Day: January 26, 2011
Why Are Gun Rights Groups Putting Guns Ahead of Children?
With the shooting attacks on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, as well as on law enforcement officers in Indiana, Florida, and Michigan, it’s hard to argue that one of America’s most pressing problems is not enough access to guns. Yet a proposed law in Florida would do just that, with a cruel bonus: it puts children at special risk of taking a bullet.
State Rep. Jason Brodeur (R-Sanford) is behind a bill that would make it a felony for a pediatrician to ask parents if there are guns in the house, and if so, how they are secured. If the doctor is found guilty of asking these questions, the penalty would be a $5 million fine and up to five years in prison.
Surely we have lost our minds.
A proposed Florida law would make it a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $5 million fine for pediatricians to ask parents if they lock up their guns
In a one-week period in my part of the state, close enough geographically for both stories to be reported by the same local news outlets, two children found guns that the adults who were responsible for them failed to secure. The first incident resulted in a 6-year-old girl shot in the chest.
According to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, when officers first questioned Donnell Burney in the emergency room, he told them he was in front of the house when he heard the gunshot and saw his daughter outside the house holding her side.
According to the arrest report, Burney later told homicide investigators he was cleaning his handgun in the kitchen and left it on the counter when he went to another room.
Did Michele Bachmann Deliberately Sugarcoat the History of Slavery in America?
Around the time that “Good News for Modern Man,” the modern-English version of the New Testament, was published in the mid-1970s, I was spending a summer out of college in the Southern, suburban small town where I’d gone to high school.
No one I knew personally objected to (or cared about) the new translation, but among a vocal minority out in the hustings who believed that the Bible was the dictated word of God, there was outrage. One of their leaders, a country preacher called Rev. Johnny, found the “Good News” to be so blasphemous that he scheduled an old-fashioned book burning in front of the courthouse.
Being young, irreligious and bored, my friends and I tuned in to the reverend’s pre-conflagration sermon on a fuzzy AM radio station, during which he made this unforgettable statement:
REV. JOHNNY: The King James version of the Bible is the only true version of the Bible because it’s the version of the Bible that Jesus carried with him on the Crusades. (Emphasis his.)
For the history challenged, what Rev. Johnny asserted here was that Jesus, who is said to have died about 33 A.D., led the Crusades against the Muslim infidels in the Holy Land, circa 1000 to 1300 A.D., and that he had in hand an edition of the King James Version of the Bible — an English translation from the original Greek commissioned in 1604 by England’s James I.
I was reminded of Rev. Johnny’s rewrite of the first 1,600 years of the Christian era when I heard GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann, who is running for president, rewrite the history of slavery in speech to potential Iowa caucus-goers over the weekend:
