Good governance draws its power from following as much as it does from leading.

Select Your Actions from What is Right, and You Will be a Leader

   You don't gain your stature from the seat you sit in. No, to show your stature, you must stand. You must rise out of your seat and speak out. To have position and power means nothing if you are a a person who sits. Be instead, a person who stands, for anyone can act, whether they have position or power or not. It is what you do, and not who your are, that displays your greatness.
   Ir is not your seat, but the ability to be independent of it, that gives you greatness. You must decide what is right in deciding what to do. Decide what is right and then give voice to that rightness.  If you choose, instead, to only to take an action offered because of the powers you have, you may leave undone that which takes no special powers at all. The correctness of action comes not from power, but from the willingness to do what is right. Select your actions from what is right, and not the seat you sit in, and you will be a true leader, rather than just one in name only.

Study American history and you will learn that one of the reasons America went to war was that the king was restricting immigration, and that the first practitioner of amnesty was Thomas Jefferson.

The practice of amnesty -- now a dirty word -- was invented in America by one of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson.

More precious than rubies, more prized than gold
Nothing so valued as new life to behold

We get our patriots mixed up. 
We hail as patriot, the despot, and see as villain, the person who stands up to the despot.

This thought came to me as I was thinking mostly about just one person, J. Edgar Hoover. Perhaps I will study more to get a better feel for whether it really applies to him.

Parkland is Just Water Under the Bridge in Utah, in Some Ways

  Parkland was water under the bridge, then, in some ways. All the protests and rallies and efforts of the students after the shooting were in hopes of bringing change. In Utah, legislators deferred last year, preferring to not act under the duress of the moment, but rather to wait for later.

And, this year? Nothing.

Rep. Stephen Handy raised a red flags bill, but it is languishing without moving forward. It takes guns out of the hands of those who shouldn't have them. Ask yourself this: If someone jumped a gunman, and wrestled the gun from him, wouldn't that make him a hero? So, if society wrestles guns away from those who shouldn't have them, isn't that much the same thing? If society wants to be a hero, it will have to have the same courage to act as the person who jumps the gunman in a shooting. We have to have the courage to do the things that save people's lives.

Red flag laws are an attempt to do that. They take those who shouldn't have guns, and take the guns away from them.

So, was the Parkland shooting just water under the bridge? On the one year anniversary of the shooting, Rep. Handy's bill sat in the House Rules Committee, unable to get introduced on the floor. Like victims of a shooting, it lies on a floor, dying.

Now, this is not to say some gun legislation did not mark the anniversary of the Parkland Shooting. But, what was it? The House approved a measure suggesting "that the best manner to protect the vulnerable without infringing on the right of the people to bear arms is to enforce the laws already found in Utah code."

Bless those who feel this way. I see it differently, though. To me, all the shootings cry out, saying something more is needed than the status quo. The status quo is not enough. And, there are things that can be done. If there is one thing that should be clear, it is that many of the shooters in these shootings should not have been allowed guns. They should have been taken away from them.

We can do this, or we can ignore the wisdom of youth. The teenagers from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High and others around the nation beg that we act, that we do something to stop massacres such as we had at Parkland.

Taking guns from those who might abuse them is the right thing to do.