Gun Control for weapons makers not users, for war mongers not hillbillies

I’m really not big on this call for gun control, mostly because it means to further restrict individual liberties, and especially because the outcry is a media induced hysteria of disreputable provenance, aimed at America’s violence junkies instead of its dealers. Really? Is Going Postal the result of a citizenry not having laws enough to control itself? US prisons reflect a conflicting diagnosis.

In tragic synchronicity with the Sandy Hook school shooting which prompted US public calls for gun control, a knife-wielding madman in China assailed twenty schoolchildren with no resulting fatalities, giving rise to perhaps the first time the non-Mongol West has ever thought it glimpsed greener pastures over the Great Wall.

My takeaway from Bowling for Columbine was not “Gun Control Now!” but the toxic volatility of America’s culture of fear-of-violence-mongering and its gun-ho idolatry. Michael Moore called for a stepping up to our responsibilities, not a surrender to dumbassedness. I hold our national arrested adolescence to be a character flaw of pioneer, frontier provincialism, an adaptation of the civilian contractor settlers conscripted for the Westward Expansion, shock troops of the Enlightenment which became the onslaught of industrial capitalism.

Americans are hicks –we celebrate it– who define our personal space with armed borders. For us it’s bombs not education, simplistic fraternal evangelism over scientific sibling-hood, our pretended easy camaraderie really armed detente: trust but verify. Because of course, American frontierism, yet unable to see itself as invasive, from Columbus to Manila Bay, has been imperial for as long as “Yankee” has been a pejorative; Americans blissfully, Disneyfically unaware.

America’s gun problem isn’t just domestic, it’s export. For gun control I’d like to see a ban on production, not consumption. Unlike drugs whose source is organic, the manufacture of weapons is a centralized racket, easily constricted and regulated. The “Gun Show Loophole” is a stop gap for small fry; let’s muzzle the beast itself. And if you think reining in the weapons industry is improbably Herculean, why-ever do you think now is the time for Hercules to dispense with his Second Amendment protection?

Just because the Right to Bear Arms has come to exclude bazookas or drones, doesn’t mean its intent was not to protect our democracy from authoritarianism. If anyone had construed the Second Amendment as a mere hunting license, Theodore Roosevelt’s national parks would have been seen as encroachments on our revolution-conferred sovereign’s right to poach.

Are Americans thinking that democracy is lost because we can’t have bazookas — that the Second Amendment is inapplicable because the high courts adjudge the masses incapable of self-governance? The “well regulated militia” has surely gone the way of the Home Guard or Neighborhood Watch Committee, as our civic nature moved from social to anti, but it doesn’t diminish the need to have minute-men insurgents to counter would-be tyrants. Obviously we’re not talking about Minute Men privateers to whom police departments can outsource xenophobic vigilantism. If Occupy Wall Street proved anything, it lifted the fog on America’s militarized police state. Public gun ownership may be the only incentive law enforcement has to knock before entering American households.

Can you doubt it’s going to take armed resistance to overthrow Mammon? The world is teetering on uprising and already we’re seeing a stalemate on the streets, between unarmed protester and paramilitary police, a draw which upholds the power imbalance between cries for justice versus patronizing injustice. Is leading by nonviolent example going to overcome the sociopaths squeezing their underlings for blood? I’m not saying that hopes for a nonviolent transformation are misplaced, but these disciples of revolutionary pacifism espouse the same religious dogma that always shackled, never delivered, common man. Factoring sociopaths into the norm of “human nature” has been forever holding back aspirations for a harmonious social construct.

Going Postal in China is demonstrably less fatal, owing to China’s mentally imbalanced having resource only to knives. How utopian to imagine a disarmed populace, those greener pastures being a hellhole of forced interned labor. As an open air prison environmental death camp, Gaza’s got nothing on China.

From Columbine to Germany to Alabama

columbineThe Europeans have the same youth dissatisfaction with modern living as Colorado does, yet nobody does anything other than mouth off platitudes about how shocking it all is. Teen gunman dead after killing 15 at German school

And now to the Alabama ‘Reliable Metal’ shootings… 10 dead in Alabama killing spree Not at a high school, yet somehow quite the same.

14 year olders with guns and my hike last Sunday

What makes the US such a dangerous place where constantly kids go bezerk? It is the constant militarism of our society, the bleak and bare social landscape. From Littleton to Cleveland, no place is safe.

Strangely enough, this last Sunday I went for a hike with my family at the Dear Creek Open Space and found ourselves above a gigantic Lockheed building in the middle of countryside nowhere outside Littleton, Colorado. How strange… Bowling for Columbine by Michael Moore… Seeing this building from the hiking trail brought back to my mind Michael Moore’s movie.

