Into Whose Arms

With all of the escalating homicidal behavior besetting the world at the hands of Americans, it is reasonable indeed to seek resolution. It seems we can’t overcome the grief of one massacre before we’re faced with another. Good then that we each possess the strength to cope with the misfortunes of others or we would be a national wreck, unlike now as we sail toward the edge of the fiscal cliff, secure under the steady guidance of our government. While they don’t slow our mad rush into the abyss, they will on occasion activate the turn signals so we can feel hopeful.

While our proclivity for gun violence remains fairly consistent from year to year, the nature of it is becoming more repellant. 13ish years ago the assault on Columbine High School in Colorado left a massive scar on our collective psyche, in part owing to the NRA offering their condolences by having Charlton Heston go there, display a rifle and proclaim, “From my cold dead hands.” Certainly moved a lot of folks into their court, I’m sure. And now his hands are ready for them.

Subsequently, interspersed by lower body-count regional atrocities, came the assault on higher education at Virginia Tech and now on primary education at Sandy Hook where the victims are younger still and disappearing lunch programs are no longer of principal parental concern.

So the call is again raised by one sector of the traumatized public, “Eliminate the machine!” while the opposing perspective just runs out and buys more of them. This is a fascinating example of social engineering: focus on certain atrocities allows that focus to guide our responses. The murder rate in the USA, while high, is fairly consistent, in most states the number of homicides actually reducing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

As of the latest accounting by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the murder rate in the USA is 4.2 per 100 thousand. Americans killed about 14,000 other Americans in 2011, give or take. As to firearm related deaths, we’re number 10, coming in on Mexico’s heels at 10.2 per 100 thousand, 3.7 of which are deemed homicides, whereas 6.1 are listed as suicide. So we kill ourselves at a higher rate than we kill each other.  I suppose that’s good.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, gun violence spiked with the introduction of crack cocaine into the USA’s ethnic neighborhoods, courtesy of the CIA. Subsequently the homicide rate has declined significantly but every indication suggests that for the most part, we don’t really like other Americans. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t like anyone else either, but we seem to hold a special contempt for our fellow citizens, expressed in our apparently inexplicable violence toward each other.

One figure rarely trotted out in regard to gun violence is the number of people who use guns for self-defense. Sure our fellow Americans kill around 8,500 of us each year with firearms (according to the FBI), but did you know that in 1994 the Clinton Department of Justice conducted a survey that placed the use of guns for personal defense at 1.5 million times a year? So imagine what the murder rate would be if only the crazies (in and out of government) maintained possession of their firearms.

Which, of course, they would. Over the course of a decade, firearms would be implicated in a major percentile of 85,000 murders and easily that many suicides, most probably more. According to the government, which is again attempting to ban them, during the same period, 15 million gun owners would protect themselves or others with firearms. And of course nearly 2 million of us would have died owing to pharmaceuticals, about that many from alcohol and closer to 3 million from tobacco. All government regulated and approved.

Yet the cry to stop the madness by leaving the madness exactly as it is while removing explosive objects in its vicinity hearkens unto us, and I suggest that if we listen to it, we should consider its siren song with some context tempered with logic. Clearly, we are not a people that should be making hasty decisions around loaded guns.

A fairly common estimate is that there are upward of 100 million firearms owners in the USA. The number of firearms far exceeds that. Even though 40,000 Americans are killed every year by automobiles, there is no demand for the elimination of drivers’ rights or that cars be outlawed. Even though government-approved pharmaceuticals kill upwards of 200,000 Americans each year, there is no demand that legal drugs be outlawed. Clearly this isn’t about body counts.

Yet that is how it is framed. Our murder rate is in decline yet our outrage can be stoked with a little local carnage (our overseas handiwork far from our concern). So it seems reasonable that if we are expected to surrender our most effective means of defense into the hands of strangers, it is incumbent upon us to see to it that our weapons don’t fall into the wrong ones. Because putting our guns in the wrong hands poses the distinct probability of them being aimed right back at us, a consummation devoutly to be avoided.

