Celebrate the International Day of the Girl!

I hope everyone will celebrate today empowering girls.

In celebration of women and girls pursuing their passions and fulfilling their potential, I offer this news item about a young woman who did so with her love of the sciences, creator of one of my favorite FB pages, I Fucking Lovr Science.  From NPR and Ozy

Elise Andrew
Elise Andrew has to put up with a lot of sh*t. And why? Because she’s young, she’s a woman, and she f*cking loves science. So much so that she created a Facebook page that now boasts an audience of over 7 million.
Andrew is the driving force behind the insanely popular “I Fucking Love Science” page. The 24-year old British blogger who now lives and works in Canada, created the page back in March 2012, while still at university. There was no big plan; she started the page “in a fit of boredom” as a collection of the cool science stories she had read. The next day, the page had 1,000 likes. Sixteen months later, that number has skyrocketed into the millions and there’s still really no plan. In an interview with ScienceWorld she explained her approach, “I just keep sharing things I think are amazing, and people keep agreeing with me.”
And fans think it’s pretty amazing, too. Taking a look through the timeline photos, you begin to realize just how popular IFLS posts are, with many images seeing “likes” and “shares” in the tens of thousands. Take, for example, a cute little representaton of hydrophobicity or how kittens illustrate concavity and convexity. The vast collection of cartoons, news snippets, photos and other tidbits all work to make science fun and humorous. Even the IFLS cover photo spells it out with a quote by Isaac Asimov: “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.’”
Andrew told World News Australia that her aim is to keep the site surprising and entertaining. “I try to keep it light,” she said. ”I try to keep it acceptable and interesting to everyone on all levels.”

Read the rest of the interview here.

Pop that pop corn, and pull up a comfy seat, the drama (and comedy) is about to begin

United we stand, against the extreme fringe right?

Harvey Dent aka Two Face

Harvey Dent aka fictional villain Two Face in the DC Comics Batman franchise, came into the graphic novel world late in 1942.

Charlie Dent, R-PA

Congressman Charlie Dent, Republican from Pennsylvania, was born in 1960 and entered the sometimes freakish world of the House in 2005.  He might be both freakish hero, and villain to some, in Congress.

What they have in common is uniting and combining two disparate and opposite sides, or in the case of Rep.Dent, attempting to do so.  Charlie Dent wants to elect the next speaker of the House as a bi-partisan effort, with the other moderate (presumably more establishment members of the GOP) members on the right.  This would effectively cut out the crazies and the tea partiers and the other extremists from power.  The radical right does not have the votes necessary to elect the speaker to replace Boehner, but neither does the more mainstream right.  Looking at the news feed over the past few hours, the prospect is upsetting the radical right extremist media.  That alone is more entertaining than any comic book.

But the less radical right could do so, overwhelmingly, IF THEY FORMED AN ALLIANCE with the Democrats.  Since that would mean the Dems in the alliance would likely outnumber the Republicans by a significant margin, it is distinctly possible that would return Pelosi to the speaker's chair, and 2nd in line behind the Vice President should the president die or become incapacitated.

Among other things it would do is to effectively END the highly obstructionist Hastert rule.  And THAT would open up, potentially, a backlog of legislation that would be brought forward for a vote, including most likely effective and comprehensive immigration reform and universal background check gun control legislation.  It would effectively end the witch-hunting committees like the Benghazi committee, and it would likely mean the end of attempts to repeal Obamacare.  The debt ceiling would be raised, and government shut downs would recede into memory.

And THAT in turn would turn the 2016 election cycle inside out and upside down, especially with those candidates for president who want to be the right wing nominee in 2016.  They have been falling over each other to go further right.   Off the top of my head I cannot begin to imagine what effect this could have on the Senate, but Mitch McConnell is no fan of the radicals, and would be badly hamstrung as majority leader of the Senate without the partnership of Boehner.  Turtle-man could still obstruct, but not nearly as effectively, and possibly not past the next year.  At the very least I would expect McConnell to work with such an alliance at least part of the time, while happily giving the bad finger to the extremists like Ted Cruz or even Rand Paul.

