I’ve never killed a man, but I’ve read many an obituary with a great deal of satisfaction. –Mark Twain

That quote from Missouri’s favorite son comes to mind every time I hear the name Rex Sinquefield. I want to outlive that sumbitch just so I can wear a red dress on the day of his funeral, and frame that obituary and hang it in my parlor.

He’s a libertarian loon who won’t be happy so long as there is a working person anywhere in the state who belongs to a union, earns a living wage or enjoys the benefits of taxpayer funded services. He wants all the money in the pockets of people like him.

The only “people like him” I can think of are the Koch brothers.

That’s actually pretty apt…Rex Sinquefield is the Koch brothers writ small. He isn’t trying to destroy the entire country – they have that covered – he is just concentrating on trying to destroy Missouri – or the liberal cities therein, anyway.

Instead of just paying his financial advisors the modest fees they earn sheltering the money of rich people, Sinquefield pours million of dollars into trying to change the tax code so more of the burden of providing the minimal public services he envisions for Missouri would be borne by those at the bottom of the economic ladder.

One of his pet issues is eliminating the state income tax and replacing it with a sales tax – the most regressive tax of all. Sales taxes hit those at the bottom hardest because they spend every dollar they earn.

So far he has failed in that quest, so this fall he has turned his sights on the two largest metropolitan areas in the state. He wants to kill St. Louis and Kansas City by taking away their operating capital.

Missouri is unique in that it has two major metropolitan areas with populations exceeding a million souls, and both of them are on the border with other states and the residents live and work across state lines.

To make the tax burden fair, if you live in Kansas City, Missouri but work in one of the other municipalities – or across the state line – in the metro area, your employer collects a 1% earnings tax on your wages or salary. This funds services like fire and police protection, street maintenance, bus service, parks and golf courses, etc.

Same deal applies if you live in one of the other municipalities or across the state line but work in Kansas City.

That is how our cities have worked it out to provide services and share the burden equitably.

A lawyer who lives in Overland Park, Kansas and works for a firm  in downtown Kansas City, Missouri pays that 1% earnings tax, as well he should, because he is benefiting from the services this city provides. Our police and fire departments protect his property. Our water services department supplies his office with clean potable water and sewer services. Our street maintenance crews assure that he has a safe commute that doesn’t shred the undercarriage of his Lexus. If he is in an accident or suddenly falls ill while he is on our side of the state line he will be tended to by an ambulance crew that is a part of our fire department and taken to a hospital that receives some of their funding from the public purse. If he eats in a restaurant over here, he has the security of knowing that the health department has inspected the kitchen and certified the food handlers. If he enjoys a cocktail after work, the bartender has been cleared by the regulated industries division to serve alcohol. If he has one too many and takes a taxi home, the cabbie is licensed, the meter is verified and the vehicle has been inspected for safety.

You can think of our city government like an iPhone – whatever comes up, we’ve got an app for that.

The only thing I can figure is that these two big, blue, liberal cities that anchor the east and west edges of the state and do things the opposite of how he would flies in the face of his libertarian orthodoxy and must be destroyed.

So he marshalled his army of out-of-state frauds to collect signatures on petitions and get the innocuous sounding “Let Voters Decide” measure on the ballot in November.

But it only sounds innocuous.

What it does is it gives the people in every wide spot in the blacktop a vote in how we fund our emergency services and operating budgets in Kansas City and St. Louis, even if they never have and never will set foot in the city limits of either city.

Cities are not the places to showcase rugged individualism. Cities require cooperation and comity and Prop. A runs counter to that reality. It is a craven attempt to capitalize on anti-tax, anti-government hysteria and destroy the economic underpinnings of the two largest cities in the state, apparently as punishment for being exemplars of what good government can deliver to the citizenry and flouting Sinquefield’s libertarian idiocy in the process.  

Sometimes it feels like I grew up with a gun in my hand…probably because I did. Everyone I knew did. Going out in the woods? Wear sturdy boots and take the .410 snake charmer because there are copperheads and timber rattlers out there, just leave the black snakes alone – or if you get a chance catch one and bring it back to the barn – because they kill rats. Walking fence? Take the .22 – you might get a chance to shoot a rabbit or two for supper. Going to the barn? Take the .22 and see if you can get a shot at that damned rat since the black snakes we catch and turn loose in the barn make a beeline for the sileage pit as soon as they’re out of the gunny sack.

