Since the Newtown Children’s Massacre on December 14th, the U.S. press, media, and blogosphere has been quite busy discussing gun control, mental health, the NRA, and overall American society. I have been slow to issue any comments as I wanted more facts to become known and to hear many more arguments from well-educated people. Two respected TMV writers, Kathy Gill and Elijah Sweete have been on the forefront of bringing to light important facts in this progressing debate with their excellent recent posts.
There have been other mass murders over the past few years and even a few smaller ones since the 12/14/12 killings that have involved various types of guns. Every day, dozens of Americans commit suicide with guns or die when shot by others. Chicago annually endures three times the total number of children gunned down in Newtown but it happens only a few at a time with very little media coverage. What made the deaths of the 26 people at Sandy Hook elementary school more shocking is that it occurred in a wealthy suburb (top 10% nationally in income, wealth and home prices) and it was perpetrated by a very disturbed rich young white male with easy access to high-powered guns and large-magazine ammunition who forced his way into the school after it was secured for the day’s classes.
This nation has expressed shock, grief and outrage, and conducted similar discussions with respect to gun violence over the past few years surrounding various mass shootings at other public locations. Absolutely nothing has been done to address the number of problems in our country that combine to produce this carnage. It is amazing that such murders are not more frequent in a nation where any person has generally unlimited access to most types of guns and ammunition – short of bazookas, tanks and missiles.
With about 300 million guns among 300 million people, losing around 30,000 a year to gun violence is the price our society has chosen in order to broadly interpret the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution and to please about a third of the population that actually possesses guns. (It’s arguably a 0.0001 rounding error.) The vast majority of nations around the world do not have similar laws and regulations, and they have far fewer deaths per capita and in sheer numbers as does the U.S., but then most Americans do not care how the rest of the world thinks or operates. We live in a massive bubble of our own making with respect to many aspects of human activities.
About half of the world’s guns in private hands are found in the U.S. – and about half of the world’s expenditures for military purposes are also made by the U.S. In a few years, annual deaths from guns may exceed deaths from automobile accidents, but both still pale in comparison to the millions of deaths in the U.S. due to heart attacks, cancer and strokes on both total and per capita bases.
Simultaneous with this steadily rising stream of private gun carnage occurring in every community across the U.S., we are seeing the Federal government expand its security state, arming its own agencies with more lethal guns and ammunition, and expanding its unconstitutional surveillance operations on citizens under the fabricated guise of stopping undefined “terrorism.” Our nation is descending into a corrupt system of crony corporatism that shields the 1% of America’s powerful and wealthy from the rule of law by not prosecuting any of their thousands of egregious and massive financial and business crimes perpetuated against the rest of society over the past decade. This massive Federal power will soon be directed against all domestic dissent and protests against the status quo.
It may be natural for some to believe that a Federal Government that works against the best interests of the vast majority of citizens cannot be trusted and should be resisted as illegitimate. That may explain the reluctance of some people to consider any forms of private gun control. Considering that most U.S. police forces possess military-style armaments and special force units, and the professional U.S. military can now be deployed within the nation to ostensibly quell domestic protests against the status quo, what is the real ability of an armed citizenry to sustain any viable power struggle with a central authority? None, nada, zilch – in reality. However mythically, some people still think they can resist with their small arsenals of private weapons.
Why have we not seen guns waived in protest against endless bank bailouts, unlawful foreclosures, federal financial regulatory corruption, or the non-prosecution of a myriad of financial frauds and crimes by top executives of various banks and financial institutions? Why do gun owners not target various corrupt public officials, and unpunished criminal bankers and businessmen who could be considered greedy enemies of the American people? The reason is simple. One visible threat or attempt to render some justice to those at the top of an unjust, lawless society, will be met by an incredible show of governmental force that will not only eliminate the holders of private guns, but also kill many innocent bystanders and unarmed protestors. The vast majority of people have enough sense not to make threats against an entity that possesses much greater firepower and willingness to use it in order to maintain its power and control. The U.S. already has by far the largest prison population in the world in sheer numbers and on a per capita amount.
The small group of individuals who turn to mass murder frequently target unarmed, innocent fellow Americans – and their random shootouts often end by killing themselves. These crimes are not generally or singularly due to some mental illness, an irresistible force compelling them to kill, or some understandable anger at particular people or defined enemies. They are arguably a result of a sociopath or psychopath acting violently simply because they lack a conscience or soul. These extreme narcissists have no empathy or compassion for other people and are not remorseful of their manipulative and damaging actions. Our society’s fundamental fault lies in maintaining an overall environment where lethal weapons are readily available to everyone – including the 5% of the population who have these inhuman attributes.
Most sociopaths and psychopaths are not violent killers. Instead they are very intelligent and they are drawn to positions of power and seek financial rewards in business, law, religion, government, and financial institutions. They seek places where personal behavior is largely unregulated, or ethical and moral standards are unclear and malleable. Many are smart enough to blend in with the rest of society and they can draw a line between physical harm to others and instead just limit themselves to the financial, social and mental destruction of other people in order to amass wealth and power.
The stupider sociopaths and psychopaths who have serious anger-management control issues rely on brute force and physical violence against others, which often involves the use of guns. Most of these characters are caught, prosecuted and convicted, and serve long prison terms. Living a life of crime often results in these individuals getting killed at the hands of others or themselves. Others simply blend in with society but it takes just a few perceived personal insults to set them to act violently against other people. They often have clean criminal records until they snap and break all criminal records.
