Tournament Golf

I have made it a personal goal to play competitive golf. This sounds relatively simple but in reality is it anything but simple. This idea started formulating several years ago when I started checking in to how to accomplish this goal. Most of the tournaments in this area are charity events aimed at raising money. They are typically four man scrambles where a team each hits the ball and then they play the best ball of the group. This process is repeated until they hole-out at which time a score is entered.

I have played in these types of tournament and enjoy them quite a bit but it really didn’t satisfy my competitive urge to compete individually. Besides, the scores in these events are really anything but reasonable and I have always suspected there is a good deal of fudging of the rules and perhaps a stroke subtracted occasionally. Any tournament that allows the buying of mulligans might be profitable but it isn’t really competitive.

The Alabama Golf Association has amateur events all the way up to and including US open qualifying. While it is a rigorous path, it is possible to follow this process up to qualifying for the US open. My goal is quite a bit lower than that. I want to be able to win some amateur events. That in itself is a significant accomplishment; and one that I fully well realize I might not ever realize. However, it is something I have committed my time and effort towards.

I picked up golf in my early thirties and fell in love with the complexity and difficulty of the game. Something about a purely struck shot conquering all the variables is almost spiritual. It is often the culmination of practice and a sort of letting go and allowing yourself to operate on auto pilot wherein you see the shot and then hit it without analyzing how to do so. I have always loved that pure sound and feel of a well struck shot and the parabolic flight of a ball spinning its way toward the target. It is a wonderful sensation but it is very hard to produce with any regularity because of the precise repetition required.

I taught myself how to play and have never had a formal lesson. My lessons were hours and hours on a course or range learning how to produce that feeling. My first experience in an amateur event convinced me that my putting and short game were seriously substandard to what was required to compete at that level. On the relatively flat greens I was used to a pitch within a few feet one way or another was sufficient to get you really close to the hole. The first Senior Amateur a played in had huge mounds on the greens so the effective target to get a pitch close was sometimes very small. I had a lot of short game bogeys and a couple of double bogeys from bad tee shots but finished about 4 strokes from making the 2 day cut.

After thinking about it a little I decided I needed to play harder courses, work on my short game, and eliminate the occasional wild tee shot. I joined a facility with two championship type courses and much better practice facilities and went to work on my game. As it turns out, the occasional wild tee shot required a LOT of work to fix. I basically rebuilt my swing, making it much tighter and connected which also made it shorter and more controlled. Regardless of what anyone tells you grip, setup, and connected changes are hard and take a massive amount of repetition to become normal. I feel like there is a BIG difference between what causes a wild shot now and what did before I made these changes. Don’t misunderstand, I have not made them impossible but I had to make a really bad swing and I usually instantly recognize what I didn’t do correctly when it does. Before I made the changes I often didn’t know what caused such a shot so it was hard to get confident I wasn’t going to repeat it the very next shot. Now… I find it easier to understand and dismiss the bad shots.

Basically I have made great progress in playing harder courses and eliminating wild shots. My short game has also come in for a lot of work and it is much sharper in being more exact around the greens. Unfortunately, some of the changes I made don’t hold up that well under pressure with my short game so my bad shots are sometimes horrendous if there is enough pressure. I know this and have taken to playing more high percentage shots but it has tended to stifle my creativity so that I don’t make many really good shots around the green like I used to. My putting has also been an area of focus although I have days when it gets uncooperative as well. I putt best when I don’t think about anything but stroking the ball to the hole. I suspect everyone would same the same thing but when you miss a couple of short ones it’s pretty hard to maintain that attitude.

I played a senior four ball tournament this year on a really punishing course and felt pretty good about how I played except for a few holes. I had five birdies over two days and we were in the running until about half way through the second day. Still… something extraordinary occurred on both days. Whenever my partner was out of the hole and my ball was the only one in play I got very erratic. Obviously, this was not a coincidental thing and I could feel myself tightening up when it occurred. The second day we both had some bad holes but by then I knew my bad holes were coming from the pressure of the moment. We tried letting me go first instead of my partner but honestly, he handled the pressure after I hit a bad shot worse than I did so we stuck with him going first and me second.

We wound up missing the cut after three double bogeys on the back side. The nagging realization that it had all been pressure related gave me some pause. No one likes to admit they choked under pressure but I knew that is what had happened. I would think about what the shot meant instead of what the shot should be and it would get ugly. I managed to feel my way through a couple of scrambling pars but I knew the shakiness of the shots was directly related to the pressure of the situation. Afterwards, after some honest analysis I decided that I needed to put myself in those pressure situations more if I expect to learn to react to them better. It is as simple as that. The learning curve exists not only on how to hit the shots but how to do it under pressure.

One thing I noticed with the better players I played with was that they too hit worse shots under pressure. However, since their worse shots were only mildly worse it didn’t absolutely kill their scores. Also, at least of couple of them seemed less affected by the pressure and with a little reasoning I put together that they had played a lot of tournament golf. Many of them played competitively in college or on mini-tours so they had been exposed to more pressure. This made perfect sense to me as I had found the same thing out about performing under pressure in both work and sports, the more you do it the better you get at doing it.

This led to me searching for a way to play more tournaments. Instead of the 2 or 3 AGA events I was eligible for, I want to play at least one a month through the winter and a couple a month afterwards. Many of the private clubs in the area have invitational tournaments but most of those are spring to fall. I finally found the Golf Channel Amateur tour online and decided to play some of their events.

My handicap is low enough that it put me in the Championship Flight on their tour which suits me just fine as I don’t want to compete against people with inflated handicaps or try to play the sandbagger game. I want to play with players I can learn something from and I want to play hard courses so this seemed a good fit for me. Most of their local events are one day affairs so that suits me as well because they are usually some distance from where I live.

The first tournament was at a course called Ballantrae just south of Birmingham. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get time to play a practice round so I was playing it blind on tournament day but I knew it would give me a chance to play under pressure. I practiced quite a bit for the tournament on all aspects of my game with special emphasis on my wedge distance and direction control. This part of my game is easily sharper than it has ever been at the moment and I reasoned that I should at least get up and down better than I had been.

The course itself was very nice but had received around 10 inches of rain the week before so it was very, very muddy. Not only was it muddy the fairways were long because they hadn’t been able to get on them with mowing equipment. The greens were very grainy but rolled at a decent pace. I didn’t quite realize that the Championship Senior flight is the same as the Championship regular flight but I was ok with it when I did. I was paired with two guys in their mid and early twenties and we were playing from the very back tees on a very muddy course.

My good drives carry 250 or so and usually roll out another 15 yards or so but on that day they were plugging in the fairway most of the day. This had me hitting a lot of 3 irons at tucked pins and I missed a lot of greens. Unfortunately, my pitching practice had been on level ground that wasn’t muddy and I was quite unprepared for the plugged, muddy lies at had all day at Ballantrae. The worst part was that the pressure and the conditions combined to make me lose all confidence in my short game. Chunked, bladed, and fat chips were the norm and I had trouble getting the speed on the greens so I 3 putted a lot as well.

All of this combined to give me a horrendous score of 98. I can’t remember the last time I shot 98 but I did that day. I started off with a pull hook drive, a fat layup out of the trees, a fat wedge, a fat chip, and a 3 putt. 7 on a relatively short par four. I never really settled in and had very few pars and a lot of others. It was a thoroughly bad day and I never played well at all until the last two or three holes when I just started hitting shots without worrying about results.

Doing my thinking and analysis after this round was not easy. It was like a bad dream. How could I shoot a 98? I play harder courses at my home course and routinely shot in the mid-seventies. I know my game is pretty sound and getting better. How did I shoot a 98? In truth, it was such an unpleasant thing to think about that I didn’t want to think about it very much. I chalked it up to inexperience and not knowing the course and registered for another event 3 weeks later.

Again, I worked on my game meanwhile and worked hard on my chipping and pitching from wet, muddy lies. I even went to the practice area one Sunday when it rained hard all day and practiced in the rain for a couple of hours. I gained enough confidence to hit down and through the mud and felt pretty good about my progress. I had started to try to maintain connection on my pitches by locking my arm to my chest which worked well as long as I didn’t turn my legs too much. I felt like I was on the way to playing well in a tournament. My wedge play was even better and my driver was accurate and a decent distance.

My next tournament was at Bear’s Best which is just northeast of Atlanta. This time, I made sure to go a day ahead and play a practice round. The course is a compilation of Nicklaus’ favorite holes all over the world so it is a mix of styles. I played a practice round with some local players that knew the course well so I learned a lot about it initially and played a pretty decent round. The good news is that even though it was wet and muddy it wasn’t as wet as Ballantrae had been and the back tees were not playing anywhere near as long.

It is amazing how nervous I get before these tournaments. Not just butterflies in my stomach but more like wild herds of buffalo galloping around down there. I have trouble keeping anything in my stomach the night before and tend to have to work hard to maintain any sort of calm. The one thing I hadn’t done was putt well on my practice round as the greens were bumpy with lots of unfixed ball marks and I had trouble getting the speed down. I had decided to spend most of my warm up practice on short game and putts so when I got to the course that morning that is where I started.

I missed several short putts on the practice green but was happy to see my speed was much better after concentrating on it for a little while. My ball striking on the practice tee was pretty good and I felt ready to play. I was with the first group out instead of the last. It seems that the Georgia local group wants the better players up front setting the pace which is logical if you think about it. My cart partner was a nice guy if a little bit of a loudly confident type. He had hired a caddie to work with him so he was with us for the day which turned out to be very handy. He worked as a forecaddie, often going well ahead to watch where our balls landed which turned out to be very helpful on questionable shots.