Lockheed to Cleveland to Blackwater to Littleton to where next? Guns are us. No place in the world will be safe until we disarm ourselves.

A society that routinely abuses children produces violent citizens

Lots of people once again are talking about the dangers of guns. No doubt about it, a society so thoroughly militarized as US society is certainly got an overload of guns. But guns alone are not the problem alone. Just who are the young people that obsess on shooting and killing? They like to play violent videos oftentimes, and their tastes in music, video, and literature tend towards the violent, too. But why? What makes for such personality disorders like the ones we see more and more often today amongst young people, many of them who want to run amok?

I’ve got a friend, who has been urging me for a long while to write about Mormons. He hates them, in short. His hatred of them is fanatical and while I find it extreme, I certainly can understand why he got the way he did. Right Wing religious groups tend to abuse the young and that abuse can oftentimes produce extreme hatred in the victims. Put that abuse together with evolved hate, then combine that with guns and hold on there! You have a volatile combination.

Don’t get me wrong. I do not know if the latest has anything directly to do with religion? I do not know if the youngsters that assaulted a gay teenager last week in Pueblo were from Right Wing religious families either? I do not know if the Columbine shooters were from that background. What I do know is that the Religious Right routinely mistreats children in their control. That’s just a given, I think. And that’s where the Mormons come in. And the Catholic Right. And the Southern Baptists (I know them personally). And the Benny Hinn style Pentecostal nuts talking in tongues. Crazy adults produce crazed kids. Add the Pentagon based economy, and anything can happen.

And it just did, once again. ( To my friend, I finally did write about your Mormons.)

Super Duper Heroes

Let’s grieve for Ken Jordan. Let’s grieve for him as a beloved son, a cherished brother, a loving boyfriend. But must we grieve for him as a slain police officer, one who died to protect us? He didn’t give his life. His life was taken from him by a drunken asshole. Just as the lives of the teachers at Columbine were taken, the lives of relief workers and journalists in Iraq and elsewhere are taken, the lives of nuns caring for the downtrodden in dangerous countries are taken.

Since 9-11 we’ve been conditioned to worship the “public servants” who fight our kitchen fires and bust our teenagers for tinted windows. Does anyone really believe these guys chose such a career because they care about us? The same can be said about our soldiers. With rare exception, men who choose a career in police/fire/military do so because it works for them. They don’t want to work at Wal-Mart, can’t work at Apple. The idea of carrying a gun appeals mightily to the kid whose head was bashed into the gymnasium locker by the big jock with the cute cheerleader on his arm. The idea of dressing up in a dapper uniform and becoming part of a powerful club resonates with the guy who has a lot of testosterone, quite a bit of adrenaline, but little else to distinguish him. They love their institutional authority. They enjoy pulling over the red BMW and watching the rich guy quake in his Bruno Maglis. They relish wiping the tears of the pretty girl who didn’t give them the time of day in Junior High.

I saw the procession for Officer Jordan yesterday. And, yes, it brought a tear to my eye. But not because he was a cop.

A pro-life license plate

A Pr0-life vehicle license plateHow did this happen? Colorado fundies are driving around with their own license plate. It’s a state license plate for pro-lifers!
 
It looks like someone used the Columbine High School tragedy to invent a commemorative license plate to remind us to “respect life” which apparently means don’t shoot your fellow classmates.

Did Oscar really boo Michael Moore

At Michael Moore’s Oscar Night speech,
WERE THE OSCAR BOOS FAKED?

Say you were programming the Oscars. Say you were able to intimidate all of the celebrities from speaking out against the war.

Say you knew Michael Moore was going to win an Oscar for Best Documentary for BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE. You anticipated Moore would violate the network ban on showing dissent about the war. How could you plan to undermine Moore’s speech?

Could you pre-record an audience response? Could you prepare booing and heckling to drown out what Moore would try to say? Could you orchestrate something to suggest that Michael Moore was a loose canon with whom not even Hollywood agreed?

What if the cameras pulled back to reveal an audience neither booing nor jeering? Too afraid to be seen clapping. Too afraid to be seen having any opinion. But smiling.

Everyone and their cousin knew what Moore was going to say. Everyone knew Moore would be the only person who could get away with speaking against the war. In fact the audience knew Moore couldn’t back down if he wanted. Ironically the showdown had been promoted in advance to boost the ratings.

When Michael Moore was announced as winner, the entire hall gave him a standing ovation. Did the same audience immediately boo him? Who booed?

According to In These Times, it turns out that a handful of stagehands standing close to the microphones were responsible for the booes. But the networks reported that Moore was widely booed by his peers. Crisis managed?

Michael Moore