Gun Laws and Sales Take Unique Twists.

     If there is any logic to American gun laws, past and present, I’d love to hear it.

     The irony and flexibility between different states and communities provide both a progressive and paranoid picture. The United States Senate panel on gun control is considering specific steps forward this week.

     State officials may be battling the federal government soon because the conflicts and confusion provide for an enormous undertaking for a comprehensive plan. It’s impossible.

     But the one thing that isn’t complicated is the enhancement of state revenues through gun sales. State officials are lining up to find a “sin tax” revenue source, and they may have found the butter for their bread. Maryland officials want a 50 percent ammunition tax and Massachusetts wants to impose a 25 percent sales tax on all gun purchases. Nevada officials are considering a $25 tax per gun sale, which would include all gun shows in Las Vegas.

     And the most persistent legislation is coming out of California. House of Representatives member Linda Sanchez, D-California, wants a 10 percent tax on all concealable weapons purchased in the United States to go toward a federal buyback program to get guns off the streets. Meanwhile, the state legislature in California is considering a 5 percent tax on every bullet sold in the state towards a mental health screening program for children.

      In Congress, the Senate legislature would target a new ban on semi-automatic weapons modeled after military assault rifles. It would consider imposing the 1996 ban on all assault weapons that expired a decade later.

     But would it make a real difference in America’s fight against violence?

     Experts say there are already somewhere between 280 million and 320 million guns in the country today. Director of gun policy and research for the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Jon Vernick says research doesn’t find any evidence gun buyback programs reduce crime.

     The powerful National Rifle Association would have you believe we need more guns in America to fight criminals. The NRA released figures recently showing more than 500,000 new members have signed up since the 26 educators and children were shot to death at an elementary school massacre by a lone gunman last December in Newtown, Connecticut.

     The General Social Survey at the University of Chicago says gun ownership in households has actually declined steadily over the past four decades. The survey also says household gun ownership rates have declined from 50 percent in the 1970s to about 35 percent since the year 2000. The national survey is the only one of its kind and is funded by the National Science Foundation.

     But those figures differ with FBI statistics as well as Gallup Research Surveys which show nearly half the households in America have a firearm.

     The Second Amendment of the Constitution allows for the right of the people to keep and bear arms, and that right shall not be infringed.

     To what logic that freedom is allowed is a good question.

     Two small communities in Georgia and Maine have taken a unique but perhaps worrisome approach to the growing gun violence dilemma.

     The City Council of Nelson, Ga., has written a Family Protection Ordinance to be considered in April.

      The two-paragraph proposal reads, "In order to provide for the emergency management of the city, and further, in order to provide for and protect the safety, security, and general welfare of the city and its inhabitants, every head of household residing in the city limits is required to maintain a firearm, together with ammunition therefore."

     As explained by city officials, the rule would mirror one passed in nearby Kennesaw back in 1982. It would mandate gun ownership in every household. It is also supported by the police chief of Nelson, a city of just 1,300 residents, who has offered free gun safety classes and gun checks, if the law passes.

     “It’s a great idea,’’ said Police Chief Heath Mitchell. “Obviously, if you cannot afford it, don’t believe in it, or are a convicted felon or are handicapped, you are exempt from the mandate.”

     Nelson residents believe it is a great deterrent from crime. They believe criminals will bypass their small town just north of Atlanta, if the bad guys “don’t know what’s on the other side of the front door of the house.”

     Despite the national and international media attention the city of Nelson has received with the proposal, it turns out it isn’t that unique. Similar laws have been passed in Utah, Minnesota, and Idaho since 2000, and a small town in Maine is also currently considering such a proposal. Monday the town of Byron, Maine unanimously rejected a proposal to require every household to own a firearm, but city officials in the 140-resident town plan to bring the issue up again next month.

     Colorado state officials are barking for stricter gun laws. That state has seen two of the worst mass murders in recent American history. Last July, a lone gunman with an assault rifle stormed into a theatre and killed 12 people and injured 58 others in Aurora.

     In 1999, two students shot and killed 13 and wounded 23 others during the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton.

