Mountain Views News          Saturday, January 9, 2016

13

OPINION

 Mountain Views News Saturday, January 9, 2016 

DICK Polman

WIL Durst Raging Moderate


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Rich Johnson

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Despina Arouzman

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Renee Quenell

Ben Show

Sean Kayden

Marc Garlett

Pat Birdsall (retired)


OBAMA GUN REFORMS VS. 
REPUBLICAN GUN SERVANTS

CHRISTIE, ISIS AND OTHER 
2016 PREDICTIONS

At the beginning of a new year, cultures all over the world 
traditionally perform peculiar ceremonies meant to wipe 
the slate clean and start afresh. The Chinese hide knives to ward off danger. In 
Denmark, old dishes are thrown at front doors to symbolize the collection of new 
friends. Spanish residents eat 12 grapes, one at each stroke of the clock to promote 
good fortune. And in the Durst household, we percolate sardonically cynical 
predictions for the upcoming 12 months.

 This is to symbolize the perpetuation of a career predicated on mocking and 
scoffing and taunting. But with taste. So here are Durstco’s predictions for the year 
2016. In the spirit of recycling and promoting a zero-waste policy, please cherry-
pick your favorites and dump the rest into the laps of worthy acquaintances.

 - After dropping out of the Presidential race, Chris Christie hits the talk show 
circuit to publicize his celebrity diet book, but is turned down by everyone except 
a podcast in Calabasas. 

 - In an attempt to expand its popularity, ISIS will merge with Alcoholics 
Anonymous, the American Automobile Association and the American 
Association of Retired Persons to form ISISAAAAAAARP, and then facilitate 
senior citizens driving soberly to suicide bombings.

 - Exxon will develop a way to block out the sun and then make a big move into 
solar energy.

 - Disney enters negotiations to purchase Tibetan Buddhism with the aim of 
starring a rambunctious Little Buddha in his own Saturday morning cartoon.

 - At the next GOP debate, Carly Fiorina smiles so hard, all the other participants 
on the dais recoil at the sound of her enamel cracking. Her face will then freeze 
like that.

 - In Dallas, Texas, a benefit held to establish the Ethan Couch Affluence Support 
Group raises one dollar.

 - After a heckler at the Masters Tournament shouts from the edge of the 12th 
green, “Give it up Grandpa,” Tiger Woods chases him with a putter, trips and falls 
into Rae’s Creek.

 - Taking his personal quest for wholeness to the next level, Vladimir Putin 
enters Jungian analysis and releases an award winning series of children’s books. 
He also takes up pipe-smoking.

 - Rents in San Francisco climb so high, members of the middle class are forced 
to inhabit tree houses in Golden Gate Park.

 - No matter who wins the Presidency, Bill Clinton actively campaigns to get 
appointed Ambassador to Sweden.

 - Air travel will devolve to the point that certain discount tickets require 
pedaling.

 - During a stump speech in Concord, New Hampshire, Donald Trump’s hat 
will fly off and his hair will be wind- whipped into the shape of a sail whisking him 
airborne into the parking lot of a Montpelier, Vermont public library.

 - Congress fixes Social Security by raising the retirement age to 83.

- New York Senator Chuck Schumer becomes the go-to guy in the Democratic 
Caucus after it is revealed that Harry Reid died months ago.

 - The NFL will lobby the Catholic Church to celebrate mass on Monday 
mornings in order not to interfere with football ratings.

 - Minnesota Department of Game officials call off the hunt for whoever shot 
the lion- killing dentist, Walter Palmer, with a bow and arrow.

 - The Chicago Cubs lose game 7 of the World Series when a lightning bolt 
strikes Ben Zobrist ten feet from home as he attempts to score the tying run.

——-

Copyright © 2016, Will Durst, distributed by the Cagle Cartoons Inc. syndicate.

Will Durst is an award- winning, nationally acclaimed columnist, comedian and 
margarine smuggler. For sample videos and a calendar of personal appearances 
including the upcoming one- man show “Elect to Laugh: 2016,” go to willdurst.
com.

Why do Republicans 
nauseatingly refuse 
to address America’s 
gun murder 
epidemic? Why are 
they so determined 
to sustain our well-earned reputation as the 
most violent nation in the civilized western 
world? Why are they jerking their knees in 
reflexive opposition to President Obama’s 
modest attempts to defend our right to 
remain alive?

