THEREIN ALL THESES BUT STRICT REGULATION ARE SHOT DOWN:
Since I wrote the original essay on USA Gunning For Guns, things changed. The adversary is mutating, now claiming the gun problem is mostly about mental health. Right, the mental health of an entire civilization, not individuals.
So I decided to separate the more technical part of the previous essay from its main thesis.
My main thesis is that a society where citizens are killing each other is the ideal universe to establish plutocracy, plutocracy being vigilantism writ large. Thus guns are pushed by plutocracy, as they constitute the ideal ecology of it to thrive.
Here I shoot down all the alternatives.
MILITIA DESIRED, BUT GUNS KILL:
The question of guns is all about REGULATION, and was framed by the USA Constitution that way, right from the start. Look at the Second Amendment. It starts with: “A well regulated militia”… (1791). At the time the USA had no police, and no standing army (a few years later appeared a very small, but very bold Navy and Marines).
Where is there such a well regulated militia? All over! Not just the French Gendarmerie. The Swiss army is a good example. Switzerland has an extremely high rate of semi-automatic guns, but it’s only a third as deadly as the USA.
However Suisse is thirteen times firearm deadlier as Great Britain, where guns are very regulated. The comparison between Britain and Switzerland makes it clear. So the best regulation is eradication.
Comparing between European countries is instructive, as always. France has millions of (registered) boar hunting rifles (boars are very big, very tough, and very numerous in France, a pretty wild country where they cause quite a bit of destruction). Occasionally such a gun is use for mass murder, but it’s very rare, because boar riffles shoot only twice (typically).
ANGRY PEOPLE ARE MAD, THUS MASS DESTRUCTION GUNS, VERY BAD:
I had myself suggest that, the more guns, the more the insane would have a chance to get their hands on them.
All the more as there are no controls on resale, possession, and no license, registration, age control or fee is needed to purchase ammunition (all obvious areas to target for regulation).
However the experts, and, even more, the numbers, disagree:
The connection between mental illness and guns is weak.
As the author, a MD, expert in this field, has it: “All the focus on the small number of people with mental illness who are violent serves to make us feel safer by displacing and limiting the threat of violence to a small, well-defined group. But the sad and frightening truth is that the vast majority of homicides are carried out by outwardly normal people in the grip of all too ordinary human aggression to whom we provide nearly unfettered access to deadly force.”
In other words, everybody gets mad, sometimes. It’s a mad civilization that overlooks this. On top of this, alcohol and other drugs abuses are generally involved in murder.
There are probably as many crazies in Europe as in the USA, but mass murders are rarer there by an order of magnitude, at least. The maniac in Norway (77 killed) was not much more maniacal than the 900,000 who voluntarily entered the Himmler’s SS. At least that is what experts found in Norway.
Mentally sick ideas are much worse than mentally sick people, because they affect otherwise healthy individuals.
Thinking all and any normal people should have semi-automatic gun in hand, bearing hundreds of rounds, each and any time when they may happen to very angry, is insane. That is, not sane. It’s that idea, fabricated by the NRA and its plutocratic masters that is insane, not so much the trigger men (the Bushmaster 223 used for the school massacre, is made by a company owned by Freedom Group, owned by Cerberus, a conspiracy of billionaires).
The trigger men are, mad, true, but, mostly only momentarily, mad. Guns turn that momentary madness into something eternally evil.
Human anger is cathartic, it helps mental phase changes. It’s a good thing for the evolution of ideas, and the promotion of fairness. But, mass murdering gun in hand, anger makes massacres. And a society continually terrified.
MODERN WEAPONS ARE OBVIOUSLY SATANIC: WHY TO EMBRACE THEM?
Well, the answer is obvious, depending upon who is truly organizing society…
Who originated the programming of run of the mill Americans into killer robots? Why so many middle age blonde American women, all over the TV, teaching their (underage!) children to use guns? Are “guns” a new form of racism? Who made it so that the media of the USA is continually telling people that the answer to violence is even greater violence, using brute force instead of solidarity?
Well, obviously those who live by violence, from violence, in private enclaves, even private cities, guarded by private armies. What’s their name, the name of their class? The sort of people who go to dinner in Sao Paulo by helicopter, because the streets are not safe. (The situation in Mexico and Brazil is similar to that in the USA, sometimes even worse.)
Thus, plutocracy, obviously, profits from violence as it creates a society in its own image. Solving problems by wanting to shoot holes into people, psychologically encourage the mightiest to go further, and shoot holes in the Constitution.
The exact same scheme, making an unsafe society, a dog eat dog society, was used in the Late Roman empire to destroy whatever was left of the republic and civil society, as citizens got increasingly terrified of each other until they ran for lords to protect them.
Trust the 70% who cannot wait to shoot their fellow citizen to understand nothing of this, and just below their rage by repeating word for word the lessons their powerful masters taught them.
SHOOTING CHILDREN IN THE NAME OF FREEDOM?
Freedom of madness? Is madness a form of freedom?
Another shooting in a school of the USA. A primary school. Obama was deeply hurt by it. He did not hide his tears. All what these small children were going to be, all these children had the right to be. Right. Notice that word: right. And now, after suffering horror, each shot multiple times like vermin, they were not. Is it because, behind its soothing words and hypocritical mien, the USA is organized by the brutes, for the brutes, and their bestial ways?
The shooter used a semi-automatic rifle similar to those used by the U.S. army in Afghanistan, to shoot Taliban. A powerful gun the lunatic used to shoot down plate glass and get into the school.
The immediate reaction of the gun lobby, all over the media was to say that, if the staff at the school had been armed with an arsenal the shooter could have been killed earlier, and so the anti-gun people caused the massacre. Thus, making guns more readily available in schools is the answer to preventing violence with guns in schools. If we take this further, then giving everyone nuclear weapons will insure peace.
One would also have to walk in 30 pounds of body armor too. All day long, every day.
It was a very good thing, the president showing what the shooting meant, the pain, the cost that American violence extracts from love. The president has to educate and that does not mean just conveying ideas, but also emotions.
What is the madness about? Academic studies have shown that having a gun in a home nearly triples the probability of being shot and killed.
Still idiots keep on repeating the slogan that they have a right to have mass murdering guns, to defend themselves. Assuredly, it’s not to defend themselves against bullets as those are three times more likely to penetrate the gun totters than others. So what is their true reason?
What are they defending against? Well, reason. Reason. Yes, reason and reasoning. Facts and statistics. And anything telling them, the bleating sheep, that they are not gods, the principal compensation in their mediocre existence.
Americans have war guns at home precisely so that they can go on a rampage, and feel like gods for a moment. It’s all in the moment, like buying on credit. The potentiality for (mass) murders is precisely what they are after.
The shooter at the primary school, 20 year old, had been propagandized into guns by his own mother, a gun totting enthusiast, who, small justice, was the first one to be shot. Ms Lanza idiotically thought she needed a vast gun collection to defend herself during what she described as the coming economic collapse of the USA. She lived in a large colonial home. She had been a stockbroker, and her divorced husband is an executive at GE, the tax dodging oldest company in the Dow Jones Industrial average. So, if she was not part of the plutocracy, she had been quite close to it.
The USA has not been more pro-gun than it has been in decades. Guess what? The USA has never been more plutocratic, ever. Are both facts related? Are guns and plutocracy related? I will argue that they are, and in multiple ways.
The gun lobby gives millions to gun advocates in elections, and millions more in indirect campaigns. The media makes a continual campaign for half a dozen false and idiotic ideas about guns. The idiots, all over repeat these stupidities in a sort of collective black mass. It’s hard to reason with ants.
THE SECOND AMENDMENT OF THE USA CONSTITUTION SAYS:
“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.”