This may very well be just a pipe dream and wishful thinking on the part of Rep. Dent.  It may be too good to ever happen, and would certainly require the approval of the behind the scenes big money that controls the moderate puppets, those sometimes referred to as being in the pockets of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  But with the dances going on among those seeking Boehner's job...............it is a long shot, but not impossible.  It all hinges on the capacity for one of the two GOP factions to capitulate, compromise and cooperate.  They have shown a decreasing inclination to do that.

THIS may very well be why Boehner was laughing as he contemplated his exit at  the end of this month on Halloween.  Who knows? Truth and reality may turn out to be, if not stranger than all fiction, as strange as comic book fiction.  We can hope, for real governance for a change.

Gun Violence Humor

There is not much funny about gun violence or our failed gun culture in the USA. This is one of the exceptions to that rule.  From FB, never more apt than when new Star Wars episodes are on the cultural horizon.

Good question.

The answer is because they are not equally lethal, and only the firearm is designed to be a weapon, a very efficient weapon.  The other items are not.

It's not just those misspelled tea party signs: conservative supporters are cultivated for their ignorance

Behold the dumbing down of America in the pandering of the right wing politicians looking for support from those who are less likely to be educated, or critical thinkers.

The grammar and spelling checker App, Grammarly, was used to evaluate the writing abilities of candidates for president in the 2016 election cycle.  The differences it showed between supporters of Democratic candidates and Republican candidates was striking and pronounced.

Let me stress, this was a politically neutral computer program, which should minimize bias. Think Progress, generally viewed as left leaning, should have used the Grammarly app themselves, as they made an error it would have corrected, in the first sentence.

WHY does this matter, you may be musing? Is this mere unimportant opportunity for snark? It matters because we think, we reason, and we persuade primarily in language.  There are deeper implications.

From Think Progress:

Bernie Sanders supporters might think you’re great, but Donald Trump supporters think your [sic] an idiot.
Grammar-wise, that’s at least what might be derived from a new analysis released Tuesday by the proofreading app Grammarly. By analyzing the spelling and grammar of comments on each presidential candidate’s Facebook page, the analysis found that Republican supporters made mistakes at nearly twice the rate of Democratic supporters.
To get their results, Grammarly went to each candidate’s Facebook page, taking comments that were at least 15 words long and expressed either positive or neutral feelings about the candidate. Then, researchers randomly selected at least 180 of those comments to analyze for each candidate.

The analysis — intended by Grammarly to be “a lighthearted look at how well the 2016 presidential candidates’ supporters write when they’re debating online” — found that, for every 100 words written, an average Democratic candidate supporter made 4.2 mistakes, while an average Republican candidate backer made 8.7 errors. It also asserted that Democratic supporters have larger vocabularies, using 300 unique words for every 1,000 words they use, compared to Republicans who only use only 245 unique words for every 1,000.

Politico back in mid-August analyzed Donald Trump as speaking like a 3rd grader.

Donald Trump isn’t a simpleton, he just talks like one. If you were to market Donald Trump’s vocabulary as a toy, it would resemble a small box of Lincoln Logs. Trump resists multisyllabic words and complex, writerly sentence constructions when speaking extemporaneously in a debate, at a news conference or in an interview. He prefers to link short, blocky words into other short, blocky words to create short, blocky sentences that he then stacks into short, blocky paragraphs.

The end result of Trump’s word choice is less the stripped-down prose style of Ernest Hemingway than it is a spontaneous reinvention of Ogden’s Basic English, the pared-down lexicon of 850 words selected by early 20th century linguist/philosopher C.K. Ogden as the bedrock of a new world language. In the August 6th Republican candidates debate, Trump answered the moderators’ questions with linguistic austerity. Run through the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test, his text of responses score at the 4th-grade reading level. For Trump, that’s actually pretty advanced. All the other candidates rated higher, with Ted Cruz earning 9th-grade status. Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Scott Walker scored at the 8th-grade level. John Kasich, the next-lowest after Trump, got a 5th-grade score.

Trump’s low grade at the debates wasn’t a fluke. His comments from an August 11 news conference in Michigan earned only a 3rd-grade score.

