On the Monday of this last July 4th weekend, I was driving back from visiting my brothers family. I passed the time listening to the satellite radio, particularly both Left and Right political talk channels.

The talk shows on the liberal channels were very similar to the talk shows on the conservative channels. They were talking about the same topics, they had the same sponsors, the same sound bytes, the same timed commercial breaks, the same news at the top and bottom of the hour…for the entire seven hours. I couldn’t take it that long, but I did listen long enough to make some observations.

The liberal channel was making the following complainants:

• Obama isn’t doing anything on gun control
• Obama isn’t advancing gay rights enough
• Obama is putting more troops in Afghanistan
• Democrats in Congress aren’t adequately addressing health care
• Sotomayor is too moderate

The conservative channel was making the following complaints:

• Obama is going to take away your guns
• Obama expanded gay rights for federal employees
• Obama is pulling troops out of Iraq
• Democrats in Congress are pushing health care reform
• Sotomayor is a liberal activist judge

If you knew absolutely nothing about American politics, and listened to these shows, the listener would have to conclude that that Obama, Democrats in Congress, and Sotomayor are hopeless moderates that can satisfy no one; not by their actions and not by their inactions.

Pundits that deliver the news via a “commentary” format usually hold extreme views (the most successful pundits anyway). Yet, polls show that 80% of Americans agree 80% of the time (actually heard that on a left wing radio program). I have coined this political tactic ‘rubberbanding,’ a term used in racing games. They preach their extreme views to those leaning to right/left, in a effort to pull the listener away from the center.

At anytime of the day, I guarantee you can turn on the radio, scan a bit, and find a political pundit talking for hours on end; 4 hours a day, 20 hours week, with listeners numbering in the millions….and there are dozens of radio pundits. Joseph Goebbels did this. So did Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury repeats the same idea using television and drugs as the medium for of social political control.

Think “incrementalism”….on meth. As Rage Against the Machine says “weapon of sound above ground.”

I believe they do us a great disservice by keeping us divided. They talk about where we differ. And where we agree, they spin the issues and try to make us more divided.

Turn it off.

Candy Johnson, City Council Ward 5

I received some emails from people who expressed concerns abut the city council opting out of the state guns in Parks bill,  which I along with some of my constituents think is a good decision for our community. The theme amongst those who are in favor of allowing guns in parks seems to be that they are worried about safety in our parks. This is not backed up by the statistics, so I have attached a list of the crimes committed in parks as reported to the Police Department since January.

In 11 of our parks there were no crimes reported, and in the others there were just a few. I think providing some information on the safety of our parks will provide some relief to those who are concerned. I will continue to oppose allowing guns in our parks, as a matter of ensuring the safety of our children. I would hate to see a permit holder get into an argument at a park with someone,  and then instead of calling the police  take matters into their own hands, and innocent bystanders get hurt. Our public safety department is here to help citizens deal with these situations. Of the type of incidents reported, very few involved weapons. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Parks with no crimes

The following parks had no reported crimes from January 1st – July 14th, 2009

• Billy Dunlop Park
• Bel-Air Park
• Burchett Park
• Coy Lacy Park
• Dixon Park
• Ft. Defiance
• Mericourt Park
• Lettie P. Kendall Park
• Patriot Park
• Sevier Park
• Sherwood Forest Park

Parks with crimes

The following parks had incidents of crime reported between from January 1st – July 14th, 2009

• Airport Park had one incident of vandalism
• Ashton Park had a case of assault
• Burchwood Park had a theft
• Dalewood Park had an incident involving drugs, and a misc offense on another date.
• Edith Pettus Park had one incident of vandalism
• Fairgrounds Park had a vehicle theft, vandalism, and a theft.
• Heritage Park had two incidents of vandalism, one incident of burglary, and one misc offense
• McGregor Park had three incidents of vandalism,  one drunkenness, one intimidation, and two misc offenses
• Smith Ballfields had one assault, and one misc offense.
• Stokes field had one assault,  one intimidation, one theft from buildings,  and two misc offenses.
• The Swan Lake Sports Complex had a case of theft of motor vehicle parts.
• Trice Landing Park had a misc offense.
• Valleybrook Park had the most serious incidents including, two incidents involving drugs, three involving alcohol, one robbery, one arson,  and one misc offense.

Many Tennesseans were stunned to hear the news that yesterday morning at 10:18 a.m. a lone gunman walked into a welcoming congregation in Knoxville and opened fire on the congregants who were gathered in anticipation of watching their children perform a scene from the musical “Annie” as part of the morning services, killing two people and shooting several more in the head before being tackled to the ground. That church, the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, is a beacon of joy and hope in East Tennessee. Its congregation is made up of some of the most loving, kind and gentle people in the fine city of Knoxville, and the horrific tragedy which was visited upon that church is a wakeup call to good people throughout Tennessee to re-examine our approach to gun control in Tennessee and throughout this nation.

Sadly this is not the first nor the last example of guns in churches, schools and public spaces being used to kill innocent men, women and children. In the past decade alone, dozens of people have been killed in our nations schools, churches and public gathering places by people who had obtained guns legally and illegally with the sole intention of killing unarmed civilians. The public school shooting rampage phenomenon started here in the South only a decade ago when two students in Jonesboro, Arkansas opened fire on their fellow middle school students killing five and wounding eleven. Since that time our nation has witnessed school shootings in over a dozen states with victims numbering in the hundreds. There have also been shootings at shopping malls and church shootings in the past year in Texas, Colorado and now Tennessee.

