You are a right wing nut job who should not be taken seriously or given credence, especially when you assert that separation of church and state is responsible for the shooting in Connecticut. If the presence of God in an academic setting were a prevention of mass shootings, we would not have had the Oikos Christian College mass shooting earlier this year.
A bad person with guns is responsible for the shooting in Connecticut, not atheists or agnostics. Guns which make available the capacity to kill large numbers of people in a matter of minutes are at the center of the problem. Without that capacity you might have unpleasant people, angry people, crazy people; but UNTIL AND UNLESS they get their hands on the means to use lethal violence, they are unable to kill people because of it. Religious people kill just as often, if not more often than non-religious people. The notion that putting God in schools will prevent that is ridiculous and offensive. The notion that we took God out of school, that God was ever IN American schools is not factually accurate either.
Looking around the globe in our modern era, it is evident that the greatest cause of death is in fact religion driven. Looking across the span of history one of if not THE greatest causes of people killing other people is religion driven, not the absence of religion.
Your words, Mike Huckabee, are one more example of the right wing nut smug, self-satisfied notion that if you could just compel people to be like you, to do things your way, every thing would be ok. That has not been true of any aspect of right wing ideology, including religion. You, Mike Huckabee, are promoting a point of view that is a fraud, a sanctimonious smug wrongly self-righteous do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do fraud of failed ideas and failed ideology. Huckabee's version of Christianity is particularly notorious for promoting hate, ignorance and intolerance, NONE of which are genuine Christian values. As a southern baptist minister, you follow in the footsteps of baptists who preached the biblical basis for slavery - and at the time, the Baptists were just as adamant that they had a monopoly on the right way to think and act, pro-slavery. The southern baptists also advocate for the disgraced failure and abuse that is homosexual 'reparative therapy', that has included torture by strong electrical shock to the genitalia, and by psychological abuse. The southern baptist denomination has been resistant to implementing protections against child sexual abuse, including sexual predators in its clergy, Apparently smug clergy like Huckabee believe God is sufficient to deter that, when clearly that has not been true. And the southern baptists have been part of the 'spare the rod, spoil the child' belief system that has resulted in significant problems with child abuse through beatings, although the more extreme the conservative fundamentalism, the greater the problem with child neglect, abuse and even child deaths from extreme discipline. This is not a Christianity of love, this is a Christianity of coercion and forcible conformity, bigotry, intolerance and even violence.
More than that, the sect of Baptists of which Huckabee is an ordained minister advocates for separation of church and state in their 'BF&M', Baptist Faith and Message.
You know what we didn't have until relatively recently, looking at the scope of our nation's history, Mike? We didn't have the prevalence of guns. Growing up, my elementary school was not locked during the day. People who had business in the school could come and go freely, with a sign directing them to go to the office. But if a parent came to pick up a kid who was sick, they just went directly to the office of the school nurse, or if they were bringing something their kid forgot, they went to the classroom. People didn't have to be buzzed in through locked security doors. Kids went outside with their classes for gym and for recess, and then back in again.
Some of my friends when I was growing up had parents who were hunters; those guns were kept VERY secure. They were not assault style weapons, with large capacity magazines and huge accumulations of ammo. Handguns were uncommon. Mass shootings were uncommon. School gun incidents were unheard of, and there were no kindergarten massacres.
Mike Huckabee is a cheap shill and apologist for the NRA. Apparently he forgot about GOD, when he made this comment while addressing the NRA, back in 2008 (from Reuters) :
"That was Barack Obama. He just tripped off a chair. He was getting ready to speak and somebody aimed a gun at him, and he dove for the floor," Huckabee told the NRA convention in Louisville, Kentucky, in comments that aired on CNN.
Democratic front-runner Obama, who if elected in November would be the first black U.S. president, was campaigning in South Dakota on Friday as he tried to wrap up the party's nomination.
The memory of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King 40 years ago, and the risks Obama could face in his run for the presidency, have been a concern of many voters during this presidential campaign.
At Obama's request the U.S. Secret Service began protecting him in May 2007, 18 months before the general election and the earliest a presidential candidate has received protection.
Wow, if that is Mike Huckabee's idea of humor, maybe he needs to spend less time running his mouth and a whole lot more time on his knees begging God for wisdom and better taste, and a greater love for truth and fact and knowledge.
As noted in Mother Jones:
In just the past four years, the NRA has helped pass weaker gun restrictions in 37 states, making the weapons easier to own, carry and conceal. At the same time, the number of mass shootings has increased in America.
The notion that more guns make us safer is a myth, a fantasy they would be heroes in a crisis that gun carriers hold in a death grip. The reality is quite different. We are not safer, and despite the increase in people carrying guns, no one with a gun has stopped any of these shootings, while these shootings have increased, not decreased.