I am the resident gun nut around here, which we define as someone who owns way more guns than they need but not nearly as many as they want. That’s me. I have guns I talk about like they are my children and I give them names. When I was growing up, guns were part of our lives and we used them judiciously. No one hunted for sport. Everyone ate what they hunted, and I knew people who ate because they hunted. I knew people who filled their freezers with rabbit and quail and pheasant, but sat out deer season; but I also knew people who planned their entire year around deer season and never hunted birds or small game. No one threatened anyone else with them. They were respected for what they were – they were made to kill. Gun control may have meant that you could hit what you were shooting at, but it was also meant you could control your temper. It was simply understood in that culture that you just didn’t shoot at people. Period.

Then I grew up, and I took a career path that put that reality up against the one filled with the carnage that I dealt with every day when I put on my uniform and went to work saving the lives of people who, for the most part, ended up crossing paths with me because they were dumbasses, or at least lacked the good judgment to keep themselves out of danger. It really is that simple. When it comes to gunshot wounds, not that many are random, and the number of innocent victims is dwarfed by the number of people engaging in – ahem – high risk activity who end up catching a bullet.

Let me tell you a story…This happened at Research Medical Center in Kansas City. RMC is an inner-city hospital with a trauma center in the southeast area of Kansas City. This happened in the summer of 2004. Dude gets shot in the ass and in the bottom of the foot. He drives himself to the hospital, and damned near knocks the glass doors to the ambulance bay off the tracks hurtling his car toward the ER. He leaves his shotgun in the front seat, gets out of the car dripping blood, and hobbles to the trauma bay. He lays down on the gurney, face down, and waits for us to swing into action. When we cut the clothes off him little bitty ziploc baggies of rock cocaine, foils of tar heroin and small bags of sticky green pot flew all over the room. I am the person from the lab, I have to help the cops catalog this stuff for the crime lab. I turn around and look at the cop who is responding to this incident and say “I’m not touching that shit.” I have his clothes to bag up for the crime lab, but first I check for contents,  and I find something in his back pocket. There are seven hundred dollar bills, folded over and covered in blood. A bullet hole right through the center. The cop who was cataloging the dope he had just crawled around the room on his hands and knees looking for looked at me and, with a mischevious grin said “I’m not touching that shit.”

Later someone asked him how he knew where to go? He responded that he had been brought to that room the other two times he had been shot.

The thing is – I have a thousand stories like that. For every hunting accident I saw, there were a hundred cases of using a firearm to settle a grudge or an argument or a twenty dollar drug debt.

The smell of a gunshot trauma was the first thing that hit me when I was a young medic. It is, for want of a better word, distinctive. It is a co-mingling of olfactory offenses. The blood and the urine and the emesis and the bowel content…and the lingering aroma of the black powder. The sickening sweetness of the cologne of a young man, mingles with his blood and body fluids, to generate a sickening hybrid of a smell; and it is the only thing emanating from his lifeless body. His eyes are usually not closed, his tongue is purple and protruded. The sponges and bloody sheets and clothes litter the floor of the trauma bay, waiting for collection by the forensics person who will be in charge of the chain of custody; and the victim lies there, waiting for the medical examiner, or if we need the room – and we always need the room – security to come take the body to the cooler.

When my realities collided, the tricorn hat got knocked off the Second Amendment, and I started putting firearms in their proper context.

Guns changed society in immeasurable ways. Guns changed geopolitics when a single shot from a handgun felled Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the end result was a world war.

A mail-order deer rifle killed an American president and yet another handgun killed that President’s brother just months before he would have been elected President himself.

When I say that guns changed everything, I am not exagerating. They are the biggest god-damned deal mankind ever unleashed upon ourselves.

If you don’t think about the fact that you have in your hands an instrument that has the raw, unbridled power to change the course of history in the blink of an eye every time you touch one…you should not have access to a gun.

There is no question that we have a serious problem in this nation with gun crimes.

