They will come for our guns, they will ban your right to protecting your way of life…
The right has used that term and similar ones for decades. The fear of thy neighbor has always been the bootlace that ties all of the angst together. In an almost cult-like manner, the zombie voters of the right march right along, it’s about the guns. Because we have enemies, there will always be enemies, and things to fight. With our guns and raw power, there’s no way to lose… right?
Quartz – Three percent of the population own half of the civilian guns in the US – Youyou Zhou
This fear campaign started off years ago, this clipping at the frayed edges of the securities people felt they had. There is something visceral and almost drug inducing in the power that those weapons of destruction carry. It is as close to religion as some may get and in some cases that’s just fine with them, it is religious, Biblical. I am afraid to think what some of our religious brethren have put into the minds of those in other parts of the world in their efforts to “spread the word.” Witnessing the aftermath of the New Zealand massacre, and all of the multiple shootings there have been it would be easy to condemn the guns again, because that is what we are educated to do.
We are going to rail against the “gun,” in all its forms, social, political, and reality vs imaginations. The political whipping trail goes somewhere back to the early 70’s when the Feds killed an NRA member and everything changed. The gun culture at that time definitely took a turn for the darker, the ownership and necessity was socially breakable at that time, people were too scared though, all of this race and violence they were being exposed to on TV and in real life. It was not an easy time with miles long lines at gas stations and rioting in the streets.
N.P.R. The NRA Wasn’t Always Against Gun Restrictions – Ron Elving
“In 1971, agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms killed an NRA member who was hiding a large number of illegal weapons. This, too, stirred a restive reaction within the NRA rank and file. To address it, the NRA’s top managers created the group’s first lobbying organ, the Institute for Legislative Action, in 1975.”
The Second Amendment, and gun advocacy changed in a matter of months. The NRA was not going to work with the Government any longer, at least not where compliance comes into the picture. The growing number of guns owned by Americans were not a novelty any longer, it was a ingredient for division and it was going to be used, and abused.
My Father once stated that nobody wanted to invade the USA because we had so many guns, and a standing army could be gathered up out of civilians in a heartbeat. The latter phrase the one that sticks in my head today, a standing army, in a heartbeat. So with the Cold War going on it was all about security and piece of mind, guns were good to keep those dang red commies out of our democracy. The Constitution was safe from those commies, either from overseas or the ones here, the guns were saved and with them our future secure… Is how the story is supposed to go. But that Constitution had some other things in it that held up our democracy with more than brute power. Those things that we live with everyday, those smaller bits that may go unnoticed.
As the world was introduced to these little machines that derive their power by our ability to program them, we gained an entire universe of new worlds. We also, in many ways, gave up on the real, the tangible, and the truth as well in this world. Because all of the things on those little machines were not what they were made out to be, unreal, unsubstantiated, and mostly untrue. In the process, division and lack of civility bum rushed the stage, the term ugly American was made out to be a truism, and the world began to turn its back on our holier than thou attitudes. It wasn’t our guns though, or our religions they were after, it wasn’t our inalienable rights. It was something much simpler than that, something much more a part of the country and way of life than we could ever imagine.
Right now the world is also talking about vaccines, some are trying to claim that an injection as a child for blank or blank will cause autism or some other condition to develop. We know that if you are not vaccinated, your chances for developing troubling and incurable conditions rise dramatically. There is that whole cause and effect, that whole business about knowing better because we are intelligent souls, civilized. We also know that if you don’t know better you may go ahead and ingest that Tide pod, or try out that latest illicit drug or some old ones, because we are intelligent souls, civilized… That does leave us with the understanding that there are connections to the little things that the bigger issues arise. So, with a tick bite back about forty years ago, the real assault on our security, the real unravelling began and continues today unnoticed by many.
Before that Second Amendment, which is actually supported in the 14th, so that is the amendment that should be protected if they want their guns. There is the first amendment, and the foundation of our country starts there.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
The First Amendment guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition. It forbids Congress from both promoting one religion over others and also restricting an individual’s religious practices. It guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely. It also guarantees the right of citizens to assemble peaceably and to petition their government.
The links in the previous text should sound the alarm, they are links to the definitions that have been argued about each part of the amendment. There is one glaring omission in them though. That part about the free press, that piece of our foundation that has been eaten away at by the Termites of progress, the lawyers of corporatocracy, and the willingness of a country to turn away from its best defences against disease and forget where we came from. Now, before running away with the thought that, “Oh, it isn’t about that at all,” there is a cause and effect, and those wishing us harm will simply supply the tick. They are not on a schedule, we are though.
Vanishing Newspapers: The United States has lost almost 1,800 papers since 2004, including more than 60 dailies and 1,700 weeklies. Roughly half of the remaining 7,112 in the country – 1,283 dailies and 5,829 weeklies – are located in small and rural communities. The vast majority – around 5,500 – have a circulation of less than 15,000.
Waketech.edu: “The Decline in Newspapers: A Closer Look” Joseph Ahrens
Local and relevant reporting, watch dogs all of us. I remember reading a paper front to back, every word, looking for those insights. I am capable of using my own intellect, my own abilities because of that…training, that education. Those very watchdogs got pushed out, pushed away and silenced. The voices of the people, the communities and impacts that every local thing delivers was sent off to a .www address and forgotten among the lights and fancy clickbait. The free-press is now deceased in America, and being relegated to a subjective posture of revenue before the facts. When advertisers are their only revenue, they will cater to that revenue. If you stop getting paid for the work you do, you look for a new job, or new way to get paid… papers are no different.
The reason this is so dang important in the bigger picture is this. If there ever was a delivery system that could later bring you down to your knees an inoculation … this is it for a democracy like ours. Our securities have always been in our communities, in the place we live and the people that live there. The local papers would paint that picture of the community quite well, and corrected quickly by readers if incorrect. That tie, that connection has been systematically snipped, cut and taken over in the process. The larger regional papers are gone as well, sucked up into the monopoly of information, the conglomerates and revenue. It wasn’t the guns they were after, it wasn’t our power to fight, but our ability to coalesce, to create that standing army. Why, what better way to “fight” your enemy than to make them fight themselves. This is America, this is now, and this is bigger than the knee-jerk reactions and emotions that develop after tragedies.
Every single basic principle above relies in some form on the ability to communicate, ability to inquire, and the ability to redress. In each of them, local and regional papers and those “responsible” for its publishing are allowed protections under the first amendment. When those powers are diluted to the corporations responsible, to the businesses responsible, then there is no responsibility to the local communities and expenditures are cut, people are cut-off, and so are communities. In today’s comments about tribes of political and ideological people, I guess we are going back to smoke signals as far progress goes. The securities we thought we knew are getting thinner, and it has nothing to do with guns. It has everything to do with us, with others meddling, and with an entitlement that will leave us never quite knowing how it all came apart. The symptoms belie the cause.
This may come as a surprise, that because of a little shot when you were younger, you didn’t have to suffer through some horrible conditions and diseases. The things that secured your life were more than likely not guns, but built upon those times when they were needed. Those primary foundations of democracy and the Revolution that was rife with little local papers, they told our stories, our wishes, and our concerns. Creating a condition where our voices ring hollow in the chasms between us is the easiest and most diabolical way of poisoning a people. A Tower of Babel has been built, and it was built with the bones of those local papers, those local watchdogs, those voiceless citizens. It will continue to grow until it falls, or we do, separating and dividing us even more so than today. They didn’t come for our guns…
