BS: The Second Amendment

Subject: RE: BS: The Second Amendment
From: Little Hawk
Date: 14 Feb 11 - 12:35 PM

Ah, yes, the "pursuit of happiness". I've got a passage in one of my songs that goes this way:

"God save America for a better destiny,
Than the pursuit of happiness at the expense of sanity,
When everything of value falls and every conscience burns,
And men will bulldoze paradise for the money they can earn."


(For those who might object to my use of the word "God" in the above, be advised...it's a metaphor. ;-) And it's a handy one-syllable word too...it works better than any other in that spot.)

Subject: RE: BS: The Second Amendment
From: Ebbie
Date: 15 Feb 11 - 11:14 AM

In Alaska the right to keep and wield a sword shall not be abridged.

Fairbanks Incident

Subject: RE: BS: The Second Amendment
From: Stringsinger
Date: 15 Feb 11 - 12:42 PM

McGrath, the Swiss are more civilized in their use of firearms than the trigger happy Americans. They don't carry to political rallies to intimidate people.

The NRA is cold-hearted and responsible for the epidemic of gun violence
in America.

There is a culture of violence in America that has been fostered by the Religious
Reactionary Christian extremists who want to intimidate those who disagree
with their anti-abortion stance as well as the proliferation of militia groups
of a neo-fascist persuasion.

There is a litany of propaganda that is broadcast by those who make money
selling weapons and bribe senators that promote this gun violence. Other countries do not have this problem that America has.

Subject: RE: BS: The Second Amendment
From: Ebbie
Date: 15 Feb 11 - 01:21 PM

America's 'culture of violence' makes me wonder about Japan. I understand that Japan has an extremely violent literature, from comic books on, and yet their violent crime rate is low.

According to Wikipedia: "Ownership of handguns is forbidden to the public, hunting rifles and ceremonial swords are registered with the police, and the manufacture and sale of firearms are regulated. The production and sale of live and blank ammunition are also controlled, as are the transportation and importation of all weapons."

Why do I think of committed crimes in America as being heavily influenced by our constant exposure to violent content featured in our media, and in our literature and movies when the same thing apparently does not happen in Japan?

Is it perhaps due to the easy availability of firearms in America and the relatively difficult access to them in Japan?

And if so, how does that affect our 'good guy' proponents' views on the right to carry?

Subject: RE: BS: The Second Amendment
From: olddude
Date: 15 Feb 11 - 01:38 PM

Strings
There are those groups that stand outside the political rallies as you say are completely wrong. They are also very much part of the problem ... However, I would submit they are not the rise in violence. Those groups existed from the time of Washington. The real violence started to occur in the 70's on with the proliferation and profits of the illegal drug trade. You then saw the profits create these rogue bands of drug gangs that will not let anyone (innocent or not) get in the way of their profits. They take ownership of city blocks and enforce it with blood - anyone's blood. Likewise addicts who need the next fix cause the rise in home invasions, street muggings and the like. So now there are two sides, the profit driven gangs and the addicts. As I see it, it comes from one source, illegal drugs. Militia groups, yes they preach the hate but they are not the ones firing rounds into homes mostly (maybe some are) but the real problem is the gangs.

Subject: RE: BS: The Second Amendment
From: Little Hawk
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 01:12 AM

I think you are absolutely right, olddude, that the burgeoning illegal drug trade is the primary factor causing a great rise in the incidence of violent crimes in the USA...in Mexico...in some other Latin American nations...even on the streets of Toronto, Canada. There are now far more shootings in Toronto yearly than was the case a few decades ago, and it is almost all associated with young members of various drug gangs fighting each other over turf, etc...sometimes killing innocent bystanders who get caught in the crossfire. The majority of these offenders are young Caribbean Blacks, it seems, and most of their victims are people from that same community.

And it doesn't happen because those kids are watching violent movies, it happens because they are dealing illegal drugs and trying to control local territories.

Regarding Japan, I don't think you have anything like a comparable situation in the domestic illegal drug situation...plus, Japanese culture emphasizes public responsibility and obedience to laws in a way that is strikingly different from the more individualistic western societies. You can still drop a wallet on the street or in a Japanese bus, and chances are very good that some private person will recover it, track you down by phone or some other way, and return it with all the money and everything else in it intact. How likely is that in North America? ;-D It's a completely different mindset in Japan than it is here. People are far more law-abiding, despite the existence of the organized criminal gangs (Yakuza)...they have their own longstanding traditional structure within which they work.

