Gun Control--Some Logical Left Thoughts, read all before responding

[Johny Felix]

Please, allow your mind to drift upwards, slowly melting into the sky as you gain a bird’s eye view of the world. Rest for just moment, ahhhh…Now slowly descend back down through the atmosphere, mile by mile, until you are hovering gently in the clouds over the little quite town of Sebastopol.

Allow yourself to float over to a bright yellow sign, just south of downtown. The shape of a building is just barely visible through the clouds, let us hover over here for just a minute. There is a giant glowing “M” just outside, and inside this building something strange happens all day and all night long. Objects of desire are manufactured here and distributed with legal haste to hundreds of people in this quite little town daily. Some avoid this place, some love it--but nobody says a word edgewise about its existence in their day-to-day conversations or political ramblings. Little do they know, that within this very building, the manufacture of what could be considered an "assault" food is being manufactured. Heart Disease, caused by the blocking of arteries due to over consumption of fatty foods mixed with sedentary lifestyle, etc. Is the number one killer of Americans. Roughly 1644 human beings die from this daily. The absolute deadliest poison in this little town, is being distributed plain-sight, without anybody batting an eyelash.

Allow us now to drift slowly and airily just a block or so further south, we can take our time now, no need to rush. Let us gracefully land on the rooftop of yet another building. The smell alone reaches our noses, before any of our other senses can be gained. The pungent, disgusting odor of gasoline and cigarettes stampede up your nostrils before you know what hits you. Clearly we have come to a foul place. This is nowhere unusual though, as is soon realized--stopping here for a few minutes of life per week is commonplace for most everybody. Warm welcomes, to the gas station. At this oasis of detriment, no person leaves without their soul getting just a little bit dirty. Cigarettes, those magic wands, are sold here, and for a nice profit too! Needless to say, we have come to a poison yet again--peddled in a legal, mortar and brick building and all. Despite the 263,080 murders per year by this industry (720 daily), there they are handing out poison legally, yet again. Also, another fun attraction to this neon gem of a road-stop, there is gasoline. Not only does almost every adult American (whether right or left, up or down, progressive or libertarian) require this lifeblood of the earth in order to sustain their own existence, but it is only available as the direct result of millions of innocent, down trodden, third world human beings being blown into arms, legs and intestines while they are making dinner at their home, playing on the monkey bars in the school yard or experiencing their only wedding day—forever scarring every person who had ever experienced the gift of life with them . And let us not get into the fact that this black elixir can only be available to man and woman alike—at the direct expense of every single micro and macro eco-system on the planet which sustains them. Staying on the topic of all-important Americans like us however, the plastic shelled vehicles that protect people from the elements and comforts us as we rocket between point A and B in our daily lives—accidentally mutilate and kill over 32,000 of us every year, maiming and/or destroying the lives of countless of our friends and families.


Ah! Something seems to be happening in the distance, let’s fly over there quickly to see what all the commotion is about. I see a lot of blue and red lights, there seem to be police involved, let’s stay in a nearby tree so that nobody can see us. Okay, I see multiple police cars, many officers have their guns drawn—something dangerous must be happening. The people in the center have a group of cars assembled near one another suspiciously, what is it they are doing? A negotiator seems to be asking one of these suspects to come forward with what looks like a some white substance in a glass jar…The police have obtained the white substance peacefully, the representative suspect has been taken into custody. The jar looks as though it contains…milk? Is that really milk in the jar they are holding? One of them just said…Oh Gaia! It is milk, raw cow’s milk they said. But the guns are still drawn? Why haven’t they put their guns away? These aren’t drug dealers, just a group of homesteading friends, getting together to exchange the goods they make. It looks like they are now taking the entire group into custody, everybody is backing down peaceably, looks like the show is over for now.


There has never existed a large sovereign social system in which militaristic violence was not a key component in enacting the laws and drawing obedience from the individuals that comprise the state. Why, at this point in our country, do we trust the individuals we do trust, to openly carry weapons, with the ability to point them at us and decide (with the backing of our “democratic” laws) to pull the trigger at their own discretion? The instance just described is something that actually takes place on our own soil—people of the lower classes, having to sell FOOD to each other incognito due to either lack of permission (ie “no permit”), lack of USDA federal certification, or inability or unwillingness to pay a large portion of their sustenance to their government. Instead, the protection of the state goes to those who actually comprise the legislature—ie the jaded term “corporations” or the legitimized large scale merchants and producers of the larger militaristic complex. Mcdonalds (or any poison food merchant for that matter) has the state sanctioned legitimacy to distribute the exact equivalent of death to the population, and if any of us went up into their establishment and attempted to stop them right then and there—we would be taken away in hand cuffs and put into a cage. The continued existence of tobacco agencies has proven that taking any other option to stop them (either judicial, legislative or executive for that matter) would be just as futile as it is exhausting. Point: things only have legitimacy because of the weaponry which backs them.


One question I pose is this: do we trust those that are making laws (now that guns are available to the people being “policed”) and would we trust them more once direct revolution (or attempting to enforce one’s own beliefs by the same means that other beliefs are being enforced upon them) becomes an entirely ‘non-option’, by having the “means” all but entirely unavailable to us?


Another point is this, and I beg people to please take a second to really think about it:

Would anybody in the United States have the convenience and leisure with which to talk about gun control laws, if they were not currently within a bubble protected by missiles, drones and guns—all of which, as you are reading this, are being used violently in your name to kill many innocent humans? (Aristotle has a similar point about the convenience provided to philosophers by slaves btw)

That bubble is currently put in place by our government. How much do you actually trust them? I mean they literally are, very simply, a composition of large for-profit companies right? Factually, there is already the equivalent of mass murder being committed by them domestically (as we saw through the statistics earlier) that far exceed and completely dwarf any other domestic danger that policemen are protecting us from with their guns.


