Not the Greatest Generation

We are not the “Greatest Generation.” During World War II, in addition to volunteering in massive numbers to serve in and support the military effort, the American people willingly submitted to gas and food rationing, bought U.S. Savings Bonds at low interest to lend the government needed cash, and elected leaders who doubled and even tripled income tax rates at some levels. By the end of the war, those earning the equivalent of $200,000 had tax rates over 50%, and the highest rate was 94%.

Americans did not rise up against an overreaching federal government. Rich people and corporations did not flee the country in droves to shelter their wealth in foreign banks. CEO’s and high earners did not stop working because, as some today suggest, why work hard  if the government is going to get the benefit? Americans were patriotic, and they were willing to make sacrifices to support the war effort.

President Obama inherited an $11 trillion national debt, $5 trillion of which accumulated during G.W. Bush’s years while Republicans held majorities in the House and Senate. There are three main reasons for the near doubling of the national debt during those years: the Bush tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the passing of Medicare Part D without allowing the government to negotiate drug prices. Since Obama took office, all those factors continue (he wanted to end the tax cuts for high income earners, but ended up capitulating to Republicans to keep the government running). Add to that the cost of the recession in decreased tax revenues and the stimulus spending of almost a trillion dollars (one-third for additional tax cuts and credits), and you see why the debt will soon reach the current maximum allowable, or debt ceiling, of $14.2 trillion. It’s a staggering number, but so are all the numbers that led up to it. Raising the debt ceiling is a national necessity, since the thought of the United States of America defaulting on debt is…unthinkable. The debt ceiling has been routinely raised every year since the ‘60s.

George W. Bush famously told Americans to “go shopping” to support the economy during war. Republican lawmakers seem to think it is patriotic to bankrupt the United States government by depriving it of tax revenue while spending on the military. For the last several years they have screamed that one of the biggest impediments to recovery has been the “uncertainty” businesses have felt because of the possibility the tax cuts would expire for those earning over $200k (really? raising their taxes by 4.6%?). Since the new Republican majority in the House took the reins in January, they’ve done nothing but create uncertainty, first by threatening to shut down government if they did not get the spending and program cuts they demanded and now by threatening to vote against raising the debt ceiling unless they get further cuts. One has to wonder whether they actually want the economy to improve or cynically believe their political prospects are better if it doesn’t.

To great fanfare, Paul Ryan (R-WI) brought forth the Republican 2012 budget plan that purports to solve the national debt crisis. Others have detailed how radical these proposals are, cutting taxes for the rich and for corporations even more and paying for them by forcing seniors to begin paying for Medicare in ten years with a shrinking subsidy over time. It actually increases deficits in the next decade according to the Congressional Budget Office. What amazed me was that only four Republicans in the House voted against the plan (one was David McKinley, Republican from WV’s 1^st district). All the rest, including Shelley Moore Capito, were willing to go on the record to vote for turning Medicare into a system that gives vouchers that partially subsidize seniors to buy private health insurance.

At the same time, the Republican leadership says that President Obama’s budget proposal which cuts the deficit with a balance of spending cuts, plans to lower health costs, and raises taxes on those earning in excess of $200,000 is a non-starter. They will defend the right of the rich to “keep their money.” No, these Republicans are not at all like the “Greatest Generation.” Their patriotism is limited to wearing flag pins and spending money on the military. Their vision of shared sacrifice is to ask corporations to give to their campaigns while they pass laws to make working people and the elderly pay.

published in the Charleston Gazette-Mail Sunday, May 8, 2011  http://www.wvgazette.com/Opinion/OpEdCommentaries/201105061526

Beware, Republicans!

Winds of change are blowing across the Arab world taking down dictators; an earthquake-caused tsunami killed thousands in Japan and damaged an atomic energy plant causing radiation releases and possible meltdowns; and a black man named Barack Hussein Obama is president of the United States.  Glen Beck, the Fox News clown, tells viewers we are entering “the end of days.” But as political satirist Jon Stewart said during his Rally to Restore Sanity, “We live now in hard times, not end times.”

In the wake of the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, with millions out of work and still losing their homes, American voters were scared and frustrated by the slow recovery in 2010. Corporations with their newly granted freedom of speech, which the Supreme Court has defined as the freedom to spend without limit to influence elections, spent hundreds of millions of dollars in support of Republican candidates.

