Gun Reform? Follow the Money. Bet on it. A Broad View.

10 Comments

1. 

   Arthur Gilroy on December 17, 2012 at 11:17 am

   Feel free. A blog is only as good as its members, just as a country is only as good as its citizenry.

   We shall see. In both matters.

   We shall see, soon enough.

   Bet on it.

   Later…

   AG

2. 

   Oui on December 18, 2012 at 6:58 am

   .
   Yorkshire man Gary Hyde supplied gun to killer in Dunblane kindergarten massacre. Later set up business supplying arms to the UK Ministry of Defence and the US Pentagon for their arms contract to Iraq and Afghanistan. A regular visitor to US gun shows and undoubtedly a supporter of the 2nd Amendment.

3. 

   The Voice In The Wilderness on December 18, 2012 at 5:30 pm

   Your best diary ever, Arthur. To the point and emotionally gripping.

   I would add only the point I tried to make on the main blog, which I will try to rephrase:

   Going after the guns is what the Koch brothers and others want. It will guarantee knee-jerk voting in the 2014 elections. AND IT CANNOT SUCCEED! This House will never pass it.
   Their base will submit to modest tax increases, but will never forgive an attempt to take their weapons. You will have to pry their cold dead fingers from the Republican lever. All you are succeeding in is INCREASING weapon sales as reported today on Bloomberg news. They also report that the biggest sales gains are in assault weapons as gun nuts try to buy them at any price before they are banned.

   Try to avert future tragedies in a way that has some chance of succeeding albeit sub-optimal. Try for better tracking of weapons to keep them out of the hands of the mentally unstable. In another thread, dataguy says you cannot predict which nut will flip out and go shooting. I’m sure he is right, but I am equally sure that a guy shunned by his classmates, his siblings, his own father and taking pysch meds if WAY more likely than the average guy at the VFW hall. Try adding armed guards at schools. I’m talking trained professionals, nor concealed carry for teachers as some Tea Party loon in the House suggested today. And, yeah, try to get that guy to vote for an assault weapons ban and a limit on magazine size.

   • 

     Arthur Gilroy on December 18, 2012 at 6:34 pm

     Excellent!

     Only one real caveat:

     Try adding armed guards at schools. I’m talking trained professionals…

     Sorry, VITW. Schools cannot afford “trained professionals.” Hell, even police departments can’t afford them, as witnessed any number of times in the news from Harlem through Philadelphia, Chicago, Oakland and right back around the country from east to west and north to south. I have a close friend who is a “well-trained professional” and also a detective in a U.S. police department. His assessment of the average U.S. cop? Unprintable, and I am not personally averse to using harsh language to make my point.

     What those poor schools would get would be rejects from the whole already overpopulated U.S. security apparatus. Not good enough even to be trusted to frisk overwhelmingly innocent air travelers for imagined weapons.

     Sorry, but there it is.

     The only solution(s) is/are long-term.

     This poor, fucked-up kid who apparently went out and killed 20+ people because he was afraid that he was about to be committed to the execrable U.S. Health and Sanity Services by his at-the-end-of-her-rope mother? Pity him and pity her as much as you pity the victims. They were all “victims.” Bet on it.

     Victims of what?

     Of a system that claims to have all the right answers while it simultaneously feeds its citizens huge doses of chemically-laden food, badly tested drugs and media-based propaganda that says “We know what we are going!!! Join the club. Be one of the insiders. One of the popular kids!!!”

     Victims of a system that shouts “Thou shalt not kill!” while simultaneously massacring thousands, victims of a system that presents violence as a media-promoted way of life while at the same time advising people not to be violent.

     They both snapped.

     Mother and son.

     Too many contradictions for a weak (and/or weakened) mind to handle.

     May the universe have the same mercy on their souls that it will undoubtedly have on the souls of the innocents who were murdered. And may the truly guilty be punished. Here and forever after.

     Amen.

     AG

     • 

       The Voice In The Wilderness on December 18, 2012 at 7:19 pm

       It was just a suggestion, mainly in reaction to that idiot suggesting teachers carry concealed weapons. The main point was lets talk about something that has a chance of political success. Banning private guns, even stipulating for discussion that it could be 100%, would stop this kind of massacre, but it cannot be politically effected. Not at this time, nor for at least another generation, and I think a lot longer.

       Banning alcohol was not effective. So it was finally repealed and replaced with laws that had some effect, such as age bans, drunk driving laws, taxes, dram shop laws and the like.

4. 

