CSotD: The Bill of Irrelevancy
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One of the challenges facing editorial cartoonists is finding new ways to respond to yet another mass murder.
Ann Telnaes breathes life into the tired "Thoughts and Prayers" theme with a piece that suggests that we care for each gun victim just as we care for each death in Vietnam … except that, on this wall, there are no names, just hastily scratched totals, because these dead are not people but simply statistics.
Not that we don't drop a teddy bear or a bunch of flowers to show our grief.
You'd never know that the DACA bill failed last night, because CNN has been wall-to-wall in an endless search for people who know people whose cousins lived near the school so that they could interview them while rerunning footage that has to be digital because tape would have worn out by now.
We'll all very sensitive and caring until the next circus comes to town.
Clay Jones also appears here regularly and a major reason is that he and Telnaes grab their pens as soon as anything happens, rather than waiting for the date on the calendar when their next cartoon should appear.
I don't mind waiting a day, as I did in this case, to let cartoons drop, but there are cartoonists who still have Christmas pieces on their websites and that's not how the medium works.
Meanwhile, Jones makes a solid point about the way brown people are terrorists and white folks aren't, though we didn't know at this stage that the shooter had reportedly trained with a white supremacist group.
Kevin Siers waited until the President had made the pro-forma sadness speech before he went to work, producing a piece contrasting words with actions.
And, if you think it's unfair to suggest that only Republicans are nursing on the NRA teat, check out this list of who gets the most largess.
Granted, it may not all actually be from the NRA.
I like Mike Lester's take, because we've worked hard to set up a police state — the parents of these murdered children were probably fingerprinted as toddlers "to keep them safe" — but, while the folks at CSI can find a killer by analyzing a fly's eyebrow, and Dirty Harry never shoots innocent punks, in the real world, a lot of crimes go unsolved and police who don't follow procedure do far more harm than good.
We've created an incompetent police state, in which information about the 9/11 hijackers sits in a pile because we don't have Arab translators and in which, as noted here, local folks were well aware that the shooter was unbalanced, but the authorities did nothing.
I have said before, and so has Edward Snowden, that when you gather as much information as you can instead of carefully following the leads that matter, you end up with a haystack in which everything is hidden so that, like the Ark at the end of Raiders, it's buried more deeply in the bureaucracy than it ever was in the desert.
The kids knew, the school knew.
The gunshop owner might have known, if people with mental illness issues appeared on background checks, but those aforementioned NRA lackeys voted to make sure that didn't happen. (Go ahead: Check the votes in the House and Senate.)
Darrin Bell's cartoon makes a plea for both peace and education.
And we have little of either.
Every time this happens, we have anger directed at the Congressional enablers, and we have diagrams of endless circles of futility, and we have arguments over whether we're politicizing death, and then we have cartoons about all that and still nothing changes.
Let me suggest another approach:
The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution to preserve the rights of individuals and of the states from federal overreach. Most of what's in it codified principles that English citizens had been promised and generally got, but were never guaranteed.
Two, however, were added in response to the American experience of abuse by England's standing army, which seemed to exist mostly to impose the will of the King, and was not particularly gentle in doing so.
Accordingly they added an amendment preventing troops from marching into town and demanding food and lodging from local citizens. The Third Amendment is considered obsolete and often taught as if it were something of a joke.
But they also added an amendment to guarantee that state militias would not become, in effect, a federal army that would terrorize the states and their citizens, by placing control of the militia in the hands of the states.
While the Third Amendment proved unnecessary, however, the Second proved an actual hindrance: In the War of 1812, reliance on the militia proved deadly, as they proved badly trained, badly led, apt to refuse orders and reluctant to engage the enemy on the field of battle.
Following the war, the national defense was reorganized and a professional army took on the task of defense, leaving state militias to serve, in effect, as State Troopers and National Guards.
It's time we stop trying to nibble around the edges of a Supreme Court that has ruled that Madison wrote "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state" in order to set the mood, not as a statement of the Amendment's intent.
Instead, how about two new amendments?
One would codify that the Constitution does not begin "We the People, Corporations and Major Political Donors of the United States …"
The other would read "The second and third articles of amendment to the Constitution of the United States are hereby repealed."
Not to ban guns. I wrote yesterday about being on a rifle team, and I grew up around hunters. I like guns.
But let's update the Constitution and get our nation out of the hands of anarchists, oligarchs and those who condone mass murder in the name of what they call "Freedom."
Meanwhile, stay safe: Use your guns for hunting and target shooting.
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