Flattening the English language whenever he speaks without a script, Trump relies heavily on words such as “very” and “great,” and the pronouns “we” and “I,” which is his favorite word. As any news observer can observe, he lives to diminish his foes by calling them “losers,” “total losers,” “haters,” “dumb,” “idiots,” “morons,” “stupid,” “dummy” and “ disgusting.” He can’t open his mouth without bragging about getting the Clintons to attend his wedding, about how smart he is, the excellence of his real estate projects, the brilliance of his TV show, his generous donations to other political campaigns and so on. In a freakish way, Trump resembles that of Muhammad Ali at his prime—except the champ was always kidding (even when he was right) while Trump seems to believe his claims (and often is wrong). Or perhaps he is afflicted with binary vision disorder, which renders all within his eyeshot either great or rotten.

Politico goes on to note this is a feature, not a bug.  I would argue it works well for reaching his desired base audience.  Politico goes on to note that part of Trump's success in business comes from his capacity to deceive.  I think we can conclude that is part of the strategy of every right wing candidate running this election cycle.  I would argue that it demonstrates the same appeal to emotional thinking that characterizes propaganda, in contrast to an appeal to rational, factual and logical thought.

I would go further and argue that this presents a distinct challenge to the function of representative government, when we let the emotional and ignorant drive the bus of government.  We do not function well as a nation when those who are anti-factual education, anti-intellectual achievement, and especially anti-science are setting the policies and funding priorities, and proposing failed ideology or superstitious religion as solutions to very real problems.

Darn! We MISSED IT! Banned Book week was Sept. 27 to Oct. 3!

My bad, I try to mark this week every year.  But don't worry - we can celebrate banned books any time, all year long.  Celebrate today, and often!

From the Banned Books Week website:

Banned Books Week is the national book community's annual celebration of the freedom to read. Hundreds of libraries and bookstores around the country draw attention to the problem of censorship by mounting displays of challenged books and hosting a variety of events. The 2015 celebration will be held September 27-October 3.

Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. More than 11,300 books have been challenged since 1982 according to the American Library Association. There were 311 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom in 2014, and many more go unreported. The 10 most challenged titles of 2014 were:

1)     The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

Reasons: anti-family, cultural insensitivity, drugs/alcohol/smoking, gambling, offensive language, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group, violence. Additional reasons: “depictions of bullying”

2)      Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi

Reasons: gambling, offensive language, political viewpoint. Additional reasons: “politically, racially, and socially offensive,” “graphic depictions”

3)      And Tango Makes Three, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell

Reasons: Anti-family, homosexuality, political viewpoint, religious viewpoint, unsuited for age group. Additional reasons: “promotes the homosexual agenda”

4)      The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

Reasons: Sexually explicit, unsuited for age group. Additional reasons: “contains controversial issues”

5)      It’s Perfectly Normal, by Robie Harris

Reasons: Nudity, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group. Additional reasons: “alleges it child pornography”

6)      Saga, by Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Reasons: Anti-Family, nudity, offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited for age group. Additional reasons:

7)      The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

Reasons: Offensive language, unsuited to age group, violence

8)      The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

Reasons: drugs/alcohol/smoking, homosexuality, offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group. Additional reasons: “date rape and masturbation”

9)      A Stolen Life, Jaycee Dugard

Reasons: drugs/alcohol/smoking, offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited for age group

10)  Drama, by Raina Telgemeier

Reasons: sexually explicit

More information on banned and challenged books is available on the American Library Association website.

More GOP hypocrisy

Just DO IT

Gun Laws Are Both Constitutional And Will Help

Over the weekend, I saw several commentators who essentially argued that no laws which will help stop mass killings are possible because they are either too weak or will run afoul of the Constitution.  These commenters included one from the NRA and another from the National Review (an ultra-conservative magazine). 

They further argued (the same old meme) that criminals will "still get guns" and so any laws which restrict access to firearms are pointless and maybe even make the situation worse because they limit what "law abiding" people may have while not limiting criminals.

There are so many holes in these statements it is hard to know where to begin and equally hard to be concise, but I'll give it a try.

First, any law which limits the ammunition capacity and cyclic rate (rate of fire) of firearms will help and not meaningfully limit the ability of civilians to defend themselves.  I have argued time and again with conservatives on this point and not one of them disagrees that a 12 gauge shotgun or higher caliber revolver is insufficient for self-defense in 99.9999% of all cases.  The argument that the .00001% is some justification for access to firearms which otherwise help to cause needless deaths, is clearly NOT justification.  The purpose of high cyclic and high capacity weapons is ONE thing only, to kill multiple humans quickly, and nothing else.  Further, the US Supreme Court has made it very clear that limitations like banning weapons with a capacity of more than 7 rounds which are gas or spring fed and require no other action than pulling the trigger to fire another round is ENTIRELY permissible under both the Heller and McDonald decisions.  Making such a limitation does not imperil safety, and probably improves it as Police Departments feel more able to de-escalate the kinds of weapons they carry as the firepower of the civilian populace decreases.

