The Supreme Court has recently upheld the Second Amendment right to bear arms for self defence, and struck down the thirty year old Washington DC handgun ban. This of course has raised screams of anguish from people who haven’t actually read the Bill of Rights and who can make cheap political points by ‘tough on crime’ speeches.
I was delighted to hear the verdict and distressed that it wasn’t 9 to 0. Having four dissenters was quite a shock to me. A few words about that seem to be in order from this particular alien, who is definitely a lover of peace, but not a pacifist, or an enthusiast on complying with unjust laws.
We have all probably encountered the saying that those who don’t learn from history are forced to repeat it. As life seems to be speeding up in this century the current headlines make this statement more and more cogent.
There is a street in Chicago called Cicero that actually comes thirty or forty miles right through the South Suburbs. It was probably named after some local politician years ago, but the historically famous Roman statesman Cicero died in 43 B.C. When Rome was the mightiest military power in the world, and looked like it could stay that way for another thousand years, he said this to the Roman Senate:
We all know what happened to Rome. It collapsed under the weight of public debt, expensive mass entertainment for mobs of non-producers, political corruption, and a few other familiar items. Those who think that history began with the American Revolution may care to consider how much we have gained in political wisdom in 2000 years. Not much apparently!
It seems to me that the only difference between the politicians of Rome and those here, and in other countries, is that the Romans wore white togas, instead of black business suits and power ties. The goals of politicians nowadays look the same as they were then—personal power, feeding at the public trough, and getting re-elected, whatever it takes. Maybe we haven’t learned much since Cicero.
Come closer to our time. In 1935 this announcement was made by a prominent politician.
These words were said by Adolf Hitler. Every tyrant has initiated ways of disarming the civilian population. When only the authorities have weapons then total state control of the citizens is just around the corner, always.
But since 1935 when the Nazis united the Germans by inventing an enemy, the Jews, and pouring its full propaganda force into making the public fear that enemy, and then mobilizing the willing public against that enemy, some things have changed.
This tactic was coupled in Germany with the complete suppression of any dissenting voices of course. That particular tactic hasn’t changed and has become more effective now in every country that has television and radio. In this country dissenting voices are ignored, at the moment rather than suppressed. If it isn’t on government friendly TV it isn’t news apparently. And a 100,000 protest march will be reported as 4,000, if at all.
But the cause and effect between guns and crime is now different from those days. Common sense long ago disappeared from politics which is now a matter of pressure groups and campaign contributions. So common sense was lost in two particular countries as soon as some politicians realized that they could raise their votes and demonize their political opponents by spinning the fiction that guns are the cause of crime. The results of this spin are among the reasons that I will never go back to Britain, or visit Australia.
It has been found by many studies in this country that gun-based crime is less in those states where people are permitted to own and carry weapons without official harassment. That seems a pretty obvious matter. The criminal doesn’t know if his target is armed. Duh!
I had many Greek friends in Chicago who habitually carried hand guns. I asked them why. They explained that if the public was barred from carrying guns then obviously the criminals could assume that they were the only people with guns and would feel free to do what they liked. As one said to me. “ I would prefer being on trial for killing some crook than have him on trial for killing me. Self defence is my right, whatever some slimy lawyer says.” He has a point.
This sounds like sublimated common sense, which virtue of course is totally absent in bureaucracies and among lawyers upgrading their resumes.
But now about Britain, and the other country, Australia. As predicted by thinking people who used guns for recreational purposes, every so-called “ reasonable” step of gun registration, licensing of owners, mandatory methods of gun storage and so forth, led eventually to the same result; gun confiscation, or government theft, since I tend to call a spade a spade. Disarmament of the lawful owners and of law-abiding citizens either way. But the cause and effect possibility of this process was totally lost in the political ecstasy of defeating opponents of the gun control measures.
In 1988 a deranged man went on a rampage in England and shot several people. The government immediately whipped up a frenzy of public opinion as though this was likely to happen everywhere immediately, and banned automatic shotguns and rifles. It takes three days to do this now using controlled television in any country. Remember 9/11.
Then in 1997, nine years later, not a day later, and in a different country, another madman shot some people in Scotland with a handgun and this incident was used to make the possession of handguns a criminal offence. A similar thing happened in Australia because a crazy person, armed with an illegal rifle killed people in Tasmania.
In both nations, because of the single incidents of individual criminals, sociopaths or psychopaths the legal property of law-abiding citizens was first declared contraband and then confiscated, purely to make political points. My alien political point is that in this country we elect psychopaths and sociopaths and then wonder why everything goes wrong.
The politicians and the controlled media in both countries said that disarming the public was for their own good, and would take guns out of the hands of the criminal elements. The same thing is happening here of course, except that here the opponents also stoop to making up spurious statistics to support their thesis.
Nobody bothers to explain how a wholesale loss to the public at large of a valued liberty will prevent the actions of an individual sociopath. Or how confiscating the guns of law abiding people will make any difference to the criminal who doesn’t get his guns legally.
And gun violence cases are always treated as straightforward. In the case of the Columbine massacre the one point that wasn’t emphasised in the reports is what drugs had been prescribed for the two boys concerned. We know about the suicidal effects of withdrawal of Ritalin on people and the effects on their ability to be aggressive. And we know that it’s often the very smart and intelligent who are put on Ritalin for behaviour modification. I blame a great deal of domestic violence on the side effects of prescribed drugs.
But that isn’t going to be in the media, anymore than the cruelty of teenagers to those different from them in any way was considered much in the Cho case.
When a totally insensitive media member shoves a microphone in the face of the family member or lover of the person who has just killed several people and then himself, the automatic response is always, “We never saw it coming.” The correct response I feel would be to grab the microphone and smash it as hard as possible in the face of the creep concerned. Then of course you ask the insensitive monster if he saw it coming.
The killers are always portrayed as sensitive, often smart students without an enemy in the world. That’s for the tabloids. Investigation always shows that the students have been the victim of teen age taunts and mind altering medications. The Columbine and Virginia events are fading away now except in the minds of the families of the victims and of the unstable who are aiming to do it better themselves. Let’s look a little deeper at the unfortunate young man in the NIU incident this year, called the Valentine’s Day Massacre by some.
When Kazmierczak killed five students, wounded around twenty and then shot himself in the Northern Illinois University Valentine’s Day incident in 2008 the immediate reports were that he was a sweet, unassuming overachiever who just snapped one day for no apparent reason. That’s total BS. The reasons weren’t made public because the reasons, like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech were connected with medications and taunting.
In December 1996, Steve, as we shall call him, sold all his personal gear in preparation for suicide. He overdosed on Tylenol. He didn’t die because he was rushed to hospital and put on anti-depressant medications. In just a few months the effect of the medications was to bloat him from a very skinny person to a three hundred pound blimp. The Prozac gave him what looked like terminal acne. Great side effects for self esteem.
The jocks who rule the roost in American schools called him Suicide Steve and hazed him with the same sensitivity as the reporter with the microphone, i.e. zero.
In April the following year Steve overdosed on Ambien; took about forty of them and slit his wrists. Another failure. He didn’t die. Back to hospital.
In November the same year he took fifty Depakote to ensure that he doesn’t have to go to school any more. That’s Elk Grove High School in case you think this sort of thing is a recommendation. Again he didn’t die and ended up in hospital. Another failure.
In January 1998 he was in hospital again because of suicidal thoughts. That happened four days after a neighbor reported him for smoking marijuana. No wonder he thought everyone was against him.
In February he was back in hospital again for suicidal thoughts. He took 120 doses of Depakote, but it didn’t kill him. Just put him in deeper problems socially. In June that year he graduated from Elk and entered a group home. The entry forms relate that he is taking Prozac and Zyprexa one time each day and Depakote twice a day. His previous medications included Paxil, Cogentin, Risperdal, Lithium and Cylert. Look these up on the Web. It’s a wonder he could even remember his name.
The home tried to get him jobs in Walgreens, Kmart and can you believe it, at an Osco pharmacy. Dracula in a blood bank. He didn’t last at any of them, poor attendance was one reason, maybe because he was on Seroquel and Clozaril at the time. Hard to get up in the morning.