 Of course we know why. It’s Obama hatred 
and gun lobby love.

 You would think, judging by their 
tiresomely predictable reactions, that Obama 
is poised to dispatch an army of flying 
monkeys to swoop into American homes 
and spirit away the 270,000,000 guns that we 
apparently hold dear. 

 But this fever swamp rhetoric is flatly 
contradicted by reality. Obama is basically 
tweaking existing gun laws to make 
them work better. Which is exactly what 
Republicans have been urging all along.

 For instance, the federal background check 
system is notoriously understaffed and under-
financed. Under federal law, if the FBI can’t 
complete a check within three days, the buyer 
gets his gun without the check having been 
completed. That’s what happened last year in 
Charleston, South Carolina. Remember the 
white racist terrorist who killed nine people 
at the historic black church? He got his gun 
because the understaffed feds didn’t obtain 
his criminal record within the mandated 
three days.

 So Obama is beefing up the background-
check system - directing more money and 
manpower to weed out the criminals and 
mentally ill. Plus, he’s earmarking an extra 
$500 million to mental-health services, to 
better help those who have woes between 
their ears.

 Yet the Republicans don’t like any of that.

 Obama also took action to close loopholes 
in existing laws - most notably, the one that 
allows people to buy guns, without any 
background screening, from private sellers 
and online sellers. Isn’t it logical to tweak 
existing laws so that everybody gets screened 
prior to buying bang-bangs? The American 
public certainly thinks so; according to the 
latest Quinnipiac poll, 89 percent support 
background checks for private and online 
buyers.

The Republicans don’t want any of that, either.

Requiring shippers to report stolen guns - 
that makes sense, too. Investing in advanced 
technology so that kids can’t accidentally pull 
gun triggers - that makes sense, too. And yet, 
not a single Republican has spoken up to say, 
hey, that’s a good idea.

 Instead, all we got was the usual pap, plus a 
lot of whining about Obama’s alleged kingly 
behavior. They’re basically complaining 
that Obama is doing end-runs around the 
Republican Congress, somehow forgetting 
that the Republican Congress is invested 
in doing the gun lobby’s business by doing 
nothing. Just last month, in fact, it squashed 
a bill designed to beef up background checks.

Kathleen Parker - the center-right political 
columnist, no friend of Obama’s - says it well 
on Wednesday: “In fairness to the gun lobby, 
which may not deserve such charity, one can 
understand reservations about limiting access 
to guns. What is less easily understood is the 
refusal of Republicans to take the reins of any 
given issue and do something constructive 
rather than invariably waiting to be forced 
into the ignoble position of ‘no.’ It is one 
thing to be in the pocket of the National Rifle 
Association. It is another to do nothing and 
then assume a superior posture of purposeful 
neglect, as though do-nothingness were a 
policy and smug intransigence a philosophy.”

Can Obama’s executive actions substantially 
curb our annual gun murder epidemic? No 
way. We have too many guns in circulation 
for that to happen. He freely acknowledged 
that on Tuesday, saying, “We know we can’t 
stop every act of violence, every act of evil in 
the world. But maybe we could try to stop one 
act of evil, one act of violence.”

 There it is - the desire to save at least a few of 
the lives that would otherwise be lost. Doing 
something to dent the death toll sure beats 
thoughts ‘n’ prayers.

 Or to paraphrase the Talmud, “He who 
saves a single life, saves the world entire.”

——-

 Copyright 2016 Dick Polman, distributed 
exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper 
syndicate.

 Dick Polman is the national political 
columnist at NewsWorks/WHYY in 
Philadelphia (newsworks.org/polman) and 
a “Writer in Residence” at the University of 
Philadelphia. Email him at dickpolman7@
gmail.com.

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LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN 

MICHAEL Reagan

HOWARD Hays As I See It


JOKING 
ABOUT 

GUN CONTROL

When I was a kid my father gave me three rifles and 
a shotgun.

 First he gave me a single-shot .22 rifle. I was about 
eight.

 Then in 1958, when “The Rifleman” came on, my 
father gave me a rapid-fire lever-action .22 Winchester rifle like the one Chuck 
Connors had. I was about 12.

Later, when I was a teenager my father gave me a .243 hunting rifle to hunt deer 
in Arizona and a 12-gauge shotgun to hunt birds.

