School shootings in America have proliferated. In response, individuals and for-profit companies have developed a plethora of products aimed [pun intended] at reducing the carnage. Are they necessary? Do they work? If one of them saves a life, it may turn out to have been a worthwhile purchase, whatever the price. But I can’t help thinking that these defensive approaches, while well intentioned, and perhaps effective in some instances, miss the point. It’s clear that in 2019 America, creative minds, inventive marketers and politicians call themselves ready to address everything about gun violence—everything, that is, but the guns.

Instead of focusing on reducing the number of guns in circulation and enacting stricter laws for owning guns, this is what passes for protecting students from school shootings. Do we really have to live this way?

Stop the bleed

Stop the Bleed is a national awareness campaign intended to encourage bystanders to become trained, equipped and empowered to help in a bleeding emergency before professional help arrives. Through the program, healthcare professionals teach effective blood-stopping techniques to teachers, parents, students and members of the general public. [I’m not saying this is a bad idea; I’m just saying that it’s very sad that there’s a need for it.]

Bulletproof hoodies

A woman whose neighbor was shot and killed in an attempted robbery has started a company that makes bulletproof hoodies to keep people of all ages safe. The California company, Wonder Hoodie, now produces the bulletproof protection in smaller sizes for young children and teens in response to the rash of school shootings.

Bullet-resistant classroom blankets

Vox describes Door Shield is a panel of “soft armor” — used as cover by police SWAT teams when they raid buildings and exchange gunfire. You nail the shield to a classroom door. If a shooter breaks into the school, teachers lock the door, and with one hard tug on a canvas strap, you release the bullet-resistant panel, which rolls down and covers the door. “Even a child can operate it,” claims the manufacturer. The list price per blanket is $1,995—pretty pricey for a school with lots of doors. The manufacturer says, “It’s cost versus value: the cost of [Door Shield] versus the value of a life.”

PepperBall

Billed as a solution for “schools that don’t want teachers to carry guns,” the PepperBall launcher is a flashlight-shaped weapon that shoots bullets filled with pepper spray. Originally, it was marketed to campers and truck drivers, who wanted non-lethal weapons to carry on the road. After the shootings at Parkland, the manufacturer saw teachers as an additional market for the product.

Bullet resistant backpacks

The manufacturer calls its armor-plated backpacks, “the backpack that will save your life.” They retail for between $150 and $500. Originally aimed at law-enforcement personnel, after a recent school shooting, the manufacturer began designing a kid-sized version.

Rocks, bats and hockey pucks

While they’re not high-tech inventions, in the category of “Whose Brilliant Idea Was This,” are the primitive weapons that some school administrators have put in classrooms for kids to use in case a shooter shows up. Oakland University in Michigan gave out 3,500 hockey pucks to faculty members and students in November 2018 to throw at a gunman. Since 2016, a Pennsylvania school district has kept 5-gallon buckets of river rocks in classrooms. “If an armed intruder attempts to gain entrance to any of our classrooms, they will face a classroom full of students armed with rocks. And they will be stoned,” David Helsel, superintendent of the Blue Mountain School District in Schuylkill County, has said. Finally, Millcreek Township School District Superintendent William Hall wanted to show that safety policies had changed from hiding from a shooter to running, fighting, and surviving. So he distributed 600 mini baseball bats, and encouraged staff to keep one in every classroom of the Pennsylvania district’s 11 schools.

Fear sells. Gun laws, apparently, do not.

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Last week the National Rifle Association suffered a resounding defeat in the State of Arkansas.

I imagine that this week most Arkansans will be resting a bit easier and feeling a lot more secure out on their streets, in parking lots, and in other public places following the defeat at the hands of the state’s judicial committee of a Stand Your Ground bill introduced by Republican State Senator Bob Ballinger. Following a hearing characterized by heated testimony and a passionate plea by State Senator Stephanie Flowers for senators to reject the proposal, the bill was defeated by a vote of four to three—with three Democrats and one Republican voting “nay” and three Republicans voting “aye.”

In their wisdom, Arkansas’ state senators delivered a blow to the National Rifle Association’s long-term legislative priority of expanding the Stand Your Ground law to all fifty states. Since 2005, when the NRA lobbied hard and successfully for the first Stand Your Ground law in Florida, twenty-four states have followed suit with their own iterations of the law—including Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.