But he showed his amazing inner strength when he visited his sister at the U of I. He saw people his own age who were happy and not spaced out on drugs all the time. He had an epiphany that he had been broken by the drugs and that he had to get off them and do something productive.
So he applied for some courses in a two-year community college. His ‘therapists’ warned him that by getting involved in school work and possibly neglecting his mental problems he could mess up all the progress he had made. At this point you are probably thinking the same as I, what progress.
He weaned himself off the drugs and gave his therapists fictional reports of their side effects. Five months later he told them what he had done. They reviewed his five month record and found it wanting and discharged him because he was no longer cooperating.
So Steve bit yet another bullet and joined the Army. Where the form asks about suicide attempts he said NO. When it asked about treatment for a mental condition he said NO. When it asked if he had used illegal drugs or abused prescription drugs he said NO.
He got his $4000 cash bonus and began training at Fort Sill, OK. Everything worked out well for him. He didn’t have to think. None of the people he was with spent any time thinking, they just did what they were told. No decisions. He was a compulsive checker, checked everything three times. Outside the army this is freaky, obsessive behaviour. Inside he collected congratulations for his neatness and thoroughness.
He was taught how to kill, how to use modern weapons. His tests showed no emotional or psychological response to this…just what the army tries to achieve in most people by training. Another plus.
And then it all collapsed. He was pulled in for a psych test for reasons nobody told him and then he was discharged for fraudulent enlistment because he lied on his application. So in 2002, February 13th, which may be a significant coincidence to some, he was taken back home. He had learned to kill and to associate socially with others and he had also been completely without drugs for a year.
In August that year he was in a dormitory with three others at NIU campus. His nickname was Strange Steve, and he knew it. One of his companions told everyone who would listen that Steve was a psycho. Great for self esteem.
Because of the influence of a professor there Steve became interested in sociology and criminology. He was smart and did very well, even coming third out of ninety in the hardest course of all, statistics. He became a tutor for junior students and inspired several of them to apply to grad school. Finally he won the Dean’s award as an undergraduate. None of the jocks who taunted him managed to do this, but they are the heroes.
Then his mother died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in September 2002. He wasn’t close to her because he thought she was afraid of him. That’s change number one.
Change number two: NIU had cut down on the sociology courses and cut out the advanced courses in criminology. He and his current girl friend were both recommended as grad students at U of I in Champaign, hours away and necessitating making changes and finding new friends. He began to freak out again about all the decisions and changes.
He stopped going to his grad classes at NIU because his credits wouldn’t apply to U of I. He began to buy guns. As he had been out of the mental health system for five years he could legitimately do this. Instead of going to classes whose credits wouldn’t transfer he began to go to the firing range with his new guns and skipped classes.
Then Cho killed thirty-two people at Virginia Tech. Steve was already known for boring people to death by repeating stories about Hitler and how clever various murderers had been, and Cho’s feat really inspired him. He went on and on about how clever Cho had been in his preparations.
He and his girl friend were living together in an apartment in Champaign and he began his checking behaviour, washing his hands twenty times a day, washing his hands after touching anything that anyone else has touched, checking that the door is locked many times. His girl friend told him that he should get a medical check up. So he did. He made an appointment at the medical center in U of I. in August 2007. Same day he traded in his guns and upgraded to more powerful weapons. He was put on Prozac. First time for over five years. Looks like a medical reflex.
In September he went back to the center because of heart palpitations, due he said, to worry about his father and unexpressed grief about his mother. They increased his dose of Prozac and added Xanax twice a day.
Almost immediately he began a job as a correctional officer in the famous Rockville Correctional Facility in Indiana. They taught him how to use a 12 gauge Remington shotgun. By an unfortunate piece of mind wandering he got to work late one day and the rules say you must start training again from the beginning if you are late. It didn’t help that he was caught speeding in order to get to work on time. Increase in paranoia.