Detecting a breeze blowing to the right, away from government spending that stimulated the economy just enough for us to avoid depression, many voters turned to Republicans. They gave them a majority in the House even though it was Republican leadership that created the deficit and brought on the recession with policies of lax financial regulations, tax breaks without spending cuts, and refusal to raise taxes to pay for wars, even on those who could easily afford it.

They promised they would focus on jobs, but since taking office have been demanding budget cuts to programs they don’t like and are threatening to shut down the government if Democrats don’t go along. Since Ronald Reagan, Republicans have subscribed to the theory that cutting taxes for corporations and top earners would create more jobs. Though this “trickle down” theory has been proven wrong again and again, it is still their only idea for creating jobs. Meanwhile, newly elected Republican governors face deficits that in some cases have been created by irresponsible tax cut giveaways to businesses. Instead of even considering raising needed revenues, they wage war on public employee unions and make draconian cuts to social programs and education.

Have the Republicans created one single job? How many jobs will be lost if they have their way with the billions in cuts they propose to the federal budget? Which way will the wind blow if Republicans will not sit down with Democrats to make reasonable compromises, thereby shutting down the government?  Is there any chance they will be willing to try to come up with sensible measures to solve long term deficit problems?

Those who thought it ridiculous to compare the protests in Wisconsin to those in the Middle East should think again. The struggle for jobs that pay fair wages in safe working conditions, for a secure retirement, for affordable health care, in short, for entry into the middle class is ongoing world-wide. The recent uprisings were sparked in Tunisia by a vendor who had his fruit cart confiscated and burned himself alive in protest. A growing, educated, yet underemployed youthful population with access to the tools of the information age, and working people sick of corruption and low wages, united to protest peacefully in the tradition of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and force out two dictators. Granted, the stakes were much higher and the grievances far more severe than in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and Michigan, but for too long Americans have watched their wages and benefits shrink while executive salaries rise and corporations move jobs overseas and find ways to avoid paying taxes.

 In the United States, the middle class has faced a headwind in recent years. Income disparity is greater than at any time since the Great Depression. The deficits are great, but our creditors are not calling in our debts—it’s not the crisis the Republicans claim it is, and even if it were, their proposed cuts do not begin to solve the problems. Senate Democrats can stop the proposed Republican cuts. President Obama could veto them even if they did pass. In either case, they could do that in the name of saving jobs and the economy. If that shuts down the government, the fault will lie with the intransigence of Republicans. Democrats have already grudgingly agreed to ten billion of the sixty billion in cuts proposed in the House budget in two continuing resolutions to keep the government running (more in recent negotiations). Republican lawmakers risk a tsunami of resentment if they don’t sit down with Democrats to find ways to create jobs, strengthen the economy, and seriously talk about long term debt.

This essay was published in the Charleston Gazette (WV) on April 5, 2011 http://www.wvgazette.com/Opinion/OpEdCommentaries/201104050737

A Cut that Hurts

Recent cuts to the 2011 federal budget have ended funding for the National Writing Project (NWP), an organization I care about deeply (full disclosure: for several years it has provided me a part-time job, something most teachers need). NWP received $27 million in 2010 and distributed much of it to over 200 writing project sites around the country in operating grants of under $50,000.

When I was in my third year of teaching, I participated in the West Virginia Writing Project’s “Invitational Summer Institute,” an intense program of writing, of reading research and teachers’ stories of teaching writing, and of designing and presenting demonstration lessons. This experience, as it is for many of the thousands of teachers each year who participate in NWP programs around the country, was career changing. Life changing, in some ways.

Before that, in my education classes and in professional development offerings by my school and district, I had understood that someone else had the answers and becoming a teacher, a good teacher, was a matter of doing what I was told in ways that I was told research said would work. Unfortunately, research could be found that said just about anything would work. In practice, I, like most beginning teachers, found the actual classroom experience daunting, challenging, exhausting, and often filled with failure by students who seemed to lack the skills and motivation to achieve, especially when asked to set pencil to paper.

Dr. Fran Simone, who served as director of West Virginia Writing Project at that time, created an atmosphere in which each teacher felt valued as a member of a professional community searching for the best possible answers to the questions and challenges the classroom experience presented. We became better writers and created a caring community by sharing our stories, which were often personal in nature. Over a few weeks of full day workshops and evenings working on our own writing, we learned more from each other than from any article or book that we read, though we learned from them as well, especially the ones written by other classroom teachers whose writing was more accessible than university based researchers, and whose classroom experiences rang true. Through this transformative experience, I became a better teacher, a better person—one who began learning to nurture the voices of students, to encourage their self-expression and through that to impact their skills and their motivation to learn.

