This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Dec. 27, 2012 - It seems that we’re all still here, so I suppose the Mayans were wrong. Either that or the New Age wing nuts who promoted prophesies of impending doom based on ancient writings confused the end of a calendar with the end of time. Hint: Though my 2012 calendar is set to expire in a matter of days, it does not necessarily follow that the next Rose Bowl will be played in hell rather than Pasadena. It may simply portend that I need a new calendar.
Having survived our closest brush with extinction since Y2K, we now have the prospect of 2013 to deal with. With that awkward fact in mind, let’s dispense with the usual year-end retrospective and instead cast our gaze to the future.
We may have dodged a bullet on the apocalypse but we can expect no similar luck with the impending gunfight in Washington. The unspeakable atrocity at Sandy Hook grade school in Connecticut has spawned renewed calls for some sort of rational gun control from our elected representatives. Even officials who are normally firearms-friendly have conceded that enough is enough. Predictably, that sentiment is not universally popular.
After observing its traditional period of post-massacre silence, the NRA came out shooting last Friday — on the very day the world was supposed to end. At least our Second Amendment freedoms can be relied upon to survive doomsday. We might perish, but we’ll enter the afterlife well-armed.
I had anticipated a conciliatory attitude on the part of the organization — a vague, non-binding pledge to come to the table and become part of the solution. Instead, we got an unabashed diatribe contending that guns play no role in shootings at a “press conference” at which the press was not allowed to speak. Personally, I was impressed.
NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre had always struck me as a man who got picked on a lot as a kid. The tough guys might pull his pants down in front of the girls at recess, then threaten to beat him up if he told the nun. Apparently, I was mistaken.
The Wayne I saw last week looked mad as hell and not about to take it anymore. He seemed to be tired of seeing guns maligned when the true villains were mental illness and the glorification of violence in the media. If the press had be permitted to pose questions, some one might have asked if other countries don’t have crazy people watching the same movies and playing the same video games, though with a far lower incidence of mass shootings.
At any rate, Wayne’s solution was to post cops in every school in America. Given our dire circumstances, his idea is not without merit. In fact, in my last column I conceded that an armed presence on campus may be needed to stem the bloodshed.
One problem with that solution, however, is how to pay for all the additional officers it would entail. This is where Wayne and his cohorts can make a constructive contribution.
Let’s levy a surtax on the sale of every firearm in America. Additionally, let’s charge gun owners $100 a year for each weapon in their possession. In Missouri, we pay annual tax on our automobiles; let’s expand the idea to include guns. The money raised can be used to pay for the army of new cops Wayne’s plan will necessitate.
Of course, owners would have to register their guns — as we do our cars — so the government would know who to tax and how much they owe, but I’m sure patriots like Wayne would be happy to suffer the inconvenience to protect our kids.
On the same day that the Mayan Apocalypse shot craps and the NRA broke its silence, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a column by Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., on its commentary page. In it, Sen. Blunt explained his opposition to increasing taxes for the top 2 percent of wage-earners in part by noting that the $68 billion a year that the proposed increase would raise could only run the government for eight days.
Put that way, the matter seems too inconsequential to argue about. But with $68 billion you could pay the entire annual budget of the Marine Corps (29B), the Coast Guard ($8.7B), the FBI ($8.1B), the Secret Service ($1.4B) and still have enough left over to reduce the deficit by $20.8 billion.
Maybe the real objection here is that the affected parties would rather not pony up. After all, if the projected revenues are so trifling, why is the opposition so strident?
With the dreaded fiscal cliff looming, negotiations in D.C. are set to resume in a last-ditch effort to avoid catastrophe. Caught between tea-partiers on his right and the Obama White House to his left, House Speaker John Boehner looks like a man who could use a drink. On second thought, maybe the Mayans were optimists.