Weapons of Mass Murder Should Be Illegal

It’s time make hand guns like the Fort hood shooter used illegal. These weapons are easily concealed, highly powerful and with high capacity, easily interchangeable clips they allow a shooter to spray hundreds of bullets in a few minutes and reload in seconds. They are weapons of mass murder, serving only evil and have no legitimate purpose whatsoever. In fact their only purpose is to kill people, lots of people, quickly.

The Virginia Tech shooter fired 170 rounds in 9 minutes and left 32 people dead and 30 more people horribly injured. The Fort Hood shooter fired 100 bullets in 3 minutes. He had high capacity magazine clips with 20 rounds per clip. With a gun in each hand that’s 40 rounds before he has to reload and he reloaded more than once which only takes seconds when exchanging clips. Frankly, with barrages like that I’m amazed they both didn’t kill more innocent people.

If either of these shooters had to reload more often and spend more time doing it they would have been quickly overwhelmed by the crowd of people who were their intended victims. But these semiautomatic guns stack the deck entirely in the favor of the mass murderer.

If you want to have a revolver or a deer rifle for self defense and sporting purposes, fine. Can these weapons also be misused? Of course, but they don’t place the kind of overwhelming force into one person’s hands that these weapons of mass murder do. You say it’s your constitutional right to own weapons of mass murder? You’re wrong, you can’t own machineguns, grenades, bazookas or a host of other arms either. That is because they serve no legitimate non-military purpose while delivering much too highly concentrated destructive force, endangering public safety. Anyway, when the Second Amendment was written a very skilled musketeer could manage at most four inaccurate rounds per minute. Reality has changed with the times.

And for those of you naive enough to think you need these kinds of weapons as hedge against a tyrannical government. Think again. Look at the resistance in Iraq. They quickly found that fighting the American military with guns was a sure way to die. That’s why they resorted to tactics like car bombs and IEDs. Thinking you’d fare any differently with your little pistol is plain foolishness.

Yes, people kill people and with these weapons of mass murder one person can kill lots of other people in a few seconds. The only people who think we need these guns are the profiteers who make and sell them, their lobbying arm the NRA, gun nuts and just plain nuts. Of the 14 worst mass shootings in the last 40 years 7 of them have been here in America. This time we need to actually do something and rid ourselves of this kind of dangerous garbage before it happens again.

United Healthcare Against Reform But For Penalties

Yet another reason for me to hate United Healthcare, the health insurance company selected for me by my employer, largely because Wisconsin is not a competative health insurance market. 75,000 UH employees and that's just one insurance company!

Gee, do you think there's a little overhead cost there for our healthcare system? The entire U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the Medicare program for 100,000 million Americans has only 60,000 employees! Yeah no public option AND higher penalties for people who don't become customers in the custody of their monopoly. Nice. I wish I could fire their ass.

From Friday's Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/13/headlines

Insurance Giant Recruits Employees to Oppose Public OptionThe nation’s largest health insurer is recruiting employees to lobby against congressional proposals for healthcare reform. Newly released emails show UnitedHealth Group wrote 75,000 employees this week to ask them to lobby their senators against inclusion of a public insurance option in the Senate healthcare bill. Form letters provided to employees also call for imposing higher financial penalties on Americans who choose not to buy health insurance.

Names of the Dead Website

Congressman Alan Grayson, who gained in notoriety for succinctly summarizing the GOPish plan for healthcare "don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly," has created a website http://www.namesofthedead.com/ to honor the 44,000 Americans who die every year, because they don't have health coverage according to a Harvard University study and of course to shame those who would stand in the way of preventing the equivalent of twelve 9/11s a year, every year, year after year.