While violent movies do de-sensitize people to watching violence on film, and cause them to expect to see more of it, I doubt that they have much to do with causing most violence. Rather, they may help to defuse a good deal of it through allowing people to discharge their frustrations vicariously by watching a video. This certainly seems to be true in Japan where there is a great deal of extraordinarily violent pornography and other sadistic material freely available on film and in magazines...most of it catered to by men. It does not appear to cause those men to go out and actually be violent to anyone.

I think back to when I was a kid. All the boys played "guns" in those days, just as a standard thing. It was part of growing up. It didn't make us violent. What made certain kids violent, though, was this: they witnessed and were the victims of domestic violence in their own homes, violence usually perpetrated by their father. That is the real source of violence in most young people who turn violent, learning by direct experience at home or on the street...not from movies or from playing with toy guns. If violence frequently becomes your actual experience when you are young, if you are repeatedly victimized in that way or if your mother is, then you may start to see it as a normal way of "solving problems"...or maintaining and defending your own identity. If so, then you're heading down the slippery slope to repeating the most tragic errors of the past.

Subject: RE: BS: The Second Amendment
From: Ebbie
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 02:59 AM

I think you've hit it, Little Hawk. For that reason, it seems to me that it should be 'curable'.

Subject: RE: BS: The Second Amendment
From: olddude
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 09:46 AM

The kid culture in the past was far more violent I think. Remember when your teacher in grade school or high school could deal out corporal punishment. In my middle school God help you if you were a kid that was "autistic". Outbursts were deal with by the "board of education" a wood stick for spanking. Nobody at that time had any idea of disabilities only "unruly children". In the homes the rule was "spare the rod spoil the child" that was the culture of the 50's. You bet playing with toy guns was the norm for a boy growing up .. Yet we had no problems at all .. none.. I think what LH said is indeed true. Crack cocaine, huge drug profit, violence to enforce the territory ... and the incredible rise of addicts ... all contribute to this culture today

Subject: RE: BS: The Second Amendment
From: olddude
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 09:51 AM

by the way, I apologize for my outburst on this thread. I should know by now not to post when I am having a bad pain day ...
sorry about that

Subject: RE: BS: The Second Amendment
From: Greg F.
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 10:19 AM

The real violence started to occur in the 70's on with the proliferation and profits of the illegal drug trade.

Yup, just about the time the "War On Drugs" hotted up. Sure has caused a lot of collateral damage. Way past time to give up on this obscenely expensive, damaging, and fundamentally useless program.

Subject: RE: BS: The Second Amendment
From: Little Hawk
Date: 16 Feb 11 - 12:45 PM

What is it that actually drives large numbers of people to extreme acts of violence...killing people? It's organized activity that is aimed toward some specific material or political objective that does it. In other words...

1. War - the biggest organized killer of them all.

2. Criminal activity - the modern drug trade, contraband liquor tade during the Prohibition era...(which was the key drug trade of that time period), robbery, mugging, protection rackets, housebreaking, etc.

3. Revolution, terrorism, and various politically-motivated acts of violence.

4. Oppressive governmental action by security forces upon a domestic population - In this case it's really a war by a government upon various elements of its own people. Extreme examples of this have been seen in: Present-day Burma, Cambodia under the Khymer Rouge, Germany under the Nazis, the Armenian persecution by the Turks, and there are many other examples.

None of these things happened because guns exist...or because drugs exist...or because violent films exist. They happened because organized groups of people devoted themselves very deliberately toward specific objectives they had in mind...either for profit or for some abstract political (or religious) objective that they held dear....and that objective caused them to act violently and take the lives of other people.

That's what we've seen again and again throughout history. Hundreds of millions of lives have been lost needlessly due to people seeking unwise and destructive objectives that required them to endanger other people.

As for the War on Drugs, it's a miserable failure and it cannot succeed. Personal use of drugs should be de-criminalized, in my opinion, and addicts should be treated as people with a medical problem, and supplied with medical aid and prescriptions to manage their habit while they are assisted in getting off whatever they're addicted to.

