Welcome to Buster's Blog

Irregular commentary on whatever's on my mind -- politics, sports, current events, and life in general. After twenty years of writing business and community newsletters, fifteen years of fantasy baseball newsletters, and two years of email "columns", this is, I suppose, the inevitable result: the awful conceit that someone might actually care to read what I have to say. Posts may be added often, rarely, or never again. As always, my mood and motivation are unpredictable.

Buster Gammons















Saturday, April 13, 2013

Portman's Vote

(A re-post of Dave Girves blogpost of earlier today.  Well-said and to the point, as always.  Dave's thoughts can be found in Buster's Links.)
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Portman's Vote

by Dave Girves
As an Ohioan I had to hang my head in shame while Rob Portman cast his vote against even having a debate in the Senate on the issues surrounding gun violence control.
I could only wonder “Why?”
After calling his Columbus and D.C. offices the best answer I could get from the staff person who answered was: “The Senator hasn’t made a statement about why he cast that vote and I can’t speculate about what he was thinking.”
Of course we know he opposes universal background checks, even though 90% of Americans are in favor of them, and most Republicans, gun owners, and NRA members favor them as well. But we also know the NRA opposes background checks and funds his campaign.
He has admitted that he opposes a ban on assault weapons and voted against the ban when he was a Representative citing concerns for the Second Amendment.
But why not debate these issues?
Certainly we can all agree that at the time our founding fathers wrote that citizens should have the right to bear arms, those arms consisted of single-shot muzzle-loaded muskets. And we can agree that no citizen has the right to own a thermonuclear bomb.
The job of the Senate is to draw the line between those extremes and say whether an assault weapon with a 30-round magazine is on the legal or illegal side of that line.
Now I can only wonder how he would have voted if his son had been killed at the age of 6, in elementary school, with an assault weapon.

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