Profiles in Courage--gun legislation in WV

March 26, 2013

Courage: Resisting gun fanatics

Hurrah for state Senate President Jeff Kessler, Senate Judiciary Chairman Corey Palumbo, Government Organization Chairman Herb Snyder and other senators brave enough to stand up against the bizarre gun hysteria that stampeded the House of Delegates this session.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Hurrah for state Senate President Jeff Kessler, Senate Judiciary Chairman Corey Palumbo, Government Organization Chairman Herb Snyder and other senators brave enough to stand up against the bizarre gun hysteria that stampeded the House of Delegates this session.

Kessler declared Tuesday that the Senate won't vote on House Bill 2760, which would revoke local gun safety laws passed by Charleston and other West Virginia cities.

The weird bill flew through the House on an overwhelming 94-4 vote, amid fervent clamor by groups wanting more gun-carrying in the Mountain State. When it reached the Senate, pro-gun throngs picketed senators and bombarded them with calls and emails demanding passage of the House measure.

Chairman Snyder, D-Jefferson, received death threats saying "you won't go home from Charleston" if HB2760 fails. He said his children received menacing Facebook messages. "This is just plain ugly," the senator said. "This is the nastiest thing I've seen in 22 years of public service."

Pickets carried signs threatening to "fire" Chairman Palumbo, D-Kanawha. "Palumbo supports petty tyrants," they said, and "Palumbo wants you defenseless."

Although Palumbo has an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association, he said the Legislature shouldn't remove Charleston's ability to choose its own rules against gun crime. "I think Charleston should be able to make that decision," he was quoted. His home-rule attitude made him an enemy of right-to-bear-arms zealots.

Amid this turmoil, Kessler said the Senate will ignore the House-passed proposal. "After being threatened over a bill, it sends a horrible message if we put the bill out there," he said.

However, the leader of the pro-gun West Virginia Citizens Defense League declared that "Senator Kessler's next" for hostile picketing. He said a rally tentatively is set for April 5 in the "heart of Senator Kessler's district," mid-northern counties and a bit of the Northern Panhandle. The leader said it's "political suicide" for any senator to oppose right-to-bear-arms believers.

We think Kessler, Palumbo and Snyder deserve "Profiles in Courage" medals for their brave stand against gun zealotry.

We hope they show the same strength against 30-plus other pro-gun bills looming in the House, such as one to jail federal officials who enforce U.S. laws, and another to hide the names of all pistol permit holders.

It's dismaying that the 2013 legislative session was supposed to cure West Virginia schools but turned into a gun circus.

 

Gun legislation in WV to supersede local laws

I sent the following email to Sen Truman Chafin (D-WV legislature) in response to the article referenced below. 

The Honorable Sen Chafin:

Re:  the following article

Firearm protection bill advances in House » Today's Front Page » The Register-Herald, Beckley, West Virginia

 

With all due respect, Senator Chafin, I am so disappointed at your spurious arguments, as outlined in the above article, against gun control laws.  Why are you comparing the firearm death rate, of 60/100,000, of our soldiers, scattered as they are throughout Afghanistan, with the firearm death rate of 80.6/100,000, of the concentrated population of Washington D C?  Why do you not, rather, compare those soldier deaths with the death rate per 100,000 in the whole of the United States, which is just 10.3 for 2011, or about 18.9/100,000 for a comparable 22 month period?  Further, the significance of high death rates in municipalities, such as in DC and Chicago, with strict gun laws lies in the fact that people can readily buy guns in neighboring jurisdictions and bring them back home.  Legislation being considered in U S Senate to strengthen gun trafficking laws, straw purchase laws, and background checks would greatly reduce this problem, and receives overwhelming support from citizens across the country, although not, regrettably, from their elected legislators.

 I think it is sad that you can make a “punch line” out of these sad statistics, evoking laughter from the Senate.

The “frenzy in Congress to impose harsher gun limits” is more than matched by the frenzy of the NRA to prevent the passage of even the simplest and most obvious of gun control legislation, such as the expansion of background checks.

It is amazing that the state can supersede, if HB 2760 passes, the right of a municipality to restrict gun use, as they now can supersede the right of a municipality to ban fracking within city limits, yet this same state thinks it can defy the federal government if it tries to pass gun laws, just as it defies the EPA when it tries to protect our air and water.   Nullification anyone?  Perhaps the legislators should read up on Cooper v Aaron,1958.