I was playing with a group that included 2 players who had played in college and one who had played some events on the Hooters tour so I knew they would be good players. Again, I was anxious not to embarrass myself or hold them up by hacking it all over the course. On the very first tee I found it impossible to concentrate on anything but not missing the ball and I hit a pulled hook accordingly. It was a sharply downhill shortish par four so I wasn’t too worried as long as I could find my ball. It was played as a red hazard down both sides so a drop was available if I couldn’t (a good policy for first holes in my opinion).

Thinking back now, I realize everyone in our group hit bad tee shots on that hole. Two of them were far enough right to be blocked out. I was in the trees on the right and one of them went far enough left to be on a steep slope trying to hit a small green with water on the right. At the time however, all I could think of was the 7 I had taken my last tournament on a similar hole. I hacked it out into the middle of the fairway and had a 160 yard downhill shot at the green. Determined not to miss it in the water on the right I aimed a little left and wound up hitting a very thin shot into a grass bunker just left of the green.

Meanwhile, my playing partner with the caddie hit one in the water trying to go over a tree and then claimed he thought it was a bunker from where he hit it. This seemed a little odd as he professed to be familiar with the course before we started. By this time my brain was telling me to just ease it on the green and let it roll somewhere close to the hole but that little Scottish golf demon inside was screaming at me not to hit it thin over the green and into the water. When I got to my ball it was well above my feet in some tall rough kind of sitting well up. In an effort not to swing under it and leave it in the grass bunker I bladed it all the way over the back of the green. Laying 4 behind the green and determined not to use a wedge again at the moment, I putted it from the rough through the fringe and left myself about a 20 footer for double bogey. It looked makeable to me at the time but I misread it so bad that it broke 3 foot left when I thought it would break 8 inches right. Now, with a five footer for 7, I naturally pulled it right and took an 8.

I had lipped out a birdie putt on this hole the day before. Unless you have been there it is hard to describe how that makes you feel. I felt like a disappointment to everyone who has ever played golf. “How does this guy get in the championship flight” is what I imagined my playing partners were thinking? Through the screaming voices in my head telling me I suck at golf it slowly dawned on me that my playing partner had a 7 and one of the other guys had a 6. Even then, I was so busy feeling like an imposter that it didn’t dawn on me that they were feeling pressure and not responding well too. I remember hearing my playing partner loudly proclaiming he had never had a triple on the first hole but all I could think was that I had done it in my last tournament. The only difference was that today I had just made an 8 so I wasn’t going to claim it was anything but a reflection of how I normally play in tournaments.

Own it, I was thinking. Own the fact that you just can’t deal with pressure. Don’t complain, don’t make excuses and don’t act like a whiner. Seeing my partner do all of these things made me determined I was not going to do any of them. All of this occurred to me but it didn’t help calm me down. I hit an inch behind my next drive and barely cleared the hazard before the fairway. My playing partner drove by my ball as if it didn’t exist. To be fair, he had hit it so far past me that he probably didn’t believe where mine was. I walked back to my ball with my laser and a couple of woods and a 3 iron. I might could cut a 3 wood around a tree to get to the small green but I knew it fell off down to the river behind so if I missed I was looking at losing a ball and a penalty stroke. I found a good layup to the right and pulled my three iron even further right thinking it might still go over a mound and disappear into the river behind. It stopped on the upslope of the mound and I breathed a small sigh of relief.

When I got to my ball I realized I had a tree directly in the way that I couldn’t get over and had to punch a 7 iron under the tree through the rough and onto the green. I hit a good shot but it came in a little hot and rolled off the green and up just into the rough left of the green. I putted it down and missed reading that it broke a foot left and down a steep hill so that it left an 8 foot putt up to the hole. I left it just short and carded a 6. Quadruple bogey, double bogey start and I was back in full choke mode. I was in shock. I was trying to remember swing thoughts and rhythm but mostly experienced flashbacks to every shanked, hooked, and bladed shot I had ever hit. My mind was on a fast forward replay of every terrible shot I had ever hit except it would go in slow motion through the shot and immediate aftermath of revulsion that would wash over me when I hit those terrible shots.

One of my playing partners was telling me to hang in there but I felt like a large bomb had went off next to my ear. I could hear what he was saying but it was being drowned out by this continuous replay of every nauseating shot I had ever hit on a golf course. That morning I had woke up from a restless night and seriously considered if I should pack it in and go home without even playing. The hamburger I had the night before was not sitting well and I knew it was mostly nerves but I wanted badly to not go play the tournament and go home instead. Now, I was thinking maybe I should of have done this and halfway wishing I would puke on the tee box so I would have an excuse for the awful mess of a golf round I was making on the course.

The next hole was a par three with a manmade dry creek in front. I took an extra club so I wouldn’t get in this ditch and then watched dejectedly as this toe struck weak shot hooked in a miserable arc right at it. It dove into the rough just short of the green but didn’t roll all the way back into the hazard. Meanwhile the only guy who had parred the first two holes in our group hit one so fat that it came up 30 yards short. It finally got through to me that we were all suffering our own arguments with mental demons; it was just that mine were winning the argument in my head. I had an impossible pitch, a downhill, side-hill lie and no green to work with. I hit a decent pitch that rolled some fifteen feet past and I realized every hole so far had been on a ridge in the green. It was like the worst pin placements possible on what was already a hard course. I two putted for a bogey and felt better. At least I was improving my vicinity to par with each hole. Maybe I would par the next one I thought.

Concentrate. See the shot and hit the shot I was thinking on the next tee. Meanwhile, my playing absolutely duffed on off the tee with a driver. It went only about fifty yards and wound up on the women’s tee in front but I didn’t even see the shot. I was so wrapped up in my own inability to hit a decent shot I probably wouldn’t have noticed a paratrooper falling into the fairway. It was a shorter hole that I had hit too far right on the day before with a 3 wood leaving me a blind shot into the green so I aimed further left and hit a heeled weak cut but a least it was in the edge of the fairway. We were playing lift clean and place because every shot was picking up mud. I could actually just see the top of the pin and thought it was on the left side of the green. I hit a pretty good 8 iron that I pulled a little and noticed the wind caught it and ballooned enough to dump it in the front right bunker.

This hole I found out later was a copy of the Old Works hole in Anaconda, Montana. It has black sand in the bunkers. Yes… black sand. I had a decent lie and a straightforward mid-range bunker shot that was not a hard shot. The day before I had hit a few shots out of the practice range bunker. It was very heavy gritty sand with a thicker consistency than I was used to but the ball came out good although it was hard to spin the ball out of it. I was thinking all this over as I walked to my ball in the bunker. As I climbed down into the bunker I realized it was very fine sand, like black powder only lighter. Instead of thinking about how it would change the shot my mind was stuck on the question of where in the world the bunkers were black. China… South Africa…. Maybe Australia I was thinking as I took half practice swings careful not to touch the sand. Ok… Three quarter swing with a slightly open face I was thinking and it should come out just right. Then… as I got to the top of my swing it happened, the thought that kills. “Did I dig my feet in?”... I wondered somewhere in the back of my mind. In that short millisecond between starting the club back and determining how far to take it back that thought unhappily exploded like a mental land mine that I had stepped on. I found myself actually trying to feel if my feet were dug in or not as if by some sensory magical wizardry I could make this assessment and adjust my swing arc accordingly. As it turns out I am not a wizard so I did the exact worse thing I could do in that situation and just raised up a little as if that would help.

As most people know the correct adjustment in a bunker, assuming one was actually necessary, would be to hit down more. The worst thing that could happen from that adjustment is to hit if fat and leave it short of the hole. There is in infinitesimally small likelihood that raising up on a bunker shot is ever going to help the result. As a matter of fact there is a much larger probability that you might kill one of your playing partners with a bladed shot screaming at supersonic speed from such an adjustment. I can only attribute that thought taking over my body in that instant to the certainty that golf gods from a race that think bagpipes make pleasant music are perniciously cruel beings. The thin 75 yard blast that flew over the green and into the woods behind the green confirmed that it was the wrong adjustment. The reaction of two people studying birdie putts to a rocket flying over their head and loudly center drilling a hickory tree behind the green was almost as bad as the solid whack of a bladed sand wedge felt in my hands when I was expecting the soft thump of fine sand. Now I had a 40 yard shot with trees in the way that is completely blind up 40 feet to a green sloping towards the bunker I just hit out of to get in this place for my 4th shot. I couldn’t even see the top of the flag from where I was. The nerves feeding my hands felt like high voltage lines pulsing out of control and I was mentally going over whether I had a chance of blading this one through the French doors on the mansion overlooking the green. I hit a decent shot that I thought was on the green but it was just short and left enough to roll into a bunker behind the green. Again…. Black sand with the consistency of powder. This time… I played it with a harder, steeper swing and it came out beautifully with no second guessing demons in my backswing. I made the putt for a six.

Stay connected and slow down I was thinking on the next tee. My driver felt like an unruly alien being in my hand and I was hoping it didn’t sprout fangs and bite me on my backswing. Breathe… see the shot… are there out of bounds stakes up the right?… This was what was going through my head. A positive thought followed by a blaring neon loudspeaker screaming dire warnings with a lot of static thrown in. Somehow I managed to squeeze in a swing between the conflicting thoughts in my head and hit a little push to the left that was short but in the fairway. When I got to my ball, it was in a very muddy spot. No grass in the vicinity but not exactly standing water either. I marked it and cleaned it wondering how far I could legally move it to replace the position but decided that I had to set it within a few inches of the spot. I found two little sprigs of grass that immediately collapsed beneath the weight of the ball. Standing in mud, the ball sitting in mud and an uphill, upwind, 180 yard shot with a large wetland in front.

“Stay connected and slow down,” I was thinking. Whack… it was that sweet feel of a perfect strike that radiated up through my hands. I looked up to see a high tracer arcing hotly towards the pin. It hit in front of the pin and jumped past it trickling slightly up the steep bank of rough behind. I just hit a perfect shot out of a terrible lie. It was probably one in four of hitting it solidly at all and I hit it perfect. The chattering Scottish demons in my head shut off like somebody had flipped a switch for just a second but as I walked up toward the green I realized I had a steep downhill lie going towards a narrow green sloping away from me. Still… I had hit the shot and I could pull this one off too I thought to myself.

It was worse than I thought. I toyed with the idea of putting it but knew it might just dive down deeper in the rough and leave an even harder shot. I finally decided to just bump it with a 9 iron. I needed to fly it about a foot but it had to go in the air that far or it wouldn’t get out of the rough and bound down onto the green. I couldn’t use a connected swing… it was all hands but suddenly the club felt right in my hand and I knew I could do this just by using my hands. Sure enough it hit it perfect and it bounded down the hill and rolled some 5 feet past the hole narrowly missing going in. “Good shot,” someone said and I knew it was a good shot; that it had come off as good as it possibly could have without hitting the hole and going in. I missed the putt coming back but just barely as it drifted a little right on me from some slope that I hadn’t seen. Not the worst bogey I had ever made I thought to myself.

The next hole was a par three over water that is supposed to be like Muirfield village but looks suspiciously like number 12 at Augusta. Steep slope down to water, narrow green and huge bunker in front with steep slopes and a bunker behind. It was playing some 150 yards to the pin but I had hit a perfect shot here the day before about 5 feet from the pin so I even felt a little confident. There was a little more wind in my face than the day before but it was the same pin. There is a tiny bailout left but it leaves an impossible pitch down to a green sloping towards the water.

The first guy teeing off hit way too much club and it hooked very high and wide left eventually slamming into the cart girl’s refreshment cart parked there waiting for us. This started those nasty little Scottish golf gods giggling insanely up in my head, “and he hits it better than you,” they were saying. The wind was hard to figure as I could see it holding shots. I tried to assure myself that everyone was over clubbing because they didn’t realize it was a little downhill but I never got confident that my club choice wasn’t too much. Naturally, at the top of my backswing I decided to take something off the swing. I have been playing golf now for over twenty years and I have never hit a good shot by taking something off a swing on the way down but the seemingly omniscient mid swing correction voice blaring in my head convinced me it would be a good idea and I toe flipped it just short enough to hit the bank and bounce into the water. My third shot from the muddy drop area was a strange sort of sidearm trapped 9 iron that threw a divot that size of a painted road stripe majestically fifteen feet out into the lake and propelled the ball over the green and into the back bunker. Free drop from the ground under repair bunker which I putted confidently through six feet of rough down to the severely sloping green stopping 3 inches short of the hole. “Great touch” one of my partners said. He was right. Assuming someone ignored the toe flip and the trench digging sidearm swing you might possibly think I knew what I was doing on the really hard shot. A 3 inch tap in later and I was the proud owner of another double bogie on a hole I had birdied the day before.

It was about this time that something happened in my head. I realized the only good swing I had made was when I slowed down my backswing and stayed connected. I also realized I had hit it HARD. I hadn’t steered it. I hadn’t aimed it; I had wound up and HIT it. That’s my game. I don’t feather touch shots, I HIT them. I cut down my backswing and control distances and trajectories with ball position but I don’t finesse my swing on golf shots. I boomed the next drive with a faint voice of Hogan somewhere in my sub conscious saying he always hit the ball as hard as possible with full swings. I didn’t miss many shots the rest of the round. I lipped out a birdie on that very hole. I three putted the next two holes from good positions within 20 feet but I didn’t miss a full or partial shot. I went at flags and I went at targets from the tee.

I hit a 15 foot high hooking 3 iron under a tree over a ravine wasteland onto and through the green on a hole I was blocked out on. I hit a beautiful dead handed 9 iron chip to die it over a slope and within 5 foot of the hole on a very slick downhill green. I missed the putt for par but I made the shot I needed to so that I had a putt at it. I didn’t think about connection or use of legs or shoulders when I hit it, I just used my hands and my feel. I noticed the best short game player in the group had a terrible technique but great hands and the guts to hit it where he thought it needed to go. Thinking back now I hit a lot of good short game shots when I threw out all thoughts of short game technique in favor of imagination and touch.

I hit one bad drive on the back when I couldn’t decide where I wanted to hit it to approach the pin and drove it into a bunker under a steep lip. I lipped out a par saving putt on that hole. I stiffed a five iron to 18 inches on a hole and made birdie and I hit a beautiful cut 3 wood onto 18 and made birdie from 15 feet on the hardest hole on the course. I shot even par on the back nine; the lowest back nine of the tournament that day. Tucked pins on severe slopes be damned; I played the course well and made putts when I needed to the rest of the day.

Maybe there is hope for me yet as a tournament golfer. Maybe next time I will listen to my instincts and play my game instead of trying not to hit bad shots and succumbing to the Scottish golf demons in my head telling me I am not very good at this game. At the very least last Sunday I proved to myself that I can play tournament golf well when I get my mind right.

What Happened to Syria?

As in most things, the events currently going on in Syria and Iraq leading to the rise of ISIS can’t be narrowed down to one cause. Widespread unrest and civil war are usually caused by a multitude of divergent events coming together at the same time to put pressure on existing social structures until they begin to fracture. We too often mistake the last link in this causal chain for the one reason such an event occurs and the rise of ISIS is no exception.

The roots of what is going on in Syria can be traced back to WWII. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which actually took a couple of hundred years, corresponding to the outbreak of WWII western powers found themselves drawn into local conflicts in the region. After the Allies defeated the Axis powers a new dynamic of power developed. Large scale machination of ships, tanks, and airplanes put a new emphasis on energy sources that both sides immediately understood to be crucial for maintaining power in the world.

As the middle east was relatively rich in oil it immediately became an area of great interest for all major industrial nations with their newfound dependence on large sources of fossil fuels. The region was quickly carved up and divided into areas of influence by France, England, the US and the newly powerful USSR. Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Jordan were newly important regions. Lines of influence and borders were arbitrarily created in many of these areas completely independent of what the native population wanted or even recognized in the scramble that ensued.

With the arbitrary establishment of Israel in response to Germany’s attempted genocide of the Jewish race, the region had a new irritant added to the mix. Native populations all across the region found themselves ruled by newly installed leaders controlled by larger industrial nations that they knew nothing about previously. In most cases local chieftains amenable to foreign control were installed as leaders in many of these newly created countries. Many of these newly established rulers had been tribal leaders of small groups previously and proceeded to immediately create a ruling class from amongst their own tribe without any thought of building a national consensus. This was the norm rather than the exception all across the region. As long as the new leaders cooperated with the industrial nation given a sphere of influence over them there weren’t too many other qualifications necessary.

Naturally, this led to problems when the other tribal leaders who had once had some power lost it. Unrest led to violence which led to further persecution and tighter controls from dictatorial leaders with foreign support and this scenario played out over and over again all across the region. When such leaders sometimes faced uprisings they couldn’t control their industrial nation supporters either stepped in to help quell the uprisings or simply replaced them with someone more brutal and able to maintain control. This is basically how a Sunni minority from cooperative Saudi Arabia gained a foothold in largely Shia dominated British controlled Iraq originally. It is also how a small Alawite minority group in Syria managed to take over a largely Sunni dominated Soviet controlled Syria.

Meanwhile in US controlled Iran, our chosen local tribal leader; the Shah carried out a brutal coup over an elected Iranian leader with the help of the CIA. The Shah’s rule was notably repressive with arbitrary prisons, torture, and all manner of human cruelty a hallmark of his rule. Eventually, the people themselves got enough of this and rose up against him behind a Shia religious Ayatollah who had conveniently been safely hiding in France. When this group took over and basically threw the remaining US influence out while at the same time taking US hostages all over Iran it set off a chain of events that has spun increasingly out of control ever since.

In response to this action the US began arming and supporting the same Sunni dictator that had sprung up in Iraq when the British had enough and pulled out of the continual mayhem there; Saddam Hussein. Hussein also relied on arbitrary prisons, torture, assassinations, and all manner of brutality to maintain control in Iraq but he was willing to fight our new enemies in Iran so we began supplying him arms, training, and large amounts of money which he used to further consolidate his power in Iraq and attack Iran.

Meanwhile, a centrist government in Afghanistan was overthrown by a couple of upstart communist groups. The Soviet Union, anxious for more influence in the fossil fuel rich middle-east, and losing influence in Egypt and Libya threw their support in the way of arms and training for this relatively small group. Unfortunately for the Soviets this group soon split into two groups that began fighting each other and brutalizing everyone else which touched off several organized fundamentalist religious groups being formed in response. Brutal mass killings became the norm amongst the many tribal and religious feuds that had been simmering for a very long time. Saudi Arabia sent in support, arms, and money for their Sunni brothers and Iran sent in support, arms, and money for their Shia brothers and the whole region devolved into a massive violent vortex.

