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
Tag: weapons industry
American Nazis get fewer recruits
Congratulations to Norway for booting the Israeli weapons program from Norwegian deep water testing facilities. Norway declared last week that German-manufactured submarines destined for Israel would not be permitted to use its submarine base on the southern coast, on account of the ongoing Israeli military aggressions against Palestine and Lebanon. No mention of restrictions against US weapons heading for American war zones. Not only does Israel have a nuclear arsenal estimated to exceed 200 warheads, they have submarines to launch them from anywhere in the world. Israel is the single nuclear power in the Middle East, now the rogue preemptive warrior has a nuclear reach beyond the purported aspirations of terrorists, alleged. So Norway has imposed a stumbling block on Israel's international war plans, but the impediment is merely symbolic in the face of America's unhindered state terror program. Where are the principled stands against aiding and abetting the US mechanized subjugation of its furthest flung imperial conquests? Norway earns sizable profits from its weapons industry, and supplies its share of NATO troops in Afghanistan. Its small contingent of soldiers reflects no economic draft, but simply the natural statistical proportion of adventurous, mercenary males. When occupied by the Germans during WWII, over 10,000 Norwegians volunteered to fight for the Nazis. Many on the Russian Front reenlisted. Against that proportion, the few hundreds today willing to join the Americans make the over-worn Nazi comparison even less favorable.
Rock papers scissors blunderbuss
US Army says our GIs may need bigger guns. No, better history lessons. It appears as if America's gun makers are lobbying for another US standard issue. The stories are creeping into the newswires that US soldiers need bigger guns. Our 5.56mm isn't enough stopping power anymore, which explains the relentless insurgencies, they're not stopping. Well, making historical comparisons isn't going to serve your argument. Soldiers, experts and a US Army Study are looking back at past adversarial mismarriages of ordnance to spell out why today's GIs need to arm up. To our M4 assault rifle, the Taliban answers with the AK-47. Every schoolboy knows that, but it's a differential in caliber that means our opponents can fire from almost twice the distance. While we're berating the obvious, I'd like to point out their 7.62mm bullets also enjoy a home team advantage which ballistics geeks know affects range and velocity. Apparently the Soviets had the same disadvantage against the Afghans, the soviets had the AK-47, and they faced rebels with Lee-Enfield or Mauser rifles. The WWII era guns suited the battle better. Before that, the British were ill-equiped with Brown Bess muskets, against Jezzail flintlocks that ultimately drove every last Englishman out. Is old better than new, it doesn't help the case for the weapons makers. I'm reminded of when the crossbow fell to the Welsh longbow. New technology stoned by old, where the simplicity of brute force was the innovation. The Swiss pike figures somewhere in there, long pointed sticks, rough metal tips outclassing honed steel. Short range versus long range incompatibility is not accidental. Weapons fashioned for the close-in fighting required of enforcing occupation came up short against the partisan sniper on the offensive. US complaints of drawing the short stick are just keeping with tradition. Astute gun experts point to the M-4's shortened muzzle as a major reason its fire lacks velocity. The shortened weapon is easier to carry through doors. An early foreshortened firearm used primarily for urban fighting was the blunderbuss. Made even more portable was the dragon, carried by the hated Dragoons, early specialists in oppressing unfree populations. There are three common threads here, all of them related. The first is the coincidence that our pertinent examples are Afghanistan, and the Afghans never lost, regardless their weapon. Not unrelated is that the practical, indigenous weapon has always prevailed. And that's directly linked to the Law of Insurgency, a principle which shamefully America doesn't teach in its military academies. Put simply, insurgents always win. Oh there were good old days of conquest when gunpowder ran roughshod over the stone-aged. Those days went with the conquistadors and the US cavalry. Some may want to think our crusader edge is back, that an overwhelming US technological supremacy has restored the oppressor's favorable imbalance, but it's not true, boots on the ground. Wasn't that was the lesson of Vietnam? Another lesson despicably cut from the patriot curriculum. In Vietnam by the way, US GIs carried the larger M-14s, so both sides fired a similarly
Yeee-Haww! Gun Totin’ Elmer Fudd students to plan next Columbine at CU
