Make Guns, Not Horror Comics & Movies...
Well, now it's official: it's safer to manufacture handguns and firearms in the U.S. of A. than it is to publish horror comics or horror DVDs. As the fast-food industry jockeys for similar state-sanctioned indemnity from legal prosecution, our Fearless Leader will soon sign into law a bill Congress passed last week that will forever shield the firearms industry from "massive crime-victim lawsuits." In the same AP release (dated October 20th), President Bush was quoted: "Our laws should punish criminals who use guns to commit crimes, not law-abiding manufacturers of lawful products."
Of course, Bush has recently allowed to expire prior bans on rapid-fire firearms that serve no useful purpose except killing human beings and profiting gun manufacturers -- "lawful products" once again. Never mind that the Brady Bill emerged from an attempted assassination of a prior President. It's all good. The NRA and gun lobbyists clearly have the Republicans in their pocket; once again, "the public good" is out of sight, out of mind.
Now, I grew up in a military and a hunting family. I live in a part of the country where most of my neighbors have firearms, and that's fine with me. I'm a deadshot with a rifle, though I choose not to have any in my home. Many families hereabouts used to pass beloved firearms down from father-to-son and daughter, but that was a problem for firearm manufacturers: the need to sell more and more firearms every year meant a culture of gun and firearm mystique and ownership had to be cultivated.
I understand (though I don't share) the fascination with firearms, and haven't a problem with those who choose to own them, fire them (in hunting or target practice), or even collect them. But the grim reality is that the firearms industry's need to increase sales exponentially year after year has resulted in bountiful harvests of death and destruction, and we as a culture suffer the consequences. The high-tech state of contemporary firearms outstrip anything that was even remotely imaginable to the writers of the Constitution or its relevent Amendment (an amendment, BTW, drafted to ensure civilian militias could counter a tyrannical government, if necessary), and it's impossible to justify the kind of rapid-fire death-spewing hardware as being necessary to any rational person unless their intention is to decimate their neighborhood. The powerful NRA and gun lobby continues to back this insane consumer frenzy of firearm ownership and mass production beyond any reason, denying all culpability -- which leads to my outrage at this latest development:
Manufacturers of firearms now enjoy greater legal protection than someone who draws or writes a horror story.
Dig, especially with populist fanatics like John Grisham fanning the flames from time to time, we continue to hear our elected officials fret more over the dire consequences of videogames than firearms, the national threat represented by, say, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (which was the target of Grisham's campaign, along with Taxi Driver) than by the manufacture and rampant sales of Magnums and Uzis (and that's the low end of the current spectrum).
Works of imagination, however confrontational or outrageous, will never, ever approach the dire threat represented by metal-sheathed high-tech bullets designed to explode internally and continue their trajectory in expansive fragments, causing the greatest possible damage on their way out of the human body.
The sales of videogames, the marketing of 'R'-rated movies, the rating of Hip-Hop music is in no way comparable to the massive advertising campaigns and seductive consumer culture firearms manufacturers have cultivated and sustained -- but note which one gets the attention of lilly-livered elected officials (like whiny Connecticut Democrat Joe Lieberman) time after time. Can't buck that gun lobby, Joe! Back that War in Iraq, Joe! But oooooooohhhhh, those nasty videogames. Why, some of them even have sex hidden in them!
Throughout the years I published and co-published Taboo, I knew I was forever "under the gun" of possible prosecution under the Rico Act; my tenacity and perseverence was based in part upon the fact that I didn't own a fucking thing, though the possibility of facing jail-time was pointed out to me more than once. Fortunately, Taboo attracted only the attention of various customs agents over the years, culminating in confiscations, bans, etc. which kept Taboo on the "condemned" lists in Canada, the UK, Australia, and elsewhere. However, comics shops continue to face more dire legal threats and pressures than gun shops or shows, and that's completely unjustifiable.
In publishing, I found censure a greater obstacle than censorship per se. Refusal of services was the most frequent obstacle that kept Taboo troublesome to publish: in the case of Taboo 2, I immediately lost my local production facility when the John Totleben cover prompted their decision to refuse to shoot the transparency needed. That same firm had proudly shown me gun catalogues as evidence of the quality of work they did; when I pointed out the apparent moral disconnect between having no moral qualms working on the gun catalogue, displaying firearms whose only reason for being was to discharge lethal projectiles, while Totleben's painting presented neither a threat to anyone's health or, for that matter, any form of behavior anyone could possibly imitate (unless, of course, you are a krill-bearing piranha-humanoid), the professional refused to discuss the matter any further.
It was the tip of the iceberg, initiating a series of expensive setbacks and debacles that effectively delayed the release of Taboo 2 for months and cost SpiderBaby Grafix thousands and thousands of dollars in unexpected, unplanned-for publication costs. Alan Moore's inside-back-cover From Hell painting was refused by two production firms (again, all we needed was the transparency shot for separation purposes) because the firm reps claimed it had "satanic intentions," and after an extensive search for a printer willing to handle the issue, we were screwed when the binderies refused to bind the book! One local bindery wrote a scathing letter to me, stating flatly that they would have destroyed the book if they could (they, of course, published gun catalogues). In the end, the pallettes of printed pages and covers had to be shipped from Bellows Falls, VT to Boston, MA at considerable risk and cost -- and the binding we did get, in part due to the length of time the job sat unbound, proved fragile (Taboo 2 notoriously suffers from a tablet-like binding from which the pages easily disengage).
Now, those professionals were all within their rights to refuse provision of services for moral reasons. But I continue to wonder about the moral compass that has no problem with participating in the propogation of the gun culture but balks at images or words that might offend. Characteristic, too, was the insistence that those most outraged were not censors.
Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press is clearly not as precious as the Right to Bear Arms in this country. That's the fact.
To me, though, it's simple and pragmatic:
Guns exist only to be fired.
Guns shoot bullets.
Bullets maim and kill.
Images and words do not.
That was 1989; I know for a fact we would face even greater obstacles publishing Taboo today.
Lest you think I am blowing sunshine up your ass, as Tim Lucas noted in his October 20th Video WatchBlog, similar woes delayed and fiscally impacted on this week's long-overdue US DVD release of Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust. Here's the relevent portion of the Grindhouse press release Tim quoted in full in his post:
"After fighting a difficult battle with printers over a graphic photo insert, Sage Stallone and Bob Murawski of Grindhouse Releasing have at last prevailed in their mission to bring Ruggero Deodato's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST to DVD.
No less than eight different printers refused to handle the artwork for Grindhouse's 25th Anniversary Collector's Edition of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST during the final stages of the project. The company encountered further resistance from numerous binderies who likewise turned down the job of putting together the elaborate DVD package due to the inner sleeve design, which features an image of a nude woman impaled on a stake.
The stonewalling by printers caused a nerve-wracking last-minute delay in Grindhouse's production schedule, and ultimately cost the disc producers thousands of dollars in added expenses. "It was a real nightmare. We almost didn't make our street date because of these problems," says Murawski. "For a while, it seemed like nobody was going to take on the job. We had a similar problem years ago with our release of CANNIBAL FEROX, where we actually did make some changes in the artwork that we felt were appropriate. But we would never change our design to suit a printer's sensibilites. We put too much hard work into the project to back down."
The producers have faced many other obstacles bringing the DVD to market in recent months. A well-known film magazine refused to run an ad for CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, denying Grindhouse the opportunity to submit an alternate design; the same publication promptly killed a story on the movie after seeing the ad. Major retailers such as Blockbuster have passed on the DVD, citing content issues.
“With all the uncensored horror product in the marketplace, it is amazing that CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is still a lightning rod for First Amendment issues decades after it was made," says Grindhouse's head of theatrical distribution David Szulkin, who served as Associate Producer of the DVD.
All 11,111 copies of the limited edition 2-disc set had to be hand-assembled, as the "offending" artwork was printed in a different facility than the rest of the DVD box. Based on the impressive advance orders, distributor Rykodisc predicts that the entire run will sell out in record time."
(For the complete post, click"Meat is Murder.")
The message is clear:
Make Guns, Not DVDs.
__
I know, it's discouraging, in't it?
Look, if you need legal counsel, check out Batton Lash's Wolff & Byrd, which is now online. After two decades of self-publishing, Batton has just launched SUPERNATURAL LAW.COM. "In addition to their print comic book," Batton writes, "Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre now have their own online strip, every Monday and Thursday. It's all new, in color and free!"
Now, when have you ever heard of free legal counsel in such matters? We need Wolff & Byrd now more than ever before -- check it outhere.
Enjoy it and bookmark it!
__
Speaking of October 20th:
Edward Alden reports in the October 20th The Financial Times a remarkably blunt, straightforward assessment of the Bush Administration's behavior patterns and record to date from Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff until January 2005.
Here's the jist of it:
Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed... In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson... said: "What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.
"Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences."
Mr Wilkerson said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran.
The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O'Neill, former Treasury secretary, early last year.
Mr Wilkerson said his decision to go public had led to a personal falling out with Mr Powell, whom he served for 16 years at the Pentagon and the State Department.
"He's not happy with my speaking out because, and I admire this in him, he is the world's most loyal soldier."
Among his other charges:
The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was "a concrete example" of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. "You don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you've condoned it."
Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was "part of the problem". Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, "she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president".
The military, particularly the army and marine corps, is overstretched and demoralised. Officers, Mr Wilkerson claimed, "start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam. . . and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel".
Mr Wilkerson said former president George H.W. Bush "one of the finest presidents we have ever had" understood how to make foreign policy work. In contrast, he said, his son was "not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either".
"There's a vast difference between the way George H.W. Bush dealt with major challenges, some of the greatest challenges at the end of the 20th century, and effected positive results in my view, and the way we conduct diplomacy today."
When my wife Marj and others expressed their confusion over Secretary of State Powell's complicity in the lies that led the US into the Iraq War, I pointed out (as Wilkerson does) that Powell was being a good soldier. The military is all about rank; President Bush is the Commander-in-Chief, and if you're in the military, you willingly fall on your sword for your superior officer, especially your Commander-in-Chief.
Of course, what remains unsaid in the ongoing keep-the-blinders-in-place coverage of the dire situation military recruiters are facing is the fact that the Commander-in-Chief is the problem.
I'm sure similar problems presented themselves in Emperor Caligula's reign.
(Thanks to HomeyM for bringing the Wilkerson news to my attention.)
Well, now it's official: it's safer to manufacture handguns and firearms in the U.S. of A. than it is to publish horror comics or horror DVDs. As the fast-food industry jockeys for similar state-sanctioned indemnity from legal prosecution, our Fearless Leader will soon sign into law a bill Congress passed last week that will forever shield the firearms industry from "massive crime-victim lawsuits." In the same AP release (dated October 20th), President Bush was quoted: "Our laws should punish criminals who use guns to commit crimes, not law-abiding manufacturers of lawful products."
Of course, Bush has recently allowed to expire prior bans on rapid-fire firearms that serve no useful purpose except killing human beings and profiting gun manufacturers -- "lawful products" once again. Never mind that the Brady Bill emerged from an attempted assassination of a prior President. It's all good. The NRA and gun lobbyists clearly have the Republicans in their pocket; once again, "the public good" is out of sight, out of mind.
Now, I grew up in a military and a hunting family. I live in a part of the country where most of my neighbors have firearms, and that's fine with me. I'm a deadshot with a rifle, though I choose not to have any in my home. Many families hereabouts used to pass beloved firearms down from father-to-son and daughter, but that was a problem for firearm manufacturers: the need to sell more and more firearms every year meant a culture of gun and firearm mystique and ownership had to be cultivated.
