On June 27th 2008 the Supreme Court upheld the Second Amendment right to bear arms for self defense, 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.
While the decision left for another time how the standards by which gun-control laws nationwide will be evaluated, it was decisive about the District's law, the strictest in the country. In addition to prohibiting ownership of handguns, the city also requires that shotguns and rifles be kept unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock when in the home. It is of course one of the most crime ridden areas in the country. That is not a coincidence.
"We hold that the District's ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
“The Second Amendment,” Scalia said, "surely elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home."
You would think that would be obvious. But there is a set of people in high places who are determined to fix matters so that it is illegal for any American to own any kind of gun. And these people are very dangerous in any country, and are particularly so in a republic well on its way to becoming a fascist dictatorship because of the previous administration’s destruction of Civil Rights. Disarming the citizenry is always the first step to a dictatorship.
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 daily 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:
“The budget should be balanced. The treasury should be refilled. The public debt should be reduced. The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. The people should be forced to work, and not depend on the government for subsistence.”
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:
"The year 1935 will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!”
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. Knowing the name of everyone who legally owns a gun is the first step to picking them up when the government wants them confiscated.
When I bought my 'essential to survival' guns in Canada I just went to a hardware store and bought them. No paperwork, no bureaucracy, just part of my shopping cart.
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.
And once bureaucrats AND the law are allied against the citizen, which is beginning to happen more and more then travesties of justice will occur more and more frequently. Consider the recent case in that same District of Columbia affected by the Supreme Court decision.
To underscore their disappointment with the verdict D.C. officials, vowed to replace the now-voided gun ban with strict handgun regulations, raising the possibility of further litigation. The following travesty of justice shows what can happen when petty state officials have an axe to grind, possibly as a revenge gesture to the Supreme Court decision.
Corporal Cort, who enlisted in the Marines in 2004 served three combat tours in Iraq. He was on his way to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in DC for treatment and rehabilitation. He lost both legs in a roadside bomb incident in Ramadi and was confined to a wheelchair.
His home was in Columbus Ohio and he anticipated being away from home for a long stay in Walter Reed. In Ohio he had a permit to carry a pistol and checked with his commanding officer how he should deal with it. The commanding officer suggested that he hand it in to the armory at the medical center where it would be kept secure during his treatment.
So far, so good. But he and his wife had to drove into the crazy District of Colombia on the way to the hospital, because that’s where the hospital is. The car suffered a flat and they drove into a service station to get it fixed. Cort didn’t think it would be smart to leave the gun in the glove compartment while the car was serviced and transferred it to his jacket pocket to keep it safe.
Someone saw the gun and called the police. When they arrived they handcuffed the Marine in his wheelchair and took him off to jail for the night. He was charged with carrying a pistol without a license, a five year felony in DC., possession of an unregistered firearm and possession of ammunition. The last two are misdemeanor charges.
Marine Cort was assigned a public defender who advised him to plead guilty. Not being stupid the corporal decided to fight the accusations. If he had pled guilty he would have lost his right to own a gun for life. He would have lost all of his medical and veteran’s benefits, and he may well have been dishonorably discharged from the Marines. And his real crime was getting a flat tire in a place where anti-gun fanaticism gains political brownie points.
Juries twice deadlocked and on January 13th this year with Cort acting in his own defense a jury acquitted him of the DC gun ban charges but found him guilty of the ammunition misdemeanor.
Obviously he was smart to act in his own defense when offered such a wimp as his public defender, and he is going to appeal the misdemeanor too. He had a flat tire when going through a place where the rules were politically motivated, in a jurisdiction where self defense of one’s home was a crime.
But the cause and effect between guns and crime is now treated by media and politicians without regard for truth. 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 when I lived in Chicago who habitually carried hand guns. Illinois is one of two states that doesn’t have a Right to Carry provision for authorized people. I asked them why they carried guns. 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 defense is my right, whatever some slimy lawyer says.” He has a point. It's the reason I'm writing this.
This sounds like sublimated common sense, which virtue of course is totally absent in bureaucracies and among lawyers upgrading their resumes. And Illinois has quite a gun crime record, because only the police and criminals (sometimes the same people) carry guns. Gun control laws in Illinois, one of the most politically corrupt states in the union, are not about guns, they are about control.
But how about Britain, and the other country, Australia. As predicted years back 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. That’s disarmament of the lawful owners and of law-abiding citizens either way. But the cause and effect possibility of this process was totally lost to the politicians 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 government controlled television in any country. Remember 9/11. That's one of the changes since the time of Hitler.