*****

Moving to another subject altogether, I would agree with olddude that kid culture was far more physically violent when he and I were kids than it is now in modern North America. And you go back a generation or two earlier...it was even more violent. What I mean is, there was a lot of corporal punishment in schools (and by parents) that isn't allowed today...and there was a heck of a lot more fighting between boys back then than there is now. This was partly because kids were a lot more involved in physical outdoor life back then...and partly because the society looked differently on boys fighting back then too. It was considered "normal". Boy, were there ever a lot of fights. I remember. There was a place near the school where guys would go to fight after school, and all their buddies would show up to watch. If that was going on now, the cops would probably put a stop to it, but back then the adults did nothing about it...as long as it was off school property. Then there was the generation before mine...kids who grew up in the 30s and 40s. I knew an old fellow who worked for my dad, and he told me about the fights between rival neighborhood schools in the town of Orillia when he was a kid. He said that all the boys from one school would meet all the boys from the other school at a pre-arranged location after classes and there'd be a huge donnybrook involving maybe a couple hundred or more kids, beating each other up with fists, stones, sticks, whatever was to hand. Incredible. And the adults did nothing about it. He said it could happen two or three times in a week in that small town.

Nevertheless, the society of that time didn't seem to have much of the problems we have now with shootings, and so on, and I'll tell you why: they didn't have a giant illegal drug trade going on in their cities, that's why. It's organized human activity by adults (and young adults) that leads to the problems we see now...not casual violence in itself. It's violence with a commercial or a political purpose that is causing most of the really serious problems in the world.

For that, you must look to the leaders, the kingpins, the commanders who are organizing that violence. That would include politicians, drug lords, secret police chiefs, captains of industry, and some religious leaders in certain places. The rot comes from the top down, in my opinion.

Subject: RE: BS: The Second Amendment
From: gnu
Date: 23 Feb 11 - 10:05 PM

So, Wisconsin? Bring in the militia? I saw a video of a middle east politcian saying he is in support of the Wisconsin "uprising".

Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain... Wisconsin? Noooooooooo... not in USA... can't happen... they wouldn't sic the National Guard on the protesters would they? But the governor... WTF?

No, they wouldn't... because the protesters are armed and fucking dangerous.

How odd that this thread fell off the page after the governments of the middle east and the government of Wisconsin decided that force against the people might be a good idea.

Debate what the "founders" meant but reality is staring you anti-gun nuts in the face... right now... on the TV... in real time... and people are dying.

Subject: RE: BS: The Second Amendment
From: Ron Davies
Date: 24 Feb 11 - 10:36 AM

"anti-gun nuts".    Right.   Now exactly which of us is meant by that delightful description?

I have not seen one posting which would support that position.

As I have said more than once, I am not for restricting rifles any more than they are right now.

I am not even for restricting pistol ownership more than we now have.

Except semi-automatic pistols.

And--still---nobody has come up with any argument why semi-automatic pistols should be owned by anybody but the police and the military.   Especially since: look what is often the weapon of choice in the senseless carnage we read about.

And of course I'd make no move to take semi-automatic pistols from those who now have them.

Just no more sales of them to the general public.

And it is striking how even on Mudcat--overwhelmingly left of center---even this reasonable request is bitterly opposed.

Subject: RE: BS: The Second Amendment
From: Bill D
Date: 24 Feb 11 - 11:38 AM

*I* was not gonna refresh this topic....but....

Where did you hear that "...the government of Wisconsin decided that force against the people might be a good idea."???
I just saw a headline saying.." Wisconsin Protesters High-Five, Shake Hands With Police"

WHO is armed & dangerous? Do you really think even the **idea** of a couple of protesters in Wisconsin having guns is relevant? IF those pro-union activists started trashing the buildings or doing more than waving signs and 'sitting-in' were to happen, it would STILL not require firearms to quell things. Tear gas, tasers....lots of things would be used first.
   There is NOTHING about this situation that would suggest the need for guns on either side.

...and what difference does it make what some Middle-Eastern politician says?

Subject: RE: BS: The Second Amendment
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 24 Feb 11 - 04:35 PM

They pulled off their revolution in Egypt without stupid stuff with guns.