In order to legally purchase a firearm in America the purchaser has to pass a background check. This is reasonable, as to protect the controlled majority from the uncontrolled minority. The background check is pretty basic: Are you a known criminal? Are you on drugs? Are you crazy? In theory, these groups are the most likely to commit egregious gun violence.

So who seeks to collect our firearms? The government of the USA. How then does it fare up under the rigors of the very questions it demands of us to acquire or legally possess a firearm? By its own standards, can the most armed nation in the history of the world legally own guns?

As to the first question, the fact of this thought exercise should answer that. The Constitution of the USA states in Article II of the Bill of Rights that,

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” 

The fact that the government is countermanding this Constitutional Amendment (with so many others) without referendum is in fact treasonous to all who swear to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution from all threats, foreign and domestic. To deny the public the rights defined in that document is a crime and those who would act thus are criminals where not traitors.

And we have no compulsive obligation to give our guns to criminals or traitors. Many will suggest that this alone is not proof of criminal behavior on the part of the government (the government and its apologists prominent among them). This rebuke is easily dismissed by several present examples of homicidal criminal behavior within an ongoing criminal network as engaged by the government of the USA: invasion and plunder of Iraq; invasion and devastation of Afghanistan; ongoing bombing of civilian populations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia; support of al Qaeda terrorists in the overthrow of Libya; elimination of constitutional protections; support of terrorist states.

Commission of any one of these crimes would negate American citizens from being able to even look at a gun – at least one not being pointed at them. As such, we would be ill advised to give any weapons to people who behave so contrary to the laws with which they seek to govern us.

Drugs? You tell me: suicide has topped battlefield casualty rates as the primary cause of soldier demise and increasing numbers of soldiers are taking SSRIs to combat depression; there is a considerable rate of alcoholism and pharmaceutical use in all sectors of law enforcement, increasingly displayed in their escalating violence against non-threatening citizens; our lawmakers and representatives serve alcohol (responsible for nearly a quarter million American deaths a year) at state functions and are known to drink it in non-official capacity. The president smokes tobacco, one of the deadliest recreational drugs known.

One look at our expanding social quagmire eliminates any doubt – the government of the USA is loaded on drugs – and dangerous ones at that.  Don’t think anyone should give a gun to anyone that doped up. But crazy? The USA certainly isn’t crazy. Is it?

We claim to be the freest nation in the history of freedom yet have more of our citizens in our prison system than any other nation in the world. Crazy. We spend more on weapons which destroy us than on healthcare, infrastructure or education which sustain us. Crazy.

We allow companies which consume the resource and pristine beauty and integrity of our ecosystem to compensate for their devastation of the real world with the invented abstract of money. Crazy! Our leaders proclaim belief in contradictory mythologies, invisible divinities, demons and angels, and suggest we can pay off debt with money that comes with debt attached.

They are crazy. We’d be crazier still to arm these people any further than they already are, by the very limitations they define for us. And we’ve seen what they do with little more than the encouragement of some of us voting for them. Think how bad it will be when they are the only ones with guns. Well, them and other crazy, drugged up criminals. They can pretty much write their own tickets and they’ve done such a grand job up to now.

The USA is at war with the world. We’re just that crazy. The fact that our government is working so diligently to disarm us indicates that in their numerous declared wars on us (War on Drugs, War on Crime, War on Poverty, etc.), they imagine they’ve won, they expect us to surrender.

That would be crazy.

Surrendering a firearm to a criminally homicidal collective would constitute the action of a crazy person, so anyone who would, shouldn’t have a gun anyway. The homicidal will take care of them. Frankly, as we all appear to be thoroughly crazy, there is really no one sane enough to surrender a weapon to, or sane enough to make a reasoned judgment as to whom they should be arming. So, perhaps we’d best just lock our guns up nice and safe and try to stay calm and reasonable until cooler heads prevail.

Any day now.

© 2012 Prezbyter 12/27/12

Sent to us by the author.