Updates on New Hampshire's Culture of Freedom

On Friday, August 9, NH Governor Chris Sununu vetoed 3 gun safety bills. From his veto statement:

New Hampshire is one of the safest states in the nation, and we have a long and proud tradition of responsible firearm stewardship. Our laws are well-crafted and fit our culture of responsible gun ownership and individual freedom. 

Later that evening,  in Derry, a 79 year old man shot and killed his wife.

Didn't  this guy know about the culture? 

In the wee hours of Monday, August 12, Dover police are investigating gunfire in a street confrontation.

Just a little individual freedom fire. Nothing to see here. 

The wee hours of Monday morning were busy. In Northwood, a man claims he shot at someone trying to break into his car. Shot 3 times and missed. The police searched the area, but didn't find anyone. 

Thursday, August 15, a responsible firearm steward barricaded himself in a house in Claremont for 9 hours. Hundreds of  shots fired, but no one was injured. 

Sunday, September 15, a good guy with a gun - a safety officer no less - wounded himself and another safety officer, at a shooting range in Keene.

On Sept. 20, a responsible gun owner barricaded himself in his house in Nashua for a few hours, before being shot by a cop and taken into custody.

A proponent of individual freedom shot off his gun in a men's room in a bar in Portsmouth on Sept. 20. 

On Sunday, Sept. 22, a traditional firearm steward from Rochester, NH, drove to Massachusetts, where he shot and killed a guy at a bar.  (Hey, at least he did it out of state). Turns out he wasn't actually a law abiding gun owner, but of course, no one knew that till he pulled the trigger. 

A double shooting in Concord, NH on the night of 
September 25. A woman was found laying on the ground in a parking lot, after being shot in the head. A man was dead, slumped against the car. She died at the hospital. There is no official confirmation, yet, but  I think we all know how this story unfolds. The responsible gun owner shot her first, then killed himself. 

Update: That's exactly what happened. Concord Monitor

On October 1, a pastor from a Pentecostal church (in Pelham) was shot and killed at his home in Londonderry.


October 18, a person was reported to have been found dead in a Jaffrey apartment in this very carefully reported story. There were two people, one dead inside, one outside in a car, and possible gunshot wounds. Since then, the story has been updated. Apparently the person who died was a high school student, as was the person outside in the car. The police believe that it was death by suicide. 


October 12, two people were shot at the same Pentecostal church in Pelham that was home to the pastor murdered two weeks ago. It's being reported that a man and a woman were shot at a wedding, by a man with a handgun. 

The story has been updated. The bishop performing the wedding ceremony was shot, as was the bride. It is difficult to imagine that this is unrelated to the death of the minister on October 1. 

On October 27, a responsible firearm steward in Nashua killed his wife, and then himself. NECN
All these guns that are supposed to be making us safer don't seem to be doing much for women. 


A guy in Chesterfield who shot up his neighborhood last year is refusing a competency exam, saying that they're trying to torture a confession out of him. Union Leader. I wonder why we don't charge guys like this with terrorism. 

On Saturday, November 9, a responsible NH gun owner displayed his idea of individual freedom by threatening a driver on I-95 in MA  with his gun.

Why Aren't All These Guns Making Us Safer?

It was a deadly weekend. On Saturday, a gunman in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, shot and killed 22 people, and wounded 26 more. Early Sunday morning, a gunman killed 9 people in a nightlife district in Dayton, Ohio. 

The weekend before, a gunman shot and killed 4 people and wounded 13 others at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, CA. 

I thought all these guns were supposed to be making us safer?

Meanwhile, here in NH, three gun safety bills languish in limbo, waiting for the attention of our governor. On Monday, August 5, there was a rally  at the Legislative Office Building in Concord, where members of gun safety groups and other concerned citizens called upon the governor to sign the bills. The room was packed with people. 

Not everyone in the room was heartbroken about the slaughter of their fellow humans. Some attendees were so dickhurt by the idea that some people were talking about gun safety, that they showed up with their guns. The guy with the long gun in the photo is Brennan Robinson, a member of the Free State Project, who very obviously came in with the intention of turning the media's attention to him. 

He succeeded admirably. Both WMUR and NHPR gave him the last word in their stories. 

This is emblematic of the NH media, which operates with GOP as their default setting. I expect  it from WMUR - hell, I've seen it in the past, from the same reporter.

I cannot wrap my head around the shoddiness of this reporting. Not a single reporter who covered this event thought to ask, "Hey, pal - these folks are all here because of gun violence - do you think it's really a good idea to bring GUNS into a room crowded with people - especially since you fit the visual profile of a domestic terrorist?" 

These are men who get up in the morning in the safest state in the country, and put on their strapons before they dare leave their houses. And we are all supposed to bow and scrape before their freedumb, because their right to play GI Joe is more important than our right to live. 

I don't expect Governor Sununu to sign those gun bills. His first act in office was to sign a bill that repealed the concealed carry license process. Gundamentalists are his base. 

I don't have any confidence that there will ever be a legislative solution to the wholesale slaughter, either at the state or national level. 

What I do know is this - people are going to stop going out. They won't go to fairs, festivals, concerts, or movies. They won't go shopping in brick and mortar stores. They won't go to bars and restaurants. And brother, when it starts to hit the bottom lines of business - then we'll see some change. Capitalism may be what changes our gun laws. 

To help along the process, I suggest that before you go to a store, a venue, a bar or restaurant that you call ahead and ask if they allow guns inside. NH is an open carry state - BUT - there's a provision built into the law:

"Businesses have the to right to ban firearms from their property, Merrigan said, and can ask customers who are carrying firearms, openly or concealed, to leave.

Customers who don’t leave a business when requested can be charged with criminal trespassing."

So call and ask, and decide for yourself whether you want to go there or not. If you see a person with a gun in a business - call the police. There is no way for you to know if he is one of the mythical "good guys with guns" or a domestic terrorist. Complaint to the management. Leave your shopping cart and walk out of the store. 

Enough is enough. And dammit, NH media - do a better job. 

Rogue Legislature

        

Last year, NH elected a Republican governor and voted for Republican majorities in all branches of our state government. It’s still something of a puzzle how this came to pass given the rampant voter fraud Donald Trump and his acolytes (including our governor) have brayed about, but the only plausible explanation is that those busloads of people from Massachusetts came to NH to vote for the GOP.

Where a new governor begins sets the tone for his or her administration. Governor Sununu’s first legislative priority was to pass a bill repealing the 100-year-old law requiring a gun owner to have a permit to carry a concealed handgun. NH has the 11^th worst infrastructure in the United States. We ranked 2^nd in the nation for overdose deaths. We have a serious housing problem, and homelessness and poverty are on the rise, yet this gun bill was the most important thing our new governor could think of?

Governor Sununu also took the big raise negotiated for him by the state employee’s union, though he hasn’t yet been willing to sit down and negotiate a contract with them. They’ve been without one for the last 180+ days. One of the sticking points? He doesn’t want to give them a raise, even though he took one, before ever sitting down at his desk in the corner office.

The legislature will be back in session next week. With the likelihood of losing at least some of those majorities (if not all) in the next election, the rabid right majority is going to attempt to pass their entire ideological wish list. There are more voter suppression bills coming up, and more bills to cut business taxes. Bills to maintain fealty to the fossil fuel industries, bills to destroy public education. There are 11 bills dealing with decals on license plates. And because our volunteer legislature full of old people has no interest in a future they won’t be part of, there’s a bill to create a memorial to Meldrim Thomson.

Governor Sununu chose Speaker of the House, Shawn Jasper to be his new Commissioner of Agriculture. One does wonder if that was a deliberate political calculation. The GOP has moved so far to the right that Jasper now appears to be moderate, and removing him from the speakership will very likely allow that rabid agenda to move along more smoothly. When Gene Chandler was elected Speaker last month, there were some sighs of relief. Some real reactionaries ran for Speaker, and Chandler, at least, isn’t one of them. That relief was short-lived.

Chandler has restructured the House leadership. It seems he promised during his campaign for the speakership, to include influential lawmakers in his leadership team. Chandler added six assistant majority leaders, who bring all kinds of “influence” to the table. One of them is State Rep. Al Baldasaro, one of the most nationally famous legislators in the state. Al is famous for a number of reasons (all of them embarrassing) but especially for suggesting that Hillary Clinton should be shot for treason. Another is Victoria Sullivan, who pleased the reactionaries in her party last year, when she launched an attack on the tweets of a female legislator, which appeared to be an attempt to distract attention from former Rep. Robert Fisher, a rape apologist her party was desperate to protect and retain. This is a nice reward for Sullivan, midway through her second term.
 
