Talking guns - again

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

In the shadow of the slaughtering of 12 innocents in Colorado last Friday morning it is inevitable that the roar of the gun control debate would become deafening. Those who put the right to bear arms above the right to live are the most deafening.

I believe in the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution gives each of us the right to keep and bear arms.  And the Supreme Court has in recent years uphold the individual right to keep and bear arms for home defense and for hunting.  If a robber - or a deer - breaks into your home and threatens your home, I say it's your right to aim straight and drop him where he stands.

How many robbers and deer are we trying to drop with assault rifles though? And are the deer firing back? Is that why we need bulletproof vests?

Not only couldn't the Founding Fathers have known that there would be assault rifles firing off 100 rounds per minute, they certainly did not envision that unstable individuals would be able to use the internet to  acquire enough fire power to arm a small town police department.  If they had, I'm pretty sure they would have expected us all to use our common sense and implement fail-safes to protect high school and college students, train riders, and theater-goers from being cut down while minding their own business.  The gun lobby's persistent suggestion that our best protection is to have bigger guns than the bad guys is foolhardy and suicidal.  If there had been return fire in the Aurora theater how many more lives would have been lost?

Restricting access to high-powered rifles, high capacity drum magazines, explosives, and flesh-ripping bullets cannot be seen as equivalent with impinging on the intent of the Second Amendment.  We should not be ignoring the Supreme Court's ruling that state and federal governments have the right to monitor and regulate arms sales. We should not be cowering from the gun lobby, but rather we should be letting common sense prevail. The Second Amendment should not threaten my right to life, health and a good movie.

Real justice for my boys

Everyone with a sense of right and wrong is up in arms about the Trayvon Martin case; and rightly so.  The idea that an unarmed young man could be gunned down for walking to the corner store in a hoodie is incompatible with our assurance that we live in a just society.  Unfortunately people get killed everyday, so Martin's murder would not ordinarily have become of nationwide interest except for the Stanford Police's unwillingness to charge the overzealous cop-wannabe George Zimmerman with the murder.

As news programs and talk shows on television and radio have been analyzing the case thread by thread over the last couple of weeks, I have been struck by the recurring conversation about the appropriate behaviors for black males out in public - all the things law-abiding black men minding their own business should and should not do to avoid being targeted, harassed, or gunned down in the streets. Are white mothers being advised to sit their sons down to instruct them on always saying "Yes Sir" and always keeping their hands in clear view?  As a mother of  two sons, I reject the notion that I or my sons should be the ones to carry the responsibility for racism. Sure we can clad this idea in the language of protection of the innocent, but it lets off the hook those who would act based on stereotypes and prejudices. It is appalling to hear a mother describe how her son is repeatedly accosted by new tenants in their New York luxury apartment.  Their assumption is that he does not belong, or that he is a service person and should be using the service entrance.  I shuddered to hear a sister talk about making sure her brother always has his hair neatly cut so that negative assumptions wont be made about him on the street.

There will always be Trayvon Martins as long as being black is, on its own, grounds for suspicion.  Having sit-downs with our sons about casting their eyes to the ground and not looking "Massa" in the eye is not progress or justice.  If Zimmerman gets off for this murder it will confirm what American black families already know and seem to accept - that a black man is a dangerous thing to be.  It will be undeniable endorsement of racial profiling - not just by law enforcement officials but also by every crazy vigilante.

Not every criminal case has a wide-reaching implication for the rest of society, but this case definitely does.  Justice for Trayvon Martin not only means justice is more likely for my two boys, it also makes it less likely that they will actually need it - even if they wear hoodies and walk with their hands in the pockets.

Reasonable doubt in the American Justice System

The whole country, it seems, has been in an uproar since a jury found Casey Anthony not guilty of the murder of her 2-year-old daughter three years ago. Newspaper websites, radio call-in shows, Facebook and Twitter have all been inundated with people expressing outrage in the jury's finding.  Every poll shows that people overwhelmingly believe Casey is guilty.  Most people believed a guilty verdict had been a foregone conclusion.

Good thing for Casey that her fate was not determined by the court of public opinion, but rather by 12 people who sat through hours of testimony and evidence and who were not convinced enough of her guilt.  With the Prosecutors having put the death penalty on the table, I think that's a good thing.  I also believe that this case is a good argument against the death penalty.

In the last 38 years, 139 people have been released from death row because they were found to be innocent of the crimes of which a jury found them guilty.  There is no way to know how many innocents have been executed.  As long as the death penalty is a method of punishment in this country innocent people will die, because the system is not infallible.  Guilty ones will also go free because juries will be hesitant to convict anyone to death - especially a pretty young, white woman like Casey Anthony - even in the face of convincing circumstantial evidence.

Like most people, I believe Casey Anthony is guilty. However, I was more convinced of her guilt by her defense's tactics, than by the prosecutors' arguments and evidence.  After careful thought, that would not have been enough for me to convict her to death either. I suspect I, and the jury, would have felt easier sending her to life in prison.

Now Ms. Anthony just has to hope Nancy Grace or Bill O'Reilly, or one of the many other crazies unhappy that she got off, don't run her over as she is released on July 17.