I understand (though I don't share) the fascination with firearms, and haven't a problem with those who choose to own them, fire them (in hunting or target practice), or even collect them. But the grim reality is that the firearms industry's need to increase sales exponentially year after year has resulted in bountiful harvests of death and destruction, and we as a culture suffer the consequences. The high-tech state of contemporary firearms outstrip anything that was even remotely imaginable to the writers of the Constitution or its relevent Amendment (an amendment, BTW, drafted to ensure civilian militias could counter a tyrannical government, if necessary), and it's impossible to justify the kind of rapid-fire death-spewing hardware as being necessary to any rational person unless their intention is to decimate their neighborhood. The powerful NRA and gun lobby continues to back this insane consumer frenzy of firearm ownership and mass production beyond any reason, denying all culpability -- which leads to my outrage at this latest development:
Manufacturers of firearms now enjoy greater legal protection than someone who draws or writes a horror story.
Dig, especially with populist fanatics like John Grisham fanning the flames from time to time, we continue to hear our elected officials fret more over the dire consequences of videogames than firearms, the national threat represented by, say, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (which was the target of Grisham's campaign, along with Taxi Driver) than by the manufacture and rampant sales of Magnums and Uzis (and that's the low end of the current spectrum).
Works of imagination, however confrontational or outrageous, will never, ever approach the dire threat represented by metal-sheathed high-tech bullets designed to explode internally and continue their trajectory in expansive fragments, causing the greatest possible damage on their way out of the human body.
The sales of videogames, the marketing of 'R'-rated movies, the rating of Hip-Hop music is in no way comparable to the massive advertising campaigns and seductive consumer culture firearms manufacturers have cultivated and sustained -- but note which one gets the attention of lilly-livered elected officials (like whiny Connecticut Democrat Joe Lieberman) time after time. Can't buck that gun lobby, Joe! Back that War in Iraq, Joe! But oooooooohhhhh, those nasty videogames. Why, some of them even have sex hidden in them!
Throughout the years I published and co-published Taboo, I knew I was forever "under the gun" of possible prosecution under the Rico Act; my tenacity and perseverence was based in part upon the fact that I didn't own a fucking thing, though the possibility of facing jail-time was pointed out to me more than once. Fortunately, Taboo attracted only the attention of various customs agents over the years, culminating in confiscations, bans, etc. which kept Taboo on the "condemned" lists in Canada, the UK, Australia, and elsewhere. However, comics shops continue to face more dire legal threats and pressures than gun shops or shows, and that's completely unjustifiable.
In publishing, I found censure a greater obstacle than censorship per se. Refusal of services was the most frequent obstacle that kept Taboo troublesome to publish: in the case of Taboo 2, I immediately lost my local production facility when the John Totleben cover prompted their decision to refuse to shoot the transparency needed. That same firm had proudly shown me gun catalogues as evidence of the quality of work they did; when I pointed out the apparent moral disconnect between having no moral qualms working on the gun catalogue, displaying firearms whose only reason for being was to discharge lethal projectiles, while Totleben's painting presented neither a threat to anyone's health or, for that matter, any form of behavior anyone could possibly imitate (unless, of course, you are a krill-bearing piranha-humanoid), the professional refused to discuss the matter any further.
It was the tip of the iceberg, initiating a series of expensive setbacks and debacles that effectively delayed the release of Taboo 2 for months and cost SpiderBaby Grafix thousands and thousands of dollars in unexpected, unplanned-for publication costs. Alan Moore's inside-back-cover From Hell painting was refused by two production firms (again, all we needed was the transparency shot for separation purposes) because the firm reps claimed it had "satanic intentions," and after an extensive search for a printer willing to handle the issue, we were screwed when the binderies refused to bind the book! One local bindery wrote a scathing letter to me, stating flatly that they would have destroyed the book if they could (they, of course, published gun catalogues). In the end, the pallettes of printed pages and covers had to be shipped from Bellows Falls, VT to Boston, MA at considerable risk and cost -- and the binding we did get, in part due to the length of time the job sat unbound, proved fragile (Taboo 2 notoriously suffers from a tablet-like binding from which the pages easily disengage).
Now, those professionals were all within their rights to refuse provision of services for moral reasons. But I continue to wonder about the moral compass that has no problem with participating in the propogation of the gun culture but balks at images or words that might offend. Characteristic, too, was the insistence that those most outraged were not censors.
Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press is clearly not as precious as the Right to Bear Arms in this country. That's the fact.
