Making Parks and Credit Cards Safe for Democracy

The strategy seems simple: Attach an amendment about gun-use in national parks to an obviously unrelated bill about protecting credit card users from issuers’ whimsical manipulation of interest rates and you get moderate democrats to vote in favor of allowing guns in national parks. Apparently, that’s the strategy of Senator Coburn from Oklahoma in his attempt to ensure that if big banking can’t have the freedom to do whatever it wants, at least the folks who go to national parks in fear of being mugged can take the law into their own hands and defend themselves.
If this is the latest pragmatism on the part of Democrats, let’s remind them about what pragmatism doesn’t looks like: It’s not mixing apples and oranges, interest rates and self-defense, or guns and butter. If allowing guns in parks is meant to be an example of reaching across the aisle, you better holster that thought. If your strategy is to count on the House to rectify the bill because of how it voted the first time, you have no integrity. You simply reinforce the image that Republicans have created: you have no principles.
Statistically, the most dangerous weapon to a policeman is his own. If that is true of police, imagine how that fact must translate for the common citizen. We need fewer guns and fewer places to carry them, not more.
The gun folks cite the old adage, “if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” I love old adages for their “truth” which results from another old adage that states the following: if they are repeated often enough, they must be true. Robert Frost lays that truth out vividly in “Mending Wall,” one of his most celebrated poems. The adage there is, “good fences make good neighbors.” The gated community crowd in America has bought into that adage wholesale, although a false sense of security is all it buys.
The unintended consequence of guns in America is that since 9/11, 120,000+ people have been killed by guns in this country. Compare that with the 4000 + American soldiers killed in Iraq. Guns are not the solution, 2nd Amendment or not. They are the problem. Letting them into national parks simply invites greater carnage, not less.
Attaching a guns-in-parks amendment to a credit card bill of rights law is not just mixing apples and oranges; it is tossing a bad apple into the orange crate.