   Arthur Gilroy on December 18, 2012 at 7:48 pm

   America’s Selective Grief
   Remember All the Children, Mr. President
   by BILL QUIGLEY

   Remember the 20 children who died in Newton Connecticut.

   Remember the 35 children who died in Gaza this month from Israeli bombardments.

   Remember the 168 children who have been killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan since 2006.

   Remember the 231 children killed in Afghanistan in the first 6 months of this year.

   Remember the 400 other children in the US under the age of 15 who die from gunshot wounds each year.

   Remember the 921 children killed by US air strikes against insurgents in Iraq.

   Remember the 1,770 US children who die each year from child abuse and maltreatment.

   Remember the 16,000 children who die each day around the world from hunger.

   These tragedies must end.

   Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans and Associate Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.  You can reach Bill at quigley77@gmail.com.

   What more needs be said?

   Red ’em and weep.

   Read the numbers and weep, goddamnit!!!

   AG

5. 

   Arthur Gilroy on December 18, 2012 at 7:56 pm

   Our Major Global Export

   America’s Addiction to Violence
   by MARK GRAHAM

   The United States is the number one supplier of weapons on the planet, its military the world’s largest employer.  Violence has become America’s major export to the world and we have reaped the financial rewards.  The only problem is we’re addicted to the drug we’re peddling beyond our borders.  The addiction passes on to the next generation through the discursive bloodstream and into the collective womb of culture.  Throughout their early years we saturate our children with violent images and language:  First person shooter games.  Action heroes.  Military heroes.  Heroes with guns.  Men with guns.  Men using guns on other men and women and children and animals.  We teach them the path of aggression, competition, and the joys of humiliating your opponents.  Our entertainments provide orgies of righteous vengeance and self-piteous victimhood.  And when one of our children unleashes his monstrous hate on other children we should be horrified–but we should not be surprised.  We have taught our children well.

   As a teacher and a parent, I could readily imagine the full horror of the massacre in Connecticut.  I struggle to keep my children safe from any kind of danger.  At my job, I have had to practice lockdowns and deal with bomb threats.  I also know how fragile our sense of security is.  Inevitably in the wake of tragedies like this, people call for stricter security.  Make us safe, they implore.  Add more cops, more metal detectors, more guns to protect us from guns.  All in vain.  No matter how much we surrender our freedom for safety, how much we try to turn our homes and schools into fortresses, we will never be able to keep death from making that appointment in Samarra with us if he’s hell-bent on being there.

   —snip—

   The most warlike nation with the least number of people ever having felt the terrible impact of war, America entertains itself with killing.  Our sports feel like combat, while the fantasies of combat we consume look like sport.  The mascot of the school district where I teach in rural Pennsylvania is a bullet.  Not a bulldog or huskie or owl or canary.  A bullet–the same thing that killed twenty-six people in another school on Friday.  Where I work many of us try our best to promote peace and tolerance, to expose students to different points of view, different cultures, different visions for the future.  Nearby my school, there’s a shooting range.  When I go for walks during my lunch break I can almost always hear someone firing automatic pistols, shotguns, and rifles, the gunshots echoing off my school’s feeble walls.

   —snip—

   The Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist in discussing the origins of genocide wrote, “It is not knowledge we lack.  What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.” So watch Obama weep as he proclaims: “Our hearts are broken today. The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old. They had their entire lives ahead of them…” Then ask yourself why he doesn’t weep for the children who die at his orders from drone attacks in Pakistan–eight times the number of children horribly murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  Why are we surprised when the violence we wreak on the rest of the world should plant its poison seeds in the hearts of our children, turning them into murderers of children?  If this tragedy means anything, it’s that America must confront its addiction to violence, to entertainments that equate manhood with killing, and to an entire political and economic system that privileges war-making over the future–and the precious lives–of our own children.

   Mark Graham is a high school teacher in the Lehigh Valley. His books include: How Islam Created the Modern World and Afghanistan in the Cinema.

   That about sums it up. Don’tcha think?

   AG

6. 

   Arthur Gilroy on December 18, 2012 at 8:01 pm

   A Culture of Violence

   Behind the Connecticut Massacre
   by JERRY KROTH

   Each time there is an outbreak of homicidal mania, whether Columbine, Virginia Tech, or Adam Lanza’s slaughter of twenty eight innocents in Connecticut, the media directs us to stories about gun control and the need for better policing of individuals with mental illnesses.

   The larger context–that America is a society brimming over with violence–is entirely lost in the discussion.

   Let’s take a look at the forest for a change, shall we:

   There are 192 million firearms owned by Americans, more than any other society in the world. Our rate of death from firearms is three times that of France and Canada, fourteen times greater than Ireland, and two hundred and fifty times greater than Japan, where firearms are aggressively controlled.

