Thursday, March 21, 2013

Bloomberg Threatens Congress

Herr Mayor wants his gun control bill passed into law - or else:

Vice President Biden and three Newtown families teamed up with Mayor Bloomberg on Thursday to demand that Congress do the right thing about getting guns off the streets.

“What Congress has to decide is if it’s politically popular, or is in in their hearts the right thing to do,” the mayor said at City Hall.

“Congress just has to get some courage,” Bloomberg said, “and it’s up to us to sort of give them that courage.”


You can read that as "Give Me What I Want Or I Target Some Of You In Your Next Campaigns".

Since he's already bagged at least one Dem for not supporting his gun control policies, and since he's made it clear that he plans to drop millions into campaigns to promote his pet policies on gun control, health issues and education reform, you can bet some in Congress will listen.

You know, I used to be a big supporter of gun control over the years.

But the older I get and the more I see the police outfitted as paramilitary armies, the more I hear Bloomberg call the NYPD his own "private army," the more I hear NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly brag about having missiles to take down aircraft and spies to take out terrorists, the more I see our rights to assembly and speech eroded in this post-9/11 world, the more I wonder why it is that an oligarch says that the only groups who should have guns are the police and the military.

It's frankly a little worrisome.

I've never owned a gun, don't want to own one, don't want to go hunting or shoot anything ever.

I find all of these shootings across the country horrific.

But I also worry about an oligarch like Bloomberg using his billions to promote his political agenda, to scare politician into doing what he wants, to push through these policies in a very anti-democratic way.

On top of that, I worry about a policy that looks to take all the guns away from people and ensure that only the cops and military have them.

After watching Occupy Wall Street when the cops ran rampant, I no longer like that idea so much.

Seriously, these guys are armed to teeth and they're dying to use that military-style equipment.

Isn't it time we question why local police forces have so much military equipment at their disposal and just who they think they're going to use that stuff against?

Bloomberg and Biden want to get guns off the street - great, I'm all for it.

Let's take the unpiloted drones away from the NYPD and the armored assault vehicles away from the cops in Tupelo, Mississippi while we're at it.

One final thing - Biden used "those twenty dead babies" as the emotional blackmail to get the gun control bill passed.

The deaths of those 20 children in Newtown was a tragedy.

But Joe Biden and his boss Barack Obama have killed way more than 20 children with their drone bombing campaigns.

Seriously, you can look that up and see.

If Biden is so concerned about dead children, he ought to get Barack Obama to stop killing them in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere.

Those children deserve as much concern as the children in Newtown who were killed in that awful, awful event.

2 comments: