Jan 6^th

President Obama has called for more stringent control over persons legally entitled to own guns. At this point if you’re a dealer at a gun show you can sell weapons to whoever wants to buy them with no background check required; if you own a gun store however, then you are required to conduct a background check. The idea of equalizing these two sales methods have given those right wingers who are fed, or otherwise nurtured, by the NRA apoplexy.

Gun control of any kind in this country is an untouchable, at least for any elected official who expects to be re-elected. Congress has even prohibited the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from investigating anything having to do with gun deaths. This prohibition is in spite of over 30 thousand gun deaths a year; pneumococcal pneumonia kills about 40 thousand citizens a year. Can you imagine congress stepping in to control the CDCs investigations of any other cause of death? In 2000 there were about 900 applications by trusts (museums and other educational institutions) for applications to purchase machine guns, sawed off shot guns and other weapons not ordinarily needed for hunting or personal protection. In 2014 these applications for machine gun and similar purchases jumped from 900 to 90 thousand.

The President shed a few tears when he was announcing this executive order and Fox news was quick to step right in and claim that the tears were a hoax aided by…onion juice on a handkerchief. Any evidence for this novel claim has not been forthcoming, nor is any likely to be.  This is in the same class as his birth and childhood in Kenya. (One of the more hilarious bits of his Presidency was when he claimed that he and Donald Trump had played soccer while growing up together in Kenya, but that Trump had not been very good  at it and had resented him ever since; which, of course, accounts for Trump’s current antagonism toward him.) Trump no longer wants to talk about the President’s birth certificate. When asked if he believes that the President was born in this country he won’t discuss the issue.

Then there are the fascinating discrepancies in the polling results about whether or not the President is a Muslim. One poll has 43 percent of Republicans believing that he is a Muslim but this increases to 66 percent of Trump supporters who believe that he’s a Muslim. Trump has encouraged the belief that the President is a Muslim with his followers and not much encouragement for that belief is needed. It is well known that the Trump supporters are a unique subset of voters. It seems to be a subset more inclined to paranoia than most.