Also from Mother Jones which appears to have been updated today:
In
the fierce debate that always follows the latest mass shooting, it's an
argument you hear frequently from gun rights promoters: If only more
people were armed, there would be a better chance of stopping these
terrible events. This has plausibility problems—what are the odds that,
say, a moviegoer with a pack of Twizzlers in one pocket and a Glock in
the other would be mentally prepared, properly positioned, and skilled
enough to take out a body-armored assailant in a smoke- and panic-filled
theater? But whether you believe that would happen is ultimately a
matter of theory and speculation. Instead, let's look at some facts
gathered in a two-month investigation by Mother Jones.
In the wake of the slaughters this summer at a Colorado movie theater and a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, we set out to track mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years. We identified and analyzed 61 of them, and one striking pattern in the data is this: In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun. Moreover, we found that the rate of mass shootings has increased in recent years—at a time when America has been flooded with millions of additional firearms and a barrage of new laws has made it easier than ever to carry them in public. And in recent rampages in which armed civilians attempted to intervene, they not only failed to stop the shooter but also were gravely wounded or killed.
America has long been heavily armed relative to other societies, and our arsenal keeps growing. A precise count isn't possible because most guns in the United States aren't registered and the government has scant ability to track them, thanks to a legislative landscape shaped by powerful pro-gun groups such as the National Rifle Association. But through a combination of national surveys and manufacturing and sales data, we know that the increase in firearms has far outpaced population growth. In 1995 there were an estimated 200 million guns in private hands. Today, there are around 300 million—about a 50 percent jump. The US population, now over 314 million, grew by about 20 percent in that period. At this rate, there will be a gun for every man, woman, and child before the decade ends.
Gun friendly states allow guns in schools. Unfortunately, none of the states that have done that in the past were very good academically. Lets keep guns and Mike Huckabee's perverse notion of God out of our schools, and instead let us promote good education, not tea party education of bad science, false history, failed economic theory, and puritan censored literature.
Gun control works. Countries that have effective restriction of gun ownerships are just as free or more free than the United States. What those gun restrictive countries don't have is the levels of gun violence that afflict this country. States within the United States that have effective and more restrictive gun control have less gun violence and deaths. We don't need more God, we need far fewer guns, and far fewer right wing hacks like Huckabee given credence or a platform for his ugly beliefs.
A bad person with guns is responsible for the shooting in Connecticut, not atheists or agnostics. Guns which make available the capacity to kill large numbers of people in a matter of minutes are at the center of the problem. Without that capacity you might have unpleasant people, angry people, crazy people; but UNTIL AND UNLESS they get their hands on the means to use lethal violence, they are unable to kill people because of it. Religious people kill just as often, if not more often than non-religious people. The notion that putting God in schools will prevent that is ridiculous and offensive. The notion that we took God out of school, that God was ever IN American schools is not factually accurate either.
Looking around the globe in our modern era, it is evident that the greatest cause of death is in fact religion driven. Looking across the span of history one of if not THE greatest causes of people killing other people is religion driven, not the absence of religion.
Your words, Mike Huckabee, are one more example of the right wing nut smug, self-satisfied notion that if you could just compel people to be like you, to do things your way, every thing would be ok. That has not been true of any aspect of right wing ideology, including religion. You, Mike Huckabee, are promoting a point of view that is a fraud, a sanctimonious smug wrongly self-righteous do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do fraud of failed ideas and failed ideology. Huckabee's version of Christianity is particularly notorious for promoting hate, ignorance and intolerance, NONE of which are genuine Christian values. As a southern baptist minister, you follow in the footsteps of baptists who preached the biblical basis for slavery - and at the time, the Baptists were just as adamant that they had a monopoly on the right way to think and act, pro-slavery. The southern baptists also advocate for the disgraced failure and abuse that is homosexual 'reparative therapy', that has included torture by strong electrical shock to the genitalia, and by psychological abuse. The southern baptist denomination has been resistant to implementing protections against child sexual abuse, including sexual predators in its clergy, Apparently smug clergy like Huckabee believe God is sufficient to deter that, when clearly that has not been true. And the southern baptists have been part of the 'spare the rod, spoil the child' belief system that has resulted in significant problems with child abuse through beatings, although the more extreme the conservative fundamentalism, the greater the problem with child neglect, abuse and even child deaths from extreme discipline. This is not a Christianity of love, this is a Christianity of coercion and forcible conformity, bigotry, intolerance and even violence.
More than that, the sect of Baptists of which Huckabee is an ordained minister advocates for separation of church and state in their 'BF&M', Baptist Faith and Message.
You know what we didn't have until relatively recently, looking at the scope of our nation's history, Mike? We didn't have the prevalence of guns. Growing up, my elementary school was not locked during the day. People who had business in the school could come and go freely, with a sign directing them to go to the office. But if a parent came to pick up a kid who was sick, they just went directly to the office of the school nurse, or if they were bringing something their kid forgot, they went to the classroom. People didn't have to be buzzed in through locked security doors. Kids went outside with their classes for gym and for recess, and then back in again.