And the word ‘automatic’ in the mouth of such people can include any gun that has a magazine with several cartridges. But it is always used in a sentence as if they are describing machine guns that can spray bullets like rain. A trick of phrasing to convey a lie.
Then in 1997, nine years later, not a day later, a 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, as recent history shows, we elect psychopaths and sociopaths, grant them unlimited power by our non-action, 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. Just what Hitler said and did. The same thing is happening here of course, except that here the opponents also stoop to making up spurious statistics to support their thesis. The criminal elements are unaffected of course.
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.
None of the US media point out that murders with other weapons are thirty times as numerous as those in which guns are used. That’s not a sensational piece of news.
And gun violence cases are always treated as straightforward. In the case of the Columbine massacre the one point that wasn’t emphasized 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 and other powerful mind altering drugs for behavior modification. I blame a great deal of domestic violence on the side effects of prescribed drugs. But blaming doctors for anything is taboo.Look at the ads for drugs in magazines.
That violent behavior/drug connection isn’t going to be in the advertising financed media, anymore than the cruelty of teenagers to those different from them in any way was considered much in the Cho case. Though anyone who has been to school would see that it was a critical part of the process of turning him into a killer.
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 would politely 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. It’s B.S. Investigation always shows that the students have been the victim of cruel teen age taunts and/or mind altering medications. The Columbine and Virginia Tech events are fading away now except in the minds of the families of the victims and of the unstable who are aiming to do a better job with own rampage.
My previous article about this subject The Right to Self Defense 7/13/2008 contains the complete history of the Valentine’s Day massacre and how it was obviously medication related.
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. It took years to bring him to that point. The reasons weren’t made public because the reasons, like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech were connected with medications and taunting, and also in Kazmierezak’s case his praiseworthy tremendous personal efforts to deal with his problems that were blocked by various authorities.
The politicians, who will do or say anything for votes, as we know, will attack the gun as the enemy. They can tell all the lies they want to about guns because guns don’t have voices to reply to them. And people who don’t know anything about guns, except what they see on the ultra violent TV of America will believe anything they are told as long as it has a negative connotation and can arouse fear.
So let’s 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, since the public have been disarmed, are now the first and second in the whole world in terms of violence of gun carrying criminals against an unarmed public. We could be first pretty quickly if the American public were disarmed.
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. Remember this little aphorism“ Gun control isn’t about guns. It’s about control.”
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 still being ruled by unscrupulous millionaires or corporations with no interest in or understanding of the majority of their fellow 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 on the streets still had their guns. But it sounded good. It will sound good here too. No laws will stop the criminals from having guns.
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, until it was too late. The warmed up lobster effect.
This banned culture included Britain’s Olympic pistol team who now have to go to France, Switzerland or here, to practice. They can’t own handguns in Britain. Only criminals, the police and the army 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, and they are now in power, it could happen here, and nobody seems to be 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. They are not concerned 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.
Prime Minister Blair, like so many political trouble makers was a born again Christian fishing for the right wing Christian vote, whatever the cost to the country. 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 as I mentioned before. 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 wounded one had been hauled into court on criminal charges 52 times. It was the record free Tony Martin who was prosecuted and sentenced to life in prison for murder. That insane situation could happen here, and fairly soon.
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. American lawyers could think up even more bizarre scenarios, and they could apply to you.
Remember OJ. The fact that he was heading to Mexico with $10,000 in cash and a false beard immediately after the death of his wife was explained in two words by his attorney…’race prejudice.’ And it worked.
The Tony Martin shotgun 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 shotgun with the proper hand load was used by some crazy British 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. No charge for the suggestion. Use number 3 shot or slugs.
The British Government now forbids citizens from carrying ANY article that might be used for self defense, 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. And this insanity could easily happen here.
The gun control fanatics are unable to see the consequences of their actions apparently. The connections between cause and effect are not available to humans until about 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, or their protection.
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 in the 1930’s, 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 girl child who found a plastic knife dropped from a lunch box in her classroom, and gave it to the teacher, was suspended for handling a weapon. The teacher could have been fired for NOT reporting it.
And security at airports has become another bureaucratic exercise in idiocy. When a National Guardsman came on security duty at an airport with an Irish name, 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 automatic rifle and ammunition.
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.”
Until the American public stops being the wimps of the world, putting up with crap that fills the streets with angry protesters in other countries, the only remedy to mention is the vote.
