High capacity magazines make no sense

John McCain says that banning high capacity ammunition magazines won't help. Maybe he is right, but it seems worthwhile to remove easy and very fast access to so many bullets from the hands of someone intent on killing as many people as possible in a given time.

It seems that we are pursuing the wrong issue. The sane have for many years attempted to classify the large clips for automatic (actually semi-automatic) weapons as unnecessary. The gun-toters have argued to keep them available. During these debates, I have never heard a case made for why the large clips are needed. Can you help me out here? If not for killing the maximum number of people in the shortest amount of time, then why are they necessary to have available for anyone other than the military or para-military police forces? Why?

Of course the far right wacko's will tell us that the assault weapons with full automatic capability, large magazines and free access to all the armor piercing ammunition desired must be available so that we can protect ourselves from our government. I don't know about you, but even with a fully automatic Bush-Master and tons of ammo, I don't think I would want to go against our government and our Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines (not to mention the Coast Guard, the National Guard, state and local police forces) and the fire-power that they, collectively, could assemble. I think I will stick to the ballot box and the power of the vote.

Guns for hunting, for the sports of target shooting, skeet shooting, etc. are fine by me. Hopefully, those out there pursuing the long tradition of hunting game animals are sufficiently good marksmen who, to stop Bambie, charging through the woods, will need less than a thirty-round clip of armor-piercing bullets to stop the wild beast running for its life. For the guy shooting skeet ...two barrels seem sufficient to knock down a clay pigeon; and the person target shooting surely can stop and reload after firing-off a more reasonable ten (or fewer) round clip.

Notwithstanding the Second Amendment rights, the argument for the NRA position of little or no regulation of firearms and their accessories has little merit in today's American society.

A path not to be taken

For more than two centuries, we Americans have wallowed in the belief that we are special. American exceptionalism has been bandied around much like a high-minded, near religious credo. No one else could measure up to our view of ourselves. Most of us felt that our high opinion of ourselves was well justified. In the past, our booming economy, the freedom our representative democracy brought to us, seemed to bear-out that we were in fact an exception to the presidential-led countries in the world's history. Most republics, headed by a president, had in the past, devolved into dictatorships.

In a recent interview by Wonkblog's, Dylan Matthews, of Juan Linz, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Science at Yale University, Professor Linz raised concerns about America falling into the category of other democracies, many that had taken the path to dictatorship. His argument has merit and should cause us to take pause.

A major concern of the professor is that we have, as a country, lost our synergistic self-interest. In recent years we have fragmented into factional self-interest. Except on an infrequent basis, we rarely stand-up for the country. Our loyalties are regionalized, sometimes driven by one religion over another, one ethnic group, one race, one lifestyle, or by one or more of a number of identifiable separatist motives. It seems that we strive to highlight our differences versus celebrating our collective similarities. This factionalization is driving us to political grid-lock; grid-lock that will cripple any ability to govern the country.

With our current electoral process, grid-lock is more and more the inevitable outcome of our local, state and national elections. Majority rule is no longer operative. With the capability of state legislatures to modify voting districts, the House of Representatives has been gerrymandered into a completely dysfunctional law-making body. The Senate may be even worse with the militant use of the filibuster to thwart the will of the majority.

Elections become less and less an indicator of the will of the American people. In the recent 2012 election, the American people by considerable majority voted for the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives elections, yet the Republicans won a vast majority of the House elections ...gerrymandered districts was named by Republicans as the reason for the Republican win of the majority of House seats. In the Senate anytime the majority party has fewer than sixty votes, it becomes incapable of legislating.

When militant intransigence of the minority party in either the House or the Senate is added to the equation, the government effectively shuts down. It doesn't matter what the president chooses to do, the broken legislature can (and as we have seen) throttle the president and the will of the people ...even when the majority of the people have spoken (voted) in favor of the president's chosen path.

What can be the remedy to dysfunctional government? In many past democracies, a strong leader, with the aid of a supporting military has taken the power into his own hands.... In many of these cases, a military dictatorship is the resultant government. Hopefully, we in this country will come to our senses and avoid such a devastating path for our people.