To me, though, it's simple and pragmatic:
Guns exist only to be fired.
Guns shoot bullets.
Bullets maim and kill.
Images and words do not.
That was 1989; I know for a fact we would face even greater obstacles publishing Taboo today.
Lest you think I am blowing sunshine up your ass, as Tim Lucas noted in his October 20th Video WatchBlog, similar woes delayed and fiscally impacted on this week's long-overdue US DVD release of Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust. Here's the relevent portion of the Grindhouse press release Tim quoted in full in his post:
"After fighting a difficult battle with printers over a graphic photo insert, Sage Stallone and Bob Murawski of Grindhouse Releasing have at last prevailed in their mission to bring Ruggero Deodato's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST to DVD.
No less than eight different printers refused to handle the artwork for Grindhouse's 25th Anniversary Collector's Edition of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST during the final stages of the project. The company encountered further resistance from numerous binderies who likewise turned down the job of putting together the elaborate DVD package due to the inner sleeve design, which features an image of a nude woman impaled on a stake.
The stonewalling by printers caused a nerve-wracking last-minute delay in Grindhouse's production schedule, and ultimately cost the disc producers thousands of dollars in added expenses. "It was a real nightmare. We almost didn't make our street date because of these problems," says Murawski. "For a while, it seemed like nobody was going to take on the job. We had a similar problem years ago with our release of CANNIBAL FEROX, where we actually did make some changes in the artwork that we felt were appropriate. But we would never change our design to suit a printer's sensibilites. We put too much hard work into the project to back down."
The producers have faced many other obstacles bringing the DVD to market in recent months. A well-known film magazine refused to run an ad for CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, denying Grindhouse the opportunity to submit an alternate design; the same publication promptly killed a story on the movie after seeing the ad. Major retailers such as Blockbuster have passed on the DVD, citing content issues.
“With all the uncensored horror product in the marketplace, it is amazing that CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is still a lightning rod for First Amendment issues decades after it was made," says Grindhouse's head of theatrical distribution David Szulkin, who served as Associate Producer of the DVD.
All 11,111 copies of the limited edition 2-disc set had to be hand-assembled, as the "offending" artwork was printed in a different facility than the rest of the DVD box. Based on the impressive advance orders, distributor Rykodisc predicts that the entire run will sell out in record time."
(For the complete post, click
The message is clear:
Make Guns, Not DVDs.
__
I know, it's discouraging, in't it?
Look, if you need legal counsel, check out Batton Lash's Wolff & Byrd, which is now online. After two decades of self-publishing, Batton has just launched SUPERNATURAL LAW.COM. "In addition to their print comic book," Batton writes, "Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre now have their own online strip, every Monday and Thursday. It's all new, in color and free!"
Now, when have you ever heard of free legal counsel in such matters? We need Wolff & Byrd now more than ever before -- check it out
Enjoy it and bookmark it!
__
Speaking of October 20th:
Edward Alden reports in the October 20th The Financial Times a remarkably blunt, straightforward assessment of the Bush Administration's behavior patterns and record to date from Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff until January 2005.
Here's the jist of it:
Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed... In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson... said: "What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.
"Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences."
Mr Wilkerson said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran.
The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O'Neill, former Treasury secretary, early last year.
Mr Wilkerson said his decision to go public had led to a personal falling out with Mr Powell, whom he served for 16 years at the Pentagon and the State Department.
"He's not happy with my speaking out because, and I admire this in him, he is the world's most loyal soldier."
Among his other charges:
The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was "a concrete example" of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. "You don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you've condoned it."
Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was "part of the problem". Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, "she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president".
The military, particularly the army and marine corps, is overstretched and demoralised. Officers, Mr Wilkerson claimed, "start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam. . . and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel".
Mr Wilkerson said former president George H.W. Bush "one of the finest presidents we have ever had" understood how to make foreign policy work. In contrast, he said, his son was "not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either".
"There's a vast difference between the way George H.W. Bush dealt with major challenges, some of the greatest challenges at the end of the 20th century, and effected positive results in my view, and the way we conduct diplomacy today."