Notice the phrasing. There is logic in the order in which concepts are presented. The Second Amendment means FIRST that one should have a “well regulated militia”. “Keeping and bearing Arms” is only in the context of a well regulated Militia. It does not mean that a deranged child should bear as many huge guns as he can carry.
At the time, 1791 CE, armies were armed with muskets. If the killer had only a musket, he could not even have got in the school (as he used his rifle to demolish plate glass). If he had, it would have been difficult to kill more than one or two children. (There was a similar attack in China against a primary school, the same week, 22 children got injured by knife, none died.)
Gun advocates feign to view every single citizen of the USA as a “well regulated militia”. That’s sheer lunacy. Wait. What? Lunacy? What to do? Outlaw the usage not of guns, but of the concept of lunacy… “the continued use of this pejorative term has no place in the U.S. Code,” legislated the (democratically controlled) Senate of the USA in May 2012. “Pejorative” means: making worse, from Latin peoir, worse. Using guns is viewed as ameliorative.
GUNS IS A CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE:
Obama looked at his notes for the longest time, silently, at loss for words, overwhelmed by the inadequacy what he had to say, wanting to say something else, not politically smart. He had to deplore the loss, but he wanted to outlaw the guns. However he does not write the laws, the Tea Party “republican” Congress does. (Something Europeans tend NOT to understand about the presidency of the USA.)
The civil right that Americans, in their confusion, seem the most attached to, at this point, is that of shooting each other. But that right, the right to kill, is a civil right that denies all others. And this, my friends, come to think of it, is exactly what plutocracy wants.
Obama has to pick his fights. So Obama grimly said what he was expected to say.
GUNS: NOT JUST A HEALTH ISSUE, BUT A MENTAL HEALTH ISSUE:
An approach to guns is to declare them a public health issue. Indeed, at the present rate, over someone’s average lifetime, eight million citizens of the USA will get killed or wounded by guns. And 300 millions, terrorized.
But this approach has not worked, because it has been barred by a wall of money.
This, by the way, proves my thesis: if the plutocratically controlled media is all about the pro-gun slogan, it is precisely because the gun psychosis is crucial to keep enough violence in society to justify a thriving plutocracy: guns are related to the elite not paying taxes… And activities such as the war in Iraq. The demented violence against Iraq was using the same sort of argument that the gun lobby uses all the time, transposed to a foreign country.
As the soft approach did not work, it is time for heavy philosophical gunfire. Firing guns, totting guns, training with guns goes well with fracking and denying that the biosphere will explode from too much heat trapping industrial gases and carbonic acid. It’s the same general idea:”We kill, therefore we are.”
The threat of guns, of being shot, especially with more and more concealed weapons “laws”, has an impact on the mental health of all citizens of the USA. This is a hidden form of abuse, and insanity.
GUN TERRORISM AS THE MOST BASIC CIVIL RIGHT VIOLATION:
To want to kill people is very American: extremely violent imagery (“I’m going to kill her/him”, “I am going to fire him/her”) is routinely used. After, all, they killed Indians, did not they? And, it worked well, did not it? Without killing the Indians, what would the alternative have been? No USA? Shooting bad people is the essential American creation saga. The Indians were very bad, but, thanks to the gun and the right of Americans to defend themselves, the Indians are now in the care of the All Almighty, Amen.
Thus, philosophically speaking, using guns (and that means the perspective, training and psychological readiness to fire or purchase guns, and general excitement about guns blatant in gun enthusiasts orgasming when they evoke the shooting of their heavy load) is part of the exploitative and extractive mentality.
The whole idea about killing somebody, is depriving someone else of the most basic human right. Thus the attachment of Americans to that right is an attachment to the greatest tradition of the Anglo-Saxon American colony, namely violating civil and human rights, of everybody who shows up, down the barrel of a gun.
How long will it take for Americans to realize that the Civil Rights movement is not over, as long as there are small children, and they get shot?
But is this Civil Right aspect the whole story? No. There is the overall reason for this entire mess, for this weakness of character, disposition, and intellectual faculties.
