I know what NRA means, I mean really means, but after the shootings in Aurora and in Wisconsin I have looked around.
What did I find: the NRA-lobby organized that Congress (pushing of Jay Dickey, rep and Rep) outlawed research on gun control with a provision that reads:
None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.
They stripped $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget - the amount it had spent on gun research in the previous year.
You understand, from that moment on, it was not possible to do research on the relationship between someone bleeding and guns, without being accused of advocating or promoting gun control.
One of the arguments was: we do not need this kind of day-follows-night research on the expense of our taxpayers.
I cheerfully agree. It results in stating the obvious: when a man meets a gun, after the meeting the man is as dead as a doornail. We're told that guns don't kill people ... but they are a very essential, indispensable constituent in cause and effect.
It makes you feel sad - I mean the budget ruling - but on the other hand: it feeds your skepticism about what politicians do not do, but are supposed to do: organizing society for society's sake.
Guess what I was reading in my Italian newspaper yesterday.
I know, I shouldn’t ask you, you do not read Italian newspapers.
I'll tell you.
John M. Fischer, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, has received a subsidy of $5 million for The Immortality Project - to study the secrets of afterlife. It's not your money - well, depends what you think of 1% versus 99%, but it's certainly not from the federal budget.
It is provided by The Templeton Foundation.
I do not know if The Templeton Foundation has the same "powers” as the combine NRA - Republican congressmen.
Nevertheless, it must be possible for John M. Fischer, Ph. D. to smuggle a few questions in the research project:
- is someone who's killed by people, based on the stand-your-ground-law or some other ridiculous point of view, assured of a place in Heaven?
- is someone whose gun has killed that other someone assured of a place in Hell?
I feel the outcome of these questions could be positive ... should be positive if there's indeed a righteous God.
Now, if it was possible to make a convert of Scrooge, then this is certainly an opportunity to moderate, and perhaps even change and mitigate the course of the NRA.
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markinjapan
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Ande Bliss
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Comments
The problems with "guns" is a similar problem with "religion". We are not free to be free from those who brandish them like weapons, use them to harass and bully, and take the lives of those who are disinclined to join in. We use them to enforce our own preferences and disregard the sanctity of another's soul.
Then I studied Physics and learned that energy is always conserved.
The emotional rage and agony and then perhaps regret of a gunuser must , if he is suddenly shot dead himself, persist somewhere, but where?
I imagine a kind of purgatory. That is one thing I like about medieval theology.
Buddhists have their own purgatory. When you are rearranged, and maybe come back as a goat or a slug.
My strategy for the afterlife is never do any harm to anyone. I would never be able to hold a gun, because the first thing I would wanna do is stick it in my mouth and pull the trigger, no doubt.
Blake called the God of this world Nobodaddy. Get it? Nobody’s Daddy.
He is the one to blame.
• “Then old Nobodaddy aloft
Farted and belched and coughed,
And said, "I love hanging and drawing and quartering
Every bit as well as war and slaughtering."
o Let the Brothels of Paris, st. 2
What a fierce theology we have, some of us.
Hate.
Why would you hate someone just cuz they are a different color, I have never figured out.
And to shoot a lady is like the ultimate Oedipal disaster.
Insofar as there being a righteous God is concerned, merely look around you and see how much decency and love wanders the world. Not a hell of a lot insofar as I can see.
From the NRA to the afterlife.
You don't moderate the NRA. I wish it weren't true, but moderating the NRA is an oxymoron.
The history of the world shows that those who would kill find a way.
With a stone,with an arrow,with a knife, white powder, bombs, Molotov cocktails and fire. For mass murderers, there is no end to their creativity. Where should we begin? Hitler? Stalin? Vlad? Edwards and Henrys? In whose name or what insane dictum did they murder?
these are the evenings in Italy.
Sagra they call it.
Sagra means: being together at long tables, enjoying the typical products and the receipts of the surroundings.
The togetherness is commercialized: it's now seven days long, and "guests" come from far.
But the sphere is still: Italian village.
Which is the reason that you didn't get an answer yesterday.
And because this is the day after the night before my head is what it is: heavy, but loaded with light-footedness.
So,
thanks Oryoki,
thanks James,
thanks Jan,
thanks koshersalaami,
thanks Ande
for coming to my little place, and your extended comments.
I can bring back another comment, but I think we all know what we are talking about.
Special thanks for Myriad. As far as I know it's the first time we meet. My pleasure.
From the NRA to the afterlife."
kosher, I like that. Blasted straight into the loving arms of Jesus! Or whomever.
I wonder how Mr. Fischer is planning to study the secrets of the afterlife - is he planning on simulating a near-death experience, then coming back and writing about it?
I have a question about your questions. Why is the method of murder important? Even if those questions could be answered, do you think anything would change as far as deaths by firearms goes? I doubt it. In fact, I have the feeling a lot "believers" would choose their guns over God if it came down to it.
Personally I don't believe in gun control. But I do think bullets should be outlawed.
aren't you - as the saying here goes - asking for a way well known? And you're asking the way to a person who doesn't even know his destination!
Anyway, thanks for coming to my little place.
To turn your question into a practical one, I have done some homework.
It appears that Fischer has planned to give a complete picture of human thinking, in the course of history, about afterlife, paradise, hell and karma. Almost-dead experiences are not excluded.
I do not know the motives of The Templeton Foundation to grant him that money.
His intention: a complete picture, which unites science, theology and philosophy.
Fischer, who defines himself a non-believer, thinks there's a lack of such a picture.
That's not quite true.
Alice K. Turner, having studied comparative religion (NYC university), before becoming editor of Playboy, has done a study of mankind's perception of Hell. And delivered a fascinating book. I can recommend that (I have it right now in my hands: The history of hell.)
So half of the work is done.
And the better half of the work, I like to add. If hell is fascinating, heaven seems a boring place to me. Just singing and white clothing.
Now, the method of murder was not my subject. The problem to get money for a certain research is what I'm speaking about - the blockade of the NRA to whatever study on the impact of the public use of weapons.
koshersalaami said: moderating the NRA is an oxymoron.
That's not an attitude I like to see among us "writers", leave alone to promote.
If Dickens believed in a happy end for his Christmas Story, then I suppose it is not asked that much that we, members of Open Salon, believe in the redeeming function of contradictions ... as a therapy I mean.
Or, to finish were I started: use the unpractical as a leverage to deliver something which is asked for.
As I said in the beginning: ask me the way, and I'll tell you my destination.
Perhaps ... who knows ... maybe in the end … we are even allowed to give a smile to your little joke, a bit cynical I would say, which I translate as Guns don't kill people, bullets do.
What we can do is reduce their influence. Changing them would be harder.