     Yet, just south of Colorado in Arizona, state officials passed a 2009 law that allows residents to enter bars with loaded firearms. Tucson officials recently took in 200 guns in a citywide buyback program with the idea of destroying those guns. State officials are discussing a law that would mandate any guns received in such buyback programs be resold.

     As if we don’t have enough guns without the sale one more in America. The Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics show there are 310 million guns in America which include 114 million handguns, 110 rifles, and 86 million shotguns. After nearly 17 million background checks since 1998, the FBI has denied about 900,000 individual gun sales. In the past year, the FBI denied 7,879 sales due to mental health issues.

     But firearm sales are a $5 billion annual industry in America, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. And that insures America continues its prominence as the most gun violent country per capita in the world.

Manhunt Adds to America's Gun War.

     Are Americans frustrated enough with the wave of recent mass murders and mental health dramas to act?

     Are we willing to sit down and resolve the very uncivil issues destroying our communities and this country, or are we merely clicking the control button toward the next television episode?

     It may be time for all of us to make that decision.

     The largest manhunt on the west coast continues today. This one defies logic but could explode into epic proportions. The Los Angeles Police Department have called upon more than 100 law enforcement officials to canvas Southern California and neighboring Nevada to find one of their own.

     Former LAPD and Navy Lieutenant Jordan Dorner has killed two people Sunday and shot three LAPD officers on Thursday, killing one, before vanishing into the mountains. After literally igniting a raging fire of terror in the greater LA area and beyond, he remains at large.

     Considered deranged and dangerous with a 6,000-word “manifesto” to his credit, Dorner has hit the Los Angeles area so hard, his own former bosses are holding press conferences underground in heavily secured buildings.

     It may surprise you to learn more cops committed suicide in 2012 than were gunned down by fugitives. It might not surprise you Dorner, who was fired by the LAPD in 2008 and possesses vast military and weaponry skills, is considered a one-man army.

     The real question is whether this is the start of something worse in society. Survivalists taking on the very community they either serve or reside in. More guns, more anger, more mental health issues, and even support from the area’s disaffected.

     “We look at the police differently from the way you look at police in your community,” Hodari Sabadu, a 56 year-old South Central Los Angeles resident told the New York Times.

     “In your community, the police is there to protect and serve. In my community, the police are there to harass and insult and to kill if they get a chance.”

     There are more than 100 law enforcement agents, including SWAT, along with some of the most sophisticated weaponry and surveillance in the United States trying to track Dorner down. And folks, that effort in itself, day by day, costs a lot of money, man-hours, and worry.

     People were outraged when a single gunman killed 20 children and six adults in the Newtown massacre in December.

     That’s old news.

     This latest western madman is creating a dire frenzy throughout the third largest police force in the nation and, to date, law enforcement officials have been unable to capture him.

     Now that is a terrorist by every definition.

     He says in his manifesto he plans to strike again. The professionals hunting him say he has the equipment to start a small war.

     When will Americans wise up and realize we are at war? We are at war with mental health issues, poverty, unemployment, and immigration within our own communities. We are at war with our neighbors who we believe will stay across the street forever. We are at war with the very people who are assigned to protect us. We are at war with our youth who do not have the proper tools or opportunities to deal with the future.

     Will new gun laws be a start toward ending the day by day violence in America?

     A recent Quinnipiac University poll released this week showed that 92 percent of the respondents support expanding background checks to all gun sales, including gun shows now exempt from background checks. Earlier in the week, a Pew Research Center Poll showed 85 percent of Americans back universal background checks on gun sales. Yet, Congress continues to stall.

     We hide our heads in the sand and believe it won’t happen to us. And then when it does, we cry wolf and want justice.

     On Friday, Black Bear Lake Mayor Jay Obernolte openly joked at a press conference that the ski resorts will remain open and residents aren’t panicking or worried. He actually told everyone to enjoy their stay while in the well-known affluent resort community. That was the same day police found Dorner’s truck abandoned and burned.

     If and when Dorner strikes again, the mayor might not be as happy.

     Dorner is believed to be on foot and hiding along the San Bernardino mountainside with up to thirty weapons at his disposal. The police are checking all of the dwellings in the Big Bear Lake community. Let’s hope the mayor won’t be eating his own words real soon.

