Bob Lord

Posted by Bob Lord

[Background: In a post by
AzBlueMeanie, Arizona GOP Doubles Down on NRA's Idiotic Proposal, Representative Kavanagh started a discussion regarding proposals
to curb gun violence. The discussion continued in a post of mine, An Open
Letter to Representative Kavanagh. I chose to place this response to
Representative Kavanagh in a new post because my prior post has moved too far
down the page at this point.]

Representative Kavanagh, 

I don’t ordinarily speak for my fellow bloggers here, let
alone our readers (many of whom are conservative), but I’m confident that many
share my appreciation that you would take the time to post comments on this
site. I hope you understand that my previous comments were intended as
criticism, not as an attack.

I’m not sure if my personal opinion counts for all that
much, as I have no special expertise here, but I’m happy to respond to your last comment, as you requested.  I also encourage our readers to chime in.

Posted by Bob Lord

Dear Representative Kavanagh,

It's not often that elected representatives comment on blog posts, so I was surprised to see comments purporting to be from you to AzBlueMeanie's recent post, Arizona GOP Doubles Down on NRA's Idiotic Proposal. If those were not your comments but those of one impersonating you, go ahead and disregard the remainder of this letter. If they were your comments, I must tell you that I'm utterly perplexed that you would ask a blogger "what is your proposal," when the blogger never purported to have a proposal, then react to those replying to your comments with this: 

I sense a lot of hostility
here in response to my simple question meant to understand the left's position,
especially regarding serious mental illness and gun violence. Forget I ever
asked and reached out for dialogue. Thank God you people don't like guns.

Your
statement, coming from an elected official, is stunning on several levels.

Posted by Bob Lord

After a week of "respectful" slience, the NRA was kind enough to educate us about gun violence once again. That's a good thing, because it's not intuitively obvious for all of us that everything but the guns themselves are causing people to die from gunshot fire. Very high on the list of causes (most of which can be blamed on weak kneed liberals) are the failure to arm our teachers and our shortcomings in detecting and treating the mentally ill. But I'm a bit perplexed, because the NRA didn't tell us where to start. Do we arm the teachers first or do we first find all the mentally ill, take their guns, and tell all the sellers at gun shows to memorize their names and faces and not sell to them (because gun show sellers shouldn't resort to running background checks)?

Posted by Bob Lord

To all BfAZ readers, a very Merry Christmas. Whether you're deeply religious or an atheist like me, Christmas isn't the day for politics, so I'll keep it light.

We sometimes celebrate Christmas on the 24th, as we did this year, in order to accommodate our children's other parents. The present extravaganza was fairly uneventful this year. The most noteworthy gifts were what I call the PINGs, an acronym for Politically Incorrect Nerf Guns. Tammy bought them some time ago for Bennet and Seth, the youngest of the brood, far before the Newtown tragedy. These are not your father's nerf guns. They're battery powered and fire about 100 of those foam darts in a few minutes, somehwat slower as the batteries wear down. With a houseful of boys and young men yesterday, the PINGs got a lot of use in their first day. I'm guessing PINGs will appear on the NRAs list of "it's not the gun" causes of gun deaths soon, but they actually seemed like harmless fun yesterday.

Posted by Bob Lord

There are sane, rational conservatives out there. There really are. 

But on a data-driven issue like Medicare, even they're hard to reach. There's just too much misinformation floating around. Once those on the right (or left) hear or see information that fits their worldview from a source that seems reliable, it's very hard to dissuade them. 

I just experienced this with a conservative friend of mine. He explained to me how our unfunded medicare obligation was "86 Trillion" and that we couldn't possibly sustain Medicare unless we "reformed it." I didn't believe the total unfunded obligation was $86 Trillion, but it made no sense to challenge that "fact," unless I was armed with first-hand data, and even then the discussion likely would not have been productive. Instead, I asked a simple question: "Upon how long a period is the unfunded obligation based?" He didn't know.

This friend of mine is really smart and very well read. If you ranked people by sheer brain power, he's easily in the top 5%, and probably much higher. But it turns out he was badly misinformed.