Cory Gardner Dances Around Gun Violence Question

6 thoughts on “Cory Gardner Dances Around Gun Violence Question”

1. This is a really tough one to read, written by George W. Bush's speechwriter Michael Gersen.  Perhaps between NRA fundraisers our junior senator can absorb these words. 

   Gerson: The return of America’s cruelest passion

   I had fully intended to ignore President Trump’s latest round of racially charged taunts against an African American elected official, and an African American activist, and an African American journalist and a whole city with a lot of African Americans in it. I had every intention of walking past Trump’s latest outrages and writing about the self-destructive squabbling of the Democratic presidential field, which has chosen to shame Joe Biden for the sin of being an electable, moderate liberal.

   But I made the mistake of pulling James Cone’s “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” off my shelf — a book designed to shatter convenient complacency. Cone recounts the case of a white mob in Valdosta, Georgia, in 1918, that lynched an innocent man named Haynes Turner. Turner’s enraged wife, Mary, promised justice for the killers. The sheriff responded by arresting her, and then turning her over to the mob, which included women and children. According to one source, Mary Turner was “stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death.”

   God help us. It is hard to write the words. This evil — the evil of white supremacy, resulting in dehumanization, inhumanity and murder — is the worst stain, the greatest crime, of American history. It is the thing that nearly broke the nation. It is the thing that proved generations of Christians to be vicious hypocrites. It is the thing that turned normal people into moral monsters, capable of burning a grieving widow to death and murdering her child.

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   1. I am pretty certain Col. Chivington and his troops were, to a man, Christians. 

      As I understand it, when Chivington was told by a junior officer that many of the indians camping at Sand Creek were small children and babies, he responded, "Nits make lice. Kill them all."

      Upon their return to Denver, numerous soldiers carried the heads of their victims on the tips of their sabers, parading in to town. But they did it all in the name of God and country. Yeah…good Christians.

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      1. Smithsonian says:

         John Chivington stood 6-foot-4, weighed over 200 pounds, and used his booming voice to good effect as a minister and ardent abolitionist before the Civil War.

         He was not only a Christian — but a Methodist minister and for two years, "Presiding Elder of the new Rocky Mountain District."  He was not reappointed to the post in 1862.  He'd served in other locales before coming to Colorado, but near the time of his death, a church historian concluded "Mr. Chivington was not as steady in his demeanor as becomes a man called of God to the work of the ministry, giving his ministerial friends regret and even trouble in their efforts to sustain his reputation."

         Eventually … "in 1996 the General conference of the United Methodist Church expressed regret for the Sand Creek massacre. It issued an apology to the Southern Cheyenne for the "actions of a prominent Methodist."

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   2. Gerson's newest column – "In talking of love, Trump gives an indictment of his own politics" – is equally damning …

      When Robert F. Kennedy spoke on the topic of national division at the Cleveland City Club shortly before his death, it was the culmination of a very different public role. “Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others.”

      That is exactly what many in the corporate world, and many conservative Christian leaders, are doing in their devotion to Trump: honoring swagger, bluster and force, and excusing a leader who constructs his political success on the cultivation of contempt and slanders against the weak. By their nearly blind support, such leaders are complicit in Trump’s rule by resentment.

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2. I'm proud of my new Congressman, Jason Crow, who was interviewed on Morning Joe this morning.

   He called for an assault rifle ban and for universal background checks.  He noted the obvious difference between a hunting rifle that he uses for deer hunting versus an assault rifle that he used as an Army Ranger.  He called out Cory Gardner for being one of the most heavily funded politicians by the NRA.

   He also called for new legislation requiring political campaigns to report advances by foreign governments attempting to interfere in our elections (Duh, although Moscow Mitch will probably block even taking a vote).

   Not noted today, but he's called for an impeachment investigation to begin in the House. 

   Thanks Congressman Jason Crow!  What an improvement from Coffman.  Elections matter!

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3. This is shocking.

   Cory Gardner was seen in public and took questions?

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