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,
Or as V put it succinctly in the best movie ever about government tyranny, 'V for Vendetta,' “People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.” If that surprises you it shows how far the rot has gone. Watch the DVD. I’ve seen it fifty times in two languages. It always inspires. It didn’t get much publicity here, too close to the truth.
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. It never occurs to them to say that every criminal using an unregistered weapon should be hit with AT LEAST the blast they are willing to direct at law abiding citizens who own guns. Every criminal with an unregistered gun is immediately a felon, and that’s all of those that carry guns. Treating them as such would remove any need for gun control laws for law-abiding citizens.
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 magazines 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, not the criminal.
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?
Whenever the Brady Campaign people talk about ‘assault rifles’ watch yourself and your reaction. They are experts at using emotionally filled and totally inaccurate words when they talk about guns. Some of the guns they refer to as ‘high powered’ another favorite phrase, are much less powerful than the ancient but famous 30-30 lever Winchester rifle that you see in old John Wayne movies.
Like the neo-cons who got us into the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan they have absolutely no regard for the truth, only for their purpose, which is to disarm the American public by any method possible, and pretend it is for their own good, just like Hitler.
The Obama administration, by accident or design, is filled with people who have made their political careers out of anti-gun rhetoric. The semi-automatic firearm and handgun licensing bill, HR 45 is the work of one of the Illinois Democrats. He is Representative Bobby Rush who was a co-founder of the Black Panthers. When he was active with the Panthers he spent six months in jail on weapons charges. Now he supports a total ban on the private possession of handguns. Maybe he would then revive the Black Panthers. We in this state are beginning to think that anything is possible with an Illinois politician.
A president can do many things without the aid of Congress. Bill Clinton, for example, asked other countries not to sell arms to the USA. His Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms policy put 80% of licensed gun dealers in this country out of business. In 1992 there were 245,000 dealers in this country. Now there are around 50,000. Obama has similar powers to affect the sales of guns to private citizens.
People who have been watching this matter have just about emptied the major gun distributors of self defense weapons since Obama was elected. The panic buying after his inauguration was only equaled by the panic buying just after 9/11. The possibility of anti-gun legislation putting a tax of 10 cents on each cartridge has had prudent people buying cartridges by the case instead of the box.
And the politicians will always say it is to help or protect you. They could for example say that to protect the American worker they are stopping the import of guns made in other countries. Sounds good. But when you look for your all American John Wayne Winchester from the All American Winchester Firearms Company you find it is now owned by a Belgian gun company now and they aren’t making that model any more. Your traditional Samuel Colt Company that made the Peacemaker 45 of all the cowboy movies is now owned by an Iraqi named Zilkha related to the richest Jewish family in the USA. They aren’t making it any more.
The famous US Army M16 rifle is no longer made by American Colt. It is made by a Belgian company, Fabrique Nationale, the largest gun maker in the world. The US Army has just ordered 475,000 Beretta handguns for the troops. Some 20,000 are destined for the troops in Iraq. Delivery is already under way. Beretta is an Italian company that has been making guns since about 1550. Were you naïve enough to think that ‘Buy American’ referred to the American army?
You may already be too late to get your personal, American made self defense handgun or shotgun. After all we’ve been outsourcing skilled machine work to other countries to save money for bonuses for top level administrators, and to cut down the influence of unions. But it will be to keep you safe, remember, as always. The criminals will not be affected, only honest people. As in prohibition days your only recourse may be to buy from the criminals themselves.
Like the lobster in the pot who stays put as the water temperature is gradually increased, your rights are gradually being stripped from you. There is a point of no return both for the lobster and you. Keep alert. News about celebrities will not benefit you, or stop the water from boiling.
Currently it is legal in most states, Wisconsin and our own corrupt Illinois being the exceptions, to carry a gun with an applied for and officially granted concealed weapon permit, on national park lands. The anti-gun group is filing a lawsuit claiming that their members will be afraid to visit national parks if the Right to Carry is allowed. Arousing fear is what the neo-cons did over the Twin Towers and used it ruthlessly to destroy the Constitution. Don’t fall for it again.
I shall never go back to Britain on the principle that I wouldn’t voluntarily enter a tyranny, however glowingly it is described in the guide books. And maybe I will have to leave this country, whose potential I admire greatly, if the great majority of ignorant TV addicts are suckered into giving up their right to defend themselves and their families. Constant vigilance is the key, not unthinkingly swallowing and repeating the garbage spewed out by such as multi millionaire Rush Limbaugh and his sycophants.