The moronic maxim that only a “good guy” with a gun can stop a “bag guy” with a gun should be put to rest. Effectively committing a crime, using a gun or not, against a person or group with or without guns, depends principally on the “element of surprise.” No matter how well trained and armed a military or security force, it can be rendered ineffectual or dead by a lethal surprise attack. That has been the history of war and crime for all of human history. The potential success of any surprise attack may be minimized by extensive fortifications and preparations but the social cost of perpetual vigilance and in expenditures of public treasury will often bankrupt the same society – and many individual liberties and community-wide institutions will also be sacrificed.
The NRA may sound “crazy” and obstinate against a majority of contrary voices at this point in time, but it knows some very important things about American history, politics and society. 1.) The manufacture of guns inside the U.S. is one of the few industries left in the country that is very profitable and it employs a significant number of people. 2.) The U.S. Congress is a body of craven, easily-frightened, corrupt individuals who reflect the divided, confused, angry, bigoted, short-sighted, ignorant and dysfunctional society at large. 3.) 47% of the population voted for a Republican Presidential Candidate less than 2 months ago that was even worse than the incompetent Democratic incumbent. They are both corrupt, out-of-touch, mendacious, tools of the oligarchy who do not care much about the vast majority of citizens. 4.) For our political system to accomplish anything – even tiny reforms or changes – requires the agreement of a 67% super-majority of Americans and politicians. That type of national cohesiveness in a collapsing empire cannot be organized under any rational or fictitious circumstances. 5.) Legal sales of the same guns and ammunition used in the recent mass murders have skyrocketed recently. 6.) The status quo of current gun ownership, regulations, accessibility and levels of national and community gun violence in the U.S. will NOT change – at all – not anytime in 2013 or for the next decade – even with more frequent and larger mass murders.
Therefore any significant (or even just a few incremental) new gun “controls,” “regulations,” “limitations,” or whatever else that could be proposed by many well-meaning and intelligent people will NEVER be passed and signed into law in the U.S. So what can our society do to protect itself from a small group of unpredictable and well-armed sociopaths and psychopaths who might shoot up more innocent people at schools, shopping malls, places of work or worship, and other venues of public assembly? Either we do nothing and accept them as simply “acts of nature” such as Tornados, or our only choice may be to embrace the NRA proposal to put “armed” individuals in every school and venue where large numbers of people can be found.
We should look only at this NRA proposal objectively from an economic stimulus perspective. (The value of human life is no longer a major concern in American society – we’re all atomized and disposable consumers or “moochers.”) Contrary to what our “elites” disseminate thru their 24/7 info-entertainment Media outlets as worthless propaganda, we are still in a deep economic recession with poverty, massive unemployment, underemployment, and poor economic and job prospects facing tens of millions of Americans. The fabricated BLS unemployment figures grossly understate reality in order to help both entrenched zombie political parties and their oligarchic puppeteers.
Many people still view all government employees as not holding “real” jobs – unless they involve the carrying and use of a gun. In every budget debate at the Federal, State and local levels, funding for people and equipment associated with police, security, defense and militarized public entities rarely have their legitimacy questioned. However, any public spending on other types of general social welfare, infrastructure, public education and health systems, regulation of private companies on behalf the general public, and general governmental operations are always demonized and subject to perpetual annual cuts.
Our Federal Government exists principally to fund a globalized military industrial complex, to manage an ever-expanding unconstitutional security spy state, and to protect and expand the wealth and power of the business, social and political elites of the nation. The only way towards any “normal” lifestyles in the future for 95% of the U.S. population (besides engaging in crime) is to be associated with these military and security sectors of the economy. These public sector and outsourced private jobs could not be accomplished by low-paid workers in foreign countries – a person actually has to be present, on-site and ready to respond – just like workers in the childcare, household cleaning, landscaping, food crop collection, and hospitality industries.
It will be years before sufficiently competent and weaponized drones and security robots can replace millions of armed security officers (trained human beings) that could be assigned to our schools and places of public assembly under the current NRA proposal. However, additional spending of public money on many new drones to patrol the skies above and hallways inside our schools would expand profits for a number of domestic defense weapon contractors. We need back-up forces to step up if front-line security forces fail. Redundancy is good for the economy – we already have over 1,000 different public and private entities engaged in national security.
Some TMV readers have called me a pessimistic realist – and many probably have called me many things that cannot be published. Since we cannot change the status quo with respect to guns, mental healthcare, and economic policy in the U.S., the NRA idea should be embraced as a potentially huge public jobs program that could actually pass in Washington DC with broad bipartisan support – without any concern for Federal deficits.
Our nation’s economy and the vast majority of its people really need secure, good-paying jobs – in order to avoid another long double-dip recession through needless higher taxes and lower Federal social spending that will likely occur in 2013 and for the foreseeable future. Hiring millions of people to become part of a new heavily-armed federally-funded security force spread across this nation in every public venue would be a huge stimulus for our economy as they would spend their salaries on a myriad of goods and services during their off-hours.
This new domestic army might not stop every sociopathic attack (and cause a few unnecessary and misdirected shoot-outs) but the national economic gain would far outweigh the statistically small number of human sacrifices. This might be the only way to counter the moronic arguments of our political and business leaders who myopically, nastily, and irrationally urge more “austerity” for everyone but themselves – and they get away with it because we keep idiotically re-electing them.
More guns for everyone – everywhere – in perpetuity!! What a thoughtful gift for America during this holiday season celebrating family, love and peace.
Submitted on 12/27/12 by Marc Pascal, happily ranting from Phoenix, AZ. This post has just exceeded 2,400 words so I can quit now. I’ve already made it onto the lists of “domestic terrorists” kept by the FBI, CIA and NSA for speaking too critically of the illegitimate powers and ideas that rule our nation. (If I stop posting, you’ll know what happened to me.)