Here Come The Real Lunatics - Let’s Repeal the Second Amendment

Ahem.  Title link of the op-ed proposing a repeal of the Second Amendment here.

Even in the best of circumstances, law enforcement has little chance of stopping a crime.  In most instances, violent crimes are first defended by the victim.  Or as recently noted by the Ohio attorney general,  citizens, including teachers, are first responders to crimes.  Law enforcement is there to pick up the pieces ex post facto.  Often after deaths, rapes, stabbings and the like. 

You are the first line of attack against your person. And, given how violent our society has become courtesy of deregulated, predatory capital, the military-industrial complex, the entertainment industry and the corporate state, never has the need been greater to defend yourself against state-created social violence.

As I have noted on here numerous times before, I am as close to an avowed pacifist as one can possibly be without actually being one. I am not a complete pacifist only for one reason. I know that the sociopath and predator only understands force.  They do not respond to reason or empathy.  They can only be dealt with through force.  If Neville Chamberlain, just one of a long line of liberals who somehow believe appeasement of evil will make the world a better place, understood this, we might never have had World War II.  Of course, if western capitalists, including those in England, didn’t enthusiastically help Hitler re-arm, we might not have had World War II.  But, then if France and England elites weren’t so interested in extracting reparations from Germany for their loss of wealth in World War I, …….   

Ignorance is seldom consistent with freedom.  And, even considering giving up any freedoms of We The People as in the Second Amendment, is most certainly based primarily in ignorance.  Turning over your ability to defend yourself, hunt, participate in sport, collect guns as investment or other reasons for gun ownership offers what advantage that anyone can cite as an  example of incontrovertible truth?  What historical context or human rights context can one cite where ceding gun ownership to the force of the state has really solved anything?   If you remove gang violence in our nation, by the way, a manifestation of violence primarily created by the state, guns aren’t even the top cause of murder in this nation.   FBI statistics show more people were killed with hammers than assault rifles.  These are shocking realities given how many hundreds of millions of guns exist in private hands in this nation.  If we were only so lucky with, say, alcohol or health care and related deaths.   Or, if only the corporate state was so lucky to have such positive results in the number of unnecessary deaths caused by the denial of health care or in the number of people granted a living wage.   Three hundred million guns in private hands in our nation is not the problem.  The three hundred corporate monopolies that run our fascist government are.

If we actually lived in a democracy rather than an exploitative, fascist society, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.  Because our society wouldn’t reflect the values of violence created and endorsed by a patriarchal state.  And, social violence in this nation wouldn’t be anywhere near what it is today.  Before neoliberal economics, the military-industrial complex, the complete chaos of deregulated capital and the rise of global fascism, there were neighborhoods, often even poverty-stricken, in this nation where people never even locked their doors.  Ever.  

I am horrified by the violence in our society and the tragic loss of life.  That said, as a person of reason, I find it rather refreshing that law-abiding citizens have recently broken a record with law-abiding FBI background checks required for law-abiding gun purchases.  They are taking responsibility for their own safety as first responders.  Of course, the lunatics in charge of the asylum point to this as clear reason why gun ownership should be banned in this nation.  That we are a nation crazed by guns.  But, law-abiding citizens or people of sound minds don’t shoot people.  People who are destabilized by the corporate state’s pharma drugfest, the military-industrial complex, deregulated capital and the industrial food monopoly often do.  There are certainly other factors that contribute to violence but the state is most certainly the major factor.    

Cut the loopholes in background checks and have an open, reasoned debate where society can participate, ie not controlled by the state or the complicit mainstream media, regarding assault weapons.  Should they require special licensing, special proof of competence, fingerprint authentication to fire, being restricted in terms of ability or ultimately, if democracy believes it necessary, the consideration of an assault weapons ban?  But that debate must also include an honest assessment of the root causes of violence in our nation.  That is toady politicians and the corporate state’s destruction of our democracy, any semblance of democratic economics and our freedoms.  

The calls to repeal the Second Amendment, always perpetuated by radical liberal idiots, serves what purpose other than another effort to make people more reliant on the corporate state?   You most certainly do have another option.  To continue to turn over your freedoms to the corporate state and allow them to increase the illegal spying, illegal torture, illegal denial of due process, illegal murder of American citizens, illegal search & seizure, illegal rendition, illegal entrapment and their anti-democratic war on American citizens that has landed more people in prison than even communist China.  Obviously, all of these efforts involving the force of the state are meant to protect you.  You know, like repealing the Second Amendment and the other force-driven illegal destructions of constitutional law.

Asking the corporate state, a manifestation of violence itself, to protect you from a violent society that simply reflects the state’s violent values is the definition of insanity.  In the neoliberal insanity that exists today, if I were a teacher, I would certainly entertain the law-abiding purchase of a gun.  Because they most certainly are on the receiving end of a tremendous amount of violence.  If it’s not a gun it will soon be something else. 

If you want to really deal with the violence in our society, dismantle the corporate state and restore democratic authority and responsibility to We The People.  Repealing the Second Amendment plays directly into the hands of the corporate state and the dumbed-down bureaucrats who benefit from it.