The Republican House majority got something accomplished yesterday. From the January 3 installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American :
The first thing they did was to remove the metal detectors that were installed after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The removal was one of the things Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) promised far-right Republicans in hopes of winning their votes to elect him speaker. The House has not yet voted on the rules package that ends “Democrat fines for failure of Members to comply with unscientific mask mandates and security screenings before entering the House floor,” but the metal detectors are gone, just three days before the second anniversary of the January 6 attack.The New York Times looks at those extremist members and finds that most are proponents of the Big Lie or members of the (so-called) Freedom Caucus or both. Illinois’s own Mary Miller is, of course, both.
So far, the removal of those metal detectors is the only concrete outcome of McCarthy’s attempt to woo the extremist members of his conference.
[I watched a lot of news yesterday without learning about the metal detectors. One more reason to read Letters from an American.]
comments: 2
I didn't know about high school metal detectors until that Sean Penn comedy about Fast Times in Richmond High. I didn't know about city hall metal detectors until after the late seventies shooting of Harvey Milk, the gay San Francisco supervisor. (His killer—if you're white you get away with murder—climbed in through a side window.
This week, after an elementary teacher was shot by a six year old, I learned that elementary schools have a metal detectors too, but only used for random spot checks.
I am always the last to know.
In my city of Calgary, the fourth largest in Canada, our court house got a detector when we renovated it: several chutes. We have to line up now but VIPs get their own faster chute.
City hall still has no detectors, but the elected officials are on another floor with a guard outside a stout glass electronic door.
I should add that my city is back west. Possibly the Canadian cities out east, such as across the river from Detroit, have detectors.
Politics: Toronto folks keep smuggling hand guns but the federal government won't help stop it. (Most taxes here go to the feds who are supposed to give it back with grants and such—provinces do the same with cities, who can raise money solely from property taxes) The feds would rather chase a rifle or assault gun owners up in rural Hudson's Bay than stop hand gun smuggling in a big city.
Say, thanks for how to make an apostrophe to start a word. I have your instructions on a software "sticky note" on my screen.
You may have seen in the news that Lauren Boebert has hinted about carrying a weapon onto the House floor. I guess now she can.
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