In the years that followed that experience, I implemented many of the practices and lessons I had observed—not all at once, but as I was ready and able. Eventually, I became a leader and innovator, and have been recognized by NWP and the College Board for the work I’ve done at Ruffner Elementary School. In a perfect world, the type of professional learning community created through the NWP model would be re-created in every school and district in the country. However, it rarely occurs in schools.

Perhaps it is too much to expect teachers to share their successes and failures, frustrations, their personal stories with those who evaluate them and pay their salaries. Perhaps only an outside player like NWP, a university/district collaboration, can fill that role.

During my twenty-four year teaching career, I have had the opportunity to do for others what Dr. Simone did for me: facilitate professional learning communities with teachers who come voluntarily during the summer to improve their classroom practice involving writing. Now this program may come to an end. It will not cause closures of schools or layoffs of large numbers of teachers. It will not immediately impact student achievement throughout the country. However, multiple studies have found that students of teachers who have been through NWP programs on average write significantly better than students of teachers who don’t.

In a time when the challenges teachers face and the expectations the public has for them continue to mount, we should be putting more funding into cost effective programs such as NWP, which leverages support at three dollars for each federal dollar.

Some argue that the role of the federal government should be limited to defense, enforcing laws, and providing (as little as possible) for the neediest among us. Education, they insist, is only a local concern. But it takes more than a village to raise a nation of children who will be able to compete in this global economy, and we should not be throwing out any effective programs that are improving their chances of doing so.

War on Public Servants

For the last decade or so, it seems that there has been a war on teachers and public education. You can’t watch the news or open a newspaper without reading about how American students are failing to make the grade compared to students around the world, and how that is the fault of public schools and teachers.  Now, it seems like the war has expanded to include anything public and anyone who works for local, state, or the federal government. Some people seem to have decided that those who have dedicated their lives to public service are somehow living an easy life thanks to those who work in the private sector, for business. Maybe the two are related. Maybe our schools have failed to educate the public about the importance of government services and the necessary and valuable contributions made by public servants, including teachers, policemen, lawyers and others who work in courts and prison systems, road departments, highway and airline safety, health and human service agencies, public lands, diplomatic corps, and so on. 

We teachers have failed to teach the American public how to delve deeply into subjects, how to explore both sides of issues, how to analyze data, how to draw reasoned conclusions. For example, I heard a politician yesterday say that “salaries in the public sector are higher on average than in the private sector,” to make his argument that public servants should take pay and benefit cuts. A recent analysis of census data by Queens College demographers prepared for the New York Times shows that while that statement is true, the educational level of the average state employee is higher than that of the average employee in the private sector. When you compare state employee wages to private sector employees with similar educational levels, in almost all states, the public employees’ wages are lower. 

We all know factories have shut down and whole industries have moved overseas. The average salary for non-college educated Americans is either stagnant or decreasing, and their benefits are shrinking. Some argue that public employees should suffer equally. How will we attract and retain great teachers with reduced pay and benefits? A third of teachers don’t stay in the profession after three years as it is.

I’ve been teaching for a couple decades, and the teachers I meet are dedicated. They didn’t go into education primarily for the money or benefits, but with hopes to better the lives of their students. I suspect most state and federal employees have gone into public service because of their idealistic nature as well.  And I’ll bet they’ve felt the same sense of sympathy I have in recent years as we’ve seen people in private industry stripped of their promised pensions or laid off and unable to find a job that pays as well.

Republicans say they are against deficit spending. However, when they had the reins of power, they cut taxes in ways that mostly benefited the rich and ran up huge deficits. The current deficits we are now experiencing can be almost wholly attributed to the Bush tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Great Recession, which has lessened tax revenues. Because of deregulation of the financial industry, we are in the midst of the deepest, widest recession since the Great Depression. It would have been a depression had the Bush and Obama administrations not convinced Congress to pass legislation that saved the banks, the American auto industry, and kept people working and state governments afloat with stimulus spending. In Wisconsin and New Jersey, Republican governors give tax breaks to business and then scream that the deficits they’ve created need to come out of public employees.

