I’m not a huge fan of watching loud cars drive around an oval track until they dive into a retaining wall, igniting the fuel and causing general mayhem. But, on Memorial Day weekend it’s patriotic to watch at least one lap of the Indy 500. After that, it is just a variation of zoom, zoom, and more zoom.
The race cars
are small, powerful, and held together by decals of sponsoring companies and
associations. The drivers’ uniforms likewise are sewn together with the logos
of the sponsors. Both are an exhibit of high-stakes advertising.
Wait, wait.
Here comes the cliché!
Why don’t
members of Congress do the same thing? Imagine if their suits and ties made
them walking billboards for their sponsors. You know, here comes Senator
Highcost sponsored by Standard Oil, Coal Manufacturers of Wheeling, the Chamber
of Commerce, Eggland Eggs, Tyson Chicken, and the NRA.
Well, it seems
that paying a member of Congress, or the state legislature, or the city council
person to vote one way or another is not a crime if you do it correctly.
The movies often showed a senator meeting in some hotel room with undercover
FBI agents who offered him (it was always a him back then) a bribe to vote for
a bill that favored the purported sponsor. The senator takes the money, the
badge comes out, the cuffs come out, and they are off to booking at the nearest
police station.
It didn’t have
to be that way. The senator could have said no to the bribe, directed the
agents to a Super-Pac, or to his campaign war chest and all would have been
legal, the agents out of the money and the senator’s campaign a little richer.
This week
there is a bipartisan group of senators trying to hammer out a reasonable
compromise that will make it harder for folks to get guns and use them to kill
school children … or others. Sounds reasonable. Shouldn’t be hard to
accomplish. Look at the corporate logos on the senators’ suits. Not there, you
say! Well then, maybe they are not being bribed, legally or illegally. Not
likely.
A mass
shooting is defined as an incident in which four or more people are killed by
guns, not including the shooter. In 2022 alone, there have been 220 mass
shootings. Gun killings represent 79% of all homicides in the U.S. compared to
37% in Canada, 13% in Australia, and 4% in the UK.
In spite of
the problem, at least 50% of the senators refuse to vote for gun ownership
regulations. For some, it is a cultural issue in their states. For most, we
could assume that they have been bought off by the gun lobby. The NRA alone has
made major contributions to a host of Republican senators: Romney $13.6
million, Burr $7 million, Blunt $4.5 million, Tillis $4.5 million, Rubio $3.3
million, Ernst $3.1 million, Portman $3.0 million, Cotton $2.0 million, Toomey
$1.5 million, McConnell $1.3 million, and it goes on, as reported by the BBC.
Senator Cruz
expressed the need for fewer doors in schools and armed guards at the
entrances, and he agrees that teachers should carry weapons as well. Is that
the way we want for our schools?
Representative
Scalise, Minority Whip in the House, who was shot at a congressional ball game,
said this weekend that he opposed any efforts to take guns away from
law-abiding citizens. That is another way of saying that he will not support
any effort to ensure that only law-abiding citizens can carry guns, that
dangerous people can’t carry guns, or that assault rifles be limited to
law-enforcement officers and the military. He has received hundreds of
thousands of dollars from the NRA.
In 1992 I
spent some time in Shanghai teaching in an MBA program for middle-level
managers who would come to the U.S. to work in Bay Area companies for six
months, and then return to China to help manage the trade with our country. Forget,
for a minute, the Chinese political system. We can agree that it was not what
we would call free. The greatest fear that these thirty-year-old managers had
about coming to the U.S. was the violence. Many of these students had been to
Europe, some had been to the U.S., and they were afraid for their safety if
they came over here. We do not like to admit that we are a very violent
country, but we are. We say that violent is not who we are, but it is. We have
more guns than people, yet only 44% of Americans live in homes with a gun.
Why can’t we
have rules and regulations that ensure that only law-abiding citizens own guns,
that people with mental issues can’t own them, and that assault weapons are
banned since their only purpose is to kill people? Why? How long must we put up
with the insanity?
Brooks Brothers went bankrupt, but maybe
Oxford or Hart Schaffner and Marx can design new suits with lots of logos for
our solons.
June 6, 2022
