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slims--i suppose in the end that time will tell. like i said, i watched the attorney general confirmation hearings, as i have been watching some of the others in order to get a sense what the new administration is likely to do--and i saw no reason to doubt his repeated statements that this is not on the administration's radar, that he cannot imagine it being on their radar. maybe you have information i don't, but i doubt it.
but i'd say that given the magnitude of damage left behind after 8 years of focused conservative incompetence and 30 years of neoliberalism, given the extent to which it is clear that the obama administration is a wholesale repudiation of that 30 years--and so given the extent to which they have to confront very complicated questions very quickly and assemble teams capable to implementing a very different type of policy orientation--and so a different kind of state---not the neoliberal state--but something else---i would expect this question to be very very far down on the agenda.
but it's also possible that a case will wend it's way through the court system that could change things.
barring that, i don't see anything really happening on this any time soon.
i don't know whether this is of any interest, but the fact is that this issue doesn't move me. i grew up with guns around, but i never took an interest in them. i was more taken with bow shooting at targets. hunting never really appealed to me. when i went hunting, i liked tracking but found that guns were heavy and got in the way and i never had any intention of shooting them at anything anyway. i preferred hiking. so i don't really have an iron in the fire.
but i have lived most of my adult life in cities, as i've said before in these debates.
so i have no particular problem with folk having guns, hunting or whatever in areas that are not densely populated--but i can't for the life of me figure out why there's an assumption that guns mean the same thing in a city. again, population density--it's as simple as that.
so i see gun regulation as a pragmatic matter perhaps best resolved at the local level--as i've said before, i see no reason why there should not be very different regulations in urban and other environments. to me, it's just common sense.
i've participated a little in this thread because i wanted to understand why the above was apparently such a problem for other folk. and there's a range of positions, some which makes sense to me, some which don't at all.
it's strange how polarized these things get. it doesn't seem necessary. but there we are.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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