What are Stand Your Ground or “no-duty-to-retreat” laws? The laws effectively remove an individual’s duty to retreat before using deadly force, as long as the individual reasonably believes that he or she is facing bodily harm or imminent death. Stand Your Ground can be invoked while an individual is present in virtually any place where the person has a legal right to be.

Here’s how Everytown for Gun Safety characterizes the dangers of Stand Your Ground:

Stand Your Ground laws upend centuries of traditional self-defense doctrine and threaten public safety by encouraging armed vigilantism, allowing a person to kill another person in a public area even when they can clearly and safely walk away from the danger.

The record on the fallout of invoking the Stand Your Ground defense is horrific. Americans were first made aware of how far justice could be thwarted with the shooting death by George Zimmerman of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and the subsequent not-guilty verdict on charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter after Zimmerman claimed he was acting in self-defense—even though Trayvon was unarmed.

The data since that first highly publicized incident demonstrates the extreme danger posed by these laws.

• In Florida, in cases where perpetrators claimed Stand Your Ground as a defense, fully 79 percent of the shooters could have retreated to avoid the confrontation, and 68 percent of the individuals killed were unarmed.
• Even more shocking, of those Floridians who claimed Stand Your Ground, almost 60 percent had been previously arrested, and about one third had been previously accused of violent crimes.
• Since 2005, there have been two hundred incidents in Florida alone in which the Stand Your Ground law played a role in the decisions of prosecutors whether to bring charges, in juries’ decisions to acquit, or in judges’ decisions to throw out the charges.

A pattern of extreme racial bias and racial disparity has become ever clearer since the unjust verdict in the Trayvon Martin case. According to a study published in the journal Social Science and Medicine:

The impact of Stand-Your-Ground laws revealed a disturbing pattern of racial bias. Individuals (i.e., defendants) in Florida were more likely to avoid charges if the victim was black or Latino but not if the victim was white. Indeed, individuals are nearly two times more likely to be convicted in a case that involves white victims compared to those involving black and Latino victims.

Here’s what Everytown for Gun Safety observes about the dangers and injustices of Stand Your Ground:

These laws are associated with increases in homicides and injuries across different demographics and neighborhoods, while disproportionately impacting communities of color. They encourage the escalation of violence in avoidable situations and do not deter crime.

Watch and listen below to the despair, the frustration, and the justifiable anger of Arkansas State Senator Stephanie Flowers as she pleads for the life and safety of her son and for the lives of all Arkansans of color who would have born the brunt of the law’s assault on public safety had it passed.

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In 2017 there were 346 mass shootings. In 2018 there have been 307 so far. On average America has experienced one deadly incident per day this year. Thoughts and prayers are not enough.

The Shameful Toll of Mass Shootings

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“I don’t wanna be brave. I just wanna be safe.” – Lyrics from “The Most Vicious Cycle,” by Kesha.

Two must-watch videos. Two approaches to get out the youth vote. One is of the mind, and one goes straight to the gut.

In the first, Barack Obama, showing off his signature combination of brain and wit, obliterates the seven most often repeated excuses why young voters fail to show up at the polls.  The most spot-on moment is when Obama narrates over an image of a bespectacled, white-haired lady and asks, “You wouldn’t let your grandparents pick your play list, so why would you let them pick your representatives who will determine your future?”

The second video, called “The Most Vicious Cycle,” was produced for March for Our Lives, the gun-control advocacy group founded by survivors of the mass shooting that stopped short the lives of seventeen teens at the Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The video powerfully inserts the viewer into the moment in a high school corridor when bullets fly and the sound and blast of gun fire shatter the every day. Music and rap lyrics are by singer Kesha, and production is by Sage Sebert, a graduate of Marjory Stoneham Douglas.

I dare you not to chuckle at one and cry with the other. But after you’ve finished, share these videos and talk about them with your friends and family. Then work like hell to make sure that the people in your lives get out and vote.

Here’s what March for Our Lives wrote upon the video’s release: “After every shooting, there’s outrage, prayers and false promises. Then it happens again. End #TheMostViciousCycle. Vote for morally just leaders and share the video.” #VoteForOurLives on 11/6.

The post Two get-out-the-vote videos, one for a chuckle, one for a tear appeared first on Occasional Planet.