Second, making it illegal to sell firearms to ANYONE and ANYPLACE without a background check is also Constitutional, very clearly since background checks have already passed muster in the courts.  Doing so would make the purchase of large numbers of firearms by "straw buyers", straw buyers who then SUPPLY the criminals, very much harder to do without detection.  So, it would likely make the access to high firepower weapons, and weapons in general, for criminals, more difficult.  Not impossible, but just like banning pseudo-ephedrine hurt access for meth amphetamine producers, it would hurt their access without in any way limiting the access by "law abiding" citizens to firearms.

Last, we MUST improve our reporting to a background database and use that database more broadly than is currently used.  It must include the ability to share data between policing agencies, and must include the ability to limit access to those who are judged mentally ill, have a restraining order against them and include the obligation to surrender weapons if deemed such.  Again, these are clearly Constitutional as they've passed muster and they will help because limiting access to firearms AND limiting the firearms they may possess may not stop everyone, but it almost certainly will decrease the potential number of fatalities if people have to reload more often, have to actuate the weapon more slowly, and potentially at least, aren't available to those who are most likely to strike out at those around them.

One post script, the other thing the right-wing gun addicts need to understand.  It is NOT the gang members who are the most dangerous, commit the most murders and otherwise use guns more often to harm so many, it is far more often the supposed "law abiding" husbands who kill their wives, or wives who kill their husbands, or students who kill their peers.  Of the 17k murders by firearms in the US per year, roughly 1000 are gang killings, meaning 16000 are others.  Those others ALSO thought they were "better" than the rest, wouldn't misuse their weapon, etc.. In short, it is THEY (YOU) who are the greatest threat to the wider community, at least where firearms are concerned and so you should not be above the same kind of sane and reasonable limits as you would expect for the rest of society, whether they be the mentally ill or the hardened criminal.  If you are judged a danger, you shouldn't be allowed firearms and you have NO reasonable need for a 5.56 or 7.62mm semi-auto rifle to lay by your bedside for you to defend yourself.  The truth is you're FAR more likely to use your "gun" to kill your family than anyone else but that right (to own and bear) has been affirmed, so it cannot be taken away.  What can be limited is the level of weapon you actually need to (supposedly) "defend" your home/family/self or what you need to hunt.  Those restrictions are legal, constitutional, valid and WILL work.  Changing the debate to what criminals will get doesn't address these reasonable limitations and are little different than ad hominem attacks on those who propose such reasonable limits.  You many not LIKE the limits, but that doesn't mean they won't work nor that they will fail to be Constitutional.

A few graphics that underline the point.  Credit for graphics to Vox, Gun Violence Statistics.


Not all parts of the US have an equal exposure to gun violence, which - logically - correlates to guns owned.  This demonstrates that more guns DO NOT keep us safer, more guns expose us to more gun violence.

Truth in Sarcasm

OF course, in the graphic below, all other countries, by which the writer appears to mean developed countries, have not eliminated mental illness.  But they have largely eliminated mass shootings. Most mass shootings are NOT the result of mental illness, such as schizophrenia, where an individual lacks the capacity to distinguish not only right from wrong, but reality from delusions.

WHAT those other countries do NOT have is our sick, failed gun culture which exalts individual capacities for violence.

WHAT those other countries do NOT have is the NRA, promoting obsessive single issue voting through fear mongering lies and propaganda manipulation.  No one in government or gun control advocacy is "coming for your guns"; they (the government, in the form of Republicans and Tea Partiers) ARE, as has been wryly observed, trying to take away your health insurance.

WHAT those other countries do NOT have is the sheer quantity of guns in private hands.  There is a clear correlation to gun violence and the number of guns, by state.

WHAT those other countries do NOT have is a gun lobby contributing to significant corruption and cowardice in government.

