Let us concede that gun rights advocates have won the argument: guns don’t kill people, people do.

However, there is a certain class of people that merit a greater share of the blame for the mass casualty events our communities have endured. For lack of a more accurate term let’s call them, “gun owners”. As well, we must acknowledge that gun owners are largely responsible (by commission and omission) for the constant blood letting since Sandy Hook (as of 8 May 2013 3,947 have perished since the 14 Dec. 2012 Newtown, Conn. massacre). Daily Kos writer, David Waldman has been tracking accidental firearm casualties since Sandy Hook—a log that reads like an almanac of nightmarish negligence.

In spite of the evidence conveying the hazard of firearms ownership, it’s still useless to debate gun control. At best, it has resulted in a stalemate over background checks. Even gun control proponents admit this measure of accountability would not have stopped someone like Adam Lanza from carrying out the slaughter at Sandy Hook. A background check would not have prevented five-year-old Kristian Sparks from the unintentional slaying of his two-year-old sister, Caroline. Again, guns don’t kill people; but it so happens that the relatives of gun owners do.

Since we are fully convinced of the human culpability when a firearm tragedy strikes, it stands to reason that this is where the effort to curb gun violence should focus. Rather than trying to contain or limit weaponry, our attention should fix upon the gun owning community. Did you know that seventy nine per cent of the massacres that have taken place in the U.S. over the last 33 years were committed by someone who had legal access to the firearm used in the crime? So, why not increase gun owner accountability going forward—especially to other gun owners?

As for the constitutionality of this proposal, here is where gun owner accountability intersects with the Second Amendment—specifically, the often ignored “well-regulated militia” phrase. As has been the case in a number of mass shooting tragedies, the perpetrator profiles as a socially isolated, or outcast, male. Putting the “well-regulated militia” phrase to work would mean requiring all registered gun owners to meet with each other periodically (quarterly, semi-annually—it would be left to legislators to hammer out) to discuss gun safety, maintenance and the function of the gun-owning community within this nation.

The conversation could go in any number of directions. The crucial point of this process would be to help gun owners acknowledge their right to bear arms is not an open-ended freedom. Its parameters involve not just individual liberty, but also a concern for public safety, protecting children, and the effort to keep one another accountable about their firearms-related goals. (Everyone should have goals, no?)

Given a proposal such as this, one could imagine squeals of protest coming from every quarter of the firearms community—consumers, retailers, manufacturers and lobbyists. What is the alternative to shifting the debate? Wait for another massacre and then watch the predictable demand for a limit on weapons, or even a call for confiscations?

Gun owners could do worse than to step up to hold one another accountable. At any given day there’s a James Holmes or Jared Loughner waiting to snap, a stranded soul who could use a reality check of sorts—an intervention should it be needed. If the gun owning community believed in the preservation of the Second Amendment, shouldn’t it do its part to protect this freedom from abuse?

The other consequence of mandating a periodical gun owner meet would be to help them grasp that their right to bear arms can be just as vigorously defended by cooperating with other voters in a political action rather than by clutching a rifle. There is no question how much the fear of tyranny prevails among many gun enthusiasts. Who can be sure, however, if they have exhausted the opportunities that political activism offers? At the very least it requires a willingness to build trust with other citizens that can lead to a governing consensus. How else should a republic like ours survive without its citizens continually at work, developing the contours of consent?

If it was true about Congress's failure to avoid sequester budget cuts, it's especially true about the U.S. Senate's epic miss on the background check amendment to the gun control bill last week.

Again, voters got the septic end of the stick. And who got to hold the clean end? That small, select group of campaign finance contributors--whose 'generosity' wields far greater force than 86% of Americans who support background checks.

What's more stunning than that injustice? Voters (you and I and everyone else we know) have no one to blame but themselves.

How could that be?

By and large, voters are not working together to draft candidates to run for public office. So, when a candidate for particular office emerges, he or she needs to reach the broadest audience of voters to win an election. That calls for mass communications--which requires immense financing. This is where the small, elite campaign finance community has emerged. Someone has to pay for those television and radio ads.

Most people have yet to acknowledge that between voters and wealthy campaign contributors lies a crucial fault line. The Senate's botching the background check amendment illustrates this influence gap. Very few elected officials are willing to talk about this--it would risk burning their own meal ticket.

