Sanders might not be the guy, but he's definitely part of the right party

“You know, I, for the love of me, I cannot understand why people who have billions of dollars are compulsively driven for more and how many people have got to die because they don’t go to a doctor, because you want to avoid paying your taxes?”
-- BERNIE SANDERS

I don't think Bernie Sanders is going to be elected president. In fact, I don't even think he'll be the Democratic nominee.

I would be willing to bet he isn't even that serious about being elected. Sanders will celebrate his 75th birthday two months before the election, which would make him five years older than anyone else ever elected before.

The only previous president who was even 70 on Inauguration Day -- William Henry Harrison -- got sick while making his inaugural address and died a month later. Ronald Reagan celebrated his 70th birth two weeks after taking office, but he was showing clear signs of a mental decline by early in his second term.

Wouldn't it be nice to be treated like intelligent voters again?

If you're one of those Americans who love to watch reality shows, you're in for a treat.

If, on the other hand, you would like to see the next president selected by intelligent voters on the basis of character and issues, you're probably out of luck.

Sanders and Clinton

We are still more than a year out from the 2016 election, but if you have been following what passes for news on cable networks and the Internet, you might think the fortunes of various candidates were rising and falling every day.

At one point several weeks ago, the media breathlessly reported that Hillary Clinton's support among Democratic women had fallen from 77 percent to 42 percent.

Of course we're just talking about preference polls, and even there, polls within the Democratic Party. Should Secretary Clinton win the nomination, as still seems likely, her support will certain return and probably even go higher.

People can own guns, but background checks are a true necessity

What's the most important of the Ten Commandments?

It may sound like a silly question, but it really isn't. If you look at the commandments, everything stems from the first one.

"Thou shalt have no other gods before me."

Honor your parents? Sure. Rest on the Sabbath? Good idea.

But the reason we listen to those and the others is that right at the beginning, God lets us know that he's in charge.

That's the way it usually works with a list. If your wife gives you a list of tasks to perform, the stuff at the top usually matters more than the stuff at the bottom.

When lists aren't written that way, it mostly seems to be done for dramatic reasons, to build suspense. If someone wins the jackpot on a TV game show, it may start with a year's supply of Turtle Wax and end with a new car or a trip around the world.

It's rarely the other way around.

Pretty difficult to justify unrestricted gun rights in modern-day America

Note: This column appeared in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin nearly 19 years ago, but the sentiments in it are as fresh as today for me.

A father is dead.

I never met Mario Navidad, the young LAPD officer who was killed in the line of duty just before Christmas.

I never knew he existed until I heard he was dead, but I know there are a lot out there like him.

We call them the Thin Blue Line, the only thing standing between us and anarchy, and I think there's a lot of truth to that.

We live in dangerous, desperate times. We live in an era when children carry guns and aren't afraid to use them, an era when it has never been more dangerous to be a cop.

Officer Navidad was little more than a kid himself. He was 27 when he died, a veteran of less than two years on the force. He had a wife and two young children.

He lived in Chino.

For a lot of young guys these days, joining the force is upward mobility. It's a way out of poverty. It's a way to buy a house and move your family to a safer neighborhood, to give your own children a better childhood than you had.

But escape comes at such a high price.

Every time you go to work, you've got to worry that somewhere out there is an idiot with a gun who'd think nothing of ending your life.

The criminal who killed Officer Navidad was 17 years old. He had stolen beer from a convenience store, two six packs. Hardly a major crime.

When he saw the police car, he didn't even try to escape. He shifted the beer to one hand, reached into his pocket for a semiautomatic pistol and started firing.

Navidad was hit six times. His partner returned fire, killing the assailant. Navidad died on a hospital operating table later the same night, outliving his killer by only a short time.

His children -- a 4-year-old boy and a 9-month-old girl -- will grow up without a father, all because their dad had the misfortune of running into someone who never knew what it meant to be a man.

I'm sure there are those among you who will wonder what societal pressures led a 17-year-old boy to open fire without warning at two police officers.

I've got to tell you, I don't much care why he did it.

I just want it to stop.

My grandfather was chief of police in a small Ohio town during World War II. He was one of the lucky ones. Except for a modicum of sleaze and sin in the railroad district, Crestline was a pretty quiet place.

