I've historically been neutral at best on gun laws. Coming from Texas it's such a cultural loser with so many voters who ought to be voting Democrat that I haven't even tried to fight that fight.

That has changed since I got older, became a parent and started having to go to so many funerals. 

There's no reason we need to allow crazy people to own guns. A group of Mayors has launched a new initiative to close the biggest loopholes in the background checks law. Here's NYC Mayor Bloomberg at Huff Po:

Today, I joined Martin Luther King III and survivors, family members and friends of the victims of the shootings in Tucson, Virginia Tech, and Columbine and other incidents of gun violence that happen every day but never make the headlines. We launched a national campaign urging Congress to take two simple but critical steps to fix our nation's broken background check system: 1) fulfill the letter of the historic 1968 gun law and ensure that all names of people prohibited from buying a gun are in the background check system; and 2) fulfill the intent of the historic 1968 gun law by subjecting every gun sale to a background check. Add your voice now at www.fixgunchecks.org.

Mayor Bloomberg's speech is in the full entry.

Here's Cliff Schecter explaining some of the background behind our insane approach to gun laws:

There is simply no understanding the prevalence of gun violence in America - as evidenced by the recent attempted assassination of a congresswoman during a mass shooting - without discussing the nefarious role played by the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Once an organisation primarily concerned with the education and training of sportsmen, in a coup that came to be known as the Cincinnati Revolt in 1977, hardliners took over the leadership and believed that any gun regulation would take us down a slippery slope to Khmer Rougism.

In the years since, unlike the US in the wake of the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy - or for that matter Australia after the Port Arthur Massacre - the response to senseless gun violence has been to discuss everything from the rhetoric on our airwaves to the weather outside.

But any public conversations regarding restricting who has access to guns has been considered verboten (although, thankfully, this time some cracks are beginning to show).

This is largely because the NRA's duping its own members, which we'll discuss below, and coming to the realisation that the real money was in actually protecting the rights of gun manufacturers, which we'll discuss in Part II of this series.

There's more...

I've historically been neutral at best on gun laws. Coming from Texas it's such a cultural loser with so many voters who ought to be voting Democrat that I haven't even tried to fight that fight.

That has changed since I got older, became a parent and started having to go to so many funerals. 

There's no reason we need to allow crazy people to own guns. A group of Mayors has launched a new initiative to close the biggest loopholes in the background checks law. Here's NYC Mayor Bloomberg at Huff Po:

Today, I joined Martin Luther King III and survivors, family members and friends of the victims of the shootings in Tucson, Virginia Tech, and Columbine and other incidents of gun violence that happen every day but never make the headlines. We launched a national campaign urging Congress to take two simple but critical steps to fix our nation's broken background check system: 1) fulfill the letter of the historic 1968 gun law and ensure that all names of people prohibited from buying a gun are in the background check system; and 2) fulfill the intent of the historic 1968 gun law by subjecting every gun sale to a background check. Add your voice now at www.fixgunchecks.org.

Mayor Bloomberg's speech is in the full entry.

Here's Cliff Schecter explaining some of the background behind our insane approach to gun laws:

There is simply no understanding the prevalence of gun violence in America - as evidenced by the recent attempted assassination of a congresswoman during a mass shooting - without discussing the nefarious role played by the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Once an organisation primarily concerned with the education and training of sportsmen, in a coup that came to be known as the Cincinnati Revolt in 1977, hardliners took over the leadership and believed that any gun regulation would take us down a slippery slope to Khmer Rougism.

In the years since, unlike the US in the wake of the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy - or for that matter Australia after the Port Arthur Massacre - the response to senseless gun violence has been to discuss everything from the rhetoric on our airwaves to the weather outside.

But any public conversations regarding restricting who has access to guns has been considered verboten (although, thankfully, this time some cracks are beginning to show).

This is largely because the NRA's duping its own members, which we'll discuss below, and coming to the realisation that the real money was in actually protecting the rights of gun manufacturers, which we'll discuss in Part II of this series.

There's more...

Money is a means to an end. To believe that it is an end unto itself is to ignore the greater values that his country is capable of standing upon. Some policies cost money; others cost lives. That ethos, I believe, is at the heart of the progressive movement.

The Most Rev. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and titular leader of the world’s third largest Christian denomination (my own, the Anglican Communion), has an essay about finance and economics in the upcoming issue of Newsweek. I am particularly struck by this paragraph:

We must hang on to the idea that not everything reduces to one standard of value. Treat economic exchanges as the only "real" thing that people do, and you face the same problems confronted by the evolutionary biologist (for whom the only question is how organisms compete and survive) or the Freudian fundamentalist (for whom the only issue is how we resolve the tensions of infantile sexuality). Traditional religious ethics—traditional ethics of any kind, in fact—do not require you to ignore the hidden forces that may be at work in any particular setting. Being human is learning how to ask critical questions of your own habits and compulsions, and it's learning how to adjust them against a model of human behavior—an idealized truth about the purpose of our humanity.

