Take Our Guns? Over our Dead Bodies!

Well, maybe.

Or the dead bodies of our children and friends.

I know, I know, Second Amendment and all that but get real; you will never be better armed than your government and you are going to lose a shootout with them no matter what. This isn’t 1776. Ruby Ridge, Waco and Occupy taught us that.

I know, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Not to put too fine a point on it, but technically, it’s the bullets.

And, that would seem to me to be at least one place we could start to find some compromise between no guns and vast unlimited arsenals of nothing more than implements of death. Ammunition could be made far less deadly and destructive, and who needs thousands of rounds?

Hunters, real sportsmen, go into the field with single shot weapons. Being from the middle of nowhere, my parents owned thirteen guns between them, none of which was a handgun. And, only two of them were repeaters; my mother’s custom Browning 16 gauge over and under (2 shots) and an automatic repeating rifle that I never saw come out of its very distinctive leather case.

It was half the length of the long gun cases. It may not have been legal at the time because, even as a kid, I perceived that my parents seemed to regard this particular gun with a great deal more gravitas.

If they take all of our guns away, we won’t need the bullets. So, maybe the two sides could come together and find common ground on the ammunition.

Unfortunately, the discussion involving whether or not guns should be legal is an argument that leads right to where the gun lobby wants it—nowhere.

On the one hand, those with criminal intent won’t care whether guns are legal or not. They’ll just get them from the Department of Justice when they work out the agreement on the money laundering services also conveniently available through a “single point of contact” at the DOJ.

Beyond that, with over 200 million privately owned guns in about 50 million American homes, seizing them would be a monumental task involving lots of domestic bloodshed.

What we do not need right now is a nationwide search of every farmhouse, outhouse, or chicken coop looking for guns to confiscate.

Guns and bullets are only symptoms of a disease, our mental health crisis.

The unrelenting stresses of a failing economy and the sense of outrage being felt as more and more people feel powerless against the oppression are increasing the murder and murder/suicide rates in every community.

Always absent from any discussion about health care are the health care risks posed to innocent people by a system that devotes fewer and fewer resources to mental illness. If it isn’t bleeding it won’t be treated.

The reaction in Aurora in the wake of the theater shootings has been a curious one, an increase in gun sales…presumably to take to the movies.

The people who sell metal detectors must be just drooling having calculated that there are about 39,000 movie theatres in America.

But, it won’t help. Anywhere people gather can provide an opportunity for a nut job to kill a bunch of people. The mall, the marina, the hospital, the amusement park, the day care center are all vulnerable. We don’t need metal detectors, we need mental detectors.

You don’t need a gun to inflict mayhem and misery. Timothy McVey brought down a seven story building killing 178 and injuring hundreds with a U-Haul full of fertilizer.

But, there is a bigger problem. We are a nation steeped in violence. We forcibly took this land and murdered those who stood in our way. I’m not pointing the finger; my family was leading the way.

War is our primary domestic export. Remember when we were “hog butcher for the world”? Today we are the people butcher for the world. At the moment, there are 121 wars being waged around the world, and one way or another, we have got our hand or our arms in all of them.

If we aren’t selling them weapons directly, we are supplying them through some sort of shadowy middleman. That is why there is the occupational title of “Arms Dealer”.

This is how they avoid the brief but embarrassing revelations such as the Justice Department selling guns directly to the Mexican drug cartels. Text your friendly arms dealer and build a layer of plausible deniability. Those wild and crazy, though grossly incompetent, guys over at the Justice Department. What a hoot!

Remember when we went to Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction? We didn’t find any so we started to sell them some back in 2005. It does make you wonder how many US casualties resulted from weapons we sold them.

Decade after decade we ask our young men and women to sacrifice their lives on behalf of peace and freedom. Or, perhaps more appropriately, the very lucrative military industrial complex that will provide both sides of the conflict with exactly as much expensive military hardware as is necessary to maintain equal strength and ongoing conflict among the foes.

Remember when the goal was to end wars as quickly as possible?

Being ever at war affects a nations psyche. Teenagers have never known a time when we weren’t at war. Warrior becomes a “career choice” for which they train on high tech video games. They are what we made them. Detached, indifferent, conditioned to violence and sometimes lusting for blood. Actual blood, not virtual blood.

We justify drone strikes as necessary and send a message that, yeah, killing is okay, sometimes.

Then it’s only a matter of deciding when it is okay, and when it isn’t. Liquor, testosterone, and mental illness obscure the bounds that normally hold us in check.

With our economy decimated, the troops come home to no jobs and no safety net, and kill their families. How the hell can we be surprised by that?

Our priorities are all screwed up. We have the funds for unlimited warfare but not for universal health care.

Poverty is growing in the US not because of a lack of money. Look how much we could find to give the banks so bankstas had something from which to pay themselves obscene bonuses.

Poverty is growing because of a vast criminal conspiracy.

In the meantime, the global game of Ponzi continues because of our leader’s unwillingness to stop it.

Doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result is the very definition of insanity.

Watch now to see if someone doesn’t step forward with the idea that maybe our problems could be solved if we gave the banks more money.

Things are getting worse, not better. There will be more mass murders and horrific acts of violence, and they will not be fueled by guns but by the untreated mental illness produced by the stress of economic and social collapse.

Where I come from, everybody had guns, lots of guns, but we didn’t shoot each other with them. Obviously, we, and not the guns, are the problem.

Less lethal ammunition and smaller magazines can reduce the scope of gun violence without gun owners losing their rights.

Since both sides have a stake in the outcome, both sides should devote substantial energy and resources advocating for universal healthcare and sufficient funding to effectively treat the small percentage of the population who suffer from this largely treatable yet little understood human frailty.

Further debating the issue of gun ownership prevents us from coming to grips with the real problem and reducing deaths attributed to acts of insane violence.

George W. Mantor
The Real Estate Professor
Founder, American Foreclosure Resistance Movement
http://www.realtown.com/gwmantor/blog

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