Speaker Chandler has also appointed a policy advisory committee. This is comprised of “influential” lawmakers who, according to the House website, will review upcoming legislation, hearings, review bills on the calendar, amendments, and give input on various issues. Two of these big thinkers are Frank McCarthy and Lino Avellani. Given that Avellani missed most of the first three months of last year’s session, one wonders how he’ll make it to the weekly meetings, and how, halfway through a second term he became “influential.” Frank McCarthy, after he was ousted in 2012, and before he was reelected, made a career of writing bellicose letters to the editor, where he made frequent bigoted and ugly accusations. In the last year or so, McCarthy has allied himself with the Carroll County contingent of Free Staters and Tea Partiers, groups that promises of inclusion must have been made to by the Speaker candidate, in order to secure their votes.

There are no moderate Republicans any more. The GOP of Trump has no interest in what is right for our state – their interest is in serving party ideology, serving themselves, and their donors/paymasters.

This rogue legislature has the potential to do a great deal of damage. Pay attention – and get involved. State politics may not be sexy, but they affect our lives every day of the week. This is an election year, which gives voters the power to hold their legislators accountable during the session, and again, at the ballot box. 


This was published as an op/ed in the December 29 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper


For those who don't understand the concept of an op-ed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_piece

We Have A Man Problem

When the story of Harvey Weinstein broke, the floodgates opened. All over social media, women were talking about their experiences with sexual harassment, with the #MeToo hashtag making the rounds. Years (decades) of stories and outrage were expressed. After a few days of that, some men began to be very uncomfortable. They began by getting defensive. Some moved on to make accusations that some of the women were surely lying. This is why women don’t come forward. They aren’t believed. 

Every woman has a story of harassment, often beginning in childhood. A family friend or a relative might have groped her as a child. She might have been a teenager who was groped by the father of the children she was babysitting for. It might be the story of a boss with a hands problem, or a violent story of date rape. It might be an experience she had while working in a restaurant. In a business where customers directly pay a worker’s salary, the worker is forced to put up with a great deal of foolishness in order to get  their pay, also known as the tip.

Hot on the heels of revelation after revelation of bad behavior by wealthy, powerful, men came the shooting in Texas. A man went into a church in a small town in Texas and killed 26 people. Devin Kelley’s past was filled with stories of violence and abusive behavior. If anyone had taken any one of the events seriously, he wouldn’t have been able to legally own a gun. He probably wouldn’t have been able to perpetuate a massacre.

There are a few things that mass shooters have in common. Since 1982, all but three of them have been men. Most of them had a history of domestic violence. It’s one of the best predictors of a potential mass shooter, but we don’t really take domestic violence all that seriously here. After all, it’s only women.

Here in NH, in 2014, three state legislators voted against Joshua’s Law, which made domestic violence a specific crime. JR Hoell was worried about “unintended consequences.” The other two were Frank Sapareto and Michael Sylvia. Rep. Sapareto was charged with assaulting his girlfriend’s two children in 2012. In 2017, he’s the Vice Chair of the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee. As for Sylvia, during discussion of a Belknap County deputy who was accused of raping a woman in custody whom he was transporting, Rep. Sylvia commented, “You know what that tells me, that tells me he had time on his hands.” The real worry shared by all three was that domestic abusers would lose their guns. Because, of course, that  “unintended consequence” would be a real tragedy.

By now we all know the tropes: when a man who has skin color of a somewhat duskier hue starts shooting, he’s a terrorist. When it’s a white guy, he’s a lone wolf with mental health problems. We often discover that that the shooter has anger issues, and even more often that he has a history of domestic violence. The Las Vegas shooter was never charged with domestic violence, but he had been heard in shops being cruel and demeaning to his female partner.

One of the great mythologies of our country is the nuclear family, where mom stayed home and baked cookies for the kids while dad went off to work and brought home the paycheck. The single paycheck family went off the rails a long time ago. It takes both partners working at least one job apiece to keep a family financially afloat. That collides with the other mythology: the macho man. The myth of the hyper masculine man has been growing exponentially, and married into the gun culture family. Now the pervasive myth is that of the gun totin’ patriot with a gun who is going to save the nation (by himself, for he is a rugged individualist!) from gubmint tyranny with his gun.

