The United States has been suffused with a warrior mentality for its entire history. It's long past time to kill it.
Yes, I'm using the rhetoric of violence in an effort to spur an end to the overarching violence of the warrior mentality that leads directly to the outrageous levels of gun-mayhem that are unique to this country in the developed world.
Kill the warrior mentality, bring the constant low-level civil war in this country to an end, and make acquisition of private arsenals difficult if not impossible. The level of gun violence in the United States will drop, slowly at first and then quickly enough to startle the many chatterers and observers who are convinced "we are a violent society" and "nothing can be done."
The key is to undo the centuries of conditioning that tells Americans that they are ALWAYS at war with one another and with some external enemy -- which in an earlier post I characterized as the fictional Bug Planet of Klendathu.
It's neither normal nor natural to believe that warriorism is a requirement for living. But for America, war-making is the constant ethic, baked in to every fiber of society.
Stop the wars. Stop the war thinking. Stop the warrior conditioning. Stop celebrating killing. Stop the killing.
Stop it NOW.
The problem is that America is a Third World country pretending to be a First World country. That was not always true, but it's true now. As with all Third World countries we have little pockets of niceness amid the squalor. The murders in Connecticut are shocking... because it was Connecticut. I read of similar events in a Chicago Housing Project, the Henry Horner Homes, in the book There Are No Children Here and that's the only place I read about them. (And believe me, no one in our government would have let most of the people who lived there keep their guns if they found them, since most of the adult residents and older children had been "inside" and lost their "Right to Bear Arms.")
ReplyDeleteI'll just point out that most people don't have nice new Glocks that they bought at the gun store because they can't afford them. When this child of an elite family decided to go human hunting, it was an unusual circumstance compared to most of the violence done by the elite. (Which usually involves stuff like toxic waste, coal slurry, an oil rig, or happens in far away lands. They usually kill with cancer or workplace "accidents," rather than taking a direct hand in the action.)
Somehow, I expect the elites will be allowed to keep their guns, no matter what kind of legislation comes down the pike. Aristocrats are always allowed to be armed, it's one of the perks of being an aristocrat. Otherwise the rabble might try to grab your stuff.
I've made the point on a number of occasions that the RKBA enshrined in the Sacred Second comes from the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which asserted that the King's Subjects "that are Protestant" had the right to keep and bear arms appropriate to their "quality" (ie: gentry could have and hold actual armament; peasantry not) -- the idea being that the King's Subjects "that are Cat-lick" did not have such a right and were to be disarmed forthwith.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, the Sacred Second is derived from measures to disarm large portions of the English populace and to concentrate private armament in the hands of "the right people." Those just happened to be the ones who were victorious in the various civil wars and so-called "revolutions" of the era.
It's not really any different now, except for the fact that the English don't have a problem with private disarmament, whereas Americans are still trying to sort it out. There are all kinds of Original Sins in the American Experiment, some of them having to do with the fact that the Civil War that took place in England during the early colonial era in North America was transferred to what would become the United States, and it's never really been resolved here.
It is a fight between factions of the elites/aristocracy for preeminence. They will have their weapons no matter what. And they will fight -- to the death -- among themselves.
The fact that so many of the proles can be induced to take sides in the factional disputes of the elites (Gingrich was a master at it) is a sorry comment on many Americans' lack of knowledge and understanding of these things...