Unfortunately, in many of these cases, the guns that were used in the commission of felony first degree homicides were obtained legally. Either the guns were in possession of parents who were not able to keep the guns from the access of their children, or in some cases rifles were used. In many states there are no laws regarding the use of these weapons by minors. In other cases guns were obtained illegally. No matter how the gun was obtained, it was used in the commission of a crime against men, women and children who lost their parents, children or grandchildren as was the case today in Knoxville.

I cannot imagine the horror of the children yesterday watching as their parents were shot in front of them, but this incident further illustrates to me the need for effective gun control regulations at the federal level. The fact is that guns kill people and in the United States they kill a lot of people. The United States has the highest per capita murder rate in the developed world, with 14 people per 100,000 dying of gun violence each year. This adds up to nearly 10,000 people a year who die at the hands of a gun, not including the additional 16,000 suicides that happen each year with the use of a gun. This is nearly thirty three times the number of Americans who have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of the war.

The recent Supreme Court ruling on the second amendment by the Bush and Reagan stacked court insures that our nation’s cities can continue to live in perpetual fear of similar incidents happening around the nation as what happened in Knoxville on Sunday. Cities are already scrambling to deal with the chilling new reality handed down by the Supreme Court this summer, which seems to mean that it is open season for every crazy person who can get their hands on a gun in our nation’s urban centers.

There is a solution though, and it is up to Congress to exercise the political will to make a decision to pass laws which place strict limits on gun ownership and to hold gun sellers strictly accountable for who they sell their products to. We have a responsibility to protect our children and our nation’s citizens have a right to live free of the fear of being visited with violence as they go about their daily lives of working, shopping and worshiping as they choose. As a candidate for federal office I believe that federal government has the responsibility to place strict limits on gun ownership in this country. Gun rights advocates argue that guns make us safe, but I believe that a heavily armed nation is a dangerous place to live. It is time to make our country safe for our children. Now is the time for comprehensive gun control for a safer America.

I am not unfamiliar with guns. I lived for 5 years on a farm and owned several guns, a 22 semiautomatic rifle, a Ruger Mini14 semiautomatic rifle, and two pistols, a Ruger 357 magnum and a Colt 45 semiautomatic that I used for target practice. None of my weapons were ever fired in anger, but I had an intimate knowledge of firearms. So I was surprised when I learned that 33 lives were claimed by a single individual with two pistols. When I first learned about the shootings, I envisioned at least a couple of people roaming the campus with military style high powered rifles. Not so, just a single nut with two pistols.

We can expect to shortly hear from the gun nuts that we shouldn’t make it about guns and that guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Which is almost true: you do have the occasional fatality where some nimrod drops his piece and it discharges, killing him. But for the most part, guns are not “smart” weapons: they must be wielded by a human in order to kill something. And we will most certainly hear about our “right” to bear arms, completely ignoring that phrase concerning “a well regulated militia”.

Americans have had a long and passionate love affair with the gun. The revolutionary war was won by the musket; in the hands of farmers with sharpshooter skills honed by years of hunting to put food on the table, it put fear into the English redcoats and turned the tide in the rebels’ favor. But in time, the “long-rifle” receded in importance, to be replaced by “The Peacemaker”, the Colt 45: the gun that “won the west”. Immortalized in countless western movies, the Colt was also known as “the equalizer” because it made a man just as capable of killing an opponent as the next guy. A gun in the hand gave a man the power of life and death over other.

This is a potent power. As our society became more and more alienated and impersonal, the individual’s need to feel personal power over his (mostly his because women are not as hung up over power as men) life became more important. But power is difficult to attain in our society: one either has to have a lot of money or must be physically intimidating. Most of us have neither, nor will we ever have either. But the gun gives us instant power over others. And so long as we refuse to meaningfully regulate access to and the use of handguns, they will continue to be used in ways that are destructive to our society and to us personally.

As an illustration of what I am talking about, all you need to purchase a pistol in Clarksville is the right amount of money and a clean record. You can walk into a gun store and 30 minutes later walk out the proud owner of a weapon of personal destruction. No questions (aside from your name and home address) asked and no training required. Consider what is required to obtain a driver’s license and ask yourself: should anything less be required to own a gun?

The “rights” argument here just does not hold water. If you go back to the original intent of the founding fathers, it becomes evident that they were concerned with being able to mount a common defense against a foreign invader or an uprising. And the “arms” they referred to were muskets, not handguns. Cases have been argued in court over the “right” to bear arms. Those cases have been lost. Owning a handgun or a rifle is not a “right”, it is, like driving an automobile, a privilege that is to be regulated by the state.

I am not here to say that guns and rifles should be banned in our society. But I do think it is high time that we demand that they be properly regulated. Ownership of a lethal weapon ought to require a psychological evaluation of the candidate, along with training on the care and use of firearms and an exam on the laws pertaining to firearms. Along with that, the state needs to exercise greater control over firearms dealers. Until we can stem the flood of guns that pass through the hands of licensed firearms dealers and into the hands of criminals, we cannot hope to stem the criminal use of guns.

And until we get past the myth of the “Peacemaker” the allure of the firearm will continue to warp our good sense when it comes to their use.