Some of my friends when I was growing up had parents who were hunters; those guns were kept VERY secure. They were not assault style weapons, with large capacity magazines and huge accumulations of ammo. Handguns were uncommon. Mass shootings were uncommon. School gun incidents were unheard of, and there were no kindergarten massacres.
Mike Huckabee is a cheap shill and apologist for the NRA. Apparently he forgot about GOD, when he made this comment while addressing the NRA, back in 2008 (from Reuters) :
Huckabee jokes to NRA of gun aimed at Obama
(Reuters) - Former Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee, interrupted on Friday by a loud crash as he spoke to the National Rifle Association, joked that the noise was Democratic candidate Barack Obama falling off a chair as he dodged a gun aimed at him.
"That was Barack Obama. He just tripped off a chair. He was getting ready to speak and somebody aimed a gun at him, and he dove for the floor," Huckabee told the NRA convention in Louisville, Kentucky, in comments that aired on CNN.
Democratic front-runner Obama, who if elected in November would be the first black U.S. president, was campaigning in South Dakota on Friday as he tried to wrap up the party's nomination.
The memory of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King 40 years ago, and the risks Obama could face in his run for the presidency, have been a concern of many voters during this presidential campaign.
At Obama's request the U.S. Secret Service began protecting him in May 2007, 18 months before the general election and the earliest a presidential candidate has received protection.
Wow, if that is Mike Huckabee's idea of humor, maybe he needs to spend less time running his mouth and a whole lot more time on his knees begging God for wisdom and better taste, and a greater love for truth and fact and knowledge.
As noted in Mother Jones:
In just the past four years, the NRA has helped pass weaker gun restrictions in 37 states, making the weapons easier to own, carry and conceal. At the same time, the number of mass shootings has increased in America.
The notion that more guns make us safer is a myth, a fantasy they would be heroes in a crisis that gun carriers hold in a death grip. The reality is quite different. We are not safer, and despite the increase in people carrying guns, no one with a gun has stopped any of these shootings, while these shootings have increased, not decreased.
Also from Mother Jones which appears to have been updated today:
More Guns, More Mass Shootings—Coincidence?
America now has 300 million firearms, a barrage of NRA-backed gun laws—and record casualties from mass killers.
| Wed Sep. 26, 2012 2:00 AM PDT
In the wake of the slaughters this summer at a Colorado movie theater and a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, we set out to track mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years. We identified and analyzed 61 of them, and one striking pattern in the data is this: In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun. Moreover, we found that the rate of mass shootings has increased in recent years—at a time when America has been flooded with millions of additional firearms and a barrage of new laws has made it easier than ever to carry them in public. And in recent rampages in which armed civilians attempted to intervene, they not only failed to stop the shooter but also were gravely wounded or killed.
America has long been heavily armed relative to other societies, and our arsenal keeps growing. A precise count isn't possible because most guns in the United States aren't registered and the government has scant ability to track them, thanks to a legislative landscape shaped by powerful pro-gun groups such as the National Rifle Association. But through a combination of national surveys and manufacturing and sales data, we know that the increase in firearms has far outpaced population growth. In 1995 there were an estimated 200 million guns in private hands. Today, there are around 300 million—about a 50 percent jump. The US population, now over 314 million, grew by about 20 percent in that period. At this rate, there will be a gun for every man, woman, and child before the decade ends.
There
is no evidence indicating that arming Americans further will help
prevent mass shootings or reduce the carnage, says Dr. Stephen
Hargarten, a leading expert on emergency medicine and gun violence at
the Medical College of Wisconsin. To the contrary, there appears to be a
relationship between the proliferation of firearms and a rise in mass
shootings: By our count, there have been two per year on average since
1982. Yet 24 of the 61 cases we examined have occurred since 2006. This
year alone there have already been six mass shootings—and a record number of casualties, with 110 people injured and killed.
Armed
civilians attempting to intervene are actually more likely to increase
the bloodshed, says Hargarten, "given that civilian shooters are less
likely to hit their targets than police in these circumstances." A
chaotic scene in August at the Empire State Building put this starkly
into perspective when New York City police officers confronting a gunman
wounded nine innocent bystanders.Gun friendly states allow guns in schools. Unfortunately, none of the states that have done that in the past were very good academically. Lets keep guns and Mike Huckabee's perverse notion of God out of our schools, and instead let us promote good education, not tea party education of bad science, false history, failed economic theory, and puritan censored literature.
Gun control works. Countries that have effective restriction of gun ownerships are just as free or more free than the United States. What those gun restrictive countries don't have is the levels of gun violence that afflict this country. States within the United States that have effective and more restrictive gun control have less gun violence and deaths. We don't need more God, we need far fewer guns, and far fewer right wing hacks like Huckabee given credence or a platform for his ugly beliefs.