 He bought all the guns legally. But he gave them to me without first doing a 
background check to see if I was a criminal.

 He didn’t even check with my mother to see if I was doing my homework.

That was a joke.

 But President Obama’s use of executive action to make it tougher for law-
abiding citizens to privately buy, sell or trade guns is no joke.

 At his teary appearance with the survivors and victims of gun violence on 
Tuesday he said it was time for the country to show “a sense of urgency” to end 
gun violence.

 Obama’s executive grandstanding still leaves a lot of unanswered legal 
questions about who does or doesn’t have to get a gun-dealer’s license and 
conduct instant background checks before selling or trading a gun at a gun 
show or flea market.

 But his executive order will not save one American from dying from gun 
violence this year.

 All it will do – if Congress doesn’t have the guts to reverse it – is create a new 
class of criminals and do nothing to stop real criminals from getting guns.

 The tears the president shed on behalf of the innocent victims of Sandy Hook, 
Aurora and Charleston were genuine. We all want to cry when we think of those 
senseless slaughters.

 Yet nothing in the president’s executive action would have prevented their 
deaths, either. 

 The dead at Sandy Hook, Aurora and Charleston were killed by guns 
purchased legally long before the time the mentally disturbed young men put 
them to such evil use. 

 All the background checks in the world won’t do much good if your mother 
gives you the guns you kill with, as what happened at Sandy Hook. 

What Obama was really doing Tuesday was giving a feel-good political speech 
about gun violence designed to get the Democrat base fired up for the 2016 
election.

 He and his fellow gun-control nuts are constantly misleading and trying to 
scare the American people about gun violence and what causes it. Despite the 
media hype and the political hysteria about spiking murder totals in cities like 
Baltimore, the annual homicide rate from guns and everything else has been 
falling in the USA for decades. It’s half what it was in 1990.

 When the White House and Hillary throw out the claim that “30,000 die 
from gun violence a year” they are deliberately being deceptive. 

 That 30,000 number, which the mainstream media never get around to 
scrutinizing, is padded with about 21,000 gun suicides, which aren’t quite the 
same as being shot down by a madman in a church or a robber in the parking 
lot. 

 It’s an old argument, but still true -- guns don’t kill people, people do. Bad or 
mentally troubled people. 

 Want proof guns are not the problem? There reportedly are more than 300 
million privately owned guns floating around the USA. 

 If just 1 percent of those guns were used to kill someone every year, there 
would be 3 million gun homicides in the United States. 

 In 2014, according to the FBI, there were 8,124 gun homicides. It’s still way 
too many, and most of them are in cities or states with strict gun laws. 

But if my calculator is correct, that means 0.00002708 per cent of the guns in 
America were used in 2014 to kill someone and .99998 percent were not. 

I don’t know how many knives and sharp objects there are in the United States, 
but in 2014 about 1,561 of them were used to murder someone. 

 Is an executive action on knife control next on the president’s emotional 
bucket list? Clubs and hammers? Didn’t Cain kill Abel with a rock?

Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and 
the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder 
of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. 
Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send 
comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. 


“When I hold you in my 
arms and I feel my finger on 
your trigger, I know nobody 
can do me harm because 
happiness is a warm gun, 
mama.”

- John Lennon, lyric from 
“The White Album”

Years before the phrase “Everything changed 
after 9/11” was used to justify whatever might 
seem unlawful, unconstitutional or un-
American, it was “Everything changed after 
Waco and Ruby Ridge”.

 In case you’ve forgotten, Ruby Ridge 
in northern Idaho was where Randy and 
Vicki Weaver escaped from what they saw 
as “a corrupted world”. They were into the 
apocalypse, home-schooling, and were really 
into guns. Randy was also into Aryan Nations, 
and sold a couple of sawed-off shotguns to ATF 
informants.

 After a year trying to get Weaver to surrender 
for failing to appear on the shotgun charges, in 
1992 a firefight ensued outside their cabin with 
a US Marshall and the Weavers’ 14-year-old 
son killed. The next day, an FBI sniper firing 
through a door killed Weaver’s wife, Vicki. It 
took nine more days for Weaver himself, along 
with his three daughters, to surrender. 