Gun culture is all around us. In NH, our new governor’s very first order of business was a gun bill. In a state with crumbling infrastructure – his biggest concern was passing a law to allow any halfwit with a gun to carry it concealed. There are too many guns, and too many halfwits – and the halfwits are increasingly armed and angry. Too many of them regard women and children as their property. A woman trying to protect herself and her children by removing them from a violent situation is perceived as taking what is theirs.

We need to change our violent, sexist culture. We need to change our societal definition of manhood and masculinity. Given that so many men can’t even handle listening to the stories of women’s lives, I am not hopeful.

Published as an oped in the November 10 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper 

RIP, NH Primary

It’s been quite a week in New Hampshire. An armed man went into the ICU at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center and shot and killed his mother. There was an attempted armed robbery at a bank in downtown Concord. The investigation into the attempted lynching of an 8-year-old biracial boy in Claremont continues. The Pence Kobach Fraud Commission met in NH to continue in their attempt to legitimize their bogus claims of widespread voter fraud.  

The meeting of the commission was held at St. Anselm’s College, a private, religious school. Former US Senator Judd Gregg helped St. Anselm’s obtain $15 million in federal funding to renovate the building that became the school’s Institute of Politics. The executive director of the Institute of Politics is Neal Levesque, who worked for former Congressman Charles Bass for 12 years. A In other words: a public, allegedly non-partisan commission met at a private, religious, rather partisan school.

Two months ago, I wrote that Kobach was under investigation for violating the Hatch Act, using his role in the commission as part of his 2018 campaign for governor of Kansas. That investigation continues. Since then, we’ve also learned that not only is Kobach the Secretary of State for Kansas, he’s also moonlighting as a paid columnist for Breitbart News. Breitbart being a far right “news” outfit run by Steve Bannon, the recently expelled advisor to President Trump. Breitbart’s ties to white supremacists resulted in them losing 90% of their advertisers between April and June of 2017.

This is the publication that pays Kris Kobach to write a column. A Kobach column in Breitbart was part of the misinformation packet handed out at the meeting of the Fraud Commission. Testifying before the Voter Fraud Commission in NH were 12 white men. There were no women. No people of color. No town clerks or supervisors of the checklist participated in this fact-free extravaganza.

As soon as Donald Trump was elected president, he began to whine about voter fraud. He won the election through the Electoral College. That he failed to win the popular vote has been a terrible blow to his overweening, childlike ego. Trump is the bestest, smartest, most wonderful person ever, and that every person in the United States didn’t vote for him can only mean one thing – fraud.

NH Governor Chris Sununu paved the way for this by bleating about “busloads of voters from Massachusetts” on the Howie Carr radio show, days before the election. Chris Sununu did not attend the fraud side show – how could he? His father, the disgraced philatelist, was ensconced on the dais. No one asked him how all that fraud impacted his son’s election. No one asked him why his family wants to sabotage NH elections.

Sununu-the-younger has had to walk back his claims of voter fraud, given that he was elected. The Republicans would have us believe that the fraud was confined to only two races – the presidential race and the US Senate race. We’re being asked to believe that people came to NH to fraudulently vote for only two candidates. In that same election, Republican Chris Sununu was elected, and the Republican Party now controls the entire state government. We’re also being asked to believe that THOSE votes weren’t fraud.

You can’t have it both ways.

One of the ideas suggested by a witness testifying before the Fraud Commission, was doing background checks on voters. The kind of background checks that are so bitterly opposed by NH gundamentalists. These are the kinds of contortions that the far right will engage in to try to ensure they stay in power. Another suggestion is raising the voting age; to ensure college students don’t vote. It seems the GOP platform has little appeal to young voters, so rather than do the hard work of recruiting, they’d prefer to just eliminate young voters.

NH Secretary of State, Bill Gardner is part of the Sham Commission. In recent years he’s become the tool of those claiming voter fraud, chosen to give them bipartisan credibility. Gardner has been in office since 1976. After a long career in public service, he has besmirched his legacy of defending the first in the nation primary by legitimizing this charade.

What should offend every one of us is the damage being done to our elections by this commission. This craven nonsense is an insult to every town clerk, every moderator, the supervisors of the checklist, the ballot clerks, and every volunteer that is part of our election process – a process that has been working just fine for hundreds of years. That the majority party has chosen to perpetuate this circus tells us that they’ve abandoned any integrity they may have once had.