The Soviet Union, anxious to preserve its tenuous foothold in Afghanistan sent in arms, advisers, and finally its own military to quell the mess. The US government, anxious to harm its cold war enemy in any way possible, began sending in arms and support for a number of fundamentalist Islamic groups on both sides. Even though no one really knew who they were supporting from the outside Afghanistan found itself having arms and money from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and the US sent to all manner of insurgents willing to fight the USSR on one side and the USSR support and military on the other.

Meanwhile, our rogue leader in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, began threatening other oil rich countries in the region besides Iran. He became so powerful and full of self-importance that he invaded neighboring Kuwait as they had a lot of well-developed and prosperous oil fields and 15 years of constant warfare against Iran had tended to erode his country’s infrastructure. Hussein didn’t see it as much of an issue, after all his supporters in the US had done much worse over the last half century to protect their interest in the region and Kuwait was relatively tiny and unimportant in his mind.

He didn’t take into account the delicate balance between industrial backed oil fiefdoms and soon found himself under attack from a well-organized US led coalition of nations that did understand the necessity of this balance if the western world is to continue to depend on Middle Eastern oil. As he quickly retreated back into Iraq a strange thing happened. Some people within the intelligence community of the US convinced our then president George Bush Sr. that if we removed Hussein Iraq would quickly devolve into sectarian violent chaos amongst Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish nativist populations that might destabilize the rest of the region similar to what was going on in Afghanistan.

Bush Sr. understood this idea from his time serving as the head of the aforementioned CIA. He also understood that Hussein was armed with chemical weapons because the US had supplied them to him during his wars against Iran. As the coalition troops backed off after chasing Hussein back to Baghdad Hussein began inflicting heavy punishment against the Shia forces in southern Iraq that had risen up while he was under attack from coalition forces. He also proceeded to use the chemical weapons we had given him in putting down a Kurdish insurgency in northern Iraq along with US arms and equipment that he had been given earlier. This set up a distrust of US promises that was to rear its head again a few years later when George Bush Jr. invaded Iraq but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Eventually, fundamentalist Islamic forces with the help of Saudi, Pakistani, and US aid in weapons and money combined with a collapsing economy at home managed to force the Soviet forces to withdraw. This led directly to the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic Taliban taking over and fomenting more slaughter against all their perceived enemies in the region. While this should have come as no surprise to the US, it certainly wasn’t a surprise to the Saudis who had been pushing for an international fundamentalist Sunni rebirth all over the world for quite some time previous by running Madrasa schools in many areas of the region free of charge that served as public education in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, and many other poverty stricken areas of the middle east.

Unfortunately, this group also became an international clearinghouse for violent religious based Jihad. With their US furnished weapons plus those they took from the retreating Soviets they were now well armed, well trained and quite effective warriors who began exporting violence in the form of terrorism throughout the world. Much of the money came directly from foreign companies operating in Saudi Arabia who demanded they submit a 20-80% tax Zakat to leaders of the faith who then turned huge amounts of this money over to the Taliban. It is also worth noting that the vast majority of Saudi money that flowed into this Zakat came from US consumers filling up our SUV’s with gas that had originally come from Saudi oilfields. Between this money and their massive revival of the poppy production used to make heroin the money flowed in just as fast as the radical ideas flowed out.

It wasn’t too long before some Taliban trained terrorist who were actually Saudi citizens flew a series of planes into buildings in the US on 9-11. Naturally, an attack on US soil was not to be tolerated, especially when it came from an openly supported group in Afghanistan who we didn’t need to buy oil from. With much anger and indignation US forces quickly attacked and subdued the Taliban and its partners al Qaida in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, at the same time we had elected an administration full of people who had been in favor of removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq ever since Bush Sr. had left him in power at the end of the first Gulf war.

They knew he had chemical weapons because they had given them to him years before. They knew he wasn’t too squeamish about using them because he had used them against the Kurdish insurgents in Iraq recently and had been accused of using them against the Iranians in their last war. Besides, they also knew he was sitting on a large supply of undeveloped oil that could be used later to pay for the whole thing. They suspected he was friendly with terrorist groups because of his open support of Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel. He had already proven to be a loose cannon by attacking peaceful Kuwait. It was time to take him out as well, while we were in the neighborhood; at least that was how the logic flowed in the Bush Jr. administration.

It wasn’t too hard to convince angry US citizens upset over 9-11 that Hussein was a threat. It didn’t seem to bother us that it was actually Saudi citizens who had attacked us on 9-11. At any rate, we soon invaded Iraq. Unfortunately, the people who had warned Bush Sr. about what might happen if Hussein was removed were right and the people who suggested the Iraqis would be grateful to us as liberators were wrong. Although history plainly shows that invading a sovereign nation rarely brings gratification from its citizens we didn’t seem to understand that reality either and in we went.

The violent chaos that immediately ensued seemed to stun the Bush Jr. administration. Shias that had been jailed, tortured, and massacred in several uprisings decided it was payback time on the Sunni minority that had been persecuting them for years. Kurdish forces in the north reacted similarly and begged US forces to arm them so that they could defend themselves from both. Unfortunately for the Kurds, Turkey to their north was one of our allies and they were deathly afraid that a well-armed Kurdish group to their immediate south would cause further problems for them in Southern Turkey which was also populated heavily by a Kurdish native population anxious for their own nation.

In a very short time the whole country became a conflagration of violent sectarian tribal violence. It didn’t help things that we had taken out much of the remaining crumbling basic infrastructure of electrical grids, water systems, and oil pumping capabilities when we went in. Murder, extortion, kidnappings, and mass killings became the norm and we had neither the manpower present to stop it nor the understanding necessary to understand its cause. Perhaps Bush Jr. could have taken some advice from Bush Sr. and understood the situation on the ground before we went into Iraq. In a blindly impossible effort to establish a unified democracy in a nation where there were three sectarian groups intent on killing each other and refusing to share power, we failed again and again to establish an environment stable enough to allow for the re-establishment of a civilized society.

Finally, we got enough and decided to leave. More accurately, we were asked to leave by the Shia elected government intent on completing their take over of all power and control in the country. This group had the backing and support of the Shia government in Iran and they neither trusted the US government nor wanted our forces around to interfere with their brutal takeover of all political power in Iraq.

Unsurprisingly, the brutal retaliation against the Sunni population in Iraq had a backlash. As Sunnis fled Iraq both with the US invasion and the later Shia takeover of the government they fled into Syria and Libya. Many of those who stayed began organizing insurgent warfare against the US supported Shia forces in Iraq. Numerous US officials warned that the US should force the Shia to share power but this advice was ignored in favor of getting out.

These Iraqi Sunni forces became the nucleus of a new power in the region; ISIS. ISIS is quite literally claiming itself to be the renewed and proper caliph headquarters for the Sunni faith. They are intent upon uniting all Sunni forces in opposition to what they consider to be members of the faith led astray by imposters; the Shia. Of course they also don’t hold a lot of love for the great Satan of the world which in their view is pretty much all imperialist groups who have been the hand behind the puppets in the region since WWII. This includes France, England, the US and Russia.

The first western propped up puppet to fall was in Tunisia but this was soon followed by a bigger puppet leader in Libya, Gaddafi. Gaddafi had been something of a hero to many in the region when he stood up to the British who put him in power and nationalized the oil companies in the late seventies. Unfortunately, he had started down a long slide towards brutal dictatorship that often accompanies absolute power and by the time 2011 rolled around he was so out of touch he didn’t see that the tide was turning.

Meanwhile, inside Iraq ISIS was gaining more and more power. Large groups of refugees from Iraq that had fled into Syria during and after the US invasion found themselves in even worse poverty than they had left in Iraq. They also found a large local population in Syria suffering terrible poverty and economic collapse because of several factors including another dictator from a minority sect willing to apply brutal tactics to maintain control in the region. Assad had been backed by the Soviets and later the newly formed Russian Republic since his family’s takeover in Syria many years before. With the rise of opposition forces in Syria he responded the only way he knew how; with devastating and indiscriminate military force.

ISIS is currently based in Iraq and neighboring Syria. They claim this region as their own sovereign nation and rule it with an iron fist reminiscent of the Taliban in Afghanistan only more controlled and more organized. This is not a shadow group like al Qaida intent on international terrorism, this is a group based in what they consider to be a sovereign nation. They likely have support both military, monetary, and political in neighboring Turkey ever anxious to hold down the likelihood of a Kurdish threat.

Meanwhile, US forces are attempting to train and arm western alliance forces wanting to remove Assad. Turkoman forces of Turkish ethnicity in northern Syria help fight Assad’s forces and ISIS believes itself to be involved in a death struggle to maintain what they consider to be their sovereign nation which includes much of northwestern Iraq. Recent Russian air raids against Turkoman forces in northern Syria have already touched off one incident of Turkish fighters shooting down a Russian aircraft and more is likely to follow.

As bad as all the politics that led to this situation are, there are other factors as well. We know what happened in Iraq to lead to the ongoing slaughter between Sunni and Shia because we caused much of it by invading Iraq and removing Hussein. Previous to our removal of Hussein we largely crippled the Iraqi infrastructure with economic sanctions for many years and then we destroyed what was left when we invaded. For all his bad qualities, Hussein understood what it took to keep these factions from fighting which is why he largely removed all religious connotations from political forces in Iraq.

