Guns

Here is my list of changes we could make to reduce overall gun violence in America and specifically increase the safety of schools. I have thought long and hard about these, after considering many of the arguments from both sides. I look forward to your agreements and disagreements.

·         Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.  I have not heard a single good reason, only childish ones, why anyone should own an assault weapon.

·         Require a background check on every gun sold.

·         Require a battery of psychological and mental tests for every gun owner, and then a quick annual checkup thereafter to make sure mental stability has not deteriorated.

·         Make gun trafficking a federal crime, including real penalties for “straw purchasers,” people making purchases who have passed psychological and background checks but are purchasing weapons for people who have not been cleared.

·         Every weapon and gun owner should carry insurance, cost to be determined by the insurance industry.

·         Increased gun safety and gun-respect instruction, maybe not done by such a vested and extremist group as the NRA.  They were fine in my day when I took gun safety and was a member, but they’ve become way too political, weird, and a lobbyist for the gun industry and its profits.

·         A panel of interested parties, including some statisticians, should study whether teachers’ being deputized with access to guns would lead to only a minimal increase in or too high of a number of children and school staff fatalities from accidents, teachers snapping, guns being wrestled away from them, etc.

·         Armed guards could be helpful in middle and high schools, if they’re already in schools with other responsibilities such as drug detection, but for many schools it has not proved to be effective nor would it be cost-effective.

·         More locked doors and the use of metal detectors.

·         Trained counselors in every school.  The at-risk kids, the alienated and lonely, can almost always be identified by teachers, but without resources nothing intensive enough can currently be accomplished.

·         Mental treatment that includes humane treatment and living centers in cases where talk therapy and drugs are not enough.

·         Some kind of study should be done to figure out why America’s fascination with our gun culture is so weird, extreme, even crazy,  including looking at the impact of looking at movies, video games, etc.

·         In order to reduce an excessive number of guns floating around out there, there should be a gun buyback program, with a premium price on weapons of offense, such as assault weapons.  If the buyout price was enough, maybe some of these cat-lady-like gun fanatics would reduce their absurd arsenals of multiple weapons.

Yes we could do these things. 

To Survive We Will All Become Socialists

I challenge you to reject socialism.  There is a buzz among intellectuals about the obsolescence of workers, both blue collar and white collar, the buzz stemming from the recent publication of books such as “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future” and “Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day”.  With the greatly accelerating growth of automation, robotics, computers, software, unpaid self-service, etc., there is a decreased need for workers, but that is how most of us make our living to then become consumers.  What are we going to do when we get to a point where humans' working is almost non-existent? As expressed in “Rise of the Robots,” even intellectual endeavors can be done by software, and eventually better.  Recent sports reports as written by computer software rival that of human journalists.  It’s no longer just the tedious jobs of the assembly line as done by those without a college education that can be done better and more cheaply by technology.  This should make us see that all of our jobs are replaceable by machines.  We make our living because we work.  Without the income work generates for us and provides us with the ability to consume and then makes profits for those who own the means of production, there is no use for workers—we become obsolete—or then even a need for capitalists for that matter.  How can humanity survive this?  It seems to me that there will be only two alternatives.  We can expand democracy into the economy with all of us earning a guaranteed income as once proposed by President Richard Nixon, even though that is that all-terrifying thing called socialism, where we would find these technologies to be our friends in providing all of us with more leisure as they do all the work for all of us, or we can continue as is until there is no more use for any of us, leading to our extermination and the eventual extinction of the whole human race.  Meanwhile, our technologies could live on happily without us.  This is no longer just science fiction fantasy.  This is inevitably what is coming and we will have to make a choice: socialism of extermination.  This is why I am not afraid of Bernie Sanders.  We all need to take a forward view in predicting the coming advancement of our technologies, what that means, and what we need to do to respond.  We need to consider how to advance an economy where we can benefit from our technologies, even if that is called socialism.  Or we need to all die ourselves into extinction.  Is there any other way we can survive?  You tell me.