America’s gun laws are shot through with irony and illogic. Some would want you to believe that our national attitude regarding guns reflects a reverence for the Second Amendment. In reality, the gun laws passed—or should I say, not passed— in Congress and state legislatures are based less on ideology and more on the purely mercenary goals of the gun and ammunition manufacturers who are the true drivers of the NRA.

So, instead of a sane approach that acknowledges that gun deaths are a public health problem, we have an irrational patchwork of laws that often defy logic and do nothing to protect us. I’ve compiled some bullet points to illustrate the insanity of our gun laws:

• As we recently learned, via the Parkland tragedy, in Florida, you cannot buy a beer until you are 21. You can buy an assault weapon at 18.
• Florida and other states also have implemented strict ID requirements for voting, but none for buying an assault weapon.
•  You must be 25 to rent a car. You can buy an assault weapon at 18 in many states.
• In Iowa and other states, you must be 21 to by a scratch-off lottery ticket. You can buy a rifle in Iowa at 18, without a state permit.
• State legislatures have passed laws allowing guns in schools, churches, bars and public parks, while at the same time barring guns from the legislative chambers of their state capitols.
• In most states, you need a license to: use a scissors to cut people’s hair or trim their toenails; use a nail file to perform a manicure or pedicure; use a razor to shave a customer; use your fingers to braid someone’s hair. But you do not need a license to wield a weapon that, used for the purpose for which it was designed, can kill multiple people.
• In many states, you can bring a gun into a bar, but you cannot serve alcohol without a state license.
• In many states, under open carry laws, you can brandish a weapon openly, but if you are driving a car, you cannot have an open container of alcohol with you. By law, your child must be secured in a safety seat, but you can have a loaded gun concealed in the glove compartment or the console.
• Federal product-safety laws mandate safety standards for baby strollers and cribs, to prevent them from pinching a child’s finger or enabling a child’s head to get stuck between the crib slats. Similar protections—such as trigger locks on guns—are not required for guns in a bedroom drawer, in a purse, or in a closet.
• You can sue McDonald’s for serving too-hot coffee; you can sue a toy manufacturer, a food company or a lawn-mower company if you are accidentally injured by their product. You can sue a doctor or a hospital for malpractice if they prescribe the wrong dosage. Gun manufacturers and gun stores are protected, by federal law, from lawsuits stemming from injuries caused by their products.
• You need a state license to perform a healing massage, but—in many states—you do not need a permit to carry a gun into a spa.
• Right-wing, anti-LBGTQ fanatics consider the act of selling a wedding cake to a gay couple as tantamount to participating in the wedding, thus violating their religious “rights.” Selling a gun to someone who uses it to kill people is not seen as participating in murder.
• If you want to fly a drone or a model airplane, you must register it with the Federal Aviation Administration. No federal registration is required for buying or shooting a gun.
• After a would-be terrorist was found to have a non-functioning bomb wired into his shoes, the Department of Homeland Security mandated that all travelers have to remove their shoes for inspection at TSA checkpoints. After mass murderers armed with military assault weapons succeeded in killing of hundreds of people, laws regarding AR-15s and other semi-automatic weapons remained unchanged.
• Pharmacies and supermarkets limit the number of Sudafed cold tablets you can purchase. You can buy as much ammunition for your handguns, rifles and assault weapons as you want to.
• Supermarkets now keep Tide detergent pods locked up, to protect children from swallowing them. After a scare in which Tylenol tablets were found to be contaminated, drug manufacturers were required to package over-the-counter and prescription drugs in “child-proof” packaging. Congress and state legislatures continue to reject the notion of mandatory gun locks that could prevent children from accidentally discharging guns.

This list is far from comprehensive—unfortunately. I welcome additions that further demonstrate the hypocrisy and madness. We live in a country where even the deaths of 20 first-graders don’t move the needle even one centimeter on gun laws. This is just plain crazy.

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One of the excuses de jour of why to not enact stringent gun controls is that the problems would be solved if guns were kept away from those who are mentally ill.

