When is "More" Too Much?

Again we have a situation where the news is full of a shooting. Again it's in Colorado. The scene of the Columbine massacre, the Aurora theater shooting, and a number of other high-profile cases, including one in Colorado Springs on October 31, 2015 this year in which a shooter killed three people and was shot, himself.

What fascinates me is that a brief, cursory review of Colorado firearms law this morning shows a couple of gaping holes.

There is no waiting period, for instance. And the State of Colorado prohibits gun registration. Yes - the State of Colorado prohibits gun registration. You can find that for yourself, here: https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/csp/colorado-gun-laws That is the Official Colorado State Patrol website.

A couple of years ago, when legislators tried to tighten up the regulations, after Columbine, after the Aurora theater shooting, before this, the citizens of Colorado held a recall election against four legislators who had proposed stricter gun laws. The ever popular Wikipedia has information on that - four legislators were named, two were recalled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_recall_election,_2013


So, before the cries of "more gun control!" become too loud, stop and ask yourself, or your roomie, why, if it's so horrible, did the citizens of Colorado themselves fight back against more restrictive laws?

It is an interesting question. Colorado is not precisely a bastion of conservative thoughts and values. Heck! It was among the first states to legalize marijuana. For Heaven's sake, marijuana retailers hold Black Friday sales to attract new customers and offer Christmas gift sets.

http://www.9news.com/story/life/holiday/black-friday/2015/11/27/black-friday-pot-sales/76463526/

I don't get it, I really don't but because the State of Colorado has the laws that it does and the citizens of Colorado seem satisfied with them as they are, okay. I'll shrug and go about my business.

Now, for the sake of intellectual exercise and exploration, let's play pretend. What if the receptionist at Planned Parenthood was a hunter, someone with experience with firearms, comfortable in their use. What if that person, or someone else there, with the same background and experience as my fictional receptionist, had a gun available. What if one of my fictional people, or someone outside, was carrying a concealed handgun, loaded with none in the chamber and the safety engaged but ready to rock and roll if needed. What do you suppose might have happened?

Yes, there might have been equal or greater carnage. Or, maybe, the shooter would have had second thoughts before pulling to a stop in front of the clinic. Maybe he would have had second thoughts even before putting the rifle into his vehicle and putting the key into the ignition. Maybe he would have thought about it and decided not to do that. Or, maybe, that receptionist, or the real-life guy who was outside, sitting in his car who looked square into the shooter's eyes and ended up with injuries resulting from glass from his windshield exploding into the car when the shooter fired at him, could have stepped up and shot the creep dead before he had the chance to terrorize everyone in that clinic, or kill three people.

The idiot's motive(s) still aren't known. The cops have had him in custody for nearly twenty-four hours as I write this, and they still don't know what the idiot wanted or was doing. Suicide by cop, maybe? Or maybe his daughter went to that clinic, had a procedure and suffered some sort of medical complication and he was out for revenge? Who knows. I don't. The cops don't. Only the shooter knows and, apparently, he's not talking.

I don't advocate going back to the Wild West of the 1800's where handgun laws were non-existent. However, I do wonder what it might be like if those of us who legally own weapons weren't surrounded by ignorant people who don't recognize firearms for what they are. They're a tool. These people aren't stupid, they're ignorant. They fear what they don't understand.

I honestly think that if firearms classes were required, if everyone had to go through firearms training, including the safe handling of them, the fear of them would evaporate. Once fear evaporated, the ignorant people who now fear them might come to realize that guns, in and of themselves, are not bad or evil.

I remember once reading that certain civilizations in the Caribbean and South America fear having their picture taken. They think the image is a form of soul stealing. They fear cameras because they don't understand how they work.

It's the same thing when it comes to firearms. People who fear them don't understand how they work.

Granted, unless you beat someone over the head with a camera, pointing it at them won't cause physical harm. It can be argued that pointing a gun at someone won't cause physical harm either, and it won't. It requires the flexion of a finger against the trigger to cause the harm, just as it requires the flexion of a finger to take a picture.

As a personal anecdote, my sister was a very vocal anti-gun advocate until she was in her forties. Then, her friends introduced her to the man she eventually married - a hunter. The last time I saw her, she took me trap shooting and let me use her custom-fitted Purdy shotgun. A year later she and her husband flew down to Arizona and went through a firearms camp. The same camp the FBI and law enforcement agencies use for their advanced training courses. Her then boyfriend taught her, educated her, that firearms in and of themselves are not the problem. They're now married and she still goes shooting.