The Republican majority elected in 2010 was put in place by an electorate impatient with the pace of the recovery and desperate for jobs. While still a minority, Republicans held out for extending  the Bush tax cuts for the rich, threatening to filibuster all legislation unless the Democrats agreed to the deficit-increasing measure. Since taking office and promising to concentrate on jobs, the Republicans in the house have not passed job measure one. Instead, they and Republican governors have been mounting attacks on programs for women and the poor, labor, and the middle class. They attack collective bargaining, threaten to shut down the government if their budget cuts are not passed.

There was a time when Republicans declared war on “welfare queens”, claiming that huge numbers of Americans were gaming the system to live a life of ease. Under Clinton, programs went into effect to help women with children find work, and offered them only temporary assistance. How does that work when unemployment rates hover near 10%? A few billion dollars are saved, though more Americans live in poverty and there is increasing income disparity. Now Republicans are coming after public employees. When they passed No Child Left Behind, they said by setting the bar high, achievement gaps would close, otherwise they would declare schools failing and fire the staff or send the children to other schools. What will they do when public employees don’t meet their unrealistic expectations?

This essay was publised as an op-ed by the Charleston Gazette (WV) on Monday, March 6, 2011  http://wvgazette.com/Opinion/OpEdCommentaries/201103060431 

Tunisia and Egypt Prove the Neo-conservatives Wrong

Is it possible that the Neoconservative theories that George W. Bush and his gang implemented by invading Iraq are coming to fruition? They theorized that after deposing Sadaam Hussein the Iraqi people would rise up and create a democratic government that would protect their rights and open up the economy to all. One Arab democracy would then inspire other Arab people to rise up against dictators. Instead, Iraq has suffered eight years of sectarian violence, government gridlock, and economic stagnation on a bumpy road to what no one is sure will become a stable democracy or even a unified nation once the U.S. withdraws completely. Iran is poised to end up with more influence in Iraq than the U.S.

Iraq may have served a purpose as an example for reasonable people in Arab countries with dictators of what to avoid in demanding change. Like Iraq, for years, Tunisia and Egypt have been faux democracies, one party states led by a president for life. As American allies (as Iraq was until Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990), their leaders have benefited from American largesse by moderating Arab extremism toward Israel, and in Egypt’s case, maintaining peaceful relations with Israel. Mubarak has maintained power with an iron fist toward any political rivalry and against any sign of Muslim extremism. His police have used tactics including torture to maintain absolute power, but thirty years of a “state of emergency,” has finally come to an end by popular demand.

The protestors in Egypt and Tunisia have included broad swaths of the populace. They are not led by Muslim extremists, and their anger has been directed against the dictator and his police rather than Israel and the United States, anger that too often Arab dictators stoke for their own benefit. Unlike in Iraq, where Sadaam, our ally against Iran, had created an elite sectarian Sunni army to repress the majority Shiite and minority Kurds, the armies of both Egypt and Tunisia have stepped forward as defenders of the people against police forces that were viewed as the repressive arms of government.

Should these anti-dictator movements result in more democratic governments it is far from clear that they will be friendly to America and American interests let alone be willing to seek peaceful relations with Israel. And should they spark similar movements in Jordan, Yemen, or other Arab states with greater fundamentalist anti-Western constituencies, the Middle East may start looking more like Iran than Turkey, which  has a strong tradition of secular government.

President Obama has walked a tightrope in his response to the situation. To anyone who criticizes him for supporting Mubarak until now, you must give equal blame to every president going back to Jimmy Carter. Every one has pragmatically supported the Egyptian government while talking about the need to implement democratic reforms. At least Obama gave a stirring speech in Cairo in which he called on all Arab countries to implement democratic reforms. Combined with the evidence that he is keeping his word by pulling American troops out of Iraq, this may have something to do with the lack of anti-Americanism evident in these uprisings.

It seems our government is trying to support a peaceful transition to democracy, understanding that there is a long way to go from deposing a tyrant to full democracy. Mubarak ceded power first to a newly appointed vice-president, Omar Suleiman, former security chief, and then the top brass of the army. Egypt’s military is almost as much an economic force as a defense force, a secondary effect of peace with Israel which caused the Egyptian army to find creative ways of keeping it’s vast military employed. The army controls large swaths of various industries and resources: water, agriculture, gasoline, even automobiles.