The question is…what the fuck do we do about it? We live in a somewhat free country, and the fact that ordinary citizens have that power I just waxed poetic about enshrined in the Constitution is ostensibly a pillar of our freedom – but most of the folks packin’ today I quite frankly can’t imagine as patriots and freedom fighters, so can we take the tri-cornered hat off the second amendment?

We all need a gut-check.

We need to start by fully enforcing the laws on the books, but we can do something more, and we ought to, even though it will be politically volatile and make the right wing freak out and buy even more guns and ammo in their never-ending preparation for the always-coming (when there is a Democrat in the White House) revolution.

We need to bring a basic framework of laws into standard compliance across all 50 states, with common sense adaptations. States need to share information. Thorough background checks for all firearms purchases should be mandatory, including psychiatric/psychological occurrences. I would go so far as to mandate that private sales, those currently unregulated, would have to take place through the county sheriffs office; and any unregistered sale proven in a court of law carry a stiff penalty, with mandatory prison time and the loss of the right to bear arms after a conviction.

I have been saying this for years: All the states need to have the same basic framework of gun laws because there are a few “donor states” with lax laws that flood the streets with cheap guns and that is why we have an epidemic of gun crimes clogging our ERs and our court dockets.

Now I am not alone in saying it. A coalition of fifty mayors – including Mark Funkhouser, the Mayor of Kansas City and someone who I have given no small amount of grief lately – has released a landmark study [.pdf] that analyzed date from the ATF that basically boils down to “Well, hell, we could have just listened to Tammy and saved a shitload of money.” I was right. Just ten states supply almost half of the guns out there used in street crimes, with Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky leading the pack.

We can’t make guns go away. And I don’t want them to. But we can – and should – make new ones harder to get, and we could control the ones that are out there by actually enforcing the laws that are on the books right now and getting serious about bringing the ones that are out there currently untraceable into the system one-by-one. It ain’t ideal, but it’s a start – until smarter people than me can get serious about this. Which will require standing up to the NRA and telling them to stop whining like whipped pups that the Second Amendment is under assault because the majority of people – who are not NRA members – want gun owners to have some rules they have to follow or they lose their right to carry weapons that were designed with one purpose – killing – in mind.

A good place to start would be with passing a basic federal gun control law that established purchase limits (who the hell needs 25 handguns at once that isn’t a licensed dealer? I’ll tell you who…an unlicensed dealer.) But the odds of something common sense like that happening are nil in this political climate, with teabillies in high dudgeon and an islamofascistcommunistsocialistnazipaganmooslimkenyanusurper in the White House.

So hold the states hostage and point their own guns at them to do so. If they take in more money than they send to Washington, limit the amount of money that flows back to them to dollar-for-dollar until they toughen up their gun laws at the state level. That ought to get the attention of states like Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky in a right-quick hurry.

I spent a lot of time over the course of my career thinking about infrastructure, because I was in a line of work that prepared to respond to mass casualty events. After we were attacked, we stepped it up and added drills that were meant to prepare us to mount a response to a catastrophic event on the scale of first the Oklahoma City bombing and then 9/11.

But primarily, we prepared for civil eventualities. Storms and massive pileups on the interstate, mostly; and every fall we drilled for a flu/respiratory infection epidemic.

Then there were the ones that made me have nightmares later. They involved infrastructure disasters. Bridges and tunnels and pipelines exploding into gigantic fireballs. And the thing that bothered me the most about those drills were the fact that I knew they were 1) lkely and 2) wholly preventable.

Every year when the American Society of Civil Engineers came out with their Infrastructure Report Card, hard copies would be printed out and put in the mailbox of every department head and everyone who had anything to do with trauma and mass casualty response. The “top three” infrastructure concerns for our area were highlighted, and a memo would be attached telling us when the staff meeting in which we would plan our drill was scheduled. We worked off the report card for purpose of relevance.

When I lived on the west coast, it was just assumed in those meetings that if we had a major quake, there would be many, many, many gas fires because there were thousands of miles of aging pipeline and the likelihood was that a major quake could affect hundreds of them. There would be ruptures, fires and explosions. When we bought a house in Oregon, we bought one that was off the gas grid in a part of town where gas wasn’t piped into the older, solidly-constructed houses that were heated by pellet stoves, or had propane tanks in the back yard. That was a consideration when we bought. (Ask my husband – I totally take the fun out of house hunting.)  