So, before we talk about still more gun control laws, which have been proved again and again and again don't work, how about talking about instituting gun education laws?

Just a little food for thought.

Best~
Philippa

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Humanity No Longer Exists

From Wikipedia's page on Josef Mengele:  Jewish twins kept alive to be used in Mengele's medical experiments. These children were liberated from Auschwitz by the Red Army in January 1945.

I have been trying hard to ignore what's headlining some of the news these days. It's the pure evil being perpetrated by Planned Parenthood.

But, as Edmund Burke once said: "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to stand by and do nothing."

So we're clear: I do not like abortion, but I do not think that it is evil. I do think it is infanticide - the killing of an infant - but I do not think the act is evil. Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes it is, tragically, convenient.

But with the latest atrocities by Planned Parenthood coming to light, I want you to stop for a minute. I want you to, if you can, put your emotions aside and think with your higher reasoning.

One of the hallmarks of life in most of the higher organisms on this planet is a heartbeat. Warm or cold blooded, if it's an animal, there must be a heartbeat for it to survive. No heartbeat = it's dead, not living.

In a hospital setting with a patient, if the heart stops beating and cannot be restarted through resuscitation efforts, the patient is declared dead. There is no heart pushing blood through the circulatory system. In whatever state the brain is, whether with full faculties or ravaged by late-stage Alzheimer's, it cannot, at that point, survive. The patient is dead, taken away for autopsy.

If a woman gets pregnant, her baby's heartbeat is detectable outside the womb between 39 and 50 days after conception. Going by the heartbeat being a sign of life, that baby's heartbeat says 'Hey, I'm alive!' even if it has no consciousness, no self-awareness.

With conception on January 1st, the baby's heart will be discernible with instrumentation (a vaginal ultrasound) on or about February 9th. I think it's probably safe to say that the heart began beating before the moment that ultrasound probe was introduced to the woman's vagina.

So Planned Parenthood, with the complicity of the breeders of these babies (there is no possible way on God's green Earth that a woman aborting her baby can be called a 'mother', since that term indicates parental feeling and caring), allows someone to take their child, to crush that child's skull and lower extremities - saving the torso for 'harvest'.

Does that disturb you, at all? The idea of crushing a child's skull?

Until the forceps clamp down, that was, more than likely, a viable human being - one with the capacity to live, to go to a loving home if the breeder doesn't want it - and yet it's being killed, crushed to death, and this society says 'oh, that's okay. Better than letting it go to waste.'

Whatever happened to the medical Hippocratic Oath of 'Do No Harm'?

Is crushing a child's skull not doing harm?

Imagine if this was something we read about in relation to the Nazi 'cleansing'. Do you suppose that we wouldn't look aghast at this? That we wouldn't condemn it, along with the shootings, the torture, the slave camps and the gas chambers?

Dr. Mengele did a lot of experiments on twins. They were, by civilized standards, horrific things. But what if he had discovered something useful, meaningful in his experiments. Would we look the other way, ignore the cruelty he inflicted on the children he 'studied'?

As it happens, there is an historian who claims that Mengele's experiments were successful - there's a book out called 'Mengele: Angel of Death in South America' and here's the article:

Nazi angel of death Josef Mengele 'created twin town in Brazil'

If this is true, if Mengele's experiments on children did bear fruit, does that make the things he did at Auschwitz acceptable? If you're nodding your head thinking, 'well, maybe...' then I suggest you read this - in full:

Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine

A child with a heartbeat at six weeks is too small, too undeveloped, to have anything except stem cells that are of any medical use. But I fear that we're on a slippery slope.

How long will it be before someone thinks about suggesting to the breeder that if they carry that baby just a little longer - until the brain starts functioning and the child can feel pain but isn't yet out of the womb - so that the organs can be harvested for some already born baby?

How long will it be before someone thinks about suggesting that 'harvesting' the organs from an otherwise healthy Down syndrome baby, or one with spina bifida or another birth defect, after it's been born would be a good idea? How many healthy children could be saved by that?

Where does this end? And how on Earth can any people call itself 'civilized' if we are so damned unfeeling, so soulless, that we say that killing our children is okay?

I can't. Not in my wildest imagination can I find this 'acceptable'. Instead, I feel soiled by this, disgusted and ashamed to call myself 'human' because with this, there is no humanity left in the soul of people.

Philippa

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PhilippaStories