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Have any of you ever unsuccessfully tried to open the door of a car in a shopping center parking lot and found that although it was the same model and color and year as your car, it was someone else’s and your car was sitting there just a few spaces away? That is enough to get you shot these days! Be careful! It is exactly what happened to a group of Texas cheerleaders coming back late in the evening from a competition rehearsal this week. One of them is still recovering from her wounds in an Austin hospital.
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| Texas cheerleaders who mistook another car for theirs and were shot at. |
Forget about tightening gun sales, red flag laws, background checks, or blaming shootings on mental disorders. They won’t significantly reduce the number of weapons in circulation. These tactics just are not effective. The problem, as I clearly said a few postings ago, is the Second Amendment which makes weapons available to anyone, (like the fellow sitting in his car in a parking lot in Texas with a gun) and is falsely used as a potent weapon in the Courts AGAINST any forms of gun control.
The Second Amendment should be repealed and replaced by State legislation setting down reasonable rules for gun possession by hunters,
sportsmen, and for business or personal protection.
(Please go back and read this blog's posting of March 31, 2023 where I pointed out in great detail that the only real solution to gun violence is the repeal of the Second Amendment.)
We must reduce the number of guns in circulation in this country. Do that and gun violence will decrease as the
number of guns in circulation (more than our total population) drops. It all will start with repeal of the Second Amendment
Current opposition to gun control measures can be traced back to the Second Amendment and its gross misinterpretation by the Supreme Court in the late Justice Scalia's warped opinion in DC vs Heller in 2008.
Here is a short ‘true or false’ Second Amendment quiz for you to take:
1. The 2nd Amendment is intended to enable citizens to bear arms for their personal protection. T or F?
2. The 2nd
Amendment is intended to enable citizens to bear arms to prevent the government
from turning into a dictatorship, no longer answerable to the people. T or F?
3. The 2nd
Amendment is intended to enable citizens to bear arms for hunting or sport
shooting. T or F?
4. The 2nd
Amendment is intended to enable teachers to bear arms to protect school
children. T or F?
5. The 2nd
Amendment is intended to allow law enforcement personnel to bear arms, without
which they couldn’t do their jobs.
T or F?
All of the above are False. The Second Amendment is intended to enable
people to keep and bear arms so as to be available to serve in a well regulated Militia, the kind of military organization
that was believed back in 1789 to be necessary ‘for the security of a free
State.’
It was included in the Bill of Rights as a bargaining chip to gain the support of slaveholding States for the new Constitution. These States wanted to be able to call upon armed citizens to mobilize to resist any possible rebellion by slaves or action on the part of the Federal Government’s army which might interfere with slavery, a vile social and economic institution. To do this, their citizens' right to keep and bear arms had to be guaranteed. That was the deal that got the Constitution ratified in 1789.
The Civil War, ending slavery in this country, eliminated the reason why the Second Amendment even existed ... the protection of slavery. It was a bargaining chip in 1789, but after the Civil War, the game was over and the chips turned in. Too many Americans,
including Supreme Court Justices, either do not understand this, or do not want
to understand this, and blindly ignore the Amendment’s first thirteen words.
For the record, here is the full text of the Second Amendment: “A
well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the
right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Think for a moment about what circumstances might today endanger ‘the security of a free State’ to the extent that the nation’s armed forces, a States' National Guard units, and a State's law enforcement structure might need civilians with weapons to be able to adequately confront them.
I believe there are none.
Repeal of the Second Amendment is the true answer to gun violence. And if it takes expanding the Supreme Court to accomplish it, so be it!
JL
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*
Americans Must Never Forget the Presidential Election of 1876: Republican Hayes versus Democrat Tilden
In that election, a century after the Declaration
of Independence, the Democrats outvoted the Republicans nationwide by 250,000
votes, but were shy of an Electoral College victory by one vote. There were 20 disputed electoral votes in
several States, of which only one would have been enough to have made Democratic
New York Governor Tilden the president. The Republicans, the ‘liberals’ of
those days (before they traded places on the political spectrum with the
Democrats in the twentieth century) needed to keep all of those 20 votes away
from Tilden. Generally, Republicans were
popular with the people and did not want to return power to the Democratic
politicians in the former slaveholding States of the defeated Confederacy.
The wheeling and dealing ultimately did give the Presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, instead of Democrat Samuel Tilden based on the decision of a highly politicized commission of Senators, House Representatives, and Supreme Court Justices appointed to unscramble the Electoral College mess. But the price the Republicans paid for the White House was a high one, too high as history has shown.
Republican Hayes, who picked up the 21 Electoral votes needed to catch up with and to defeat Democrat Tilden, had agreed to remove most of the Federal troops from the defeated Confederacy, with the firm promise that the Democrats who controlled the newly readmitted formerly secessionist States would uphold the rights of former slaves there. And that’s how Rutherford B. Hayes got the 21 electoral votes he needed to become our nineteenth president.