This doesn’t explain what happened in Syria. As it turns out, there are other reasons than Assad why the people in Syria were so stirred up before refugees from Iraq began streaming in. From 2004 to 2011 Syria experienced the worst long term drought in a thousand years according to a Global Assessment Report. People in northern Syria experienced a 75% total crop failure during this time. Livestock herders lost around 85% of their livestock. In 2009 the UN estimated that 800,000 Syrians from rural Syria had lost their entire means of livelihood as a result of the droughts.

Experts estimate some 2 million Syrian people from rural areas were forced to move into cities to seek means of avoiding starvation. Add to that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees fleeing the destruction in Iraq and a picture starts to emerge of the economic chaos and human suffering that touched off the uprisings in Syria.

To be sure, a part of this problem was simply poor or indifferent governance by Assad. Based upon short term assessment studies during years of plenty Assad implemented large subsidized shifts in farming methods to irrigated cash crop farming of wheat and cotton. A huge rise in the number of wells dug for this effort along with the terrible drought led to every increasing water shortages in both rural and city populations in Syria as the exact same time large numbers of jobless, penniless refugees from Iraq arrived.

However, and this is worth noting as well, a NOAA study published last October found strong observable evidence that the recent prolonged period of drought in Syria is linked to climate change. This study further observed that if recent trends continue crop production in the whole region of the middle-east will decline between 29 and 57% in the next 35 years. There is a large argument over whether this is caused by man-made activities or normal cyclical climate change but there is no argument that displacing large populations of largely self-sufficient rural populations into deeper and more hopeless poverty inevitably leads to radicalization and violence.

The oft ridiculed statements of Bernie Sanders and President Obama come to mind when one takes note of the fact that real time climate change problems are very much a part of what is going on in Syria right now. All evidence suggests this situation will get worse before it gets better. Add to that the ridiculously inept foreign policies we have pursued in the middle-east since WWII and the whole region seems like even more of powder keg. A powder keg that is getting drier and more easily ignitable with each year of continuing drought in the region.

What is a Conservative?

Since the 1980’s government has seen a massive resurgence of politicians who identify themselves as Conservatives. Reagan seemed to make the term so magical that in some areas of the country it is presently impossible to get elected unless you identify yourself as a conservative. Let’s see if we can define the term Conservative.

Conservative- of or relating to a philosophy of Conservatism which is further defined as follows: tending or disposing to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions. This seems a reasonable definition as Conservatives are generally resistant to changes in recognized norms. Much of the present Conservative movement is built around this basic principle. Conservatives usually want to maintain present conditions or else revert to past conditions. In either case it is a philosophy desiring very slow and gradual change and highly resistant to new ideas in most cases.

Let’s take a look at how this movement has operated throughout US history. We could go further back and follow it through world history but for the sake of brevity I will try to hold this discussion to US history. I’ll start with the birth of this country as a sovereign nation, the American Revolution.

Conservatives in the colonies were overwhelmingly against the revolution. As usual in such dynamics the Conservative movement wanted to maintain the status quo. At that time in our history wealth was the common denominator of the ruling class. People without wealth were not allowed to vote and therefore were usually kept from holding office in any form. The Conservative movement looked in horror upon the idea of universal suffrage which it equated with rule by the mob. The leaders of Conservatism in Great Britain most strongly vociferated this belief in speeches wherein they exclaimed that rule by the wealthy was in fact the natural order of things. Aristocrats would always rule over everyone else and it was the duty of the poor to obey their betters. It was unnatural for them to rebel against the rightful king and would lead to anarchy. Conservatives within the colonies echoed these positions and clung tightly to the monarchy, refusing to entertain the ridiculous idea that common people might have the intelligence to rule themselves.

Thankfully, Conservatives in the colonies lost this battle both figuratively and militarily and a nation was born on the principle that all men are created equal. It is worth remembering this was not a conservative principle but rather a radical idea pushed and forcibly upheld by the most progressive men in the colonies, a group we today tend to identify as our founding fathers.

In 1860, the United States found itself literally torn in two over the question of the spread of African slavery into the new territories. Conservative Democrats, determined to protect the source of their wealth, insisted on the right to carry their most valuable assets (slaves) into the new territories. The Conservative party in the north had sided with Conservative Democrats for much of the preceding 40 years as arguments over slavery rocked the halls of Congress over and over again. When the nation elected a Republican president pledged to oppose the further spread of slavery, southern states immediately called for secession conventions to consider whether they should withdraw from the Union.

Without getting bogged down in too many details it was the Conservative movement within the Democratic Party that walked out of their nominating convention and split the party. It was the Conservative members of the US Supreme court who decided that it was impossible for a black man to become a US citizen. It was the Conservative movement in US religious institutions that split these institutions by their insistence that the black man was not only not endowed with the requisite intelligence to become a citizen, he was intended to be a slave as a part of God’s plan.

Later, it was the Conservative movement within Congress that battled against the passage of the 13th and 14th amendments which gave blacks their freedom and their citizenship. It was the Conservative movement in the South that later put in force literacy tests and other qualification tests in order to remove the black man’s right to vote. It was the Conservative movement in the south that put in place Jim Crow laws throughout the south that removed many of the basic rights that black men had gained through these same amendments with legislation carefully crafted to keep them separate in every way possible.

It was the Conservative members of Congress from both parties who fought hard against the Civil Rights Act in the sixties that removed these same restrictions. It was the Conservative movements within the state governments that railed against segregation and refused to follow federal laws removing these restrictions.

In the early part of this century it was the Conservative movement within both parties that rallied against the passage of the 19th amendment that gave women the right to vote. It was the Conservative movement within existing religious denominations that pushed against this same principle throughout the US pointing out their belief that the Bible placed woman in a subservient position. It was this same Conservative movement that argued that women weren’t intellectually capable of making such important decisions as they were designed by God without this requisite intelligence. It is the Ultra Conservative movement even today that suggests that suffrage rights to women is at the source of much of what is wrong in this country today.

Also in the early part of this century it was the Conservative movement within this country that lobbied strongly for the continuation of child labor in factories and against the rights of organization of labor unions; labor unions that were later instrumental in passing legislation against the harsh realities of child labor over the loud protestations of this same Conservative movement. It was the Conservative movement within this country that organized against 40 hour work weeks, overtime benefits and minimum wage standards claiming they would collapse the economy and bring about economic devastation if put in place.

It was the Conservative movement that fought tooth and nail against the Social Security Act which provided old age pension, survivors benefits for victims of work related accidents, aid for orphans, widows, and disabled people as well as rudimentary unemployment insurance. Conservatives warned that these ideas were the first steps in a long slide towards communism and concentration camps.

It was the Conservative movement that opposed Medicare with the help of their paid shill Ronald Reagan who advised that it was be the end of freedom on this country as we know it. Medicare that allows Senior citizens to obtain the healthcare they need in their declining years was equated again with the first step in a slide towards dictators and the absolute ruination of our healthcare system.

It was the Conservative movement that fought against the creation of air and clean water standards that guarantee corporate entities can’t poison our water systems and pollute the environment without paying for cleanups. It is the Conservative movement which still today fights against any efforts to enforce these regulations and regularly lobbies and control elections with massive political contributions aimed at making sure they can continue to pollute without financial responsibility for the problems they cause.

I am often baffled when I hear people proudly proclaim they are Conservative. Obviously, being a Conservative means different things to different people and I know a lot of Conservatives who simply want more gradual change and slower, less jarring upsets to our system. Nevertheless, the history of Conservatism in this country is not one that I want to be identified with. I really can’t understand why anyone else would.

Blind Hypocrisy

Republican primary presidential candidate Ben Carson recently started a minor firestorm of public opinion when he suggested that he would not “advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.” Naturally, such a biased statement seeming to denigrate a whole religion put some people on edge. Carson, in a later interview, went on to further clarify his views with the following statement: “I do not believe Sharia is consistent with the Constitution of this country,” Carson said, referencing that Islamic law is derived from the Koran and traditions of Islam. “Muslims feel that their religion is very much a part of public life and what you do as a public official, and that’s inconsistent with our principles and our Constitution.”

I happen to agree with most of this statement. The President, and many other elected officials take an oath upon entering office to support and follow the US Constitution as the supreme law of the land. Any religious beliefs that would tend to force someone in such an office to ignore and violate the provisions of the US Constitution must be set aside in favor of following the US Constitution.

Carson later stated, “Anyone who is running for president should embrace the Constitution and should place it above their personal beliefs,” he remarked. “Anyone who can’t do that should not be running for the presidency.” I completely agree with this statement. Hooray for his ability to understand this as a basic qualification for running for the office. Unfortunately, Carson and several other Republican candidates have a form of severe myopia when it comes to understanding the import of this statement.

Just a few short weeks ago we in this country were faced with the spectacle of a county court clerk in Kentucky who refused to follow the ruling of the Supreme Court of the land that said that she must issue marriage licenses to same sex couples. The clerk, Kim Davis, was eventually jailed for a week for contempt of court in refusing to follow this ruling because she felt it went against her personal religious beliefs. In other words, we have experienced a clear cut case where a duly elected official refused to follow a ruling based upon the same US Constitution that Carson insists must be placed above a public servant's personal beliefs.

Instead of a hypothetical case where a Muslim might be tempted to violate the Constitution in favor of their religious belief we have a real life situation where a Christian did violate the Constitution in favor of her religious belief. Carson could not have spelled this out any clearer. It is exactly that situation he described above only it is a Christian refusing to follow the Constitution instead of a Muslim putting their personal belief system above the law of the land.