PLUTOCRACY: OF VIOLENCE, BY VIOLENCE, FOR VIOLENCE:
The propaganda of the NRA is highly reinforcing of plutocracy (NRA = National Rifle Association, aka Nihilistic Rats Atrocity).
According to some, the Plutocrats’ greatest fear must surely be that one day the plebs will wake up to their crimes and rise up against them, so the last thing they would wish is for the plebs to be armed. That’s a crafty anti-idea.
For example that the People needs semi-automatic guns to prevent the (plutocratic or not) government to take over. But that’s as ridiculous as claiming that the sheep will avoid the slaughter by bearing arms. A sheep is a sheep. Sheep is controlled with the mind, not at the point of a gun.
Citizens of the USA have been brainwashed into believing that the key to their safety resides not in firing bankers and plutocrats, but in shooting each other. This they do with great enthusiasm: 100,000 get killed or wounded by gunfire, each year. The USA is in a chronic civil war (which kills nearly as much as the one in Syria! In absolute numbers, except, it never ends…).
I have had “friends” who stridently defended their right to have the trunk of their cars full of war weapons. I put “friend” in quotation, because how can I be friend with the deeply deranged?
Talking to them I was exposed to non sensical arguments about how well defended their arsenal made them. Never mind that most gun deaths are from a gun in the home!
They just faithfully repeated the inanities of the extreme right-wing media.
I know differently. I came within millimeters of violent death a few times, and, each time, surprise was the main enabling factor in my near demise. All military treaties, Chinese or Western, say the same: surprise enables aggression as much as all other factors combined. Thus, to prevent aggression, of individuals or civilization, one has to reduce the surprise factor. Having weapons of mass destruction around is one such risk. And certainly a modern military gun is such a weapon.
THOSE WHO THINK GOOD GUYS SHOOT FIRST ARE IDIOTS:
The bad guys know that the first thing to do is to shoot first. A Congress Representative, who was shot through the brain, and a judge who was killed in the same shooting, both loud gun advocates, had claimed, loud and clear, throughout the media, that they were excellent shooters. They trained at the same gun club. With gun in hand, they could protect all and any. They both owned Glocks, and, in a form of justice the great god has at the ready, they were both shot by a Glock.
Unsurprisingly, when the time came, those two fools were surprised, and before they could draw like at OK Corral, their topology got irreversibly modified. Maybe thankfully, otherwise probably more would have died in the crossfire.
The bad ones know the most basic thing about war: that the first thing to do is to shoot first.
Glocks’ magazines for sale in the USA can carry up to 33 bullets. In the rest of the world, only police and the military use such weapons (and rarely!). But, in the USA, the 70% who love guns are apparently police or military at heart.
GUNS MAKE PEOPLE AS STUPID:
The deepest aspect of it all is that citizens of the USA have been brainwashed into violating common sense. And it goes further than that: as they live in a society where they get increasingly violated, they displace their self esteem into believing that they can take others out, and that they are omnipotent that way.
What to do when the leading nation is losing its mind because it is goose stepping behind the corporations that have seized control of its common sense?
Not much. This is no accident. The masters of the USA have persuaded common people that they, the common people, are the problem, and it would just be solved if they all could shoot those among them who are bad.
Plutocracy is intrinsically not compatible with a civil society. So plutocracy taught citizens of the USA to shoot each other, to be sure that there would be no civil society. And that’s something they do very well, as the eager servants of their masters. If one wants plutocracy, one needs to insure that society is not civil. Shooting each other, and expecting to be shot is a good first step that way. Bad health care, bad justice, expensive education are complementary ways to achieve an uncivil society.
Plutocracy is not just about wealth, it’s not just about the Dark Side, it’s also about hell. Not just about living through hell, organizing hell, but also about having a taste for it. Taxing the rich, not carbon burning the planet anymore, removing the guns from holier-than-thou mental retards are various aspects of the same problem. Fighting plutocracy encroaching upon civilization.