   The U.S. has more prisoners, per capita, than any country on earth–three times more than Cuba, seven times more than Germany–and, indeed, we house twenty-five percent of all the prisoners in the world.

   As for media violence, by the time the average American child leaves elementary school, they will have witnessed 8,000 murders and over 100,000 other acts of violence, and, to rub more salt into these open wounds, the U.S. also leads the world in the sale and rental of violent video games.

   That litany of statistics comes to us compliments of our gratuitous interpretations of the First and Second Amendments.

   But the forest we are talking grows ever larger.

   Since World War II, the United States engaged in over fifty military operations abroad killing some four million people (Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, the list goes on). If you add in to that total massacres by proxies and surrogates, the number flirts with five million (Indonesia, Chile, Guatemala, and elsewhere).

   We are the only country in the world seemingly perpetually at war. In 2011-2012 alone, the United States was killing people in nine different countries: Iraq and Afghanistan with troops, Libya with rockets, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen with drones, Honduras with raids against drug cartels, the Philippines with air support against insurgents, and most recently in Kenya as 150 Special forces started their operations. No other country in the world can boast of so many military involvements.

   To remedy the horrors we saw in Connecticut should not be limited to screening mentally ill individuals from purchasing Glocks–which is about as far as our craven mainstream media wishes to venture. Instead we need to recognize the massacres of Jonestown, Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Connecticut are merely symptoms of a much more ubiquitous cancer.

   To finally address this problem is to begin a long and arduous process of cultivating a culture of peace. Such collective psychotherapy begins by treating the patient on many fronts and in a multi-dimensional way: To forbid the sale of handguns, nationwide; to ration the sale of ammunition; to prohibit the sale of violent toys to children (Greece already does), to aggressively control the sale and access of violent video games to children (Australia, Venezuela, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and Brazil already do), and to prohibit the broadcast of violent scenes, explicit or implicit, on network television during family viewing hours, a practice already in effect in many European countries.

   And, who knows, we might even take it one step further and retreat from our aspirations of empire and global hegemony, close down our military operations, and bring our vast armies and armadas home –over 400,000 Americans at last count stationed in almost 1,000 overseas military bases.

   Russia has ten overseas military bases. China none.

   So much room to grow!

   Imagine our progressive President, instead of limiting his compassion to the shedding of a tear at a press conference, actually proposed comprehensive and revolutionary changes and legislation that focussed not on the symptoms but, at long last, finally started to address the disease itself.

   Imagine indeed!!!

   But…don’t hold your breath.

   So it goes and WTFU.

   Please!!!

   AG

7. 

   Arthur Gilroy on December 18, 2012 at 8:18 pm

   Wake the fuck up some more!!

   Violence and the American Mind

   by DEEPAK TRIPATHI

   Had it not been for the Newtown massacre of twenty children and six adults, before the gunman killed himself, at an elementary school in the United States, this column would have been about the latest events in Egypt, where a struggle is taking place between Islamist and liberal-secularist forces over the country’s future. That struggle for the soul of Egyptian society is going to be long and complex, even when the result of the constitutional referendum becomes known. In America, the killing of so many schoolchildren, by a man just twenty years of age, has so shaken people that consideration of Egypt’s politics can wait another day. This is a time when we are compelled by conscience to reflect on a phenomenon which is both destructive and far-reaching. We should ask whether America’s culture of violence has become like a giant octopus whose many tentacles are destroying itself, as well as lives in distant lands.

   When I first arrived to work in the United States in the early 1970s, before moving to Britain three years later, I was twenty-two years of age. My grandchildren now live on the east coast of America. They are as young as the victims of the gunman Adam Lanza. The enormity of his act fills me with horror, particularly because I feel close to America, although I have lived in Europe for more than three decades. So, when I am being critical of America, I am being critical of something that is part of myself. Nonetheless, it is difficult to be silent when atrocities like the Newtown massacre take place.

   What happened there was particularly savage, but we should not forget that such violence has become all too frequent in American society. While television channels were focused on the Newtown massacre, there were a number of shootings across the nation, from California and Nevada, Illinois, Colorado, Alabama and North Carolina. And a sixty-year-old man was arrested in Cedar Lake, Indiana, with 47 guns, threatening to “kill as many people as he could” at an elementary school. The country is awash with weapons, the thirst for guns is unquenchable. ABC News reported that Americans tried to buy two million guns in November alone.