As it turns out Carson has commented on the case in Kentucky in very concise terms. Unfortunately, his comments directly oppose his statements about Muslims and their belief system. When asked about the Kim Davis case and her right to refuse to follow the Constitution he responded with the following: “But this is a very basic right. This is a Judeo-Christian nation in the sense that a lot of our values and principles are based on our Judeo-Christian faith. There are substantial numbers of people who actually believe in the traditional definition of marriage,” he said. “I’m one of them. It doesn’t mean that I don’t think that other people can do whatever they want to do.”

He continued, “And Congress now has a responsibility to step up to the plate and enact legislation that will protect the First Amendment rights of all Americans. That’s the reason that we have divided government. When one branch does something that tilts the balance, the other branches need to pitch in and correct the situation. This is a serious problem.”

In the first place, no one’s First Amendment rights endow them with the right to deny rights to other people; no matter if they believe their faith demands they do so or not. As Carson rightly stated before, the Constitution of the supreme law of the land and it has to come before someone’s personal beliefs if they are to hold public office in this country. Unfortunately, Carson doesn’t seem to recognize this includes his and Mrs. Davis’ Christian beliefs. Make no mistake about it, the Supreme Court ruling was based directly on the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, the supreme law of the land. Neither Carson, Davis, nor any of the multitude of Republican candidates who have since come out in favor of Mrs. Davis’ decision to flout that Constitution in favor of her own personal belief system seem to understand the hypocrisy inherent in believing Christian beliefs should trump the US Constitution.

In the second place, a basic understanding of 7th grade civics should also be a requirement for someone to run the US government as President and Mr. Carson seems sadly deficient in his understanding of how our government actually functions. Congress does not the authority or responsibility to enact legislation to overrule the Supreme Court’s rulings on the US Constitution. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land and the Supreme Court is the body which rules on interpretations of the US Constitution. While most 7th graders understand this principle and therefore understand that the only way to change the US Constitution is by the amendment rules within the Constitution, Carson thinks Congress should “pitch in to correct the situation.”

Of course none of this should come as too much of a surprise when it comes to Ben Carson. Carson severely castigated Planned Parenthood for selling fetal tissue when that particular scandal was in vogue amongst Conservatives. He didn’t seem to understand that hypocrisy of such a statement coming from someone who had personally used such fetal tissue in his own research projects earlier in his career. Carson seems to commonly be unable to see where his stated positions contradict his personal activities or where his high flying rhetoric about Muslims contradicts his own statements about Judeo-Christian values.

If one is to believe Carson is right that people who cannot place the US Constitution above their own personal belief system should not be running for the presidency we seem to have several other Republican candidates who have recently failed this test as well. When the events surrounding Kim Davis’ incarceration for refusing to follow the Constitution in carrying out her duties came to light there was no shortage of indignant Republican Candidates supporting her right to put her religious beliefs above the Constitution.

Rick Santorum postulated the following: “Martin Luther King wrote a letter from Birmingham jail and said in that letter that there are just laws and unjust laws and we have no obligation to condone and accept unjust laws. And then he followed that up and said what is an unjust law. An unjust law is a law that goes against the moral code or God’s law or the natural law. I would argue that what the Supreme Court did is against natural law, God’s law and we have ever obligation to stand in opposition to it.”

It would be hard to find someone more clearly expressing their belief that their religious beliefs should supersede the US Constitution than this but other Republicans seem to be trying to do so.

Mike Huckabee, another Republican candidate, went even further: “If someone needs to go to jail, I am willing to go in her place, and I mean that.” Imagine the spectacle of a US president refusing to follow a ruling of the US Supreme court and instead demanding to go to jail because their religious beliefs so far outweigh their conviction that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land.

Ted Cruz had the following to say on the subject: “I stand with Kim Davis. Unequivocally. I stand with every American that the Obama Administration is trying to force to choose between honoring his or her faith or complying with a lawless court opinion.” Senator Cruz, a highly educated lawyer, is surely spouting rhetoric. Again, 7th graders understand the difference between “a lawless court opinion” on the US Constitution and a duly considered opinion rendered by the final arbiter of Constitutional law in our system of governance. Cruz surely knows the difference in what “the Obama administration” wants and what the US Supreme court has duly decided. Never one to let the truth interfere with what he wants to project to voters, Cruz has once again proved himself to be wholly devoid of integrity with this statement.

Marco Rubio also weighed in on Mrs. Davis’ right to somehow refuse to do her sworn duty and uphold the Constitution. “We should seek a balance between government’s responsibility to abide by the laws of our republic and allowing people to stand by their religious convictions,” Mr. Rubio said. “While the clerk’s office has a governmental duty to carry out the law,” he added, “there should be a way to protect the religious freedom and conscience rights of individuals working in the office.”

It is unusual to find someone so easily fluid in speaking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time as Mr. Rubio. His ability to support both sides while ignoring the reality that Mrs. Davis is required to follow the law as the arm of the government charged with issuing these licenses. Either she issues the licenses or the law is ignored in favor of her own personal religious beliefs. There is no other solution no matter how skillfully Mr. Rubio avoids the question.

All US Presidents are required by the US Constitution to take the following oath before taking office:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Carson is right about one thing. There is no exception to this oath such as “unless my religious convictions conflict with the Constitution.” Unfortunately, neither he nor any of the Republican candidates seem to understand the import of this oath. I would suggest that the statements above concerning Kim Davis effectively disqualifies all of them from eligibility for the office according to Carson’s own logic.

Confusion about Liberty

I have been watching with a kind of fascinated incredulousness the situation in Rowan County Kentucky wherein the Court Clerk refuses to issue marriage licenses in protest of the recent Supreme Court decision regarding gay marriage. The same thing is happening in several counties in Alabama where they had simply decided not to issue any marriage licenses in the hope that this will forestall the eventuality of issuing marriage licenses to gay couples.

Unfortunately for Kim Davis, the Court Clerk in Rowan County Kentucky, there have been lawsuits filed to force her to issue such licenses. Mrs. Davis, who has been married four times herself, has taken it upon herself to fight this issue in court rather than follow the ruling. Mrs. Davis issued the following statement through her lawyers:

I have worked in the Rowan County Clerk’s office for 27 years as a Deputy Clerk and was honored to be elected as the Clerk in November 2014, and took office in January 2015. I love my job and the people of Rowan County. I have never lived any place other than Rowan County. Some people have said I should resign, but I have done my job well. This year we are on track to generate a surplus for the county of 1.5 million dollars.

In addition to my desire to serve the people of Rowan County, I owe my life to Jesus Christ who loves me and gave His life for me. Following the death of my godly mother-in-law over four years ago, I went to church to fulfill her dying wish. There I heard a message of grace and forgiveness and surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. I am not perfect. No one is. But I am forgiven and I love my Lord and must be obedient to Him and to the Word of God.

I never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage. To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God’s definition of marriage, with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience. It is not a light issue for me. It is a Heaven or Hell decision. For me it is a decision of obedience. I have no animosity toward anyone and harbor no ill will. To me this has never been a gay or lesbian issue. It is about marriage and God’s Word. It is a matter of religious liberty, which is protected under the First Amendment, the Kentucky Constitution, and in the Kentucky Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Our history is filled with accommodations for people’s religious freedom and conscience. I want to continue to perform my duties, but I also am requesting what our Founders envisioned – that conscience and religious freedom would be protected. That is all I am asking. I never sought to be in this position, and I would much rather not have been placed in this position. I have received death threats from people who do not know me. I harbor nothing against them. I was elected by the people to serve as the County Clerk. I intend to continue to serve the people of Rowan County, but I cannot violate my conscience.

Mrs. Davis obviously has deep convictions on the subject of gay marriage and strongly believes that her religion requires her not to participate in sanctioning such a marriage. Personally, I have no problem with her conviction and feel that she has every right not to participate in something that she feels would signify her disobedience to her chosen god. However, if she no longer feels that she can carry out the duties of her position as a servant of the county she should simply resign from her office. She is perfectly free to do so. What she has no right to do is project her own personal religious beliefs into her position as a servant of the people of Rowan County in contravention of established law. Make no mistake about it, it is now established law that she must issue such licenses if the people of Rowan County ask her to do so in spite of her personal religious beliefs. An appeals court has so ruled and the Supreme Court of the United States has also so ruled.

Mrs. Davis seems terribly confused about one thing though, the idea of religious liberty. Religious is defined as relating to or believing in a religion. Religion is defined as the service of or worship of God or the supernatural. It is further defined as a personal or institutionalized set of attitudes, beliefs, or practices. In this particular instance this last definition seems to most accurately describe Mrs. Davis’ idea about her religious duty when she describes her belief that the First Amendment, the Kentucky Constitution, and/or the Kentucky Religious Freedom Restoration Act allows her to choose to follow God’s word instead of the laws of the government she is currently in the employ of. She further goes on to state that our founders wanted conscience and religious freedom to be protected.

Perhaps there is good reason for her confusion as the term Religious Liberty is something of an oxymoron to begin with. Liberty is defined as the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views. Organized religion is an institutionalized set of attitudes, beliefs or practices. Therefore, Religious Liberty is by definition a combination of two words that are antithetical to each other in meaning. It is quite literally impossible to be free from restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life or behavior while following an institutionalized set of attitudes, beliefs, or practices.