There are lots of problems with this contention:

1. Guns kill. They facilitate violence among human beings. The more guns that are in our society, the more likely it is that someone, deemed mentally stable or mentally ill, will be able to use one. The most effective way to control guns is to reduce their number. It’s kind of like the most effective way to combat obesity is to reduce calories.
2. Who really knows how to define or categorize who is mentally ill? Much as we may like to think otherwise, the fields of psychology and psychiatry are inexact sciences. Labels, diagnoses are things that we are forced to do because the nature of human communication requires descriptions to explain even what is uncertain.
3. For what it is worth, researchers have found that at some point in our lives, over half of Americans will experience some sort of mental illness. We move in and out of periods of our life when we are depressed or anxious. The symptoms of other problems such as manic-depression or bi-polarity occur at varying times in a person’s life. For all of us, some days are good ones, other days are miserable.

Considering that we are people in motion, not just physically but also mentally, it is wise to minimize our proximity to weapons that can either do harm to others or to ourselves.

Consider one of the nation’s greatest proponents of gun rights, Missouri Governor Eric Greitens. To say that he had a bad day yesterday would be putting it mildly. He was humiliated to do the perp walk as he was indicted for on a felony invasion of privacy charge for allegedly taking and transmitting a non-consensual photo of his partly nude lover. Details of what exactly happened fall short of actual facts, at least with regard to what the general public knows. But it is rather clear that there was some sadistic, if not masochistic, behavior involved by Greitens. There was clearly hypocrisy involved as he ran for governor as a man of family values (his official gubernatorial portrait is not an individual one; rather it includes his wife and two children).

But hypocrisy may be normal for politicians, in fact, for most of us. But he has other strange behaviors such as disappearing for days at a time. He is very belligerent towards others. He has few friends, even among those who are supposed to like him like his Republican colleagues.

It certainly is not for me to say that Eric Greitens is mentally ill. However, despite his military career which included being a Navy Seal, he still seems to be rather fragile. Again, that is not an indictment of him in comparison to anyone else. It is simply evidence that if we want to have a safe and secure society, we are better off having as few guns as possible within the civilian population.

Unless Greitens is convicted, he will be free to purchase virtually whatever guns he wants. That scares me. I think that it’s scary for America.

How many times has he been called one of the “good guys,” and as Wayne LaPierre, executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association says, “the only way to top a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”

If only LaPierre and his like knew on any given day who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. I think that’s beyond all of our pay grades, even his, which is high. To be safe, let’s get rid of as many guns in civilian hands as we can.

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Here’s one reason why we can’t have a rational discussion about guns in America, even after witnessing mass shootings like those in Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, Orlando, Columbine, Virginia Tech and San Bernadino, to name just a few: Politicians love guns. They love them so much that they use them as campaign props. They use them as blatantly obvious metaphors for what they plan to do to regulations and laws they don’t like—especially those rules that would limit access to guns. They pledge allegiance to their gun-lobby donor overlords. And they gleefully fire off weapons of mass destruction in their ads as a way of demonstrating their manliness, their toughness and their take-no-prisoners political attitude. Guns are their political weapons of choice.

The violence — both implicit and explicit — in these ads is astonishing and frightening. They promote culture in which people worship guns, boast about their collections, show off their firepower, and willfully refuse to acknowledge the dangers inherent in widespread, unregulated gun ownership. These ads are about addressing problems not with words, but with bullets and brutality. These politicians have calculated that demonstrating a shoot-first-talk-later [or never] attitude is a winning campaign strategy. And unfortunately, in many cases, they are right.

Clearly, the once-hallowed bully pulpit has given way to the bullet pulpit. That’s why I’m not holding my breath waiting for an honest conversation about ways to reduce gun deaths in America.

Here are some examples. Watch and weep.

Ted Cruz making “machine-gun bacon” [2015]

Will Brooke, candidate for Congress in Alabama, having “some fun” exercising his Second Amendment rights to do some damage to Obamacare [2014], as happy music plays in the background.

Eric Greitens [now Missouri Governor], a “conservative warrior,” is all smiles as he fires a machine gun in this 2016 campaign ad:

Montana’s Greg Gianforte blasts a tv screen [2016]. [This is the guy who later assaulted a reporter, and got elected despite the attack—or possibly because of it.]

It’s not just southern Republicans who do this stuff. Even Jason Kander [a Missouri Democrat who ran for US Senate, whom I generally respect] had to get into the act. He lost to incumbent Republican Senator Roy Blunt, a major recipient of gun-lobby campaign funds. Maybe Kander should have shot the gun, not just assembled it.

Nor is this phenomenon exclusive to men. Here’s Jodi Ernst, now Senator Ernst from Iowa, taking her “shot” in 2014.