He didn't get killed. I'm not sure if anyone ever even shot at him. He died in his bed at 89.

Yes, he was one of the lucky ones. He saw his children and his grandchildren grow to adulthood, and he even met a couple of great-grandchildren.

Some cops die of old age, but far too many die young. Far too many children of police officers out there are growing up without knowing their fathers.

We owe a lot to the Mario Navidads among us. If you think things are bad now, if you think crime is almost out of control, just imagine what sort of society we'd have if no one was willing to take the risks police officers take every day.

I don't know how to solve this problem. I'd like to meet someone who does. It's obvious that poverty, lack of education and a host of other issues contribute to it.

I do know one thing.

It's far too easy to get guns, waiting period or no waiting period.

Gun advocates say only outlaws will have guns if guns are outlawed. I don't care about that. I want us to keep guns away from sick, demented children.

Before you pick up your phone to tell me why private citizens should have the right to brandish semiautomatic weapons, take a second and think about this.

Think about Mario Navidad.

And while you're at it, think about two fatherless children.

'Zero tolerance' only keeps good people from doing their jobs

Zero tolerance.

It's getting so you have to be pretty old to remember a time in this country when there were rules and the people running things had the discretion of how to enforce them.

I don't remember exactly when the concept of zero tolerance got started, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if there wasn't a tie-in with attorneys being allowed to advertise their services.

That happened in 1977. And once they were allowed to run ads on radio and television and start putting huge billboards along the highways, Americans became the most litigious people in the world.

All of a sudden, lawyers were telling people that if anything bad happened to them, they could sue someone and make lots and lots of money.

So in addition to having to make good decisions and do the right thing, people had to be aware that they could be sued and have to defend their actions in court.

What made perfect sense at the time might not sound as good when explained to a jury of 12 people hearing it for the first time. So too many organizations decided to take away any discretion when it came to interpreting and enforcing the rules.

There were pretty much always rules against bringing weapons to school, but zero tolerance defined things as weapons that were anything but weapons. Guns that fired nothing more lethal than water -- squirt guns -- could be banned for their potential to disrupt classes, but plastic toy guns were nothing more than, well, toys.

As for discretion?

Forget it.

A classic case in Orange County, California, in the early '90s went far beyond stupidity. A little boy in first grade was waiting for the school bus one morning when he saw a razor blade in the grass.

He was afraid someone would be cut by it, so he picked it up. When the bus came, he tried to give it to the driver. The driver refused it and told him to give it to his teacher when he got to school.

So the little boy got to school, told his teacher about the razor blade he had found and tried to give it to her. She took him to the principal's office and told the principal he had brought a weapon to school.

Zero tolerance?

Yep, zero tolerance. The principal expelled the little boy from school for bringing a weapon onto school grounds.

This was something of a cause celebre in California at the time. A year or so later, when I found myself involved in a similar case, I was glad to find people intelligent enough to show some flexibility.

My son was in second grade when we got a call from the principal of his school. I went in to talk to her, and she told me that my son had brought a knife to school that day. It wasn't a bowie knife, a switchblade or even a Swiss Army knife. It was a tiny little penknife from the Roy Rogers Museum, with a blade small enough and dull enough to make it less dangerous than a paper cut.

She said two third graders had been bullying my son on the playground. Rather than complain to a teacher, he had tried to deal with the problem himself. As he told me later, he had no intention of hurting anyone. He just though that if he showed them the little knife and threatened to scratch them with it, they would leave him alone.

Heck, he was 7.

The principal asked me what thought. I told her I knew my son would never intentionally hurt anyone, but that I certainly understood that he couldn't be bringing weapons -- no matter how innocuous -- to school.

She seemed relieved to hear that. She told me she didn't want to punish my son, who was a good student and no trouble to his teacher at all. School district regulations said she should expel him, and she said if I had given the normal parent reaction ("It can't be my kid's fault!"), she would have.

But since I understood the situation and her reaction to it, she said I should just take him home for the rest of the day and he could come back to school the next day.

I thanked her for her kindness.

There's zero tolerance ... and zero tolerance.