Ban expires

Friday, 11:32 pm

By KateC

The ban on assault weapons expires on Monday. The law, which bans weapons like AK-47s, Uzis, and high capacity ammo magazines, had been in effect since 1994. Congress has let the issue slide and the President hasn’t had much to say about it either. So, come Monday, these weapons will be legal and you can bet there will be shipments of them on the way to warm the cockles of assault weapon enthusiasts’ hearts all around the country.

I can hear it now. “Guns don’t kill people, terrorists do.” That is what I’d anticipate Tom DeLay, who wants the ban to expire, would say.

Lifting this ban must put an ugly gleam in the eyes of some ne’er-do-wells the world over. Especially the ones who harbor fantasies of standing in Times Square or Faneuil Hall Marketplace and emptying a few magazines before going down to glorious martyrdom.

It’s pretty strange, isn’t it? I can’t take a nail file on an airplane, but the people who hyperventilate over the possiblities of nail file attacks don’t consider easy peasy availability of assault weapons, designed to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible, anything to get in a lather over. I’m more and more convinced that the legislators in Washington don’t have anything stuffed between their ears except dead air.

Warm welcome, not.

Thursday, 1:13 pm

By KateC

A quote from this week’s New Yorker magazine: “The Republicans are here.  We--we New Yorkers--hope they enjoy the amenities of our city.  We hope they are treated politely by all of our fellow canyon dwellers, including those among us who are alarmed by the performance of the incumbent Administration during the past three and a half years--alarmed by its mania for shovelling cash to the very rich at the expense of families of middling means, its servility to polluters and fossil-fuel extractors, its reckless embrace of fiscal insolvency, its hostility to science, its political alliances with fanatic religious fundamentalisms of every stripe except Islamic (and of that stripe, too, when the subject is family planning or capital punishment) its partisan exploitation of our city’s suffering after the attacks of September 11, 2001, its transubstantiation of the worldwide solidarity that followed those attacks into world anti-Americanism, and its diversion of American blood, treasure, and expertise away form the pursuit of All Qaeda to a bloody occupation of Iraq that appears to have done nothing to weaken Islamist terrorism and may have done more than a little to strengthen it.”