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In 1934, following the era of Al Capone and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Congress placed restrictions on the sale, purchase and ownership of what it termed “Class 3 weapons,” aka automatic weapons. Fast forward to 2017 Las Vegas – enabled by a device called a bump stock, Stephen Paddock killed 59 people and injured more than 500 in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Was Paddock using automatic weapons? Not really, but with a bump stock, a legal AR15 semi-automatic becomes every bit as lethal as the Tommy guns of the roaring twenties.

How did the modern bump stock come about? Ask its developer Jeremiah Cottle of Moran, TX. [from an article on Tactical Life.com]

I’ve been a recreational shooter my entire life, and I’ve always enjoyed shooting full-auto weapons. At the same time, purchasing a Class 3 firearm is outrageously expensive, not to mention it requires a mountain of paperwork sure to give you life-threatening paper cuts. I had bump fired in the past, but it was completely uncontrollable, unsafe and unusable. I wanted to find a way to change that, to make bump firing safer and more controlled.

So, I thought about it, and I prayed about it. Ultimately, I decided to go for it. I used all of my savings from the military, sold everything in my house that wasn’t nailed down and started making 3D-printed models and solving problems. Finally, I sent the stock to the BATFE [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] when I had a design that was close to being commercially ready. I was so happy when I got the word that it was approved.

Cottle’s company, Slide Fire is the principal manufacturer of the bump stock. Its promotional videos are chilling. Have a look at their showpiece.

How does a bump stock get past Federal regulators? The approval letter from BATFE explains

“The stock has no automatically functioning mechanical parts or springs and performs no automatic mechanical functions when installed … Accordingly, we find that the ‘bump-stock’ is a firearm part and is not regulated as a firearm under the Gun Control Act or the National Firearms Act.”

More from Jeremiah Cottle:

Some people like drag racing, some people like skiing and some people, like me, love full-auto. Unfortunately, the average recreational shooter doesn’t have access to a Class 3 firearm of their very own—they’re just expensive and impractical, like buying your own personal golf-cart hovercraft. I mean, if you can afford it, why not? For everyone else, Slide Fire brings shooters the same full-auto experience but without having to take out a second mortgage on their home.

I wonder how much Cottle loves full-auto in light of what happened in Las Vegas. Maybe the incident didn’t affect him. According to Slide Fire’s video, it’s every man’s birthright, freedom unleashed. But right now @SlidefireSol is getting slammed on Twitter and rightly so.

One of Slide Fire’s videos begins with a quote it says is from George Washington [it is actually a misquote from George Washington Carver], “When you can do common things in uncommon ways, you will command the attention of the world.” Sad to say, in this case, the idea is very true.

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As we reel from the carnage in Las Vegas, Congress is contemplating a bill that would make it easier to purchase silencers that would make it easier to shoot people without making a lot of noise or damaging the killer’s hearing. And guess who thinks this is such a great idea that he made a promotional video on behalf of silencer manufacturers? None other than that great intellectual, big-game killer Don Trump, Jr., son of the guy who, after Las Vegas, said, “We’ll talk about guns later,” meaning, of course, “never.”

Disguised and hiding behind the laughable euphemism, “The Hearing Protection Act,” the provision is, according to US News and World Report:

…tucked into the bipartisan Sportsmen Heritage and Recreational Enhancement, or SHARE Act, [which] would eliminate restrictions on silencers and instead treat them as ordinary firearms. Under the National Firearms Act of 1934, suppressors – along with “destructive devices” such as grenades or rocket launchers, “sawed-off” shotguns and machine guns – require federal registration and a special license to own, as well as a $200 tax stamp to purchase that would also be repealed under the proposed law.

… Proponents of the Hearing Protection Act say suppressors are unfairly maligned and make it harder for hunters to hear their surroundings, potentially endangering them and others.

But gun control advocates have slammed the measure as a boon to manufacturers of silencers, whose sales have been slumping in recent years. They also point out silencers would make it much more difficult for law enforcement to stop shooters like the one who opened fire on an outdoor music in Las Vegas, killing at least 50 and injuring hundreds of others Sunday night.

Law enforcement and military experts oppose the bill. Kris Brown, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said this in a statement after the bill passed out of committee:

There are very effective hearing protection devices already available on the open market…Keeping guns out of dangerous hands and stopping school shootings, ambushes of police and other mass shootings before they can start is the priority for the American people – not making it harder to detect a shooting once it starts.