At a Christmas Eve gathering in 2008, a natural gas explosion in a suburban Sacramento neighborhood killed a 72-year-old man and injured his daughter and granddaughter. Investigators determined that Pacific Gas and Electric was to blame for a leak, but federal and state regulators never cited the utility for safety violations.

It was one example of what many experts and studies say is weak oversight of gas pipelines in the United States, a problem that has contributed to hundreds of pipeline episodes that have killed 60 people and injured 230 others in the last five years. Those figures do not include the final toll of the explosion of another Pacific Gas and Electric pipeline this month in San Bruno, Calif., that left seven people dead and more than 50 injured.

Though the cause of that explosion was still under investigation, it was the latest event to raise concerns among safety experts. Several independent government reviews, going back several years, have found systemic problems with the way the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the federal agency in charge of pipeline oversight, enforces safety rules.

In 2004, for example, the General Accounting Office documented how pipeline safety enforcement “needs further strengthening.” It noted that average fines of less than $30,000 offered little deterrence and that the agency had trouble collecting the fines.

A 2008 Congressional Research Service report said that the enforcement strategy of federal agencies of the nation’s pipelines was an “ongoing concern.”

“I believe there is a lack of a strong safety culture in the natural gas industry,” said Jim Hall, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board from 1994 to 2001 and an experienced pipeline investigator. “When you have a lack of enforcement activity, you end up with a tragedy.”

Lack of enforcement activity?

That’s something of an understatement. And by “something of an understatement” I mean that’s the understatement of the fucking year because enforcement activity was all but non-existent during the Bush years. An investigation by the New York Times found that a third of the cases opened in the last eight years are still open, and more than a few that were opened in the early nineties are still open and unresolved. The oversight agency is such a shambles it has lost track of what has been resolved, what is still pending, what fines have been paid, what fines are outstanding for so long the offenders would be arrested for contempt if the cases were civil and against an individual.

And still the agency defends it’s work while lobbyists for industry trade groups insist that pipelines are safer than the rocking chair on your grandmothers front porch; and utility companies always blame incidents on other actors when something goes wrong, even thought when incidents happen and the feds investigate, it’s almost always the utility that is at fault.

I have said for years – ever since the first time I sat in one of those mass casualty drill planning sessions in an earthquake zone – that a single federal agency needs to directly oversee all energy pipelines, and in theory that is the case. But in practice, state agencies oversee most of the miles of pipelines in this country, and the feds oversee those that cross state lines.

The state agencies operate with federal dollars, the inspectors are trained by the feds, and certification to inspect comes from the feds. All rules stem from federal guidelines.

But…

The actual amount of actual oversight that actually gets done varies wildly from state to state.

Now, throw in all the safety waivers that have been issued…What’s that you say? You don’t believe you read that right? Oh, yes, you did. There really is such a thing as a safety waiver, issued by the federal pipeline agency, that allows companies to ignore certain safety regulations and standards in the construction of pipelines that carry volatile hydrocarbons all over the country and into our homes. “That is one of the areas where we have a lot of concern, especially the drain on the agency with the volume of requests for exemptions,” said Carl Weimer, head of the Pipeline Safety Trust, a nonprofit, federally-funded watchdog organization that was established in response to a fatal blast in Bellingham, Wash in 1999. He believes that companies seeking exceptions should have to pay fees that would cover the cost of handling the requests.  

Meanwhile, the pipeline agency has started acting like it takes it’s oversight rule seriously under this administration. They are changing the system by which waivers are issued, and they are reviewing waivers that were issued before the adults came to town with an eye to toughening up some of the ones that have already been issued and putting a five-year limit on all exceptions granted, rather than keeping them in place indefinitely when that is what the company wanted.

This is some of that change I can believe in. It isn’t sexy or glamorous or flashy, so it doesn’t get the attention of the press. It’s just basic nuts-and-bolts good government. It’s the sort of thing that affects every single one of us in small, subtle ways that we never, ever think about unless something blows up and catches our attention for a minute. It’s one of those things where you measure success by how much they are taken for granted by the population at large.