   Let us think about some of the worst mass killings of the past twenty years. Last September, there was one in Aurora, Colorado, where twenty-four-year-old James Eagan Homes killed 12 people; in November 2009, an Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hassan cut down the lives of 13 victims; a few months before, Jiverly Wong murdered 13 at Binghamton, New York; Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, April 1999; and the Oklahoma City bombing perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh in April 1995. The list goes on.

   Then, in the name of maintaining law and order, police officers, often trigger happy, shoot first and talk later. A few day ago, a Chinese woman was shot by a policeman’s Taser gun, as she tried to purchase several iPhones from a New Hampshire store. How many of us can forget Rodney King, the African American, whose savage beating by Los Angeles police officers in March 1991 shocked America, and millions and millions around the world?

   While all eyes are on Newtown for a few days, killings continue around the United States without much notice. Trigger happiness is an instinct difficult to separate from the ease with which guns can be obtained. Their availability in America is in abundance, price is cheap, the reasons to possess them many. To show off as trophies, to hunt, to “protect,” to satisfy one’s macho instinct; or because it is every American’s right to carry arms. Such mindset is absolutist. Such faith in the superiority of culture, which feeds on the idea of “American exceptionalism” that gives the United States a divine mission, is fatally flawed. For man cannot remain unaffected by what he does to fellow humans. At this time of sorrow, it would be appropriate to also think of the many young and the innocent killed in America’s foreign wars.

   In a Boston Review article titled “The Power and the Glory: Myths of American ” in the Summer 2005 edition, Howard Zinn wrote these words: “Divine ordination is a very dangerous idea, especially when combined with military power (the United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons, with military bases in a hundred different countries and warships on every sea). With God’s approval, you need no human standard of morality.” It is this state of mind that haunts America today.

   Deepak Tripathi is a historian whose interests include the United States in the contemporary world. His works can be found at: http://deepaktripathi.wordpress.com and he can be reached at: deepak.tripathi.writer@gmail.com

   Had enough?

   I have.

   Do something!!!

   Tell your friends.

   Tell your relatives.

   Tell your colleagues.

   And most of all…tell yourselves!!!

   AG

8. 

   Arthur Gilroy on December 18, 2012 at 8:53 pm

   “Finally” because I’ve had a busy day…a busy week, really… preparing a concert for an intermediate school full of brownish kids in Bushwick, Brooklyn whose lives are so much more challenged and at risk than those of the vast majority of middle-class suburban white kids that I cannot even begin to describe the difference.

   And finally…sigh…

   The Obama Hypocrisy

   Do Arabs Cry For Their Children Too?

   by TOM MCNAMARA
   Rennes, France.

   Once more tragedy befalls America. But this time the tragedy is even more bitter due to the fact that such a large number of young children were involved. A gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, shot and killed 26 people, 20 of them children – all between the ages of 5 and 10 – at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on the 14th of December. The attack ended with the gunman committing suicide. It was the Nation’s second deadliest school shooting.

   Most people can’t imagine the evil and insanity needed to drive a person to commit such a heinous act. The murder of innocent people is reprehensible, but it is even more so when carried out on the most vulnerable elements of our society, children. Most disturbing of all is the well planned, deliberate and determined manner in which the murders appear to have been carried out. Early reports state that the gunman was highly accurate, leaving only one wounded survivor alive at the school.

   President Obama, reading a prepared statement, was overcome with emotion. “Our hearts are broken,” he said. The victims were “beautiful little kids. They had their entire lives ahead of them: birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own.” It was at this moment that the President reached up to the corner of one eye, touching an apparent tear.

   On April 3rd, 1991, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 687, imposing sanctions on Iraq as a result of its invasion of Kuwait. This resulted in Iraq being economically isolated from the rest of the world community. But by the end of 1995 there were reports that the sanctions were having a devastating effect on the populace. A study in The Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Association, reported that up to 576,000 Iraqi children may have died since the end of the first Gulf War as a result of the sanctions imposed by the Security Council. UNICEF, in 1999, estimated that at least 500,000 children died who would have otherwise normally lived had it not been for the sanctions in place. The Security Council, led by the United States, rejected numerous appeals by Iraq to lift the sanctions.

   In 2003 the US invaded Iraq for a second time. The second Gulf War was a bloody and brutal affair, costing the lives of over 4,400 US soldiers, with almost 32,000 wounded. But these figures pale in comparison to the suffering experienced (once more) by the Iraqi people. A study released in 2006 found that there were 655,000 more deaths in Iraq than normally would have been expected had coalition forces not invaded in March 2003. This figure was more than 20 times higher than a figure that then President George Bush was using. The study found that most victims were between the ages of 15 and 44.