When my wife Marj and others expressed their confusion over Secretary of State Powell's complicity in the lies that led the US into the Iraq War, I pointed out (as Wilkerson does) that Powell was being a good soldier. The military is all about rank; President Bush is the Commander-in-Chief, and if you're in the military, you willingly fall on your sword for your superior officer, especially your Commander-in-Chief.
Of course, what remains unsaid in the ongoing keep-the-blinders-in-place coverage of the dire situation military recruiters are facing is the fact that the Commander-in-Chief is the problem.
I'm sure similar problems presented themselves in Emperor Caligula's reign.
(Thanks to HomeyM for bringing the Wilkerson news to my attention.)
posted by SRBissette at
7:34 AM
3 Comments:
I'll post thourough replies, as time permits.
Let me tackle your comment, Jim:
That's a sorry news story, indeed, but those kid's motives are unknown at this time (as far as the available reporting online I could find), nor are his actions representative of any definable group, orientation, or movement, Jim. I know countless Goths, with and without guns, and they're just people -- just people. Some of them are really great, funny, talented, and creative people.
Consider the following, and the wrong-headedness of applying your line of logic to it:
__
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=ne-us-12-l13&flok=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20050101%2F2233197210.htm&sc=1110
[January 1, 2005 AP news story]
36 Children Injured in N.D. Sled Accident
MINOT, N.D. (AP) - Thirty-six children were injured in a sledding accident during an all-night New Year's Eve
party hosted by a religious organization.
Three of the children were hospitalized, but all were in stable condition Saturday, hospital officials said.
The others were treated and released.
Police Sgt. Winston Black said more than 100 children ages 12 to 19 attending a Youth for Christ event gathered at a high school around 4 a.m. to slide down
a hill using sleds built out of cardboard boxes. A sign posted on the hill prohibited sledding.
The children and Youth for Christ staff piled eight to 12 passengers on the sleds, then went down the hill in
quick succession, Black said. ``The sleds struck rocks, a light pole and each other,'' he said.
Black said he did not know if the organization had permission to use the hill. Police were investigating.
Larry Stenson, director of the Minot Youth for Christ, said Saturday that the injuries happened when some of
the children went down the wrong hill - one that was much bigger than the hill organizers intended to use.
Stenson said parents of the injured children ``were gracious.''
``They know that it was an accident,'' he said. ``I think most of them believe our intent with kids is to love them, help them - help kids grow mentally, physically and spiritually.''
__
I could hit below the belt, and cite no less than two separate events in which women attacked pregnant women, cutting them (and in the first case killing the mother-to-be) in order to remove their fetal infants. But I think you get the point: my caricaturing these tragic events by extrapolating the actions of either an unfortunately reckless and arguably stupid Christian group (in the case of the news story I did cite in detail) or homicidal zealots (in the case of the women assaulting pregnant mothers) as being de facto representative of extreme stupidity/and/or/homicidal zealousness on the part of ALL Christians is patently absurd.
"Regarding sleds, sure, people should have them if they want them -- but you want Christians to have them too??"
I am not, of course, arguing that, though that's pretty damned close to what YOU'RE saying, Jim.
It's all people. Just people. I know some devout Christian Goths -- what do you do with THAT conundrum? This is neither here nor there, but the absurdity of your statement is informed by more prejudices and presumptions than I am able to dissect in a single post.
Re: "How should YOU relate to this, Steve? Try to imagine that one of these guys came to YOUR home when YOU were out and found only YOUR wife home . . ."
I don't have to stretch far to imagine that, Jim, given a family crisis I had to deal with last year. The fact was, the young man who so derailed and threatened our home and peace of mind (he had, in fact, threatened my life) wasn't twisted by "living in a society that publishes so much material that is so focused on evil and violence," but apparently by his life situation, which included being raised by born-again former drug-addict religious zealots who abandoned him at age 18, leaving him homeless to fend for himself. I can no more extrapolate (much less state with the absolutism you assign motives to the "16-year old Goth kid" you do not know, but only read of in the news) what TRULY drove him to his acts than I can state without question the role religion did or did not play in his actions -- which, by the way, I dealt with via the police and (by his own decision) the courts. Relevent to the topic at hand, I in fact turned over the shotgun in my home to the police at the time, to ensure any violence that might arise would not involve firearms in our home (thankfully, the violence that arose was minor, and none of it as terrible as it might have been).