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| Rutherford B. Hayes, our 19th president |
Hayes had meant well and did not believe he was
jeopardizing the newly enfranchised Black voters in the South. But he was wrong. The promises of the Democrats turned out to
be worthless, and unenforceable in the Southern States, and this corrupted ‘deal’
gave birth to many of the problems with which we must deal today.
That holds true today. Be they nineteenth-century Democrats or modern Republicans (since the 1964 Civil Rights Act), if they represent a part of the old Confederate States of America, they are not to be trusted.
Eventually, Tilden did get a high school in Brooklyn
named after him, though.
Only with the 1964 Civil Rights Act were President Lyndon Johnson and the
Democrats (now the ‘good guys’) able to begin to crack down on the now-Republican
States of the defeated Confederacy. It s a continuing task.
Read about how the country got into this mess in
1877, resulting in Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan, and trlal-by-lynching in
the South by CLICKING HERE …. or by copying and pasting this link on your browser line: https://www.history.com/news/reconstruction-1876-election-rutherford-hayes.
What happened in 1877 makes the efforts of our
recently defeated president to remain in office seem amateurish.
JL
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*
We Have an Immigration Crisis
Ducking an issue, avoiding dealing with it, or
being content with half-way measures with which to face it are not good
political tactics. It’s like putting off
going to the doctor when one discovers a suspicious lump that won’t go away,
afraid of what a referral to an oncologist might reveal. This more or less describes how the United
States is dealing with its immigration policy, and it is something for which
both Democrats and Republicans are responsible.
The problem is not limited to the United
States. It is much larger with people all
over the world seeing that Western democracies in Europe and North America
offer a better life for them, and their families, than whatever is possible in
their native lands. Many people in Africa,
Asia, and Latin America would rather emigrate, legally or illegally, to Europe
or North America than stay where they are.
That’s why Africans risk dangerous boat crossings of the Mediterranean
to get to Italy or Greece, and there are long lines at the United States’
Southern border, and many more crossing the Rio Grande illegally when the sun
goes down.
The words of Emma Lazarus’ poem inscribed on the
base of the Statue of Liberty (‘Send those, the homeless tempest-tossed to
me. I lift my lamp beside the Golden
Door’) are beautiful, but today, almost seem naïve.
Lady Liberty’s torch should continue to light
the way for those fleeing real danger or even death in their countries and seek
asylum here, and for those born here to parents who came here illegally and
managed to establish new lives here.
But there must be restrictions. Otherwise, as water seeks its level, unlimited immigration would dilute what natural wealth our country possesses or has developed. If unlimited immigration were allowed, our population would quickly double, pushing our standards of living downward, as the economy struggled to support more people. We wouldn't become another India, but we certainly would drift in that direction with a vastly increased population drawing upon our not unlimited resources.
Shamefully, too many Americans are
descendants of immigrants who did not have that problem because there was plenty of wealth, specifically land, that was acquired by stealing what
belonged to Native American populations, but that is history and not the case
today. There is no one to steal from in
the twenty-first century other than the existing American population.
The real answer is to work to make the countries
immigrants are coming from more economically successful and more democratic so
the impetus to leave would be reduced.
Economic and social support of governments there, and private
investments as well, might be an answer, and I hope that turns out to be the case, but unfortunately it would mean
working with often corrupt and undemocratic governments. Traditionally, such aid money has ended up
in the wrong pockets and rather than improving life for a nation’s people, it
has ended up purchasing multi-million-dollar condominiums in Miami for the
politically connected.
This is the problem. I do not know if a real solution is on the
horizon yet.
JL
* * *
Goodbye, Cinema ... and Other Good Things
The local papers here (Palm Beach County) carry
stories about the old ‘City Place,’ recently renamed ‘Rosemary Square’ and more
recently ‘The Square,’ possibly replacing one of its centerpieces, the AMC
multiplex movie theatre there with an office tower, just as the old Macy’s Department store has been replaced.
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| AMC Theatre - West Palm Beach, originally part of the Muvico chain. |
This would complement the morphing of downtown West Palm Beach into a financial and business center, rather than the entertainment and retail mecca it was just a few years ago. I suspect that other than the Kravis Center for the Arts, the Convention Center, Palm Beach Atlantic University, and the Norton Museum, downtown West Palm Beach will just be a collection of office towers and hotels within a few years, with a few condos and good restaurants thrown in. I believe that the movie theatre will disappear as have so many throughout the nation, succumbing to direct streaming of cinema into individuals’ homes.
There still will be some movie houses left around
for the ‘arty’ films that don’t make it to ‘streaming,’ but movie houses will
soon go the way of pay telephone booths, and even follow newspapers into an
underserved oblivion. I wonder how many
locals still remember getting a slice with pepperoni at the ‘Pizza Girls’ at
the foot of Clematis Street. They’re gone too.
JL
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Housekeeping
Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time
there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and
we’ll see that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might
suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. (You can pass those email addresses to me by email
at jacklippman18@gmail.com . )
Forwarding
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If you
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There’s
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Either
way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or
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Again, I
urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from
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Have a nice day.
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