His life began to fall apart again. At Christmas 2007 he had dinner with his girl friend and his father and they dropped the father off at the house of Steve’s sister. He had vowed never to see her again, so he had his girl friend drop her present off at the door. It was a box of coal wrapped in Christmas paper.
In January 2008 he contacted a Navy recruiter and said he wanted to join up. There wouldn’t be any problem it seemed, as long as he wasn’t currently taking any meds when he took the psychiatric exam. So he tries discipline again, and goes off the Prozac etc. Immediately all his obsessive compulsive behaviour returns.
In February he bought extra magazines and ammunition for his .380 pistol. Less than a week later he bought a Remington shotgun like the one he was trained on, and a Glock 9mm, a very powerful modern pistol.
He called his girl friend on Valentine’s Eve telling her she would be receiving a package but not to open it until Valentine’s Day if it got there sooner. It turned out to be a very expensive ring.
Next day he went to the Intro. to Ocean Science room and used his shotgun six times on students, and his pistols forty seven times, and shot himself with the forty eighth shot, the last one left in the magazine. Obviously cool, collected and aware of every time he pressed the trigger.
He was described as I said before, as a sweet, unassuming, overachieving grad student who suddenly snapped for no reason.
Obviously however it was the end of a tortuous and horrific trail of mental problems brought about or exacerbated by the overmedication of symptoms and the use of drugs to modify behaviour to keep other people happy, rather than to cure underlying issues. The cruelty of teen agers to one another didn't help.
This is probably true of ALL the shootings involving people at the end of their tether. I’ve gone into some detail here. If you investigate the Columbine shooters and Virginia Tech Cho you will see many of the same patterns. Let’s get on with it after that detour. Six second sound bites don’t do it in complex situations, and that’s all the media are going to give you. Readers know better. See the August 2008 issue of Esquire for a thorough treatment of the issue, and check the incidents on the Web, which does a better job than the tabloids or news bites.
And now look at the result of concentrating on the gun as the enemy. In both those countries I mentioned, gun related crimes have increased dramatically. Merry Olde Englande and Australia are now the first and second in the whole world in terms of violence of gun carrying criminals against an unarmed public.
Murders in London tripled in 2001. You are three times as likely now to be the victim of a gunman in London than in New York. And as criminal violence has increased so the insane ‘ solution’ of more gun control has been the only focus of the monomaniacal politicians. Clear thinking is as rare among politicians in Britain as it is here. Dead horses are the first ones flogged.
And remember that politics is the only profession in which a serious examination or examinations do not have to be passed in order to enter it. In this country an access to great wealth and a network of contacts is all that is necessary in many instances. In England it is definitely a matter of old money and which school or college you went to that gives the influence needed.
As is clear from our own institutions we can be ruled by a puppet surrounded by thugs in suits, as a Common Dreams reporter recently wrote. We are being ruled by unscrupulous millionaires or corporations with no interest in or understanding of the majority of their citizens.
In England in 1998 the Home Secretary proudly announced “ The government has fulfilled its pledge to remove all handguns from the streets of Britain today.” This of course was the usual twisted half lie that politicians use so cleverly. Those guns were NOT on the streets. They were in the private homes of law-abiding citizens. The criminals still had their guns. But it sounded good. It will sound good here too.
Then the government said that….” It has put a firm brake on the development of a dangerous gun culture in the UK.” Another lie. The “dangerous gun culture” was made up of law-abiding citizens who naively believed that registering their guns was a harmless move, and obeyed every restriction the government could think up. This banned culture included Britain’s Olympic pistol team who now have to go France, Switzerland or here, to practice. They can’t own handguns in Britain. Only criminals, the police and the army can own guns. This is insanity. Doubtless there are people who think that every Olympic Games marksman is a potential Jesse James.
So it’s obvious why I am not going to go back to a country run by lunatics where every action is made with an eye on influential voting blocs and not on history or common sense. But note well what has happened since, because if a similar bunch of people have their way it could happen here, and nobody is mentioning the possibility.