Protestors should keep up the pressure, but let the country return to normalcy as the new leadership tries to design and implement a new constitution. The Egyptian people seem to have set their hopes on the army to carry out reforms and allow free and fair elections, but they should follow Ronald Reagan’s advice to “trust, but verify.” The people of Tunisia and Egypt have demonstrated to the world they are capable of peaceful protest and deserving of the opportunity to elect governments that will maintain their security while allowing them the full freedom of representative government and human rights. They may achieve democratic reform more quickly and with less loss of life and economic hardship than the “regime change” George W. Bush sought through preemptive war. Let us hope that these peaceful revolutions result in true democracies that play a role as moderating influences in the Arab world.

first published in the Charleston Gazette-Mail on Sunday, February 26, 2011 http://www.wvgazette.com/Opinion/201102251603 

Mind of a Murderer

Disclaimer: what follows is an exercise in fiction writing. Somewhere in America the next Jared Loughner or Seung-Hui Cho is mulling over his miserable life and choosing a target for his rage. Maybe this is what he's thinking. None of this is what I think--I love Charleston!

It has been such a long and gloomy winter, I think I’m going to explode. I’m stuck here in this nowhere little town, Charleston, West, by god, Virginia.. Nothing ever happens here. Once in awhile somebody kills somebody, but what do you expect, it’s America.  Downtown is two short blocks and a downtown shopping mall. Between them is the “transit mall” where the poor folk catch their busses to the west side or the east end, South Charleston, Dunbar, Marmet, Belle, all the little dead places that make up this chemical-laced, coal-built, state government financed river valley.

The Indians didn’t even want this place. They came here to hunt, but they lived in better places, flatter places where the sun doesn't sink behind a hill a couple hours after it clears the hill on the other side. Places where it doesn’t rain or snow every other day. Well, the snow isn’t too bad, but what’s getting to me is the clouds. I looked it up. It’s only sunny 65 days a year. That makes it cloudy 300 days of year. I need to get out of here, go someplace sunny. Groundhog day was just the other day. Guess what? It wasn’t sunny. Big surprise. But I have a feeling winter’s going to go on for a while.

I’m going to kill somebody. I haven’t decided who. Somebody famous. Thing is, not too many famous people come here. But eventually I’ll have my chance. People run for president. Forget killing a president, too hard. Even if you could get close, they’ve got him covered like a glove. Of course I could kill the governor, but that would be too easy. And who would care outside WV? I mean, I guess it would make a splash and be national news for a while, but in 50 years? Only the kids in WV History class would know, and they’d forget it. Of course, somebody running for president wouldn’t be all that famous either. I don’t know. Maybe I should kill the president. Or maybe I’ll kill a bunch of people. Like that guy Cho, the one that killed all the people at Virginia Tech.

But Cho killed himself. What a waste! I’m not saying I would expect to get away with it or anything. I don’t think I’d want to be like a serial killer, keeping everything secret, worrying about getting caught all the time, trying to outsmart the cops. Plus, I’m not into torture or anything. I wouldn't want to know anything about the people I kill. Well, I guess if it was a famous person, I’d know about him or her, but that’s different. I wouldn’t really know her. You’re probably thinking I just want to copycat Jared Loughner. Well, maybe I do. He is kind of my current hero. I mean, his mug shot, you know, the one with where he’s kind of looking up at the camera with that little smile and the wild eyes, fresh shaved head. He sort of went with the idea of a famous person, a congresswoman, but then he took out a whole bunch of others, too. He’ll be remembered for a while. Plus, he’s going to have a trial. That’ll put him in the news for years to come. I mean just look at Charles Manson. He still pops up once in a while. And he’s got it made – a lifetime of free meals and free medical care.

It’s not like I hate people. I don’t like them much, that’s all. And women, I guess you could say I’ve got a love/hate relationship with them. I’m always wishing I could find one that would, you know, hang out with me, but it just never seems to work out. I’m not going to do the dating thing. I can’t stand calling somebody and saying, like, you want to go out? Why can’t you just say what you mean? Hey, you want to do it with me? Ok, that is a little direct, but why can’t you say, “Hey, you think you might want to do it with me after a while?” No, you’ve got to go through that whole getting to know you thing, buy ‘em a meal, take ‘em to a movie, pretend to accidently touch their hand or their knee.  Screw that. So, I just do sex on the internet. Got a million women out there willing to take off their clothes and talk dirty to me. A lot of it’s free, too.

Hey, if anybody reads this, I just want you know I’m kidding. Really! It’s just idle thinking on a cloudy day. The sun will be out one of these days and I’ll feel better. Or maybe I’ll move to Arizona.