Mrs. Davis ironically misses the truth that she is in fact by definition denying other people’s liberty by her misunderstanding of the terms she used in her statement. Her actions are themselves the very definition of oppressive restrictions imposed on one’s way of life. Her decision to violate law and refuse to issue marriage licenses to gay people because her narrow ideas of what serving her god demand is logical proof that she neither understands the definition of liberty nor deserves the cover of hiding behind it.

Liberty is also defined as the power or scope to act as one pleases. Obviously, the liberty to act as one pleases extends only so far as the point where these actions interfere with someone else’s liberty. Neither the First Amendment nor any of the rights called out in the Bill of Rights are correctly construed so as to restrict the rights of other people. In other words, they are personal rights aimed at allowing and expanding personal freedom. They were never intended to be used as weapons or shields behind which one could hide in order to restrict or inhibit the rights of other people.

While Mrs. Davis position is untenable in the extreme, we seem to suddenly be besieged by religious based groups demanding that it is a religious liberty for them to be able to deny rights to people whose lifestyle they find offensive. Any suggestion that liberty contains within it such a right is a blatantly obvious proof that someone doesn’t understand the term to begin with.

In April of 1864 Abraham Lincoln gave a speech to the Maryland Sanitary Fair in Baltimore, Maryland. The following passage of that speech accurately describes this same confusion on a subject around which a similar argument about liberty sprang up; the liberty to enslave others:

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in the same word we do not mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name…. liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names…. Liberty and Tyranny.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty. Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty.

Lincoln was dead on in 1864 with his philosophical thoughts on liberty. They are no less true today. At some time in the future we will look back with horror and revulsion on the idea that one group of people with religious convictions should, in the name of liberty, have the temerity to restrict the basic rights of another group because they have a different sexual orientation. This will be the same kind of revulsion we currently feel looking back at a society in Lincoln's day determined to go to war to protect the liberty to own other human beings.

The Demise of the Welfare Queen

Ronald Reagan created a mythical character during his run for the Presidency in 1980. The welfare queen was a lazy, shiftless character who lived on public assistance and drove a cadillac. They laughed at you as you drove to work in the morning, content to live high on the hog on your tax dollars and a little too lazy to get a job. Even though this character never really existed she became a force in American politics, one that never failed to ratchet up the frustration with the working class. Many people still believe that one of the main problems we have in this country is that we have a whole class of people who no longer want to work, but are being provided for by the government. I believe this is a problem but it is on such a small scale at to be much smaller than some of our other problems (more on this in a minute).

As an example I looked up the current figures on TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). There is no such thing as Welfare in the US anymore. The welfare program was replaced by TANF in 1996. There were some very important changes to the system put in place at that time which I will discuss in more detail in a moment but for now I want to concentrate on numbers.

TANF is funded by a combination of State and Federal taxes. The Federal Portion of the funding for TANF totaled 17.1 billion dollars in 2013 according to US government numbers. While 17.1 billion dollars is not an insignificant number it is massively outweighed by several other programs in the budget. Let’s start with Corporate Welfare in the form of subsidies and tax breaks to the largest corporations in the US.
According to US government numbers in 2013 Fortune 500 companies alone received 63 billion in federal subsidies. If we look at the top 965 companies in the US this number swells to 110 billion. Boeing, a company with many well paid employees in our area, received almost 13 billion in that year. In other words, we handed 6.4 times more money to corporate interest in 2013 than we spent on the whole TANF program.

Let’s take a look at where the TANF money actually goes, how it is distributed. The actual cash distribution to needy families is 28% of the TANF budget. In other words, we actually handed out in EBT transfers 4.78 billion dollars to needy families. This means we handed Boeing 2.7 times the amount of money we gave to needy families all over the country in 2013. While no one thinks 4.7 billion dollars is insignificant, I have a hard time understanding why are were simply not outraged that we are handing 2.7 times that amount in one year to one of the largest, wealthiest corporations in the US. Public assistance is a problem and a drain on our budget. Understanding that it is 6.4 times less of a problem financially than the corporate welfare that lobbyist pull out of Congress every year tends to make me think we have other problems that need our attention worse.

Let’s look at who is eligible to received TANF money. This information is all on the TANF website for the state of Alabama. The second requirement specifies that no adult can receive Family Assistance benefits for more than 5 years in their lifetime. There are no exceptions to this rule. In other words, as soon as they have received 5 years of benefits they are through. They will receive no more benefits for the rest of their life on penalty of imprisonment. This is a cumulative total and does not reset if they go off of benefits. The old welfare queen stereotype Reagan rode into office simply doesn’t exist at all. No one simply chooses not to work and draw benefits for the rest of their life on the TANF system.

Children are eligible for benefits as long as they are under 18 and in school. If they drop out of school they are no longer eligible. All persons who receive TANF benefits must be US citizens. No one, adult or child is eligible for TANF benefits if they can’t prove US citizenship. It seems like the myth of illegals coming here to live on welfare doesn’t have any basis in reality either. No child who is receiving foster care is eligible. All Child support payments the child is receiving through the court system must be turned over to the state. No child may receive benefits if their parent or guardian is on a strike.

For a child to receive TANF benefits their parent or guardian must be employed or participating in the state JOBS program to receive training for employment. Such relatives must accept any job offered to them unless the County department tells him or her otherwise. All relatives must apply for any other benefits they are eligible for such as Veteran’s benefits, Social Security, Unemployment Compensation etc. These benefits will be counted as income along with any income from jobs of any family members living in the same household and TANF benefits reduced accordingly.

Any child or relative convicted of a felony is not eligible from that point forward. Any child or relative convicted of a controlled substance violation is no longer eligible for benefits from that point forward. There are restrictions on where benefits (EBT) cards can be used and what they cannot be used to purchase. The following are places where EBT cards cannot be used on punishment of fines and/or imprisonment. Liquor, wine, or beer stores, gambling establishments, strip clubs, tattoo or piercing store, or a place providing psychic services. Benefits cannot be used to buy liquor, wine, beer, tobacco products, or lottery tickets.

Let’s look at what money people on TANF can receive for assistance. The numbers are based on family size in Alabama. The following table specifies the amount for families of varying sizes.

1- $165
2- $190
3- $215
4- $245
5- $275
6- $305
7- $335
8- $365
9- $395
10- $425
11- $455
12- $485
13- $515
14- $545
15- $575
16- $605

Since most families receiving TANF benefits are also receiving some other forms of assistance this is not the amount they will receive. Any income from jobs (51% on TANF have jobs) or other assistance is first subtracted from this benefit. In other words, for a family of four this means $245 dollars a month is the maximum TANF benefit they can receive. I am sure you are aware that this hardly leads to a life of luxury. There aren’t a lot of people standing in line to try to buy groceries for four people a month on $245.

Perhaps the real problem is that we are in some way encouraging people not to work by making it possible for them to just go on public assistance. In other words, what can we do to reduce the number of people on assistance, to get more people off of assistance and into the work place? As it turns out we know the answer to that because we are already doing it. Since 1996 when the TANF program went into place to replace the welfare system we had at that time, the government and independent concerns have been tracking the numbers of people on public assistance to see if the TANF program is an improvement. When TANF went into operation there were a little over 14 million individuals on the existing welfare system. As of 2013 there are a little less than 4 million people on the TANF system. While this is far too many, it is a 350% reduction in people on public assistance. All of this has taken place while the number of people in the US has grown by 48 million people.

In other words, we are looking at a problem has been reduced 350% in the last 18 years. One would never know that to listen to conservative pundits but numbers don’t lie, it is a problem that is getting smaller instead of one that is getting larger. Just in case you are wondering the Alabama TANF program has shrank 38.5% since its implementation in 1996. We never had as big a problem here as in some of the larger urban areas but the truth is that it is shrinking everywhere across the nation and usually by much larger numbers than ours as is evidenced by the overall 350% reduction.

Let’s look a little deeper at statistics about who is collecting TANF benefits. The average TANF family has 2.4 persons, including an average of 1.8 children. In other words, 75% of the people receiving TANF benefits are actually children. Over half of the TANF families receiving benefits have no adults in the household receiving TANF benefits. 51% of the families receiving TANF benefits are single parent families where the head of the household also has a job.

Let’s look at the average adult on the TANF program and the length of time they have been on it. After all, the narrative says that there are whole generations of families out there living on public assistance because they are simply too lazy to get a job. 41% of adults on TANF have been on it less than a year. Another 23% have been on TANF for less than two years. Only 12% have accrued a lifetime total of over 4 years. This same data shows that only 2% of adult TANF beneficiaries actually ever reach the 60 month limit.

I think everyone agrees that public assistance is a necessary evil, one that has to be carefully implemented and controlled both for the benefit of the people receiving it and those paying for it through their hard earned tax dollars. The old “welfare queen” narrative of people living high on the hog because they are simply too lazy to work and getting fat and happy on the government dole just doesn’t exist anymore. We have made a lot of good progress since 1996 towards eradicating the problem and we are still making progress in the direction. Unfortunately, that is not the message getting out to the American public.

Perhaps here in the modern land of OZ we should pay more attention to what is actually going on behind the curtain. Maybe if we weren’t so distracted by the booming voice of a corporate conglomeration intent upon distracting us with infuriating scenarios of a society too lazy to work while they pick our pockets and raid our treasury to finance the candidates they choose, we might actually be able to take control of our government again.