I do not own a handgun. I would want a good one and they are too expensive for me to buy as a retiree. If I had sufficient discretionary income in the current political climate I would certainly buy one. When I lived in Canada, teaching Indians, I had to use a rifle and shotgun to get food from the supermarket of the forest. And I was a one shot marksman. I know how to use guns therefore, unlike many hysterical people who get all their gun data from violent TV movies, and was once a member of a team of competition shooters using handguns, before retirement occurred.
I belong to the NRA because it was the very first civil rights organization in this country. And civil rights are important to me. And I have to mention that when I used a gun to feed myself and others, or as a recreational shooter, I NEVER even once pointed a gun at another human being, even an unloaded gun. And neither did anyone in my groups or team who actually knew how to handle a gun.
And I must mention too that Canada has more guns per person than America, but there is proportionally far less gun crime because Canadian culture is less violence oriented than American culture.
Every household in Switzerland that has an adult man in it also has a gun in it. Gun crime in Switzerland is non existent compared with ours. It isn’t the gun that does the damage. It’s the finger on the trigger and the brain behind the finger.
Trial lawyers on the whole in any country are concerned only with the letter of the law, and how they can twist the words, not with justice or humanity or common sense. Britain does not have a constitution. In a reaction to the crime situation the Blair government pressed for new laws that take away civil liberties that are centuries old., including the right to choose trial by jury, the right to remain silent, the right against self incrimination, and it is pressing for hearsay evidence…gossip…to be admissible in civil trials. Maybe it’s a contagious disease he caught from George W.
Blair, like so many political trouble makers is a born again Christian. We had here a religious bigot as Attorney General in Ashcroft, and the same process of disarming the public is well under way already with a different excuse of course…national security. Any excuse will do for the power hungry. The Supreme Court decision has slowed down the flow a little, but the media are criticizing them intensely.
But note the next step which may happen here too. In Britain, now that the citizens are disarmed, it has become a criminal offense to protect oneself against criminals.
For example: Tony Martin is a 54 year old farmer whose home had been several times burglarized. He heard burglars in his home and confronted them with a shotgun. He shot one dead, wounded another and the third got away. The dead one had been arrested 29 times for crimes including burglary and assaulting the police, the other had been hauled into court on criminal charges 52 times. It was Tony Martin who was prosecuted and sentenced to life in prison for murder.
The sentence was reduced to manslaughter and he is serving seven years in jail. The wounded burglar was consulted by the Home Office as to whether Tony Martin would be subject to parole. The government gave this burglar £5000 (taxpayer’s money) so that he could afford a lawsuit against Tony Martin. This is the insanity that occurs when lawyers are let loose to try out new approaches to improving their trial statistics.
The Tony Martin system is the anti criminal solution for me, since a good .44 Magnum is out of reach financially, and functional shotguns are inexpensive. A twelve gauge, double barreled shotgun with the proper hand load was used by crazy hunters I knew in Kenya. They reckoned it was fairer to the lions they hunted to have to get close enough for the shotgun to do the job, within maybe 20 yards.
They despised people who used high powered rifles with telescopic sights and killed the lion when they were so far away that it couldn’t even be aware of them. And what would fix a lion would fix a burglar.
The British Government now forbids citizens from carrying any article that might be used for self defence, even knitting needles and walking sticks have been declared offensive weapons in court cases.. A British citizen who held two burglars at bay with a toy gun was arrested for using an imitation gun to threaten and intimidate. A British Petroleum executive was assaulted and injured in a London Underground train. In desperation he fought off his attackers with the ornamental sword blade in his walking stick. He was tried and convicted of carrying an offensive weapon.
The gun control fanatics are unable to see the consequences of their actions apparently. The connections between cause and effect are not available until the mental age of seventeen. Hence the three times the number of driving accidents of sixteen year olds over the seventeen year olds. Maybe the mental age of our rulers is the trouble.
The innocent will always be the target of government action, and the strange logic of lawyers will ensure complete decimation of all human and humanitarian rights, for the good of the public of course. Always for their own good.
And the disease of control for its own sake is alive and well here too. Children have been suspended from school because they pointed a loaded finger at another child and said, “Bang!”
