The somber one year anniversary of the Blacksburg shootings brings us to an appropriate station-stop. Time to stretch our legs, pause and reflect on where we are. where we may be going and how the Hell we got here.
Writers of all stripe have been busy spilling pools of ink at “the cause” behind the unique, homegrown Yewessian* malevolence of the mass shooting via a form of inductive reasoning: isolating one problem which in the mind of the observer leads to larger ills as tidily as would bread crumbs in a forest. Typically, from the “right,“ the media, a lack of “family values” and morals (darkly hilarious, given Christian leaders’ propensity toward lying, pederasty and fraud); from the “left”, guns. The Janus of American politics squanders buckets of days and words trotting out, ad nauseum, the usual stock suspects, ferreting out the favorite color of thread thread in lieu of the more illuminating view of the quilt.
To blame this bloody fad on this or that while ignoring or failing to recognize root or structural causes misses a major point—and an opportunity. To heap opprobrium at the video games, media or guns in the abstract and not attempting to open a dialog about the overlying structure is a waste of powder bringing us no closer to a solution. For one example, the observation that the gun is just an object, possessing no inherent evil is correct. A gun is merely a vehicle for someone’s death, like the car driven into a crowd or a knife fatally wielded by stressed Japanese school kids.
For evidence, I cite the afternoon my Uncle Uno once bade me fetch his tackle box before an fishing outing. I found it—right behind a Swedish Army uniform, a case of nine millimeter ammunition and a Bofors 9mm open bolt submachine gun, an ugly, little device possessed of all the grace and beauty of a grease gun, one of hundreds, thousands, similarly stored in that nation. Not only has one never been used in a mass shooting, Sweden hasn’t gone to war since 1814.
This faulty this-or-that mechanism points to a limitation presented by the approach so common in western philosophy. The Aristotelian/Hegelian Thesis + antithesis = synthesis, while unmatched at inducing in normal people skin tones akin to that of a raspberry Popsicles seldom delivers a route by which to arrive or even approach solutions to “problems.“ Instead of salving the ill, the dialectic usually succeeds in forcing the “sides” into a siege mentality, and as Sun Tzu pointed out in his Art of War, a siege is the most corrosive and ineffective method for solving a disagreement. The “victory” comes often at such a toll as to become meaningless.
So it is with most “problems,“ and our societal way of dealing with them. The various sides become increasingly shrill and adamant to where the original point, what was at stake, becomes lost in a cacophony of hysterical shrieking—or worse. Abolitionist and proponents of slavery together pushed this nation into the Civil war while in the aftermath, the Industrial system, very like slavery, prospers to this time—viz China. In the endless quarreling about The Wah, as Mark Twain called it, we tend to gloss over that it took the United States a hundred years to enforce “equality,“ and we still aren’t there, as new figures on ethnicity and class, education, health and homelessness reveal. For balance, one might reflect that Russia beat us to full voter enfranchisement by the same one hundred years, in 1864.
When examining the Gun mess, as well as most any other “problem,“ one would be well served to examine the quandary with an eye toward a larger, structural sphere in order to fully understand how it came to be, what is at stake, as well as “what is to be done.“ One could make a valid argument that it isn’t the guns, the media, yada yada, but the dollars. For that is what this society is based on, that which we hold in the highest regard. Pass the plate.
A thousand cuts nurtured the Yewessian* nightmare. The ills gnawing at the guts of this nation can all be traced back to the font of gross capitalism, unleashed by a non-existent, false courtroom decision, a priori self-absolved of all ethical responsibility by Friedrich Hayek and other proponents of the market. Santa Clara V. Southern Pacific Railroad wrongly granted to corporations “personhood” and Bill of Rights protection. It should seem axiomatic that those come attended with responsibility, but not to the corporate supercitizen. To say, for example, that the Yewessian transportation system, a toxic, hazardous mess represents “market choice,“ reveals either an ignoramus or a calculated liar, callously and opportunistically glossing over history and the facts.
Fairness? Justice? Ethics? Coming out of the blocks The Free Marketeers, Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman distanced the market from the troublesome fluidity of ethics. Friedman said so explicitly in his 1970 New York Times piece, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits. Any ardent supporter will tell you as much. To single out one cause, Guns, TeeVee, given the outlying system is shortsighted and myopic. We will never get a grip on “the problems,“ until we face that fact. Nothing matters except profit, right, wrong, life, death, nothing.
Now that the assumed immutable perfection of “the market,“ has taken such a deserved righteous pounding over the hypocrisy of Wall Street and The Federal Reserve’s latest pluto/socialist circle-jerk—the Bear Stearns outrage, it is time to begin a dialog extending past the false politic of this nation and to the very core of “what it’s all about,“ to begin to recognize how things have gone so horribly wrong.
The gun business is just another lucrative venture, one that causes pain, death and trauma extending past the affected individuals, the dead and the survivors, into the very fabric of our nation. To that, not to belittle the ripples from a school shooting that widen, cross and persist, I respond with a shrug, not to be cynical about the effects, more reminded of the Megadeth song, “99 Ways to Die.“ A gunshot death is just another person killed by the market. The crazier things get, the more people are wont to flock to the gun store. A school shooting is excellent press for firearm manufacturers and distributors and nutritious fodder for their spokespeople buried in the NRA.
