Let’s Do Something!!!

It is time we call-out those that through tactics, legislation and inaction protect the weapons and people that make mass shootings more possible. The NRA, high capacity magazines, legal modifications, and assault-style weapons are the perpetrators and tools of the domestic terrorist, but the enabler is the Republican party and their current leader President Trump.

It is time that we do not accept the ‘the thoughts and prayers’ of these enablers as sincere. It is time that we see past their “time to mourn” stalling tactics… the mourners are screaming for action. Their claims of violent games and film, broken families, mental illness as a cause have been made but not acted on… they have only been made to distract us from the tools of a mass shooting. We are capable of dealing with the underlining social problems, but their inaction exposes their true concerns, that the social problems are merely a decoy from dealing with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their well funded NRA lobbyist

We have let the NRA backed Republicans shame us into putting off action until the appropriate time, the appropriate time has come and gone… again and again with no action because they are in the position to stall and pontificate their way to inaction.

Their inaction, hypocrisy, excuses, fear-mongering, and tolerance for right-wing extremists and racist is dividing and destroying this nation's core principle.

It has to stop!!!

Their stand against “Gun Free Zones” is purely self-serving:

Their time for Thoughts and Prayers is very short, and self serving:

Their claims of cause are often disproven, vague, and eventually unaddressed:

Finally, some Republicans have had enough of the charade:

Sensible changes can be made without taking guns away from those who are law abiding and responsible.

“…all of us have to send a clarion call and behave with the values of tolerance and diversity that should be the hallmark of our democracy. We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments; leaders who demonize those who don’t look like us, or suggest that other people, including immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as sub-human, or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people. Such language isn’t new – it’s been at the root of most human tragedy throughout history, here in America and around the world. It is at the root of slavery and Jim Crow, the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. It has no place in our politics and our public life. And it’s time for the overwhelming majority of Americans of goodwill, of every race and faith and political party, to say as much – clearly and unequivocally.”  
---Barack Obama

My illegal 7-day pill box and your gun rights

Intro: Part 1

Every week when I sit down with all my prescription drugs and fill my 7-Day pill box with them I am breaking the law. Whenever I leave the house and I put my lunch time pills in a small plastic pill bottle I am breaking the law. If police had any reason to search my vehicle, me, or my house I could be arrested for illegal possession of prescription drugs. We're not talking about opioids, Vicodin, Valium, OxyContin, or even pain pills, we're talking about cholesterol medicine, blood pressure medicine, and heart medicine.

We’re talking about all prescription drugs. Most of which have no street value, no narcotic effect, their sole purpose is to keep me alive, both in the short term in the long term, but unless I carry them in the original prescription bottle, properly labeled, I am breaking the law.[i]

How can this be? Don’t we all have a god given right to pursue good health and prolonged life? Doesn’t

the Declaration of Independence guarantee a right to pursue “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”? Doesn’t a right to self-defense extend to all physical threats? Is someone threatening to do me bodily harm any more dangerous to me than the threat of a life altering stroke, the slow death of cancer, diabetic seizures resulting from a faulty pancreas?

Laws against me carrying benign prescription drugs are necessary because less than 2% of the population breaks the law.

In most states where this applies even though I:

• might be taking pills for mental disorder I can still purchase a weapon,
• might be taking pills for a behavioral problem that might contribute to domestic violence I can still buy high capacity magazines
• may have committed domestic violence I can legally buy high capacity magazines and a modification kit to turn my semi-automatic into a fully automatic tool of mass destruction
• may have threatened violence I could still legally purchase, carry, and stockpile a weapons stash,

…in most States where my fully loaded 7-day pill bottle is illegal it would be legal to carry a weapon, concealed or openly.

I’m not advocating for the outlawing of guns. I’m arguing for more rational and reasonable access to my daily medications.

I am not arguing for the abolition of laws concerning controlled substances. I’m arguing for rational and reasonable measures to address mass killings and violence.

I am not being hypocritical by taking opposing stands on the restrictions of gun ownership and the use of my 7-day pill bottle (the present, opposite, position of the laws is hypocritical), I am pointing out the hypocrisy of fighting for unfettered gun access but not fighting for unfettered access to my legally prescribed medication.

My steady and consistent position is that in both cases there rational and reasonable solutions between the two extremes: its called compromise.

As a lifelong gun owner, I cannot see how it is so unreasonable to even consider trying to find a solution that might help hinder these mass shootings and epidemic levels of violence.

Many people would defend the laws against 7-day pill bottles as necessary to fight the devastating drug epidemic. Oddly many of the same people will rationalize against even the most benign regulations to slow the flow of dangerous weapons into the hands of irresponsible, impaired or dangerous people.

End of part 1

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[i] Technically you break the law the second you take a pill out of the original prescription container… for that two seconds it takes to get the pill out of the bottle into your mouth you have been breaking the law.

Stephen Willefred is the hero, not his AR-15.

Guns

I am a gun owner (2), and intend to replace one of them later this year. I am a veteran. I was qualified on different levels with the M-16, small bore weapon (.22cal) and even the hand grenade. I have been robbed at gunpoint two times in my live.

I belong to the Union Sportsman Alliance (even though I don't hunt).

I believe the NRA is not about the 2nd amendment or gun rights.

The NRA has evolved into no more than a political action arm for far right extremist, but