10 Comments
May 26, 2022Liked by Abdul El-Sayed

And then comes to next to last paragraph. Bam! Out of the ballpark! Way to go Abdul!

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May 26, 2022Liked by Abdul El-Sayed

Abdul, you said it all and said it well. Thanks, and get well.

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1st of all get well soon

Another way to look at the positive and negative rights is to look at them as inalienable vs legal

Adam Smith coined the phrase life liberty and property. Our founders would have known that phrase they specifically changed it to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Inalienable rights are not things that can be transferred to someone else whereas property can and a gun his property

Hence the 2nd amendment as part of a legal framework is a legal right not an ineliable rightHence the 2nd amendment as part of a legal framework is a legal right not an inevitable right

While scalia's writing with regards to Heller was fairly narrow because the Washington DC law was very very broad that's still shot open the door to allow guns to go wherever whenever and however by whomever

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Yes, the killers are 18 year old, men, who are "radicalized" on social media sites.

We also know that neurological development is not complete at that age. Namely the judgement node has yet to develop. I see this development in my own children. What they want to do at 18, and then again at 28, is quite different.

We need REGULATIONS of GUNS and Social Media sites who create this behavior, by live streaming it. Before long the horror show goes viral and FB is making more money with every hit.

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Yes, the recent conflation of the stated purpose of the 2nd Amendment to allow the Federal Government access to well-regulated (state) militia in times of threat with the pre-independence (civil) right of free, adult males to possess arms for hunting and defense purposes has corrupted the minds of many Americans. The separation of these two different motivations related to arms is authoritatively documented in Saul Cornell’s 2006 “A Well Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America” [Oxford University Press]. In the words of eminent historians “it’s settled history”!

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Enough is enough! Laws have to be passed.... enough is enough

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Hello Abdul and fellow subscribers: This is about guns, but it is more about the "culture of violence." Here are my remarks that I knocked earlier today for the David Feldman Show that just ended.

I fully support “commonsense” gun control measures like background checks, licensing, certification, red flags, and the banning of military style semi-automatic weapons, assault rifles, and high-capacity magazines. These measures might have had a marginal effect on the 274 mass shootings in the United States since 2009, resulting in 1536 people shot dead and another 983 people shot and wounded. However, these victims of military violence represent only a drop in the ocean of gun violence in America.

In other words, these legal efforts even if successful, are not nearly enough to confront America’s deeply ingrained “culture of violence” that cuts across all our societal institutions, differentiating once again American exceptionalism.

For example, more than 50,000 persons are killed annually with guns in the United States. Comparatively, our homicide rates are from 3 to 10 times higher than the rest of the civilized nations on earth.

With respect to school age children, 12 die daily, 365 days a year from gun violence. That means that the vast majority of the 4400 youths dying annually from gun violence were not school related shootings.

Since Columbine in 1999 and through 2021, more than 311,000 children at 331 schools across America have experienced gun violence. This includes at least 554 shooting victims and 185 children, educators and staff members who have been killed in these assaults.

In sum, when we combine all the mass shooting murders on and off campus in the United States, they account for less than 1% of all the annual gun deaths in this nation.

What needs to be understood is that gun violence and other forms of violence in America are symptomatic of what H. Rap Brown articulated when he retorted to a reporter’s questioning at a press conference in 1967: “Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cheery pie.”

In other words, the cultural and social problem of violence in America, which is exemplified by gun violence, also includes annually 150,000 drug overdoses, more than 10 million victims of domestic violence, more than 500,000 persons living in a state of homelessness, and 31 million without health care.

Think about what it means culturally to have a president of the U.S. and other high ranking Republican officials celebrating a while teenager who fatally shot two demonstrators and injured a third in Wisconsin. And what does it tell you about U.S. culture when 40 million Americans learn that the Seditionist-in-Chief not only wanted to know why the national guard could not shoot the Black Lives Matter demonstrators after the police killed George Floyd, but who was also endorsing the “hang Mike Pence” chants after the vice president had been briskly escorted by security out of the Capitol building, and these Republicans are still “all in”?

Finally, to unpack cultural violence in America, we all must address or come to terms with patriarchy, domestic abuse, bullying, gun culture, white supremacy, racism, and the militarization of policing in America.

If you want to read more here is a link to my 2003 textbook, Violence and Nonviolence: Pathways to Understanding: https://www.amazon.com/Violence-Nonviolence-Understanding-Gregg-Barak/dp/0761926968.

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Sadly, those leaders who keep blocking the passage of any legislation designed to bring some sanity to this issue, probably won't change their stance until one of their children is mowed down by a semi-automatic rifle. I shake my head at their continued kowtowing to the NRA, our very own home-grown domestic terrorist organization. That we tolerate the wide distribution of weapons designed only to kill is mind boggling. The rest of the world, especially those countries with good gun regulations look on in horror as we now seem to be okay with our children being slaughtered. What kind of people are they who stand by and do nothing, while stuffing their pockets at the public trough? I am sickened by this and them.

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