I'm running incredibly behind schedule today; hence the lack of posting.

However, I am in receipt of a postcard which I thought I should scan and share. The topic is gun violence and the Philadelphia Inquirer:

I never really made the connection before, but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

And as the picture makes clear, what we have is a deadly, concealable, easily available handgun, which was manufactured in Philadelphia by John Deringer, and eventually crossed state lines and traveled to Washington DC where it inflicted fatal gun violence on the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.

Unfortunately, I cannot read the text of the Inquirer article, but no doubt the easy availability of readily concealable handguns was the root cause of the gun violence, although I'm sure America's culture of violence also played a role.

There are other factors which might be said to have driven John Wilkes Booth to do what he did, but by today's standards, is it really fair to blame Booth? As we know today, 98% of gun violence arises out of arguments, which only escalate to fatal violence because of the presence of guns. As is typical of the gun violence today, the gun violence of 1865 also began with an argument:

Abraham Lincoln was elected president on November 6, 1860, and the following month Booth wrote a long speech that decried what he saw as Northern abolitionism and made clear his strong support of the South and the institution of slavery. On April 12, 1861, the Civil War erupted, and eventually eleven Southern states seceded from the Union. Booth's family was from Maryland, a border state which remained in the Union during the war despite a slaveholding portion of the population that favored the Confederacy. Because Maryland shared a border with Washington, D.C., Lincoln declared martial law in Maryland and ordered the imprisonment of pro-secession Maryland political leaders at Ft. McHenry to prevent the state's secession, a move that many, including Booth, viewed as unconstitutional.

Among men of Booth's cultural background, there was a mindset which resembled today's "code of the street" -- with disputes and arguments often settled at gunpoint. And by any standard, Booth clearly had an argument with Lincoln, and Booth's honor code required that Lincoln be killed!

The inescapable fact is that without the gun, Booth's argument with Lincoln would never have turned fatal!

With so many obvious similarities to the gun violence today, it's amazing that it took this country so long to realize that guns were the issue, but it really wasn't until 1968 (many assassinations later) that the country finally wised up and started passing real gun control laws.

That's why gun violence is a thing of the past, right?