Please let us image an absolute worst case scenario for this country. If the walls that currently protect us from the onslaught of war going on in the outside world, suddenly came crashing down for instance. (Do you trust the government enough to keep them up forever?) Would you want the option to be armed and ready for potential ground war happening in your neighborhood, so that you, as a mother can defend your children’s lives? What if backing down or peace wasn’t an option? Is it for many civilians in war ridden countries now?


Imagine another worst case scenario. If our current government began to suddenly shift into the equivalent of Nazi Germany, as real people (just like you and I) experienced not very long ago, would you want to have the capacity for you to defend your Jewish (or say Islamic?) neighbor? Or would you want them to have had the option to arm themselves for the very real self-defense of their family? Or would we simply trust that the government was making it’s choices in our best interests—because all other options are essentially out the window? You know, the Jewish population did not fall victim to the Holocaust overnight, it began with years of slowly but surely taking their rights and their ability to defend themselves away—which included excessive gun control.


If this country was at a point where its people had to sell real food that they grew or raised to one another on the black market as though it were drugs, where parents had to hide their children from advertisements so that they don’t compulsively consume fast food and cigarettes or join the military as soon as they turn 18, and armed men patrolled the streets (with cameras on every corner watching theit back) to protect the rights that allow these dynamics to exist, would handing your gun over without question be the smartest move given the direction things were going?


I am not suggesting violent revolution or anything of the sort, I am simply asking that people start viewing the socio-political reality that we are held in with global/historical eyes. Unfortunately there are many deadly events that happen daily in our hyper-populated world, statistically domestic gun violence in the US (although definitely scary) in not even nearly the most prevalent one. Weapons definitely are, however, the most prevalent means of control and forced obedience. Ironically, giving up guns now may be one of the worst mistakes that people can make for their children’s future—because we have no idea what that political reality will consist of then, yet deciding that "semi-automatic" weapons be essentially outlawed now may have dire repercussions for them. Not to downplay the seriousness of other human beings losing their lives due to domestic gun violence—but why are these other hundreds of thousands of domestic murders not taken nearly as seriously via legislation and media coverage? Media politics is not what it is by accident my friends, how could these hundreds of thousands of other deaths be overlooked by accident? They can't...I guess there's a last side note to think about…



Just my offering as a self-proclaimed liberal who currently resides in an eco-village in West-County. Sorry that there is not a super consistent single thesis with this thread. Feel free to share it with your friends.

[Ubastet]

You have put into words, just what my sentiments are on the subject. Thank you.

Please, allow your mind to drift upwards, slowly melting into the sky as you gain a bird’s eye view of the world. Rest for just moment, ahhhh…Now slowly descend back down through the atmosphere, mile by mile, until you are hovering gently in the clouds over the little quite town of Sebastopol.

...

[podfish]

There has never existed a large sovereign social system in which militaristic violence was not a key component in enacting the laws and drawing obedience from the individuals that comprise the state. Why, at this point in our country, do we trust the individuals we do trust, to openly carry weapons, with the ability to point them at us and decide (with the backing of our “democratic” laws) to pull the trigger at their own discretion?
One question I pose is this: do we trust those that are making laws (now that guns are available to the people being “policed”) and would we trust them more once direct revolution (or attempting to enforce one’s own beliefs by the same means that other beliefs are being enforced upon them) becomes an entirely ‘non-option’, by having the “means” all but entirely unavailable to us?

Would anybody in the United States have the convenience and leisure with which to talk about gun control laws, if they were not currently within a bubble protected by missiles, drones and guns—all of which, as you are reading this, are being used violently in your name to kill many innocent humans? (Aristotle has a similar point about the convenience provided to philosophers by slaves btw)

Your initial points are all true. If you only measure by actual carnage, guns aren't really that big a problem. I still can't believe that we've ended up letting all kinds of random people operate heavy machinery at high rates of speed, in close proximity, with minimally engineered safeguards. It's truly nuts, and would have been unimaginable if proposed 150 years ago.
And we tolerate all kinds of health threats that arise as a consequence of industrial actions, and we permit and even enjoy products that are poisonous to us.

SO??? Opposing gun regulation on those bases is the same as saying "but mommy, joey got away with it!".

To the second point, though you make it with more context than the woman in the press demo who says you need AK47s because the army that will try to oppress you is well armed, it's still a silly idea. I can't believe it keeps coming up. This argument's been taken to a ludicrous extreme in the example some give of "hey, what if the Jews in the ghettos had been armed?". Uh, Poland itself was armed. Didn't work out well for the goyim neighbors either. When a country descends into internal chaos, people may have need to form local militias or be able to stand off home invaders on their own. That sounds like Waziristan to me. I don't really want to start down that road.
Like it or not, a civilized country gets that way by conceding a monopoly on violence to its government. Of course you don't blindly trust them. But you don't deal with that by making a shadow military to oppose them. The political evolution of last few hundred years can be characterized by lots of experiments in how a citizenry can ensure their government serves, rather than owns, them. The countries that have been better places to live in have done so by encouraging engagement, not resistance, to their governments.

Back to the list of things that we tolerate that are bad for us: think of the counterpart on this side. Why are you worried about a government takeover, when you couldn't feed yourself/fix your own transportation/keep yourself housed and warmed, because of lack of skills, knowledge or control? Apparently, judging from recent events, you're in more danger from a comet than you are from government oppression! So rather than arm yourself and train with weapons (you -do- think it takes a bit of skill to fight back against any non-zombie opponent, don't you? or do you think just buying a prop will defend you?) why not buy tools and learn to be, not only self-supportive, but able to help support your neighbors?