Guns waste lives

A slogan from the gun-rights world: “Guns don’t kill, people do”, though more accurately it should be “Guns don’t kill, shooters do”. This slogan points out that, though a gun may be used to kill somebody, it requires a shooter to pull the trigger. Of course a shooter is only a shooter if the shooter has a gun (no gun, no shooter) and guns can kill by accident (no shooter, yet gun kills). Another slogan from the gun-rights world: “Guns save lives”.  Guns have no feelings and know nothing of saving lives, so perhaps “Guns don’t save lives, people do” though the people involved are not necessarily shooters. What lives are saved? Nationally, in 2009, more twice the number of people died from suicide (36,909) than died from homicide (16,799) and “Suicide was the only leading cause of death showing a significant increase” from the previous year. More suicides involved a gun (18,735) than homicides with a gun (11,493).

Throwing all into confusion

Considering the mischief caused by Tea-Party Republican representatives, and the resulting confusion about how to end the shutdown, here is Rawlins Lowndes’s realistic view of the proposed US  constitution of 1787, as collected in the Anti-Federalist Papers (54):

Great stress was laid on the admirable checks which guarded us, under the new Constitution, from the encroachments of tyranny; but too many checks in a political machine must produce the same mischief as in a mechanical one – that of throwing all into confusion. [1]

Lowndes was trying to protect slavery in South Carolina against those in the Northern States, those who would try to do away with that peculiar institution: affirming that “whilst there remained one acre of swampland in South Carolina, he should raise his voice against restricting the importation of Negroes.” He was a pragmatist.

Dwelt a miner, forty-niner

Actually, the California Gold Rush started, not in 1849, but in January 1848 when gold was found in Coloma, California. Though it is difficult to be precise, it is thought that gold worth many billions of dollars in current values was extracted, a great deal of money and a great contribution to the USA economy. For example, San Francisco grew from a few hundred residents before the discovery of gold to almost 40000 residents in a very short time. This was growth through exploitation of US natural resources (and miners) and not through exploitation of US ingenuity (though, no doubt, many miners were ingenious), which had a multiplier affect throughout the US economy, thus increasing federal government income.

 

Single-parent families, in black and white

When talking of children living without mothers or without fathers things are not simple. There are many varying reasons for single-parent families from death of a spouse/partner to no spouse/partner in the first place. The consequences for individual families are also varied, and poorer finances are generally are an important consequence – though there is a world of difference between a divorced affluent woman in her late 30s and a never-married adolescent living alone with her baby.

Based on US Census Bureau figures for 2011 from the Annie E. Casey Foundation National Kids Count Program, 16,356,000 white children and 6,509,000 black/African-American children live in single-parent families. The total of single-parent children for all ethnicities is 24,718,000; and so about 66% of single-parent children are white and 26% black (of white children, 38% are non-Hispanic white and 28% are Hispanic/Latino).