Killing Machines Don't Help Anyone.

     Until Americans step up to accept and promote dramatic change in our culture, we’ll continue to be comfortably numb toward gun violence.

     That is, until the bullets knock on your door.

     What arguably started at Columbine in 1999 has actually become an epidemic in 2013 of Newtown proportions. There were sixty mass killings across the country between those two tragic events, and Congress talking the same nonsense.

     More gun laws. An assault weapons ban. Arming teachers in our schools.

     Think those ideas will work in Chicago where 503 murders took place in 2012 and forty-two murders have already taken place in January of this year?

     They aren’t working right now. A sixty-five year-old Vietnam veteran is holed up with a five-old boy he has taken hostage in a bunker down in Midland City, Alabama. The suspect had shot and killed a school bus driver in front of twenty-one children who’d fled for safety. Police are trying to negotiate for the boy’s safe release.

     Is there any law that would indeed have prevented this situation?

     Local folks have gathered outside the Midland City Town Hall to sing “Amazing Grace” in support of the boy's safe release and family.

     We need a whole lot more “Amazing Grace” here in America.

     Fifteen year-old Hadiva Pendleton was shot and killed a mile away from her school just days after performing at President Barack Obama’s Inauguration Event recently. She was killed in a Chicago park a mile away from her school by random gunfire. Obama owns a house in the affluent neighborhood less than a mile away. Pendleton was an honors student.

     Chicago has some of the most stringent gun laws in the country, say experts. That hasn’t stop the criminals, though. They can travel to Mississippi and purchase killing weapons at gun shows without dealing with background checks. In fact, thirty-three states in the U. S. don't require mandatory background checks at gun shows. Gun manufacturers continue to pour lobbying funds at federal and state officials for those Second Amendment rights to grow. The Second Amendment under the Constitution allows folks to bear arms and defend themselves. There is nothing written about game-killing other human beings in that document that I know of.

     Do you want freedom? Whose freedom? Nine year-old Christina Green had paid the ultimate price for hers two years ago. She now has a softball complex named in her memory. The third-grader was one of six people gunned down at former U. S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords’ public speech in Tucson, Ariz. Giffords was shot in the head and survived to speak three short sentences before Congress last week. It was deeply moving, troubling, and unfortunate her wounds have left Giffords sounding like a third-grader at the public hearing.

     While Giffords testified before Congress, a gunman walked into a Phoenix office and shot three people. Two eventually died. The following day, Mark Hasse, Assistant DA in Kaufman County outside Dallas, was shot and killed while getting out of his car for work at the courthouse parking lot.

     After watching dozens of YouTube videos on gun violence combined with countless gun laws articles I'm aware of the complexity of the issue. Now I’m afraid to leave the apartment. I close the windows tightly and lock the doors at night. Four blocks away, a teenager had been murdered at a grocery store last month.

     Is it a lack of civility in society? Violent video games captivating young innocent minds? Blood and guts on television selling commercials for the almighty dollar? A lack of discipline and authority in the home today?

     All of the above. But there is more. Mental health, unemployment, ongoing cuts in social services, and the lack of prosecution of violent offenders in our courtrooms are leading us toward our own demise. It’s a rapidly growing national epidemic.

     Ladies and gentlemen, we are dying left and right at the hands of our own guns. We don’t need another war with a hostile country. There are enough weapons in the United States to arm everyone.

     If the American people do not take matters into their own hands, our society will turn into the Wild Wild West again in no time. Get ready. It’s coming.

     Last year there were 5,000 gun shows in the country. Opinions on what to do next range from Newtown parent Mark Mattioli, whose son was one of twenty children who died at Sandy Hook Elementary School by a lone gunman, said, "It is a simple concept. We have a lack of civility across our nation."

     Yet, NRA Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre counters with his criticism of President Barack Obama's administration stating, "I don't think you can trust these people."

     Each and every adult in America has a civic duty to get involved in some way. The first step is your local government. You can take an active role into the safety and vibrancy of your own community. But you have to make a sacrifice and take a step.

     Or you can sit back and wait for the next nearby tragedy. Have your cell phone handy with the 911 code ready and waiting. It may not be a long wait.