A Conversation About Guns

link to an animation using this script:  http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/8309520/?listid=20729577 

Gun Lover: It's terrible the way the left-wing media is trying to say the latest rampage by a crazy shooter is because of my right wing political heroes and talk show hosts. Words don't make people use guns to kill other people. Only people kill. If everyone had a gun, we'd all be safe.

Concerned Citizen: That sounds wrong to me. I think we need laws to protect us from people who want to use guns to kill. Not everyone can be allowed to own guns that are made as people killing machines.

Gun Lover: Everyone in our country has a right to own any weapon they want. It's in the Constitution.

Concerned Citizen: Semi-automatic hand guns are dangerous in the hands of certain people. It should not be so easy for people to own them or carry them around concealed. I would like them to be banned for private ownership.

Gun Lover: You are trying to take away my freedom under the 2^nd amendment which says all Americans have a right to bear arms.

Concerned Citizen: Perhaps you are a sane and responsible citizen and should be allowed to use or even own such a weapon. If there were a licensed required, or limitations on where they can be carried, perhaps you would qualify for a license.

Gun Lover: The government cannot be trusted to decide who should carry a gun or not. The government is trying to take away our rights. Americans have a right to bear arms and serve in a militia and the government cannot take away that right. It says so in the Constitution.

Concerned Citizen: The government also has a responsibility to protect its citizens. The second amendment says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” This was written before the U.S. had standing armies or states with National Guards. Citizen soldiers had to have their weapons available in their homes in case they were called out to defend the community.


Gun Lover: It says the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. If the government tries to infringe my right to bear arms, it is taking away my constitutional rights.

Concerned Citizen: Since we have standing armies and our states have National Guards, we no longer need citizen soldiers to keep weapons in their homes. The Supreme Court has ruled that the rights of some citizens can be infringed if they represent a danger to the community, such as the mentally ill and convicted felons.

Gun Lover: If the government tries to infringe my right to bear arms, it is taking away my constitutional rights.

Concerned Citizen: Communities and states can also pass laws to restrict where guns can be carried. If the government lets every citizen own and carry any weapon he wants to, some people might want to own a nuclear weapon or a tank. Lines must be drawn about what kinds of weapons people should be allowed to own and where they can use them. Do you think every citizen should be allowed to have a tank or rocket launcher or machine guns?

 Gun Lover: If the government tries to infringe my right to bear arms, it is taking away my constitutional rights. You will have to pry my gun from my cold dead fingers. It is the right of the people to alter or abolish the government if it infringes on our rights. This is called a 2^nd Amendment remedy.


Concerned Citizen: That language is from the Declaration of Independence not the Constitution. It said the people have the right to overthrow a government that is trying to deprive them of unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that governments derive power from the consent of the governed. Our government is a representative democracy. We elect our representatives, so they have our consent to pass laws. Some of the laws we have elected them to pass are to protect us from being shot on the street by machine gun wielding idiots.


Gun Lover: If the government tries to infringe my right to bear arms, it is taking away my constitutional rights. If the government does not follow the Constitution I have the right to form a militia to fight the government.


Concerned Citizen: That is treason. The Constitution does not give you that right. If you use your weapons to fight the government you are breaking the law.


Gun Lover: I have the right to free speech and I will kill you if you don’t shut up. You’re confusing me. I have the right to own this semi-automatic weapon and you can’t take away my rights.


Concerned Citizen: You do not have the right to make threats to kill me. That’s against the law. If you threaten to kill me or point that weapon at me you could have it taken away by the government and not be allowed to own weapons. Americans have the right to be protected from people like you.


Gun Lover: You are a socialist, anti-American, elitist who is ruining our country. People like you are making true-blue Americans who own guns mad and you deserve it if they use their 2^nd amendment rights to kill you.


Concerned Citizen: That is an example of the kind of legal, but uncivil speech that right wing radio and TV talk show hosts and some politicians have been using. Unfortunately, some crazies interpret that as an excuse to go out and kill law-abiding Americans or attack the government or its representatives. We must pass laws to protect us from the insanity of unregulated gun ownership. People should have to have a license to own certain weapons and the license should have to be renewed periodically. We should either figure out how to keep these weapons out of the hands of unstable people or ban them for private ownership.


Gun Lover: I’m going home to watch Fox News and listen to Rush while I read right-wing blogs that will tell me what I want to believe is true.