 The “Waco” incident took place 10 miles east of 
the city, at the compound of a sect called Branch 
Davidians, led by 33-year-old David Koresh. 
Tenets of their faith included the apocalypse and 
that, as their leader, Koresh was entitled to all 
the women of the compound, regardless of age. 
He went on to father children with children as 
young as 12 and 13 years old.

 They were also really into guns. They 
stockpiled and traded weapons as a major part 
of their practice, but it was their penchant for 
converting legal semi-automatics into illegal 
machine guns that drew the attention of the 
ATF.

 An attempted raid on the compound in 1993 
left four ATF agents dead. This brought the FBI 
and a 51-day standoff. Nineteen children, aged 
5 months to 12 years, were allowed to leave the 
compound, and showed signs of physical and 
sexual abuse. As Attorney General Janet Reno 
explained, it was concern this abuse was still 
happening at the compound that led to the tear 
gas attack hoping to end to the standoff.

 A federal investigation concluded the 
Davidians then set fire to their own compound 
and carried out “mercy killings” of those 
remaining, leaving 76 dead, including several 
children.

 “Waco and Ruby Ridge” is often mentioned 
by the yahoos still (as of this writing) occupying 
the visitor’s center at a federal bird sanctuary in 
eastern Oregon. They are also really into guns. 
“Waco and Ruby Ridge” was cited as motivation 
by Timothy McVeigh. He was really into guns 
– as well as gun shows and explosives, which 
he used to blow up Oklahoma City’s Murrah 
Federal Building in 1995, killing 168 and 
injuring over 600.

 Those bird-sanctuary-occupiers (referred to as 
“VanillaISIS”, “Y’all-Qaeda”, and as engaging in 
“Yee-hawd” on Twitter), cite as their motivation 
the treatment of Dwight Hammond and his son 
Steven. They, too, were really into firearms – 
and fire.

 They set the first in 2001, to cover up illegal 
shooting of deer on federal land. Prosecutors 
charged they set it fully aware of campers nearby 
who’d be endangered by the blaze. The second 
fire on federal land, in 2006, was alleged to 
have been set as protection against another fire 
then raging. There was a “burn ban” in effect, 
however, to protect firefighters fighting that first 
blaze – whose safety the Hammonds ignored.

 Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy objected to 
the Hammonds’ mandatory prison sentences; 
arguing it can’t be illegal to destroy land owned 
by our government since it’s illegal for our 
government to own land – or something. In 
2014, the Bundy ranch became a gathering spot 
for nearly a thousand people who were really 
into their guns. They came to support Bundy 
in his efforts to stiff taxpayers out of a million 
bucks in grazing fees he owed from twenty years’ 
grazing on public land (taxpayer-subsidized 
fees, at that).

Bundy’s sons made the news, too. Later in 
2014, Ryan Bundy pulled his daughter out of 
school because she wasn’t permitted to carry a 
knife. He called school rules “communistic”. A 
warrant was issued for the arrest of Cliven Jr. 
for probation violation stemming from felony 
burglary and weapon theft.

 Brother Ammon is now heading the armed 
occupation of that bird sanctuary visitors’ 
center. He and the Yee-hawdists were apparently 
emboldened by a lesson taken from the 2014 
confrontation at the Bundy ranch; that with 
enough people who are really into their guns, 
you can aim them at, and openly threaten, 
agents of our federal government – and get away 
with it.

As for gun laws, the argument is made we need to 
better enforce those we already have. President 
Obama issued new guidelines to do that. The 
law says if you’re in the gun business, you have to 
run background checks on buyers. The president 
clarified that if you’re buying and selling guns – 
at flea markets, gun shows, over the internet - 
you’re in the gun business, and have to run those 
checks. The president said you shouldn’t be able 
to buy a gun as some corporation or trust, just 
to avoid those background checks. He said if a 
shipment of guns loses a crate-or-two somewhere 
along the way, the feds will want to know about 
it. There will be more hires at the FBI to speed 
up background checks, and more at the ATF to 
monitor gun traffic on the internet. Privacy laws 
will be tweaked to allow better access to mental 
health records during background checks.

 President Obama said, “This is not a plot to 
take away everybody’s guns.” The right and 
those really into their guns are convinced it is – 
or at least an effort to destroy the Constitution.

 I don’t think guns should be taken away from 
everybody, either – but maybe just from those 
who are really into them.

Mountain Views News

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