I’ve long said that when NH loses the first in the nation primary, it will be because of the GOP. Say goodbye, NH. It’s all over now but the shouting.

This was published as an op-ed in the September 15, 2017 edition of the Conway Daily Sun  newspaper

Time For A Divorce

found at quoracd.net

For years we’ve been hearing Texas threaten to secede. NY City has threatened to secede from the rest of the state. In 1933 State Senator William E. Martin of North Dakota proposed that the 39 western states leave the US. The remaining states of Maine, NH, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey would be left as the union.

That was not a bad idea. Sadly, nothing came of it. The Free State Project, the armed miscreants invading our state with the intention of taking over and dismantling our state government would like to secede. Out on the west coast, the California Freedom Coalition has turned in a proposed ballot initiative calling for California to withdraw from the US. Spokesperson Cindy Sheehan said the state should stop subsidizing a federal government that is out of state with California values.

miguelcolumbia on reddit

We’ve held this huge, unwieldy country together for almost 250 years. That’s a long time. We’ve always been deeply divided (remember slavery?) and those divides have been glossed over, but never actually healed.

Racism is a huge divide. Religion, even though we’re increasingly non-religious, is a huge divide. The evangelicals have a death grip on the middle of the country. Anti-Muslim fear is a constant beat, drummed by people who wouldn’t recognize Sharia if it leapt up and bit them on the buttocks, but are sure that Sharia Law is already being enacted in the United States. We are divided by science and facts. A great many people who believe in Noah’s Ark deny that humans are having an impact on the climate. Anyone who doesn’t like the news they’re hearing feels free to declare it fake. We have wealth, poverty, gun, and education divides. We have an information divide. We are divided on whether women are fully autonomous beings or not. We don’t even agree what facts are any more.

Worst of all, most of this is tacitly accepted. We’ve somehow accepted living in the “post-truth” era, where alternative facts rule the day. Hardly anyone is bold enough to say that this is absolute nonsense, and if we can’t do better than that, we should get out of the nation business. 

Rob Beschizza on Boing Boing

Bottom line – a large segment of the nation voted for a dull-witted reality TV star with an incredibly embarrassing hair style at the last presidential election. A nation that once praised the virtues of statesmanship, went in the opposite direction, and chose a leader who is an acknowledged grabber of female genitalia.  He and his grifter family are now lining their pockets at taxpayer expense. This clan is hastening the demise of the US as a global superpower. Under Trump, we’re officially a rogue nation.

Under Trump, we have reality TV government. He tweets incessantly, picking fights, blaming others, and just plain making stuff up. A large part of the audience cheers him on. That’s what they’ve become. An audience. There is nothing on the looms, but they swear they can see the fine fabric the Emperor is clothed in.

Nation States Forum

I’m not sure there’s any hope for unity, not after all this. If you were married to someone who was rude, abusive, and insisted on revising history and loudly trumpeting ignorance while calling it fact, would you stay with them? We should consider a divorce. A big national divorce.

The eastern seaboard down to Virginia is blue, and that includes New York. The west coast, Hawaii, and Nevada are blue. The rest is mostly red with some outcroppings of blue. Years ago I proposed creating the nation of New England – well, I wasn’t far off. We’d find a way to divide the country up equitably, with the red minded folks moving to the south and the center. They’d be able to have all the freedom they want from regulation, from taxes, from big gummint - from all the things that make them so unhappy. They could set it up any way they wanted:  monarchies, theocracies, dictatorships, or perhaps Randian enclaves with manly men doing manly things together with no government required.

The blue countries wouldn’t be picking up the tab for them any more, (or for a bloated military) so they’d have plenty of money for innovation, education, and infrastructure projects. High speed, cross-country rail could connect the blue coasts. No need for the red area to contribute. Or participate. The blue countries could set up their own social security systems, safety nets, and health care. The red countries could issue bootstraps, handguns, and hire bathroom police. Careful consideration would have to be given to missile silos, weapons sites, and military assets. All nuclear weapons will be destroyed. This isn’t going to be a quickie divorce.

The US is a superpower in decline. Ideology and willful ignorance divide us. There’s no way to come back from that.  We’re in an abusive relationship. We might as well accept it, split up, and move on.

quora

Published as an op-ed in the June 9 edition of the Conway Daily Sun Newspaper