American carnage and other questions

by Jeanette Strong --  I get a lot of emails from conservatives, which I appreciate. It helps keep me aware of what is going around. One email I recently received said that we are one election away from socialism and having all our guns taken away from us, or something like that. The tone was very ominous – Elect a Democrat for president and America is lost! Those were the email’s sentiments, not mine, but they perpetuate the myths spread by the right-wing. Besides the factual errors in most of these emails, the authors seem to forget that we had eight years under Democratic President Bill Clinton and eight years under Democratic President Barack Obama. During these 16 years, no one had their guns confiscated unless they were a criminal, we did not turn into Venezuela, and the economy did great. Under Clinton, we had exceptionally low unemployment and we had a budget surplus for three years – no deficits. Under Obama, we began the record economic recovery we are still enjoying, now over 10 years old, and in March 2010, we began the longest streak of consecutive positive job creation in U.S. history, which is still continuing. In spite of that, conservatives continue to spread the same old tired talking points about guns, socialism, and so on. So I have some questions I would like to ask. If anyone has answers for these, terrific. If not, maybe they will help focus people’s attention on actual facts and not made-up horror stories. Please feel free to check any of the claims made. Actual facts are a great basis for making decisions; we should all be using them. Guns I read and hear a lot of gun owners say that background checks infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners. How does a gun seller know if someone is a law-abiding citizen without a background check? We keep hearing that Democrats want to confiscate our guns. How many guns did Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama confiscate from law-abiding gun owners? In his inauguration speech on Jan. 20, 2017, President Donald Trump spoke of crime that has plagued our country. He then said, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” To give some context, on Oct. 1, 2017, 58 people were killed in a mass shooting in Las Vegas, the worst mass shooting in American history. In 2018, there were 340 mass shootings; 113 people were killed in 94 school shootings alone, the worst year ever. As of Aug. 4, 2019, there have been 251 mass shootings in America. When will this “American carnage” stop, as Trump promised it would? Economy, government, and health care If Democrats are anti-business “socialists,” why does the stock market do better historically under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents? And why are more jobs created under Democratic presidents, in general, than under Republican presidents? If government is not supposed to use “other people’s money,” meaning taxes, to pay for government services such as the military, law enforcement, border protection, and other services, whose money is government supposed to use? Republicans claimed for eight years that Obama was going to declare martial law. When did Obama do so? Another claim was that after a major disaster, FEMA would set up concentration camps or death camps, in order to exterminate political dissenters. How many FEMA death camps did Obama set up? When the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was being debated, many conservatives predicted that if it passed, the government would set up death panels to ration medical care. When did Obama set up these death panels? On June 16, in a live interview, Trump said he would produce a health care plan that would be “less expensive than Obamacare by a lot. And it’ll be much better health care.” This plan was to be revealed within two months, on August 16. Where is that plan? Republicans seem to have nothing to run on except fear, hate and recycled lies. If they had anything more, they would talk about it. In contrast, Democrats are running on job creation, gun safety (NOT confiscation), immigration reform (NOT open borders), improved health care, and other issues people care about. The pattern we have seen in the past is: Democrats get the economy going, Republicans come in and crash it, and Democrats have to come in and clean up the mess. When the next recession hits, I hope voters will remember these facts and vote accordingly. Jeanette Strong is active with the local democrats and we appreciate her submitting her opinion pieces. We also encourage submissions from the conservative viewpoint and hope to start a polite, public discourse at our own local level. Submit comments and commentary to [email protected]       Never miss a meeting or community event – keep an eye on the community calendar at https://www.thefallonpost.org/events/ If you like what we’re doing, please support our effort to provide local, independent news and contribute to The Fallon Post, your online news source for all things Fallon.