Voters have surrendered their perogative as the majority interest in this nation; one that should be setting the terms over how much money a candidate can accept as a campaign contribution--that the amount should not wield a corrupting influence.

It goes without saying that very few voters would willingly elect a pederast or convicted felon to public office. The scruple is clearly defined. And though there is a general consensus about how much the current campaign finance system corrupts public policy, acknowledging this agreement is not enough.

It takes but a small, meaningful commitment by a pluralilty of voters to convey to all candidates for public office, challengers and incumbents alike: you're not a candidate worth our consideration if you accept any amount greater than $250 per campaign contribution.

If, ever, that day arrives, you'll observe a people taking responsibility for the republic and its destiny by which they live.

Any sane person would have difficulty taking seriously what the National Rifle Association has to say about public safety and gun owner responsibility. Two months after the massacre of six school teachers and 20 children in Newtown, Conn., all the firearms trade group can offer are 'solutions' that ultimately fatten the bottom line for the companies they represent.

Consider the windfall of increased sales the industry enjoys each time one of our communities suffers yet another slaughter of innocent citizens. The spike in sales owes to the paranoia (no doubt flamed by right-wing talk radio) of ignorant people convinced that the government is just days away from outlawing guns.

Fat chance, as the NRA has Sisyphean task. The scope and depth of NRA's influence over elections is unquestioned--a force that it wields in Congress in the name of 'individual freedom'. The freedom as an individual to avoid being shot, be damned.

The time is long past that we begin to acknowledge the vicious cycle of violence that benefits the NRA's business model. More guns in the hands of more people increases the frequency of bloodshed, whether or not the shooters possessed the firearms legally. A comparative look at gun fatalities between the U.S. and other industrialized nations, illustrates the peril of easy access to firearms.

It's a sweet spot the firearms industry occupies: given relaxed gun laws in a nation saturated with its product, such conditions improve the chances that someone mentally unfit (Newtown, Conn.; Aurora, Colo.; Oakpark, Wisc.; Tucson, Ariz.; Virginia Tech) will get his hands on a rifle or pistol. A meaningful segment of the population already worked up by talk radio, will do the NRA's bidding and move gun manufactuers further into the black--after victims of firearms violence have hemorrhaged red.

Perhaps it will take additional Sandyhook massacres before national consensus begins to recognize a callous, blood-shedding industry in operation. How many more lives must be snatched before voters see blood money in the hands of candidates for public office taking campaign dollars from the NRA?

Special Snowflake Soledad O'Brien, Wasserman Schultz beg for viewers; Twitter users would rather have root canal

Citizens From 18 States Ask Obama to Secede From the Union
(They're asking politely--why can't we oblidge them?)

Democrat-Boycotting Libertarian Eric Dondero on Whether He Would Let a Democrat Drown

To call those who are rubbed raw about President Obama's reelection victory, maladjusted is a polite characterization of their behavior.

Somehow they pretend that the Republicans hadn't tried to outright disenfranchise voters and buy the election to win.

They've been spared a dishonest victory. Who takes sincere pleasure in winning by cheating? Doesn't winning at any cost illustrate the saddest, most pathetic instincts there are in human behavior?

And the loss is self-inflicted.

Already conversations are underway about presidential race for year 2016. More often than not, voters who complain and write off the political process will not engage with other voters in the effort required to draft a candidate to run for office.

Instead, most voters will wait around over the next four years, looking in from the outside as party leaders, loaded campaign contributors and political operatives decide what candidates will be "viable"--worthy of their support, primarily; then there is that secondary consideration--will voters support them?

For once can't we, the people, do the foot work for a presidential candidate that makes the exploratory committee and party machinery obsolete? Voters have the numbers to make this a reality; lacking only the coordination and political will.

How goes the cliche? If you don't vote you have no right to complain. And complaining never drew any voter closer to the decision making process that nominates and ultimately elects a candidate president.

Leave it to quick thinking children who can take advantage of a chaotic situation--when adults caring for them aren't paying attention--to achieve aims not in the interest of the whole family. The fallacious quality of Republican political discourse over the last several years invites a comparison to such juveniles. The hazard of such behavior is that truth and accountability endure such erosion so as to undermine a citizen's trust in elected officials, as well as the institutions they are selected to manage.