WHAT other countries DO have that helps drastically reduce mass shooting, is a combination of guaranteed health care, including for mental health, and significantly stricter and more effective gun control.

WE could have both of those, but conservatives obstruct and oppose it.  They would rather have wealth and income inequality by serving corrupt big money interests, not the citizens of this country.
The right wing politicians don't care if we citizens are killed or injured in large numbers, or in smaller number individual shootings, especially those which are murder suicides, seen daily across the country.  The party signified by the color red doesn't care if you or those you care about bleed, so long as they cash in on their nice green money.  The right wing voters believe they will somehow avoid, individually, any threat to their safety by carrying a gun.  Evidence does not support that emotional thinking.  Right wing voters believe they will survive the lack of a comprehensive medical policy by luck, and maybe prayer, and a false notion that, somehow, makes them more free.  That doesn't appear to be successful either, based on the number of people in this country bankrupted, regardless of religious belief or political affiliation.

Conservative ideology is a failure which is literally killing people in this country, by violence and by illness that is preventable.

Oregon Shooter DID NOT target Christians

The conservative guns-and-Bibles pushers are LIARS. That explicitly and emphatically includes the GOP candidates who are exploiting the Oregon shooting for political gain.

They make money and gain influence by peddling false claims about tragedies.  They make claims from un-verified reports; in the case of Oregon, the unverified reports about targeting Christians which law enforcement conspicuously would not validate or confirm.  The guns-and-Bibles pushers then CONTINUE to push their inaccurate but scary narrative, even after the facts are clear their statements and positions are false.  Follow the money; they do this because there is bloody $$$ in it for them, from the religious right and from the gun promoters.

To update that old line "there's money in them thar hills!", there is money in those 'shills'.  From dictionary.com:

Shill, noun:a person who poses as a customer in order to decoy others into participating, as at a gambling house, auction, confidence game, etc.

The Oregon shooter, like the Columbine shooters he emulated, did not target people for their religion, much less for being Christian.

From the Inquisitr:

Even initial reports that Mercer was targeting Christians now appear to be incorrect. Initial reports indicated that he asked victims if they were Christian, and shot them in the head if they answered yes.
But new reports from witnesses say that Mercer did ask questions about religion, but it did not appear to be a motivating factor in who he shot and who he did not.
“‘Do you have a God? Are you Christian? Do you have a religion?’ It was more so saying, ‘You’re going to be meeting your maker. This won’t hurt very long.’ Then he would shoot them,” said Stephanie Salas, whose son, Rand McGowan, was wounded in the attack, in an interview with the Associated Press.

We saw something similar in the Columbine mass shooting back in 1999.  There were false claims made then about religious persecution in the targeting of victims.  And it is likely from the information known to date that the Oregon shooter, who had a sick interest in becoming famous (or more precisely notorious and infamous) like those other shooters, was to some degree emulating the Columbine shooters.

This shooter - and I won't use his name, precisely to deny him that notoriety, was into Goth.  The Columbine shooters were erroneously widely reported to be into Goth.  The Columbine shooters were, again erroneously, widely reputed to be outcasts, without friends, part of the 'trench coat mafia'.  And the Columbine shooters (who were really trying more to be bombers) were widely reported to have targeted certain groups, notably jocks, minorities, and Christians. 

Watch the news coverage of the Oregon shooter unfold.  Then take a look at his proto-type mass shooting, Columbine.  The parallels are chillingly clear that the Oregon shooter was emulating the myths and the actual behavior of the Columbine mass shooting in a number of ways.

From the most definitive research on Columbine, Dave Cullen's book Columbine, via the article 7 Myths about Columbine:

Myth #3: The Columbine killers targeted certain kinds of students.
Truth: Although initial news reports claimed the Columbine killers had targeted minorities, jocks, and Christians, the killing was indiscriminate. Their initial plan was to blow up hundreds of students in the cafeteria. When the bombs failed to go off, they killed students randomly. Interestingly enough, Eric’s friends described him as a sports enthusiast, and two of his best friends were Asian and African American.