When I was a kid, in a boy’s school, that attitude would have emptied the school. Of course those were the days of Cowboys and Indians as a major playground activity. There is no sense in any law when applied by a bureaucrat or interpreted by a lawyer. The child who found a plastic knife from a lunch box in her classroom and gave it to the teacher was suspended for handling a weapon.
And security at airports has become another bureaucratic exercise in idiocy. When a National Guardsman came on security duty at an airport not all that far away, he had to go through the screening like everybody else. He handed his automatic rifle and other lethal metal objects of his trade to the personnel and then still beeped the machine. He had a Swiss Army knife in his pocket. “You aren’t allowed to take that any further.” said the idiot in charge of public security. He did his duty by the rules, confiscated the deadly Swiss Army knife, and gave back the harmless automatic rifle.
A friend of mine was stopped in a European airport because she had a zipped up manicure set, and the nail scissors and nail file were bureaucratically dangerous weapons. She never got the chance to assault the pilot with her nail scissors. Bummer, a life ambition thwarted. They were confiscated of course, like the Swiss Army knife.
This is the sort of thing that must happen where bureaucrats are concerned. The great rule of bureaucracy is “No exceptions!” “The rule is clear and everybody must obey it.”
The election is coming up soon and major issues of civil rights may not even be mentioned much because of the apparent current need for a country with thousands of nuclear weapons and a $500 plus billion Pentagon budget to intimidate a country with no nuclear weapons, but a lot of oil.
This great danger to the American people, over 2000 miles away, is likely to remain the noisiest issue with accusations of being unpatriotic if you remember your children and your own liberties, and check your candidate’s stance on guns and the insanity of attacking Iran in the interests of the genocidal Israelis.
And I’m glad that as an alien I don’t have some of those choices to make when just about every candidate in this democratic republic with millions of unemployed, and foreclosed is a millionaire, or at least very rich and getting richer and if an incumbent, can grant himself a $5000 pay raise without needing even to vote on the matter. But as a human I do have a duty to fellow human beings to mention these matters just in case nobody else does.
Just look for a moment at what is actually in the document that the Founding Fathers penned. Remember that Jefferson, one of the major brains of this brilliant group said this,
The people who wrote the Second Amendment did NOT suggest that the people might possibly have the right to keep and bear arms. They ACKNOWLEDGED that such a right already existed and should be continued. They said, “ The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
The media of course will play the card of expected tremendously increased gun violence, though all the facts are against it.
No amount of legal chicanery will stop criminals obtaining firearms. Criminals do not give a fig about the law. The only people affected are honest citizens.
But look at all the accounts of people being killed with guns, you might say. O.K. but where are the accounts of people being saved from harm because they had a gun when the criminal appeared. Every issue of the NRA magazine has many examples of old ladies or gas station attendants who didn’t get raped or killed because they had a gun. Those incidents are not headline material. It’s easy to count victims, that’s headline stuff, but the occasions when a gun saves a life is not news. It doesn’t make the right political point. Silence is a standard weapon of tyrants. Silence and secrecy.
A recent article from someone who had actually read the Second Amendment pointed out that you would be better off having a gun in the bedroom rather than a phone, if an armed criminal broke in. You could quite easily prevent the crime with a gun. With a phone you would get the police to the scene of the crime in time to photograph your dead body, and write a report. Great choice! And your death would then be used as an excuse for tougher gun laws against the law abiding citizen.
Matters like this are easy to find out about by looking on the web, or at foreign newspapers. NOT reporting something is the way news that the authorities don’t like is treated here. And there is a whole lot that never gets into the American press or on the TV screen. This is reasonable, since the media is run by corporate advertising revenues, and we all know how honest those who run corporations are, don’t we?
Good luck with your election choices, and with the Republican owned voting machine you get to use, and with the choice of people who report the vote count, and are expert at losing the votes of black voters and poor folks, or jamming the phone lines of Democrats, or telling people without transport they must go to another voting station miles away on the wrong day, not to mention a little hacking that gives the preferred candidate more votes than there are voters in the district. After all, it’s a free country with liberty and justice for all.