Those in positions of power are rightly concerned with “cost”, but all too often it is the wrong kind of cost. They speak as if money is the only thing that matters when weighing the pros and cons of a given decision.  Medical evacuations from Haiti to the U.S. were suspended for four days because Florida Governor Charlie Crist didn’t want his state paying for them. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is against giving Khalid Shaikh Mohammed the judicial rights our founders believed all persons should have because it would be “expensive for the taxpayers and… disruptive for New York City.” The Republican National Committee opposes cap-and-trade because, they say, "The Democrats are planning to jack up energy prices and pass the cost on to you and your family… Can you and your family afford an additional $3,100 in higher energy taxes a year?" (Ignore for a moment that that number is grossly exaggerated and focus on the underlying implication that fiscal cost is the only thing that matters.)

Money matters – you can’t do what you can’t pay for – but it should not make up the entire definition of the word “cost.” One of the most important textbook words I learned in college was “externality,” and Crist, Bloomberg, and the RNC have failed to internalize the externalities. They are not asking the right questions about cost. Yes, security for KSM’s trial would cost a bundle, but where does the Constitution say that “we the people” means only the people with cash? Aren’t our values supposed to be universal, not fiscal? Having the trial costs money; not having it costs our principles. Governor Crist, it’s only January; isn’t eleven months enough time to rework the budget for a new expenditure or to ask the federal government for retroactive aide? The evacuations cost money; the supsension costs lives. And yes, cap-and-trade might cost families a few hundred dollars a year, but do we really think that saving a few hundred dollars is worth the cost of 24,000 American lives lost each year to coal pollution, or that $300 per year is worth the cost of entire low-lying cultures?

Money is important. I’m ticked that, even without the stimulus and Iraq, the 2010 budget will have a bigger deficit than the 2009 budget. If we want to ensure that our most important programs are sustainable in the long term, then we can’t keep running deficits anywhere near this large. At the same time, however, there are things are worth paying for. When facing a choice between dollars and lives, money should be used on behalf of greater values. It should not be hoarded for its own sake nor distributed inefficiently through corporate welfare and tax cuts for the rich.

That is why I am a part of the progressive movement: My values remind me that people matter, and that money is nothing more than a means to an end. It may well be the most important means, but it is still just that, a means. Anyone who comes to believe that money, whether their own or the nation’s as a whole, is an end unto itself risks losing sight of the true power and depth of human relationships and of life. American citizens should seriously question the gap between our historical rhetoric and our modern reality.

Yesterday I was honored to be on a call with America's leading mayors and the US Conference of Mayors to talk about a huge problem affecting cities from coast to coast: the foreclosure crisis.

I've been talking about how a family is losing their home every 13 seconds for awhile now and the recent failure by Congress to enact bankruptcy reform to protect homeowners because of industry pressure was a real blow to stopping that clock.  

But the failure in Washington isn't going to stand in the way of ACORN's push to address the crisis at the heart of the economic meltdown and teaming up with some of the leading mayors in the United States is a major way we're moving forward to help families stay in their homes.

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I'm shocked -- shocked -- to find that Mike Bloomberg is just a political opportunist who only left the Republican Party to set himself up for a potential independent run for the Presidency in 2008.

Mayor Bloomberg has begun reaching out to city Republican leaders to gauge whether he could run on the GOP line in his re-election bid this year, several sources told The Post.

The maneuvering began in the past two weeks, and sources said the mayor is expected to try to run on a major-party as well as a third-party line, likely one of his own creation.

Several sources said Bloomberg's political aides have started reaching out to GOP chairs in the five boroughs, including Manhattan's Jennifer Saul.

When the DLCers were talking up and even helping organize Bloomberg's potential independent bid for the Presidency, I spoke out, largely because it's wrong for Democrats to support the presidential ambitions of non-Democratic candidates (even ones who previously hailed from the party, only to bolt because it would be easier to be nominated and become mayor of New York City as a Republican than as a Democrat). Additionally, though, it seemed to me at the time -- a sense that panned out long ago, even before today's news, when it became clear that he would continue to support the Republican Party even as an independent -- that Bloomberg was not really leaving the GOP, only trying to make it appear as though he was making such a move. Now, with Bloomberg reportedly angling for the GOP nod for mayor this year, his real intentions have become that much more clear. No wonder, then, it was this type of support Bloomberg was earning in his abortive Presidential run.

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