Of course, they don't want to actually shoot PEOPLE, mind you, just the faceless (to them) threats like Liberals, Blacks, "meskins" Indians, Ay-Rabs, and anybody smarter than themselves. --Dudes, I'll put this to you bluntly... carrying a Gun is not going to turn you into a Bad-ass. Rambo was a movie. A work of Fiction. John Wayne was an Actor and to the best of anybody's knowledge never shot anybody. Every single one of his movies, including the "historical dramas" was a work of Fiction. I know, he didn't star in Rambo, but the same logic applies to Sylvester Stallone. Your fears about whichever of Your Fellow Americans you intend to shoot or try to intimidate into submission with your Big Bad Gun won't go away, and neither will the people you think will be intimidated by Your Big Bad Gun. Add in the FACT that if you fire into a crowd, such as the SU building, your classroom, the drunken frat-rat party you're attending (and you attempt to impress your fellow Big Little Boys with your gun) the odds are much greater that you'll kill or maim people who you didn't want to kill or maim, rather than the Liberals, Blacks, Hispanics, Ay-Rabs, Indians, gays, or Real Bad-asses of whom you are so very afraid. Some of you actually got into college on Merit, meaning you know a little bit about Mathematics. Math is very important to such studies as Physics, including the Newtonian Laws governing the study of Ballistics. For those of you who didn't actually study to get into college, that's the study of the behavior of projectiles, applies to everything from a slingshot to a Nuclear Armed Intercontinental BALLISTIC Missile, but the most common usage is for firearms. Because firearms are so cheap, easy to purchase, and just any person regardless of (lack of) intelligence can purchase or steal one, it takes ZERO amount of courage, smarts or Toughness in any form to carry one, to load one or to fire one. One element of ballistics is that the rapidly travelling (around the speed of sound for just about any pistol or revolver, and there is a distinction between the two) will be travelling about 100 to 200 feet per second slower after it goes through the person you intended to shoot, assuming that you hit your target. Most shots fired even by trained individuals don't actually strike their intended targets. As hideous as the body count for either of the World Wars was, it's dwarfed by the number of shots fired. So you have a far greater "shot" at killing people you didn't intend to shoot. But the truly Delusional method of getting really Stupid People to stock up on guns is to convince them that the Gun will, in (lack of supporting) fact, make them less cowardly than they actually are. So they sell a whole bunch of Guns to emotionally crippled In-DUH-viduals who believe that kind of crap. And, trust me, or don't trust me, it won't
Silly warmongers, space is for kids
Once again the Colorado Springs peace community has the unique opportunity to protest the annual Space Symposium hosted at the Broadmoor. First, the event provides unparalleled access to the upper echelons of the US military industrial for-profit killing machine. And this year, their war-in-space theme is not even disguised: "Space as a Contested Environment." Think they're talking about Sputnik? Leave space to NASA, not to baby killers You can banner in front of weapons industry office buildings, you can have your progress blocked at their parking lots, but at the opening ceremonies of the Broadmoor Space Symposium, you can put your message directly in the faces of the war criminal bosses themselves. Details to follow.
Raytheon makes most popular US export
A middle aged tourist whom I met in Costa Rica told me that he was an engineer for Raytheon. He was anticipating cutbacks like everyone else facing the economic climate, but he really hoped that lawmakers would come to their senses and recognize that the weapons industry was America's most reliable profit center. Without any sense of the inhuman destructiveness of his products, he explained how an economic recovery would do better to rely more heavily on businesses like Raytheon.
Pro-militarism Gazette puff pieces have helped endanger GI lives
The Colorado Springs Gazette is always promoting military contractors and pushing for more warfare to keep that weapons industry moving, and has done this hiding behind the great pretense that they supposedly only care about American troops. That's their big lie and many readers fall for it. But let us look for a moment at KBR, one of those war profiteers that The Gazette has done puff pieces in their paper for previously in the not so distant past. KBR is in the press now once again for their company policy of having deliberately exposed American soldiers to toxic chemicals that are deadly fatal. See The Boston Globes recent article titled Witnesses link chemical to ill US soldiers So cut back to The Gazette's puff piece for KBR titled WORKING FAR FROM HOME By the way, KBR is actually the name of Halliburton these days, the company Dick Cheney came from. Notice how The Gazette puffed for these guys in 2001 like they were God's gift to America. We in Colorado Springs need to expose the lying propaganda of The Gazette, and point out how it helped expose American soldiers to deadly poisons. What a sorry ass newspaper!