Take the case of Gov. Mitt Romney's 2012 run for president. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi provides a summary of Romney's political campaign career to date. Capturing the kaleidoscopic quality of his campaign's talking points, or rather, allegations, Taibbi dispenses with the niceties offered by most journalists covering (for) the Romney-Ryan campaign.

[I]ndependent voters are not reading those dense commentaries [about Romney's tax plan and jobs proposal], and instead are responding more to the general vibe surrounding Romney's campaign, which is clearly benefiting from the fact that he's being so aggressive that the whole world is left scrambling to react to his bullshit.

If anyone else is as mystified about the quality and direction Republican political discourse has taken, look no further than to political master operator Karl Rove as the source of a novel messeging paradigm. As an unnamed Bush administration official Ron Suskind's New York Times Magazine piece published in the fall of 2004, Rove sets the journalist straight about the new prevailing political reality. In Suskind's own words:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality...." "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

"Creating our own reality" works well for children's play. However, in the world of adult responsibility with life-or-death consequences, this way of thinking dispenses with the burden of accountability—a crucial element to any functioning democracy.

In the case of the Romney campaign, nothing says, "We create our own reality" like switching your campaign platform or simply telling lies about your opponent—and doing either one with a chronic frequency. It illustrates to voters and everyone else concerned that you have little interest in accountability. You play by a separate set of rules than the ones everyone else must obey.

There wouldn't be much else to say about the moral hazard that "making it up as you go along" poses to our republic—except how troubling it is to watch a solid 25 per cent or more of voters willing to overlook the prominant role "creat[ing] our own reality" has taken in Republican political discourse.

President Obama arguably scored only one point in the first debate with Republican opponent, Mitt Romney. It was getting the former Massachusetts governor to admit that his team's proposed Medicare reform amounts to providing a $6000 annual voucher for the under-55 crowd to buy private insurance.

Given how high health insurance rates leap from year to year, the vouchercare scheme merits that band-aid-slapped-on-a-hemorrhaging-wound kind of metaphor.

What such policy debates always overlook is the assumption that health care should be dispensed primarily as a commodity rather than as a necessity.

Even President Obama affirmed that the conversation would steer clear of questioning healthcare's profit-driven structure. Marking a crucial difference between Medicare and the health insurance industry, the president acknowledged that "private insurers have to make a profit. Nothing wrong with that; that’s what they do."

Certainly, nothing wrong with that--unless one considers the industry's practice of denying coverage to patients with "pre-existing" conditions; or worse, refusing to pay for life-saving treatments.

"All the incentives are toward less medical care, because--the less care they give them, the more money they make." So said White House counsel John Erlichman to President Richard Nixon back on February 17, 1971, about the beauty of Kaiser Permanente's HMO model. Consider it as a pivotal moment in the history of health care in the U.S.

The Nixon administration had looked to the HMO as means of containing inflating cost of medical care, without ever questioning whether or not it should be embedded within a transaction for profit.

This is the starting point for any serious conversation about health care affordability that can produce action-worthy conclusions.

A sincere debate begins by posing the following question: If private industry's primary aim is profit making, how will it muster the self-restraint needed to deliver health care at an affordable cost?

The most fitting tribute I could muster on the recent news that Andy Williams has joined Henry and Johnny in crooner heaven, was to post my favorite cover of "Moon River".

On a couple of levels it's been fun watching the NFL replacement referee disaster unfold. The league is trying to stick it to the unionized professionals while sending in what appear as rank amateurs to officiate regular season games.

It also works as an illustration of why letting the market do its thing (a.k.a. laissez-faire) is a terrible way to run an economy. Business and commerce need compentent referees to achieve a fair, accountable outcome from trade. Letting the players go at it without oversight falls far short of assuring orderly transactions. Weak, ineffective regulation is an invitation to mishap or mayhem--preventing a just and fair resolution. Go ask the Greenbay Packers' fans.

James Madison said it far more eloquently in Federalist #51: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." Let's fit that statement for a capitalist context: "If market players participated fairly, no regulation would be required." The 2008 financial crisis proved this wasn't the case. Why can't libertarians grasp this?