A better gun bill?

Breaking news. This just in to WTMR News Central:

Sens. Grassley of Iowa and Cruz of Texas just popped a news release onto our desk. It announces their last-minute amendment to the Obama Administration's gun bill.

I've taken time to read only the contents section, but the money fact is that it appears to attack violence without a useless pretense of background checks.

It needs to fit into the already-set machinery, and I haven't the vaguest guess about its prospects.

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I never write much about Grassley, though I like him personally and consider him -- at worst --  one of the better men serving in Congress. A lot of us wish we could we could pry him away from his love affair with mandated ethanol and other welfare schemes for the ag industry. (He has a down-home awww-shucks demeanor which occasionally moves the literati to write him off as a hick. Usually they do it only once, chastened by the embarrassment of wondering what to do with that bundle he hands them. "Will my detached Ivy League ass fit  in my attache case?")

Don't know much about Cruz except that he sometimes has an impolitic mouth. To be expected, I suppose. After all, he's elected from the same state that once hired Ann Richardson's to govern the place.

Mere near

Sometimes I empathize with reporters trying to do a good job. Take Alan Fram of the AP for example.  He was assigned the overnighter on today's scheduled votes on  S.649 -- the Big Gun Control Bill. As is known from here to Planet Zangaro, the key to this thing is the Manchin/Toomey amendment to dink around with Feinstein's original language on background checks.

Like everyone else in the media, Fram probably began by buying the Obama adjective  "universal,"  then switched to "enhanced" and "expanded" when even the anti-rights left quietly abandoned  -- as untenable -- their lie that the checks would be within a dozen parsecs of universality. And that led the poor ink-stained wretch to:

"Just over half the public — 52 percent — expressed disapproval in the new survey of how President Barack Obama has handled gun laws. Weeks after the Newtown slayings, Obama made a call for near universal background checks the heart of his gun control plan."


"Near universal" is a valiant effort, but an impossibility in a context of reason, as in the emo mother's wail that dear sweet Snooki is nearly a virgin but, unforunately, also nearly pregnant.

Even competent journalists must work in a linguistic setting controlled by the loudest liars on every side of a hot issue. That's not because they necessarily want to, but because their sound-bite-conditioned audiences expect it, a general readership that, in fact, would be lost without buzz words.

And reporters themselves become similarly conditioned.  They shouldn't, but they do. That's one reason you never read a mass-media report that the term "        (adjective)  background check" is, all by itself, a lie.

It does not examine your "background." It scans records compiled by bureaucrats and associated -- correctly or otherwise -- with your name. The same sorts of records kept by the same sorts of data entry drones that screw up your bank balance, credit record, IRS standing, medical history, and even from time to time, criminal history.

Even with 100 per cent accuracy, the Inner Party's database has a probability of being irrelevant to "who you are."  Take mine. I have a 23-year rap sheet consisting of guilty pleas to two nefarious failures to heed a snow-removal ordinance plus a speeding bust. This proves irresponsibility -- the very quality Sen. Feinstein believes prima facie evidence of unfitness to bear arms. Think that's a silly argument? Please recall a New York effort a few years ago to deny gun permits to folks who failed to pay parking tickets on time.

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Back to you, Alan of the AP: Take no offense. That piece is a good summary of what we face in the Senate today. Besides, I'll bet that in a world less saturated with meaning-free gobbledygook, you wouldn't even think of typing "near universal." 

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For  meticulous followers of the Senate sausage mill, the Manchin/Toomey amendment is S.Amdt 714 to Feinstein's main bill which is S.649.  The media reports that eight votes will be taken today, and if you have the stomach to follow closely, the bill itself and all amendments are detailed here.

If it helps us evaluate the quality of information we're getting from our electric teevee sets about whodunit in Boston, we might consider this:

For a few days, the prosecutor shootings in Kaufman County, Texas, commanded the air waves. Virtually every on-air performer conveyed the notion that our culprit was a cabal of racist, ex-con, anti-government, gun-clinging skinheads.

Upon further review, authorities and the media now suggest that the prime suspect is a fat, middle-age, former government employee with hair, a law degree, and a conviction for stealing government computers.

So no matter who Rachel Maddow decides to blame for the Boston bombs during any given on-camera take, we might want to reserve judgement.

Americans

Without drama, in the absence of  televison cameras, some Boston people  you never heard of, and never will, make a difference --  undoubtedly more of a difference all of the horrified on-air performers and grandstanding politicians combined.

A simple Google place  offering a bed and a meal to other Americans and guests displaced by the terror bombing near Copley Square.