But that’s not how Don Jr. sees it. In a video released in December 2016, Junior—in a business suit—gleefully fires off a rifle equipped with a silencer, and then shoots a hand-gun similarly tricked out. “I think it’s great,” he says. “I love your product.” Then he calls silencers a “public-health issue,” and “about safety,” that would also be just dandy when “getting little kids into the game.”

But don’t just read my excerpts, witness his testimony in all of its gun-blazing, beyond-belief,  insane illogic. Ready. Fire. Aim. No need to cover your ears, though.

The post The silence of the guns: Don Trump Jr. edition appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The blood-red Missouri legislature, the state’s once-Democrat-now-Republican Governor, and our party-uber-alles senior Senator continue to make this state a beacon for everything that’s going wrong in our country today. It’s not hard to find examples. Here are just a few:

• Missouri’s first-term Republican Governor, Eric Greitens [of assault-weapon ad fame], has signed a bill that revokes the City of St. Louis’ minimum wage hike. So, as of August 28, workers in the City of St. Louis who were earning $10/hr. under the new minimum wage, will get a pay cut, back to the old minimum wage of $7.70/hr.
• Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft [yes, he is the son of former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft] is one of only three Secretaries of State in the U.S., who have unconditionally surrendered vast amounts of voters’ personal information to Donald Trump and Chris Kobach’s election-suppression commission. No questions asked. Just handed it over because his Republican president asked for it.
• Republican U.S. Senator Roy Blunt unequivocally supports the McConnell/Trump replacement for the Affordable Care Act. Well, Missouri never expanded Medicaid anyway, so what’s the big deal, right?
• REAL ID is still a real problem in Missouri, because the legislature took 12 years to finally pass it. The 2017 legislature passed a bill that would bring state IDs into compliance, without which people using Missouri-issued IDs would be barred by TSA from flying. [Some ultra-conservative legislators held out for “privacy rights” by including a clause that allows people to opt out and just keep their old, non-compliant IDs.] But Missouri is about to run out of free passes from the federal government, and there’s still no plan to help people get the proper ID. But, y’know, why would anyone want to leave Missouri [or try to enter a federal building] anyway?
• Just yesterday, I attended a meeting at which lawyers were explaining the rights of surviving spouses under Missouri law. Here’s how the statute begins:

…The surviving spouse [is] entitled to the following property of the estate without regard to its value: The family bible and other books, one automobile or other passenger vehicle, including a pickup truck, with its means of propulsion…

If the order in which things are listed is indicative, the most important possession is the family bible. Next in order of priority is the car or pickup truck, and the dead spouse can’t screw the surviving spouse by having had the engine removed. These are apparently the laughable priorities in Missouri law…

• Missouri has some of the most lax gun laws in America. The legislature has decided that anyone can carry a concealed weapon almost anywhere in the state without the need to get a permit or training. Missouri also has the distinction of being the first state to adopt a “Stand Your Ground”  [otherwise known as “shoot first”] law since Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012. Naturally, that puts Missouri out of step with the rest of the country, where an American Bar Association task force and numerous other state legislatures have urged states to rethink such laws.
• Governor Greitens, again: He is rapidly earning a reputation for being a “mini-Trump,” with no experience in government and grandiose ambitions [He has amassed a huge campaign war chest, and is clearly aiming for a presidential run in 2020.]  Last week, he boasted that he was going to go on a rampage against crime in St. Louis by putting the Missouri Highway Patrol out on the interstates in force, looking for bad guys. After deploying the Highway Patrol for the weekend, he further bragged that they had made “dozens of  felony arrests.”  Statistics revealed than the Patrol had made only one arrest.
• While some people are describing the Trump administration as a “dumpster fire,” Missouri is home to the mother of all dumpster conflagrations—the one in St. Louis, where an underground fire in the Bridgeton Landfill is creeping ever closer to radioactive waste dumped nearby during the 1970s and 1980s. No one actually knows when the two will merge, and no one actually knows what will happen when the confluence takes place. Wait, it’s worse: No one knows if it has actually already happened.

And these are only the items that popped into my head over a period of about 15 minutes. It’s hard being a blue person in a red state. The only consolation is that things might be even worse in our once- proudly-blue-state neighbor, now turned fiscal laughingstock—Illinois.

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