Do We Need Traffic Laws? Ask The NRA

According to the NRA we don't need background checks or other gun laws because criminals will always get guns. How many of you drive 30 ... 35 ... or more, in a 25 mph zone? So we have speed laws, but we don't obey them anyway. How many of you want to do away with speed limits? I mean do AWAY with speed limits! Kids playing in the street? The hell with the little brats, run over them! 88 year old Mrs. Jones crossing the street? Kiss her goodbye! You'll find her up the street real quick. You see, if you listen to the political right, which includes the leadership of the NRA (that's the National Rifle Association, for those unaware), the problem with the country isn't under regulation, it's over regulation; we've just got too damned many laws. We heard the same thing about banking. We needed "deregulation," and we got it, pushed heavily by that stalwart American (then) Senator Phil Gramm, known for calling Americans "a bunch of whiners" during the 2008 presidential election campaign, because people complained about the economy.* Some conservatives even believed the banking industry could regulate itself! Yeah right, and I'm going to grab that pot of gold from the next rainbow I see.

Folks, this is all part of the same bunch of malarkey that has come from that bunch of reactionaries for decades. They pushed deregulation for banking, but when the industry proceeded to get itself into trouble, I don't recall the right wingers taking ANY responsibility for the meltdown, but you have to understand their philosophy, business is NEVER wrong. The free markets are always right. Now it's about gun laws. Have we learned any lessons?

* Gramm was then working for John McCain's campaign. He was an.. ahh, "economic adviser."

WORD HISTORY:
Speed-First the noun form of this word, which traces back to Indo European "spe," which had the notion of "success." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "spodiz," with the same meaning. This then gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "sped," presumably with a long "e" sound, with the meanings "success, prosperity, good fortune, good luck," but also "quickness." Just a total guess, but perhaps like the saying "the early bird catches the worm," the idea of "success" being often associated with "quickness," and even "quickness of mind," may have given the word the secondary meaning which eventually became primary in English and other Germanic languages. Anyway, the word then became "spede," with the secondary meaning of "quickness" gaining momentum, and by the time the word became "speed," the "quickness" meaning had prevailed, undoubtedly helped along by English borrowing foreign words like "prosperity" and "success," which filled those respective meanings. Old Germanic had a verb form, "spodijanan," which meant "to succeed." This then spawned Old English "spedan," which meant "to succeed, to prosper, to have success, to move with haste." Like the noun form, this eventually became "speed," with the "move with haste" meaning becoming the main meaning. The other West Germanic languages^ had/have forms of the word too, although from what I can tell, only Dutch ("spoed"=haste) and Low German Saxon ("spood"=success) have surviving nouns, although Dutch has the compound noun "voorspoed," which means "success." Verb forms have endured in German, which has "sputen" ("to hurry, to hasten"), in Dutch, which has "spoed maken" (literally "make haste"), Low German Saxon "spoden" ("to hurry, hasten"). I could not find a form in Frisian.

^ North Germanic apparently did not use forms, or if there were forms, they died out without any record being left behind.