Our civilization provides certain tools to work with -- including, yes, guns -- and I chose what seemed to me the most rational and compassionate path to deal with what was a very real, pressing, and emotionally damaging crisis.
Furthermore, it could be argued, with some justification, that religion has caused far more destruction, death, and harm than anything we're discussing here. Our current global state of affairs could be presented as a prime example -- but that, too, would be a specious and prejudiced argument to present, as clearly religion has also inspired many great works and positive changes for cultures, populations, and individuals.
You've muddied the waters with your comment, Jim, and I've no reason in my world to be more afraid of Goths with guns (BTW, that Goth teen didn't have or apparently need a firearm) than I would be of Mormons with guns or Seventh-Day-Adventists with guns or Buddhists with guns. In fact, I would probably have a much better chance with the Goth, given circumstances and the bent of my nature.
"By beholding we are changed" -- the role horror fiction/films/art has played in my life, and that of many I know or have had the good luck to meet, has been positive and beneficial. It is part and parcel of who I am, and I'm not a threat to anyone. Well, except the mice this time of year. It is, after all, mouse holocaust (as noted in prior posts) in the Bissette household.
Restated for all comments here (which I will respond to more fully when I have time):
My point, pure and simple, was that under the current proposed law, gun manufacturers would enjoy indemnity that is NOT available to cartoonists or publishers.
That Mike Diana or Berni Wrightson or Steve Bissette are now more vulnerable for prosecution than Smith & Wesson, Colt, Glock, Ruger, or Raven Arms is ridiculous. That the publishers at Eros and comics retailers who sell adult comics face greater risk of legal prosecution than the manufacturer of the AR-15 assault rifle is a sorry state of affairs. That making marks on paper in patterns that inpreted by a viewer could be considered "horrific" or "harmful" is now a less protected right than the mass manufacture of firearms or armor-piercing shells, which are manufactured solely for destruction ("amusement" or "collectibility" is not the point of the technology), is insane. There are no marks I can make on a piece of paper, however they are interpreted by anyone's eyes or mind, however deranged, that in and of itself would shred flesh and bone, pulp organs, splinter internally into multiple explosive fragments, and blow a ragged seven-inch hole out of someone's back as it exits.
Do I make myself a bit clearer?
Thanks for your comments, brumbarr, much appreciated. However:
"Steve, you're flat-out wrong about the civil lawsuit thing."
Well, I was glib -- I'll post further on that here, I haven't the time I'd like right now to address the point -- but not "flat-out wrong."
Re:
"The point of the legislation is that business engaged in legal commerce should not be subject to politically-motivated harassment or "revenge" lawsuits."
That is "the point" as articulated by those who support the legislation, but narrowly intepreting/assigning parameters defined by caricaturing lawsuits against gun manufacturers as being "politically-motivated harassment or 'revenge' lawsuits" in the context of such an open-ended law is glib, too.
Many of the key lawsuits -- such as the New Orleans case, detailed in all its intricacies by Peter Harry Brown and Daniel G. Abel in the book Outgunned: Up Against the NRA -- were prompted by police departments and entire cities that were so fed up with the inability to enforce any form of regulation, control, or sane restraints on gun-trafficking traceable to increasingly devastating homicides. As firearm technology enjoyed vast refinements in the 1990s (laser sights, armor-piercing bullets, etc.), the firearms were simultaneously becoming more lethal and more readily available on urban streets, while safety devices were woefully inadequate when they existed at all and gun trafficking spun completely out of any imaginable control. The NRA has carried major stick in Washington, and this is the ultimate revelation of that political power; legal recourse was all that was left to cities like Chicago and New Orleans, and to glibly dismiss those suits as "politically-motivated harassment or 'revenge' lawsuits" distorts the core issues beyond recognition (which the NRA does quite effectively).
