Vermont and Guns and My Man Bernie.

Bernie Sanders is my candidate.  According to a poll I took, I agree with him on 95% of things. However today he said something stupid, and it breaks my heart, yet I understand.  Bernie is an old white guy, a transplant to second whitest state in the country.  It is also the second least populated.  (Only Maine is whiter and only Wyoming as fewer people.)  I was born in one of these states and grew up in another, I am intimately familiar with the well-intentioned "not getting it" we can have.  I was painfully schooled by some very smart black people and now I mostly keep my mouth shut.

There's not a lot of gun control in Vermont, but there are more deaths than the Senator realizes.  In 2011, for the first time, there were more gun deaths than motor vehicle deaths.  This summer Vermont suffered a quadruple homicide, and it was not the first in the state's  history.  According to the Vermont State Police that was a mentally unbalanced service man in 1945, who apparently shot to death a family of four.  There was another one in 2001, a man attempted to sell a gun and when rebuffed shot four members of the same family.

These are great examples of why everyone, including Vermont, needs better gun control.  Alright, maybe not the 1945 murder, but interestingly, mentally unbalanced white man, just sayin'.

But my man Bernie went on about how Vermont was "different" from Chicago and Los Angeles.   There are two immediate issues here:

1. I suspect many perceived Chicago and Los Angeles as coded talk about non-white people.
2.  These mass shootings aren't happening just in urban places.  They happen everywhere.   Almost exclusively perpetrated by white men.

I love Bernie, I would like to see him get better knowledge about racial issues.  I have no doubt that he means well....