Conservatives and the Money Issue

Most Conservatives seem angry at the Federal Reserve System and, especially, at paper money printed by the Federal Reserve. In fact, everything would be better, they seem to think, if we went back to hard cash — that is, coinage. Actually, I think the situation is worse than that; they would really like us to go back to plain old metal. After all, coinage can have devious mixtures of metals.

The whole idea is ridiculous so far as I can see. Anything that qualifies as “currency” for payment of bills or purchase of commodities qualifies as such because people agree that it is worth something. This can be paper, coinage, or precious metals — or even a person’s word of honor. All the weight of this issue rests on the word ‘agree’ and depends on social relationships and trust. Precious metals are no more trustworthy for these purposes than printed paper. Our basic needs are food, clothing, and shelter (and iPhones) and you can no more make any of those from precious metals than you can from printed paper.

Back to the Old-Time West

“The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” So chants the NRA and their supporters. There is little evidence for the truth of this claim, but it does have the “virtue” of taking us back in time to the Old West. The history of that experiment indicates pretty strongly that towns eventually became safe havens by asking everyone to surrender their guns on the way into town.

Another classic NRA yarn is, “people kill people, not guns.” That is entirely true, of course, but it is also irrelevant. It is a classically weak argument because it completely fails to acknowledge the total causal chain. When we look at the causal chain, we see that a gun was in between the person who killed and the person who was killed. Granting that some people use their bare hands, some use knives, and some use cars, there are a huge number of homicides in which a gun was in the middle of things. But the argument is used to convince us not to look at guns but rather to look at people. That’s fine, of course; we should look at people, especially violent and mentally unstable people. However, we don’t look at guns with the idea of disciplining guns; we look at the ways in which guns get into the hands of violent and unstable people. That is what legislation is about, and the NRA “argument” does nothing to address that issue except trying to distract us from seeing the point.

Yet another NRA tactic is to convince people that the government (if not Obama himself) is almost at their front doors hot on taking away all their guns. The fact that people (some people, that is) seem to believe this is completely amazing. But they do believe it with religious fervor and are stock piling ammunition and weaponry and keeping it close to the front door. There are no facts to support this claim so why do people believe it. It’s effectiveness relies on widely held hatred of government, especially among so-called conservative people. (Why they are called “conservative” when their mission is complete destruction of the Constitution is beyond me.)

High schools and colleges should teach critical thinking, but that is the reason (partly) why Conservatives do not want to support education.

Gun Violence in America

Yesterday there was yet another shooting on a school campus. We do not know anything about the shooter, at this point, except for his name. But it is likely that he had severe mental issues that brought him to the place of doing this kind of violence. What we do know is that religion seems to have had a confusing dimension to his furry. The event has, of course, brought out all the familiar arguments — e.g., “if more people were armed with guns, shooters would be neutralized before too many people are injured,” “people kill people, not guns,” etc. And, of course, there is a wild-and-crazy segment of our population that believes (really believes) that the Federal government is actually out there preparing to take away their sacred guns and will do anything to prevent that. 

After we mourn the loss of yet another bunch of people, perhaps Americans could spend a few moments simply contemplating the facts (just dry old simple facts). There have been about 45 campus shootings this year. At maybe ten fatal injuries per incident (which is actually high) that makes about 450 school fatalities this year. However, there have already been almost 40,000 gun-related incidents and 10,000 deaths in this country this year. Campus shootings get a lot of press time, but no one looks seriously at the actual carnage that goes on. More than 40 people will be killed with guns TODAY. 

These are not really dry statistics; it is a national disgrace. No other modern or “developed” country in the world has anything like this kind of record!

So, about the argument that we should arm school cops. Just yesterday 30 other people were probably shot dead beyond the poor young people in Oregon. What would an armed school cop have done about that? How do you know which 30 people were about to die so you could arm their nearest neighbors. The answer is that you don’t. Arming everyone just puts a whole lot more guns in people’s hands and increases the likelihood that some one with real mental problems can get armed. 

The saddest thing of all is that our government is completely unable to do anything about this because the National Rifle Association literally owns the legislative wing of government and rules over it with an iron hand. And poor slobs continue to fund the NRA with their annual dues because the NRA keeps telling them the government is coming to take away their precious guns and keeps telling them that having their guns is their absolute Second-Amendment right. We love to fixate on that right — with all it’s weird 18th Century language about militias and dreadful fears about the English disarming them — but I honestly think that the intelligent authors of our Constitution and Bill of Rights would be horrified, today, to see what has happened.