by Frank Wynerth Summers III on Thursday, January 17, 2013 at 11:19am ·
President Barack Hussein Obama has come out with his gun policy intiatives. There is no doubt that former US Representative Gabby Giffords, Vice President Joe Biden, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will find many opportunites to say, write aand support a wide variety of people who will discuss the future of the country and the role guns will play in that future. There will be many experts discussing the current situation. This has been a time with many high profile shootings since President Obama came into office and there were already many high profile shootings.
I have written of gun policy before. I would support a regime that allowed federal licensing of transport of guns acorss State and other jurisdictional lines except by licensed wholesalers. Any retail or personal transit would require a not too expepensive federal license and be recorded. Jurisdictions could then also make rules for themselves. Beyond that I have proposed a whole new constitution. Howver, I will leave aside my own radical vision for now and eal with what we have. Some states may fortify schools, some have extensive gun control. The feds could tax all guns and ammo with a single 10% value added addition to all other taxes and prices. Half of this woulod go to the records and policing of the new law by the ATF. The rest would go to the general treasury. I think the national registry of not nice people is a really horrible idea. It is both eveil and idiotic. those are its good points.
This is a time when many Americans are concerned about the killing of Americans with handguns. I feel that I must weigh in on the issues related to handguns, AR-15 rifles and the numbers involved in killings in this country. I also feel that I must weigh in on policy concerns. America is certainly a nation with many firearms. Their is little more to it than that which almost all Americans will agree about. We do not agree about how many guns there ought to be or anything else along those lines.
The truth is that the President of the United States has ties to people in the Weather Underground, has supported the Occupy Wall Street and the larger Occupy Movement and has been silent about the role of the Black Block Anarachists and others in this whole world of people who make trouble for a living when there is such work to be had. I respect more people in that world than perhaps many people in my readership do. It has been years since I had any real prospertity or a mortgage, I know lots of people who have been bankrupt, in jail or otherwise in trouble. I kinow some really wretched people who live in nice homes and have many financial assets and in many cases they know I despise them. But it is this vast mob which has so much increasing influnce under President Obama who are most deterred by guns. They will be free to remake the country into their own image when the guns are more limited and be much more bold in undertaking that national transformation.
Popular questions in the media and the public today are focused on how to stop people shooting up schools. There are few wondering how to stop the destruction of a society in which schools are possibly worth attending. I think things are pretty horrible already but they certainly can and likely will get worse.
“Why Do Riots Occur?” may be a hard question. But there is no doubt that a heavily armed populace is a deterrent to the pursuit of mob rule across a society.
Remember what happened after the Rodney King beating? That did not spread far beyond the neighborhoods in South Central Los Angels in large part because large numbers of people in the frenzied mobs were aware that other people with different points of view were well armed at home. The plague of angry idiocy which has been the downfall of many civilizations was contained then and has often been contained thus. Britain has countless more cultural resources to deter riots than we have relative to the threat. However since disarming the populace the role of riots has greatly increased. That violent riots are part of the discourse in Britain is evident when one discusses the 2011 United Kingdom anti-austerity protests which connected with the sometimes violent student protests of November and December 2010, and was prompted by cuts and changes to the welfare like and unsustainable realtively new system funding various forms of higher and further education in England. Significant in the UK was that a student protest included a violent protest when students attacked the automobile in which Charles, Prince of Wales and his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall were riding. This is a symbolic attack equal to only a handful of possible symbolic acts in the United States.
But overall these anti-austerity protests were nothing compared to the 2011 England Riots proper. Are any Americans remembering images of England’s firefighters blasting water hoses on a shop and flats destroyed by arson during the initial rioting in Tottenham?
Across large parts of London from the 6th to 10th of August 2011 as well as in Birmingham, the West Midlands, Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Bristol and elsewhere there was a wave and network of rioting, looting, arson, mugging, assault, and murder. The numbers killed were fewer than in one mass shooting but the effect on life and culture and the message to those in society was very strong. After such events it hard to trust other reports because people do not report violence. Code fo this problem in the UK is that anti-social events occurred under Blair but crime went down. That simply means that the honest live in perpetuial terror. Low-grade and limited terror but terror nonethless.
Those who want only the Police to be armed would do well to remember that the British disturbances I am discussing here began on August 6, 2011 after a protest in Tottenham, following the death of Mark Duggan, a local man who was shot and killed by police on 4 August 2011. The protestors became angry after police attacked a sixteen-year old who provoked them. Several violent clashes with police, along with the destruction of police vehicles, magistrates’ court and a double-decker bus. The complete loss of many and severe damage to more civilian homes and businesses occupied by the disarmed British citizen-subjects of this era was likely nothing compared to what will happen here. This is completely forgotten now though it did get some attention from the media then . Before the wave of unrest ended a very conservative estimate of £200 million worth of property damage was incurred, and local economic activity was significantly compromised. The riots have occasioned debate among Brits of varied political, social and academic backgrounds regarding the causes and context in which they happened but have not brought back the hidden and polite British guns society which prevented total social upheaval of this kind. Well spoken people discuss the rioters’ behavior in terms of structural factors such as racism, classism, and economic decline, as well as cultural factors like criminality, hooliganism, breakdown of social morality, and gang culture. The absences of a gun-toting law abiding element is not discussed. The struggle is over and the future is determined. President Obama cannot get the country he wants with guns allowed to those depressed and not always able to keep the rules in a society sunk under rules. Most of those rules are badly thought out, badly written and ill-advised. The nannie-staters, the thugs and the cowards will have their unholy alliance to run our country. The honest tough, the mildy misanthropic and the law-abiding who deals openly with imperfection will become a legal underclass. None of us will survive this as a culture but we will be individually dead (most of us of old age or other such causes) before the final transformation occurs.
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