh-lease.

The Mayans and mesoamericans were phenomenally time obsessed. Europeans, on the other hand, have been pathetically sloppy with time-keeping. Sure, we have nanotime now, but it was just a few hundred years ago that time skipped 11 days in part of the western world but not all of it (*). We’ve flopped all over the place with calendars determined by the fiat of emperors and popes. Leap Year (except every 20 years except every 100 years except every 400 years); “30 days hath September…”; spring back, leap forward; a hodgepodge of day and month names: Wednesday (even Germans favor a more logical Midweek), February? Could our calendar be any more comical? We might as well add dog years to the discussion.

I have ZERO faith in any conversion between calendars. Time gives us illusions of both precision (which has sharpened) and accuracy (relative to what/when?). So, we foolishly say the Mayan calendar ends 12-21-12 and compound the nonsense by wondering what timezone that applies to.

Mesoamerican Long Count calendar – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Long Count periods

The Long Count calendar identifies a date by counting the number of days from a starting date that is generally calculated to be August 11, 3114 BCE in the proleptic Gregorian calendar or September 6 in the Julian calendar (or ?3113 in astronomical year numbering). There has been much debate over the precise correlation between the Western calendars and the Long Count calendars. The August 11 date is based on the GMT correlation (see Correlations between Western calendars and the Long Count calendar section elsewhere in this article for details on correlations).

The completion of 13 b’ak’tuns (August 11, 3114 BCE) marks the Creation of the world of human beings according to the Maya. On this day, Raised-up-Sky-Lord caused three stones to be set by associated gods at Lying-Down-Sky, First-Three-Stone-Place. Because the sky still lay on the primordial sea, it was black. The setting of the three stones centered the cosmos which allowed the sky to be raised, revealing the sun.[1]

Rather than using a base-10 scheme, like Western numbering, the Long Count days were tallied in a modified base-20 scheme. Thus 0.0.0.1.5 is equal to 25, and 0.0.0.2.0 is equal to 40. The Long Count is not pure base-20, however, since the second digit from the right rolls over to zero when it reaches 18. Thus 0.0.1.0.0 does not represent 400 days, but rather only 360 days.

Note that the name b’ak’tun is a back-formation invented by scholars. The numbered Long Count was no longer in use by the time the Spanish arrived in the Yucatán Peninsula, although unnumbered k’atuns and tuns were still in use. Instead the Maya were using an abbreviated Short Count.

Mesoamerican Long Count calendar – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

More than 30 years ago, my Droog, John Merck, suggested we celebrate the end of the Mayan calendar. Not as farsighted as the Maya, but way ahead of the herd.

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." — Sam Adams