Myth #6: Cassie Bernall was martyred for her faith in God.
Truth: According to the eyewitness under the table with her, Cassie was shot when Eric poked his shotgun under the table and said, “Peekaboo.” The 911 tape verifies this testimony.
The martyr story arose from the testimony from another student in the library, Craig Scott (brother to victim, Rachel Scott), who recounted a conversation that took place across the room. Valeen Schnurr was the one who actually professed her faith in God, and this took place after she was shot. As she lay bleeding, she prayed, “Oh my God, don’t let me die.” Dylan turned around and asked her, “God? Do you believe in God?” Valeen said, “Yes, I believe in God.” When the killer asked why, she replied, “Because it’s how my parents raised me.”

We also heard, about Columbine, that those two mass shooters would have been stopped if someone had a gun.  There were two armed cops who were unsuccessful in stopping those two shooters.  Likewise, there was a security guard, and numerous armed students, mostly trained veterans, on the Oregon campus - it was NOT a gun free zone - and they did NOTHING to prevent the tragedy from taking place.  In fact, no civilian with a gun has EVER prevented or stopped a mass shooting in the United States, even when on the scene.

Conservatives like to play the victim card, claiming to be victims when they are not. It is one of the more annoying aspects of conservatives. The religious right is particularly prone to making these false claims. Pro-gun advocates likewise push the notion they could be attacked at any moment, by fill-in-the-blank adversaries, and they likewise push the factually faulty notion that if they have their gun(s) with them they will shoot the bad guy dead, the good-guy-with-a-gun fallacy.  All of which sells more guns to stupid people who are not fact or reason based, the goal of the NRA.  Because gun sales need two things, a ginned-up threat and the myth that another gun in circulation in the hands of a civilian carrier is the solution.

Pro-gun candidate Ben Carson is trying to gin up his support from the religious right based on the false initial claims that Christians were targeted in the Oregon shooting.  God-and-Guns scam artist Mike Huckster-bee, promoter of fake diabetes treatments to desperate sick people for cash, and Bible-thumping pro-gunner, is also trying to gain political advantage from the tragedy.  We also see Donald Trump doing the same, with a less explicitly religious persecution angle.  And we have the Lt. Gov. of Tennessee claiming that Christians should be arming themselves because they are a persecuted minority - both factually false claims.

Whether it is claiming they're some kind of martyr if you don't wish them Merry Christmas, to the false claims they were targeted in the latest mass shooting -- by a self-proclaimed fellow conservative -- they try to spin gain, including political capital from these false victim claims.  Pushing the "we are victims" at every opportunity, no matter how factually false is also part of the right wing propaganda that keeps the right wing, especially the radical and extremist right, feeling angry and agitated. That gets unqualified crooked con artists elected, and it sells a lot of guns.

It does not get us good governance or greater safety.  It is based on lies and corrupt money, corrupt power.  Only the foolish and the willfully ignorant should support this effort to propagandize, manipulate, and gain advantage from these efforts to push an us vs. them national mentality of fear and divisiveness.  They lie, they profit, they gain advantage and power.  DON'T LET THEM. They will make you their victims, not the victims of some shooter who should never have had access to legal guns in the first place, much less 14 of them (yes, they found another one).

Dick shooters, Dick NRA, Dick GOP

We have too many guns, too many shootings, too damn much money corrupting our government preventing action and too damn much right wing propaganda lying and distorting the discussion.  The President tells it straight, and the country needs to listen: we need to restrict guns better than we are doing.  It is time for government regulation to save us from crazies, extremists, racists, and the armed religious right.

According to the Freethinker - to which we link on our bog roll -

The Guardian reports that the father of Anastasia Boylan, 18, who was one of those injured, said that Mercer started asking people one by one what their religion was.

‘Are you a Christian?’ he would ask them, and ‘if you are a Christian then stand up’ and they would stand up. He’d say ‘because you are a Christian you’re going to see God in about one second’ and then he shot and killed them. And he kept going down the line doing this to people.

In this Guardian report, Mercer described himself on an on-line dating site as as  a 26-year-old, mixed-race “man looking for a woman”. He said he was “not religious, but spiritual”, was a “teetotaler” living with his parents and was a conservative Republican.

When 3 people shoot themselves in their shorts in one week, it should be obvious we have a problem.  It should be obvious guns are not making us free or safe, so many guns are making us numb and dumb, hurt and dead.

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You have to appreciate the wit of the internet sometimes

Yup - former democrat and too-liberal-for-21st-century-conservatives, right wing secular political saint, Ronnie Ray-gun

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