When a corporate body makes a decision that leads to a death, never is there a righting of the wrong, only monetary settlements to be written off as a cost of doing business. For example, I cite the Ford Bronco II, a vehicle so unstable that Ford Motor Company would not allow its test drivers to even operate the vehicle, or the Pinto and the deaths that could have been prevented by a thirty-five dollar piece of plastic. I am not singling out Ford except as an example. I could also point out corporate decisions I personally witnessed during
my time as a lowly Audio Visual subcontractor in the ‘Park. Formulas were chosen for reasons of cost, even though the clinical trials indicated a higher death rate. “We’re not about curing anything, we are in the business of palliatives,“ one be-suited speaker said from the lectern—making people feel well enough to crawl to their wage-slave day, to make someone else money. Without justice, there can be no peace. Here in the US, although corporations are persons, they cannot, obviously, be imprisoned. There is no justice.
Dead is dead, whether by a Ford or a .44. Millions of premature deaths, here and worldwide, can be laid at the feet of a system we have inherited and continue to nurture via our lack of depth, knowledge and complacency. Let’s go through the primary causes of non-natural death:; tobacco: around a half million or so, (3) automobiles, crashes alone, (excluding uncountable respiratory deaths, etc) forty to fifty thousand, (4) guns: thirty thousand, many of them accidents. (5) alcohol: twenty thousand (hard to calculate). lllegal or diverted “drugs,“ low on the list, less than twenty grand (Marijuana, none, zip, zero), although the costs to society via attempts at interdiction and incarceration are staggering—and
profitable if you are in the private prison biz, this, in light of the nation’s one hundred fifty million rotting in prison from a conviction for victimless crimes. For balance, it may be worth reading a recent study which noted that the Medical/Pharmaceutical biz is responsible for around eight hundred thousand or so.
On the Second Amendment: the founders of this nation, those who were truly interested in liberty, correctly feared erosion of basic rights, not so much from external threats but from the inside. Given the recklessness of various Presidential administrations and the timidity of the scrofulous flacks in Congress, a historic nervousness about firearm bans would seem prudent, given that the that the “well ordered militia” has been superseded by the National Guard, a branch of the Federal government, who have fired upon and killed US citizens, although any pathetic commercially available popgun would be useless against a AH 64, Apache attack helicopter, of which a dozen or so are stationed at RDU, the NG 130th, who make daily flyovers of the capital city. Why you reckon a “militia” needs those babies? A ride on a lowly “utility” model, a Blackhawk, induced me to rid myself of the bulk of my really crazy stuff, although the intruder who entered my house through a window made my glad I retained a .38, to scare him the back out the hole he came through, to send a message to his little buddies. In the aftermath, every single house adjoining mine fell victim to B and E’s—save mine.
Once the bees are out of a bag, it is really hard to get them back in. And when we have a commercial army, beholden to no rule except, ala Blackwater, stationed right here in North Carolina. I’ll keep my deer rifle, thank you. I met those dudes in New Orleans. I dealt fine with the National Guard, and NOLA cops. Blackwater? Those guys spooked me.
The Rockefellesque supercitizen is under no pressure or self-inducement to present more than a filmy appearance of ethics, then, only to mollify. Guns are merely money makers, no more moral or immoral than squirrelly cars and poisonous “medicines.“ The people have been reduced to profit centers. It is outside the ken of business to anything other than wrap themselves in a PR happy face—and make money. The careless amorality could be summed up with an early American Tobacco’s product name, Pro Publico Bono—literally, “for the public good.“ That is the all one can expect, pretty talk, until we recognize and accept that that we, en toto, have been juked by the market and their possessions, their gutless quislings in government.
Until we insist on sharing the power and liberty enjoyed now only by commercial interests via the influence of cash and K street lobbyists, we can expect to see more of the same—more illness, more death, more erosion of our core Bill of Rights protection. Until the people en-masse understand and begin to demand redress and rightings of the defacements to our Constitution by the courts, the people will continue to plod along and hector each other over small change and the foggy targets created to steer us away from the source of the toxic goo in which this nation has become mired.
Don’t hold your breath. My intuition tells me that the mind-lock on the collective, the commercialization of Government, is so complete nothing but general collapse of the system will change anything. Buckley V. Valeo, a break point for campaign financing, held that money equals free speech. Since corporations are “persons” and since they have the money, nothing will change.
“In a way, Katrina might be the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans,“ Malik Rahim told me from his back porch in New Orleans, he, the godfather of Common Ground, the “only group who was doing anything,“ as a Fed put it to me, upon my return. We’ll see.
As far as the subject of this piece is concerned, to smooth the differences and perhaps reduce the opportunity for gun crimes, both sides should lock arms and demand that legislatures, law enforcement and the courts enhance and enforce laws and penalties about weapons possession. If any unauthorized child, felon, or loonytoon gets (1) caught with, or (2) commits a crime with a weapon they didn’t legally purchase or are forbidden to possess, the supplier, even if by sloth or laziness, should be charged with some combination of accessory to the crime and/or delivery of a weapon and be subject to an active prison sentence—no deals.
* “America” refers to the lands of this hemisphere. To apply it solely to what lies within the U.S. political boundary erases nations and and an entire continent lying south the Rio Grande. Yewessian refers to people subject to the government north of that river and south of Canada.
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