   Nowhere was the fighting more intense in Iraq than at the battle of Fallujah (I & II). The American attack was in response to the murder of 4 Blackwater contractors, who also happened to be ex-special forces. The first battle lasted from April 5 to April 30, 2004, and was primarily a Marine operation. It was some of the most intense fighting that US soldiers had seen since the battle of Hue City in Vietnam. A local Iraqi official reported that at least 600 civilians were killed, with 1,250 more wounded.

   The second attack on Fallujah involved seven Marine battalions, plus two Army battalions, and was a multi-phased affair. Combat operations started on November 7, 2004, with fighting lasting until the end of December that same year. An estimated 3,000 insurgents were killed or captured, with 70 US soldiers killed in action (a total of 151 US soldiers died in both battles).

   But disturbing revelations came out after the fact. There were reports that the US had used chemical weapons, a war crime. A documentary by RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, entitled “Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre” provided troubling evidence to support these claims. Photographs, videos and interviews with US soldiers who were part of the attack on Fallujah purported to show that phosphorus bombs were used on the city. There were also accusations that incendiary bombs known as Mark 77, a type of napalm, were also used. One US soldier is quoted as saying, “I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone … I saw the burned bodies of women and children.”

   More damning was an article in the March – April 2005 edition of Field Artillery Magazine. In it, officers of the 2nd Infantry’s fire support team reported that “White phosphorous [WP] proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE [high explosive]. We fired `shake and bake’ missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out.” A reporter with California’s North County Times, who was embedded with the Marines during the Battle of Fallujah in April 2004, reported seeing the same thing.

   There were also reports that Coalition forces relied heavily on rounds comprised of depleted uranium (DU). DU is a by-product of the process used to manufacture enriched uranium for nuclear reactors and weapons. DU has 40 percent less radioactivity than natural uranium, but it has the same chemical toxicity and contains ionising radiation.

   A medical study conducted on Fallujah after the battles (Busby et al 2010) confirmed anecdotal reports of an increase in infant mortality, birth defects and childhood cancer rates. It found that Fallujah had almost 11 times as many major birth defects in newborns than world averages. A prime suspect in all of this is what the report calls “the use of novel weapons,” possibly those containing “depleted uranium.” The increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in Fallujah are greater than those reported in the survivors of the US atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

   The US has now been fighting in Afghanistan for over 11 years (longer than the Soviet Union). A key component of US strategy in the Afghanistan / Pakistan theatre, or “AfPak” as the region is commonly known, is targeted drone strikes. America’s drone policy has reportedly killed between 474 and 881 civilians in the region, including 176 children. But apparently the targeted killing of children is now accepted military practice. Army Lt. Col. Marion Carrington of 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and who is assisting the Afghan police, is quoted as saying, “It kind of opens our aperture. In addition to looking for military-age males, it’s looking for children with potential hostile intent.”

   We watch the horrible images of pain and suffering coming out of a small town in Connecticut where 20 children were murdered less than 2 weeks before Christmas. We have no choice but to collectively mourn and take part in the families’ grief. That someone would engage in the systematic and premeditated murder of children is unfathomable and an abomination against everything it means to be human.

   But the misery and torment that befell Newton can be multiplied a thousand fold across the Arab world. American policy and actions have resulted in the deaths (i.e. murder) of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent children. The deaths of these children can be considered as war crimes and a crime against humanity of the highest order. They should shock and outrage us, compelling us to demand an immediate change in American foreign policy.

   But in order for that to happen one must first believe that Arabs cry for their children too.

   Tom McNamara is an Assistant Professor at the ESC Rennes School of Business, France, and a Visiting Lecturer at the French National Military Academy at Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan, France.

   “Finally” because some numbnuts posters here dared to question the propriety of my having approvingly posted the sentiments stated by Osama bin Laden…just another sinner, as are we all, but one who had some things right for sure…when he wrote in 2004:

   By what measure of kindness are your killed considered innocents while ours are considered worthless? By what
   school [of thought] is your blood considered blood while our blood is water?

   By what measure of kindness are the 20 dead children of Newtown any more or less important than the tens of thousands of international citizens of all ages dead by the hand of the U.S. over the last 60 years?

   Ask this of yourselves, O ye of little understanding.

   What would the world…and the U.S…be like now if in the 1960s the U.S. had aimed its might at improving its own state rather than attempting to dominate the states of others by military and quasi-military means?

   I know my answer.

   What’s yours?

   Later…

   AG