The Donald Runs for President

There is a rather well-worn maxim that says politics makes strange bedfellows. The gist of this statement is that often what seems like competing interests find themselves on the same side of individual issues and thus become temporary partners in pushing an agenda they mutually desire even if their core values are diametrically opposing. We are seeing this played out on the national presidential stage today with Donald Trump. Trump is a rather bombastic entrepreneur that is the epitome of what my dad used to call a snake oil salesman. He has made and lost several fortunes in some rather shady business dealings. Buying, building, and selling casinos is as akin to what most Americans consider business as loan sharking is to banking. It is a rough and tumble business historically prone to investment by organized crime and fantastically unsavory characters of every stripe.

Trump leveraged a middle end residential real estate business that his father started into a commercial real estate business aligned toward aggrandizement of his own name. The one thing Donald Trump has always been excellent at is self-promotion. He started out with some very large no money down projects that he leveraged into successful buildups with the help of 40 year tax abatements he was able to finagle from politicians in New York. He then leveraged a right-to-buy payout from the city government into a tidy fee for himself when the city built the Javits Convention Center. By the late 1980’s in a boom economy Trump acquired the Taj Mahal Casino by going heavily into unsecured debt. Massively expensive upgrades by Trump left him even deeper in debt. In 1989 he financed the building of another Taj Mahal casino with high interest junk bonds to the tune of another 1 billion dollars in debt that he couldn’t repay. On the verge or corporate and personal bankruptcy Trump filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy on his corporate debts. Investors lost hundreds of millions of dollars but Trump was able to convince them that it was better than losing everything by fiscal blackmail. At the same time he was able to restructure and extend his personal debt. This was Trump’s first experience with corporate bankruptcy but it was not to be his last. He never again involved his own personal fortune directly in financing his business ventures. It was much safer to use other people’s money to finance his schemes.

By 1991, the restructured Taj Mahal emerged from corporate bankruptcy when Trump ceded 50% ownership in the casino to the original bondholders in exchange for a lowered interest rate and more time to pay. The contracts that Trump had made with vendors were restructured during this time. In order to understand what this means it is necessary to understand that a Chapter 11 bankruptcy gives a debtor shelter from creditors. Trump used this shelter to renegotiate contracts with vendors so that they received pennies on the dollar for services they had already rendered. With the shelter of the court Trump pointed out that they could either accept reduced payment or nothing at all because they had no leverage to force him to pay and the only other option would be that no one would get paid anything. This is how Chapter 11 bankruptcy works. The small creditors get the shaft and the large creditors extend their terms out until they can get paid. Trump is a master at this game. Besides personal aggrandizement and pompous arrogance it is probably his strongest skill.

Chapter 11 has worked so well for Trump that he has done it four times altogether. Trump’s casino property and real estate boondoggles filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1991, 1992, 2004, and 2009. Each time Trump received a huge personal salary while he negotiated the bankruptcy payments down by refusing to pay contractual debts his companies compiled. He has successively used less and less of his own personal money to finance his deals so his personal wealth has increased with each succeeding bankruptcy. Trump, true to his nature, sees nothing wrong with this business model.

“I’ve used the laws of this country to pare debt. We’ll have the company. We’ll throw it into chapter. We’ll negotiate with the banks. We’ll make a fantastic deal. You know, it’s like on “The Apprentice”. It’s not personal. It’s just business.” To be fair, Trump is not the only so called entrepreneur to utilize Chapter 11 laws to build a huge personal fortune while refusing to pay back other people’s money. The last Republican presidential candidate did the same thing for his personal fortune although he wasn’t so brazen about it.

You might notice that Trump doesn’t like to use the “B” (bankruptcy) word in his explanations. It has a negative connotation. Borrowing other people’s money and then not paying it back as a business model is frowned upon by most honest Americans who believe they are obligated to pay the debts they sign their name to. It’s a basic tenet of something called integrity.

What is most amazing about Trump’s run for the highest office in the land is who is supporting him. Conservatives and grass roots Tea Partiers love Trump’s brash posturing. The same people who lecture everyone on fiscal responsibility are supporting someone who has made an extravagant living borrowing and spending obscene amounts of money that he can’t pay back. I have a standard response now when I hear someone saying how Trump is a great business man. He bankrupted a casino. Casinos are business designed to skillfully separate people who don’t understand the concrete science of odds from their money in a foolproof manner and Trump has managed to bankrupt four of them.

The Gun Ownership Argument

Once again our nation has been shocked by someone wielding a gun to slaughter innocent people. It’s hard to say if this is a new trend or something that sells newspapers and 24 hour news airtime so well that we hear about it more than we used to. The one thing I am certain of is that it is a horrible crime whenever and wherever it is committed. It’s hard for me to imagine how someone could be so twisted as to kill people just to make a point or for personal enjoyment but obviously there are those who do. As usual in such situations our gun laws immediately come up for review and discussion. The fact that we are a rarity for an industrialized civil society in that guns are so widely owned never escapes anyone’s attention when incidents like this occur.

I was raised by a gun owner and NRA lifetime member. My dad was a hunter and a competition target shooter. I was shooting a rifle before I was seven and a handgun not long after. Many happy hours of target shooting and hunting with my dad followed. He reloaded for himself and for other target shooters, down to the details of having different loads for different guns of the same caliber. Guns were serious business to my dad. He supplemented the money necessary for these activities with his reloading and teaching gun safety as a certified instructor for civilians as well as police officers. For a time, he had a gun shop on the side as well, so I was raised in an environment where guns were quite commonplace and part of your daily lives. The one overarching message from observing my dad giving shooting lessons and safety courses is that handguns were designed for one purpose and one purpose only, they kill people. They are not to be pointed at someone to control their actions or to protect yourself. If you point a gun at someone it is to kill them. Any other proposed use for handguns is simply avoiding the point that they are made to kill other people.

We have become desensitized to this reality by the way that handguns are regularly utilized. Police use them as a means of controlling the actions of suspects. Movies and TV shows are full of people using handguns for this and other reasons but the reality is that they really only have one function and any attempted usage for something else often leads to that purpose whether we mean to or not. People whose express purpose is to kill other people realize this. Unfortunately, most other people do not. They are concealable, they are relatively lightweight and they are extremely deadly when used by someone with reasonable skill.

Every time some sort of mass killing spree occurs there is an instant backlash against the proliferation of gun ownership in this country. This is usually followed by an opposite and equal reaction in which a lot of gun owners point out that if someone else would have had a gun, maybe there wouldn’t have been so many innocent people killed. There is an element of truth in both arguments. However, the likelihood that an untrained gun owner will be able to stop someone intent on mass murder while under fire is a long shot to say the least. I am sure it has happened and will happen again in the future but the odds of having such a person in the same place as some random nut job killer intent on taking a lot of innocent people out are rather long. Add to that the better than average chance that such a gunfight will result in even more innocent people being shot and the whole concept of safety by more gun wielding falls apart.

There is however, one other factor that needs to be taken into account when we weigh the good that comes from gun ownership vs. the bad. There are probably a lot of reasons for this but the fact remains that gun accidents account for a lot of accidental deaths in this country. I am struck by this often when reading the news. It is not as dramatic as someone walking into a church in order to kill a lot of people he doesn’t know but it happens a lot more often so it has to be accounted for if we are to truly do an analysis of the relative merits of massive gun ownership. The truth is no one likes to hear about this. No one gets any sort of pleasure from a news story of a dad accidentally shooting his four year old son while getting his gun out of the car. It won’t be on the 24 hour news cycle because there isn’t a lot of good ratings in horrifying people with the death of innocents accidentally killed by their loved ones. I can’t imagine the heartbreak and constant pain that would follow such an incident but it happens and it happens a lot more often than the mass shootings we seem to be so fascinated with.

If you add up all the mass shootings since 2010, in 19 separate cases some 154 people have died in these sensational incidents while 97 have been shot and survived. During this same time period we have averaged over 600 children per year being killed in gun accidents. In case you haven’t already done the math it come out to over 3200 children who have died from accidental gunshot wounds in the US since 2010. Any way you slice this information the fact remains that it is a direct result of our fascination with owning guns in this country. It simply doesn’t occur in other civilized nations because they don’t have the same kind of fascination. Breaking this down a little further, we average somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 accidental shootings of children in the US annually. In 2010 alone had 15,576 accidental shootings of children in the US.

Another argument that usually comes up is that such killers will find another way to kill people if they don’t have guns. While this is possibly true it has no effect at all on the fact that without gun ownership we wouldn’t have so many gun accidents. You simply can’t make that argument at all unless you ignore reason. Every gun that is not sold in the US is a gun that will never accidently shoot a child. The corollary to this is that every gun that is sold increases the likelihood and therefore the number of children that will accidentally be shot. More gun ownership equals more accidental shootings of children. They are directly and indisputably linked.

Let’s go back to the original discussion. Suppose every mass killing in the US since 2010 had been headed off by the presence of a gun toting citizen capable and skilled enough to kill each of the cold blooded murdering shooters before they could get the first shot off. We would now have 154 more innocent people walking around unharmed in the US. We can leave off the sheer improbability of this occurring but these are the numbers. This is the very best scenario we could possibly have had happen by having an armed, trained, and somewhat prescient citizen who could see what was happening beforehand and kill the gunman before he has a chance to kill anyone else.

Unfortunately, we would still have over 3200 dead children who have been accidentally killed during that same time period because we have a fascination with gun ownership. I don’t know how we stop people intent on killing innocent people with guns. I suspect it is a price we pay for living in a free society. What I do know is that there is a direct correlation between innocent children dying from gunshot wounds and the number of guns that we own.