As Wendell Gauthier stated almost to the week seven years ago, "We are taking the gun dealers to court because the political process failed us."
"Put another way: it's one thing to sue GM for making an unsafe car; it's quite another to do so because you hate cars and hate GM for making them."
The presumption in your statement inherently misstates the issue:
Cars are not manufactured to blow big holes in things or kill, they are manufactured as transportation devices. Injury, destruction, and death can be consequences of unsafe vehicles (and, more often, unsafe driving/drivers). However, guns are not manufactured to do anything but fire metal projectiles (now customized to maximize their destructive power) with greater accuracy and at greater speeds (as projectiles, and in terms of increasing rapid-fire quantities of projectiles). That is what they do, and all they are intended to do.
The equation of guns and cars is specious and obfuscating; if you want to get into cigarettes and guns, let's dance.
And for the record, I made it quite clear I didn't "hate" guns. I've grown up with them, I am a solid shot, but I choose not to have them in my home any longer. However, I face greater risk of facing legal prosecution for having published Taboo than I ever did for having a firearm in my home, and that is what prompted my post and was clearly stated as its context.
I am only emphasizing the absurdity of the greater legal threat those who write/draw/publish now face in comparison to that faced by firearm manufacturers.
You are twisting what I've posted into an anti-gun screed, which is not what I posted.
I'll respond to your Brady Bill paragraph when I have more time, but do want to follow through to your concluding comments:
Re:
"Steve, some of us go to bat for the Bill of Rights ACROSS THE BOARD. That means cutting checks to Comic Book Legal Defense Fund _and_ NRA _and_ ACLU and so on..."
If the CBLDF and ACLU had the lobbying clout of the NRA, we wouldn't be having this online conversation. For reasons I'll go into in discussion of the Brady Bill, the former two organizations have my support; the NRA does not.
Re:
"I am curious, though: Do you extend your "rapacious corporate greed" critique to those who make and sell books and movies?"
I have plenty to say on that topic, but I repeat: books and movies are not, in and of themselves, created or manufactured to inflict harm. They are, in and of themselves, as objects, inert, stationary, and of little real threat as objects. Guns exist only to be fired. They are, in and of themselves, often lovely constructions -- I dig that -- but their intent is to fire projectiles at great speeds efficiently and with great accuracy. Books exist to be read; movies exist to be viewed.
Bringing us to:
Re:
"Ideas, as Lenin famously said, are far more dangerous than guns. Books like THE TURNER DIARIES are worse than a roomful of rifles because they tell to take those rifles and murder people with them. The rifles have no opinion on the matter."
If I didn't believe in the power of images and words, I'd be neither an artist or a writer. I am fully aware of the potential and the history of books, images, speeches, ideas prompting much harm -- but ALL books, images, speeches, ideas are not inherently, by definition, in and of themselves, dangerous.
ALL guns are, by the nature of their intent and being, inherently, by definition, in and of themselves, dangerous. They exist only to fire projectiles with rapidity, efficiency, and great accuracy. That is what they do. That is all they are meant to do. That is what they are manufactured to do.
Re:
"I defend such loathesome stuff on account of the 1st Amendment, but let's not be coy: You are in far more peril from what's in your neighbors hearts than from what's in their gun racks."
Agreed, but I am in far less peril if my neighbor comes at me with a stick or boomerang or blade -- or, for that matter, with a book or rolled-up comic or videocassette or movie -- than if he sets up on the road above my house with an Uzi and lets loose.
This does not, per se (as you would have it), mean I want to empty my neighbor's gun rack, or that I want the government to come in and empty it for me. Hell, he can fire that fucking Magnum of his over that bird-seed-raiding bear's head at 3 AM all summer, for all I care.
I just find it ridiculous that I'm more vulnerable for what I DRAW and WRITE and PUBLISH than if I manufactured that Magnum for my neighbor to blast at the fucking bear with.
Arctic Luke:
OK, bully for you. I don't make the former, I have made the latter. See above comments/replies for my point, if you missed it.
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