 

 

 

 

About Godless Democrats

This op ed was posted in WVGazette in response to a aprevious op ed in which a writer lambasted "godless democrats."

Mike Harman: Godless Democrats are in good company

Key figures in America's past, like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, had some problems with the Christian Bible and worked hard to ensure religious freedom when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were writt

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Thank you for printing Clairmont Smith's letter Feb. 19, blasting away at godless Democrats. I was beginning to wonder if anyone could get my blood pressure back up to normal.

I don't think godless Democrats are all of a piece, as Smith would have you believe. I assume most Americans, like me, bristle when others start telling us what kind of religion to embrace, if any. It seems to me that some key figures in America's past, like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, had some problems with the Christian Bible and worked hard to ensure religious freedom when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written.

Some of us godless Democrats are quite interested in learning about the various religious teachings, because we want to understand what purpose religion serves, and where people like Smith get their ideas. And, in keeping with tradition, it looks like they're making it up as they go.

Why not take a look at what some great Americans thought? Let's consider Paine, whom many credit with stirring the revolutionary fervor to the tipping point: "I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church," he wrote in "The Age of Reason."

Jefferson was known to be cautious of investment in any organized religious code. "The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute inquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine," he wrote in a letter to John Adams in 1814.

Later on, Mark Twain got in his licks in his autobiography: "In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing."

Will Rogers: "There is no argument in the world that carries the hatred that a religious belief does. The more learned a man is the less consideration he has for another man's belief."

Frederick Douglass, an American slave who escaped, wrote his autobiography at age 27 and went on to become a friend of Abraham Lincoln and recruited thousands of black men into the Union Army. "I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes -- a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me ... I ... hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land," he wrote in "After the Escape."

Let's not leave out John F. Kennedy, a Democrat who was a Catholic, but famously said, "I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation, or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me."

Smith couldn't help but refer to Ann Coulter in his defamation of godless Democrats, which makes me suspect that he is in fact a handler of serpents. She has been known to bite anyone within spitting range. He has apparently been bitten hard.

Harman is retired and lives in St. Albans.

 

Jephthah's Daughter

Jephtha’s daughter

Do you remember the Bible story of Jephthas’s daughter?  (Judges 11:30-40)  Jephthah had vowed that if the Lord helped him win the battle of Ammon, that when he returned home, he would offer to God as a sacrifice whatever came to greet him from his house.  Well, did he think it would be his dog?  Or that God would be satisfied with a dog as a sacrifice for giving Jephthah this big victory?  But of course, it was his daughter, his only child, who came out to welcome him home “with timbrels and with dances.”    And Jephthah was saddened, but had to keep his vow to God.    Jephthah allowed his daughter to grieve for two months, but then fulfilled his vow, and sacrificed her to the Lord.

I don’t know why I thought of this story often during the Bush/Cheney administration, when Cheney, while not disowning his daughter, Mary, for being a lesbian, could not support LGBT issues.  And when she had a baby, he and his wife had their picture taken with their grandchild, but not with Mary and her partner.  Sacrificing her to his ambition.  Then, even worse, was Alan Keyes, who, after losing senatorial election to Barack Obama in 2004, came home to Maryland to discover that his daughter was lesbian, then threw her out of the house and refused to pay her college tuition anymore.   Sadly, we know he was not alone in that attitude and action.

Now there is Sen Rob Portman, previously anti-gay rights, even co-sponsored the DOMA legislation, but now has had a change of heart upon discovering that his son is gay.  Though it took him two years after this discovery to come out in favor of marriage equality, he is still the only Republican in the Senate to do so.    While his change of heart and mind is welcome, would that he could warm the hearts of his fellow Republicans.  (But we shouldn’t forget, there are a number of Democratic legislators who do not support marriage equality.)  Say, of Speaker John Boehner, who has said that he would not approve marriage equality even if his own child was gay.  Still, no one is quarreling with his right to his own beliefs, but why does it follow that his beliefs should be the law of the land?

We are all Jephthahs, and our children are all Jephthah’s children.  They trust us implicitly, and though our hearts may be wicked, they come to greet us with “timbrels and dancing.”    And yet we continue to sacrifice them, in the name of our God, in the cold, implacable, misbegotten belief that we have a right to impose our religious convictions on others, indeed, to make our beliefs the law of the land.  And to deny our children their hearts’ longing.