What could the president do practically? Exposing the mechanism above is difficult. It basically boils down to telling gun fanatics that they are deluded, hateful sheep living in a fantasy world, due to their lack of cognitive and logical abilities. Moreover that mood they enjoy to wallop in contributes to making the USA far short of its human, educative and economic potential, and it hurts the entire planet, when they insist to burn, or sell, ever more carbon to consume.
However, a well chosen gun task force, similar to the one Ronald Reagan has called after the space shuttle Challenger disaster, but with more and quicker powers, could make the necessary educational work, pointing out, for example, that guns nearly triple the probability of homicide inside a home (and certainly 10 times more in a societal context: the USA has 50 times more firearms murders as Great Britain, per 100,000 people!).
Unfortunately, Richard Feynman is dead, but a number of smart scientist, psychologists, philosophers, etc could certainly be put together, to arrive to the obvious conclusions anybody really smart would arrive at. After all, emperor Justinian instituted something similar for law, 15 centuries ago, when he set up a commission headed by an esteemed atheist (!) law professor. Now Justinian reigned 40 years, and Obama does not have that sort of time. So things have to move fast.
I am pleased to report did this right after the first version of this essay came out.
The first thing to do is to try to renew the ban on assault rifles, which expired in 2004, under the mandate of the invader and torturer of Iraq, G.W. Bush (not a coincidence). Executive orders could be used. Even they fail, they will have the advantage of exposing those who offer children in sacrifice to Pluto, as the Carthaginians did to Moloch.
In the USA, a child is 13 times more likely to be shot by a firearm than in any other country in the world. Public opinion, and the NRA may be somewhat surprised by the primary school massacre. They are surprised, so they have to be attacked vigorously, now. Assaulting with the right ideas in the name of justice is how goodness imposes itself.
Of course the plutocrats and the darkest mood they foster are mighty. It makes fighting them all the more interesting.
The most sold brand of Assault Rifle in the USA, Bushmaster Firearms International, is part of the Freedom Group, owned by Cerberus Capital Management, itself the property of a number of billionaires, some of them gun fanatics. Cerberus is the triple headed dog guarding Hades, and it apparently thrives in Manhattan nowadays. (Thanks to Allexi Helligar for reminding me of this.)
Time to throw the gauntlet to the partisans of brute violence, the fanatics of shooting and murder as freedom. If nobody will throw the gaunlet to infamy, how is infamy going to feel bad about itself? Time to persuade swing states voters that they were morally decrepit all along, and their redemption lays into turning to other ideas, instead of pushing that trigger spastically, again and again and again, because they know of nothing better to do with their brains.
Note 1: Tale of two constitutions: The obsession with France, is obvious in the outlawing of French cheeses. One is forced to have when studying the subject, because the constitutional debates in France and the USA have always been entangled. That comes from the entangled Franco-American Revolutions, culminating with those diverging, but related, constitutions the two countries ratified within a few weeks in 1789. One constitution choose human rights, the other, mild plutocracy and implicit slavery; Lincoln and Martin Luther King found very costly to rectify the constitution from 1789; but not all that ought to be clarified has been clarified yet, such as the 2nd Amendment from 1791.
Note 2: The usual well paid idiots came up with the argument that if the courageous principal had been armed, she would have killed the murderer, and protect the children. And true, the principal gave her life, without a weapon, to protect the children. However the killings had apparently already started (remember the surprise effect). In the general case, the logic is flawed. The density of lunatics is whatever it is, and the mass killings occur when a lunatic and a mass destruction weapon find themselves in the same neighborhood. This is proportional to the product of the density of lunatics by the density of weapons. Only the later can be controlled, and be brought down to zero.
Note 3: The last of five massacres in 12 years, killed 35 people in Tasmania. The Australian government instituted a buy-back program of 600,000 semi-automatic guns (which fired every time the trigger is pulled). Regulations brought the murders down by 60%.