It’s time for personal responsibility

There’s a ton of rhetoric at the moment calling for sweeping gun ban / legislation. Let me ask this question to everyone here calling for the gun ban: With more and more US cities on the brink of bankruptcy (1), emergency response services being cut (2), police telling citizens to arm themselves as they lack the manpower to provide timely response (3), the Supreme Court ruling that the 2nd Amendment is a constitutional right (4, 5, 6) AND that the police have NO OBLIGATION to protect you (7), what will you do when you, your spouse or your children are confronted with someone who has no moral values and has absolutely no value for your lives? Will you call 9-1-1 and cower in the corner waiting for the police response that won’t make it there in time to save you? Or will you stand up and defend you and you loved ones?

Let’s get real here people; we have a much, much bigger problem than the gun itself. We have a run-away problem with the lack of self-responsibility, over prescribed medication and the belief that the government is supposed to provide everything for us. Sadly, there is evil in this world we live in and it isn’t going away anytime soon. Criminals don’t follow the rule of law and no matter how many new laws that are put on the books; there will always be people who break them much to the detriment of society. The sooner people take off the rose colored glasses and realize WE (ones self) are the only ones responsible for our actions and safety, the better the chance we have to make real changes.

(1) www.governing.com...
(2) www.ncdp.mailman.columbia.edu...
(3) losangeles.cbslocal.com... izing/
(4) www.lawnix.com...
(5) en.wikipedia.org...
(6) www.state.il.us...
(7) en.wikipedia.org...

Its not just personal responcibility that's needed. We need to wake up and realize that we are destroying our own nature. We aren't made to just punch a clock all our lives in concrete jungles.

We need better rites of passage than getting a drivers licence and getting wasted on one's 21st birthday. We need to learn to use entheogens properly in conjunction with meaningful rites of passage and as a treatment for mental illness, and we need to learn how to make a mythos more meaningful than the comics and sci-fi mythos.

No, it's the government's responsibility to take responsibility for me.

I know my 2nd link is written with more emphasis on "National Disaster Preparedness" but read what it actually says:

State and local public health agencies across the country have experienced substantial budget cuts over the past several years. In recent reports from the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), over half of the country’s local health departments have experienced cutbacks in the past three years. In 2008, NACCHO reported that local health departments had lost 7,000 jobs through budget-related cuts, layoffs, position eliminations, and attrition. When combined with earlier NACCHO findings, this workforce loss results in a cumulative 23,000 jobs lost from 2008-2009, approximately 15 percent of the entire local health department workforce in the country. In 2009, an additional 25,000 local health department employees were affected by cuts in working hours or mandatory furloughs resulting from budget cuts. The Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) recently noted three public health workforce issues:

1. The US has an estimated 50,000 fewer public health workers than it did 20 years ago. As of 2008, twenty percent of the average state health agency’s workforce will be eligible to retire within three years, and by 2012, over 50 percent of some state health agency workforces will be eligible to retire.

2. The average age of new hires in state health agencies is 40.4

3. Four out of five (80%) current public health workers have not had formal training for their specific job functions.

Chew on that bold text for a minute....