A Problem With Guns?
Robert L. Kocher
Is there reason to control guns because "guns kill people"? Fifty years ago there were few prohibitive gun laws in the United States. Rifles and shotguns could easily be purchased over the phone from magazine ads in many of the hunting and firearms magazines. I lived in a Midwestern city that had one of the largest small arms dealers in the country, if not the world. They conducted their business over the phone and through the mail from magazine ads. In some ads at other dealers, 20mm antitank rifles were available.
Yet, with the exception of the fantasies in old James Cagney gangster movies, in the 40s and 50s the streets of America were safe beyond anything remotely imaginable today. Millions of veterans had returned from the war with millions of military weapon souvenirs. America was swarming with rifles and pistols, and the crime rate was low. Even in 1962 when I was in the army near Washington, D.C., later to become the murder capital of the world, one could take a nap on a park bench with no fear of being bothered.
As is well known, the unofficial Swiss national motto is, "A rifle behind every door." A principle Swiss national sport is rifle shooting. Their military keeps their small arms at home and usually keeps their arms after retirement. The crime rate is minuscule.
The Israeli military keep their arms at home. Their violent crime rate is minuscule.
In a number of states in America gun ownership is nearly unrestricted, nearly universally common, and the carrying of open or concealed firearms is nearly unrestricted. The crime rates are low.
Small arms are not dangerous in Israel. Small arms are not dangerous in Switzerland. For most of its history, small arms were not dangerous in America. In portions of America they are still common, but still not employed in violence or other criminal acts. Virtually any scientific analysis indicates public ownership of small arms correlates with lower violent crime rate in a civilized industrial society. From a correlative basis any serious study shows that a shotgun, pistol, or rifle in every home would not be a societal threat, but would more probably be expected to result in crime reduction. Indeed, the recent study by Dr. John Lott Jr., examining the most extensive collection of information known over a nearly two-decade period, argues this to be true, although his conclusions have been subjected to shrill denunciations in a wide-spread liberal panic attack. Why the denunciations and panic?
If a low incidence of violent crime can, and has, occurred coincident with the widespread ownership of an abundance of small arms, then the incidence of violent crime is not a function of guns, but of something else.
If small arms in the possession of the public were a potential remedy to a serious violent crime problem in the United States and the purpose were to provide that remedy, then one would believe they would be welcomed rather than fought. The presence of small arms is not fought for purposes of controlling crime and violence, but for other reasons. There is a cultural and political axis in American society looking for any excuse, and manufacturing excuses, to prohibit guns of any kind from being kept in the hands of the people.
Violent Crime in America
The roaring 20s saw a dramatic rise in homicides in America due to the conflicts between rival individuals and small gangs. Flamboyant rogues such as Al Capone vied for power and reputation during a period when the smuggling of a good grade of whiskey into the country was a welcomed service. This was ended by three factors. Frist, the repeal of prohibition ended the source of funding and glamor for the rogue glory days. Second, Elliot Ness type federal agents moved in to pressure the mobsters. Third, the ascendancy of the Costello-Luciano-Lansky organizing capacity evolved in the underworld after which the rogues became outlawed within the underworld and crime became organized and more benign.
Indeed, some of the top mobsters, many of whom remained unknown, were somewhat puritanical in values and personal habits. Frank Costello, the "Chairman of the Board," in the underworld had a gruff voice because of a throat operation, but was a rather quiet, decent, and intelligent man who made his money in silent partnership with Governor Huey Long in illegal slot machines. As he said, "I don't kill people, I buy people." He, and the top echelon of the organization bought people. People in high places looking for illegal sources of large sums of money or power also bought the organizational capacity of that echelon. Hence, for example, John Kennedy sent $250,000 bags of money to the mob to help throw the presidential election. Violence was bad for business. So during the 30s, underworld violence diminished accordingly except for occasional slight internal conflicts that went largely unknown to the outside world.
The gang violence of the 20s was predominantly purposeful and well directed. While it produced spectacular headlines, members of the general public were spectators, not threatened participants. The average person was unaffected. By 1940, open gang violence was an anachronism.
In the halcyon 50s, the homicide rate, in fact the rate for all crime, was consistently the lowest since about 1905, before which records are probably somewhat unreliable. Yet, America was awash in personal small arms which could be purchased without serious restriction.
During the mid 60s the homicide level began to increase astronomically. It more than doubled between 1965 and 1975.
At this point it's important to understand the realities of the entire spectrum of the period and what should be talked about when there is discussion of violence in America. In media descriptions there is focus on homicide followed by quick focus on guns, handguns, so-called Saturday-night specials, and assault rifles. There is also an attempt to relate the homicide rate to turf wars by drug gangs--and an attempt to frame the center of dialogue upon incidences such as the two high school brats who recently killed classmates in Columbine, Colorado. This is little more than fiction or distortion employed by anti-gun advocates.
The sensationalized accounts in newspapers or on TV, or as portrayed by anti-gun advocates, bear little or no resemblance or relevance to the realities of crime or what Americans have to face.
According to U. S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics for 1998, http://ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/guns.htm, "Victimizations involving a firearm represented 23 percent of the 2.9 million violent crimes of rape and sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault." That means over 2,200,000 people in America were raped, robbed, or just beaten half to pieces without the use of a firearm of any kind. The 2,200,000 without the use of firearms is the realistic daily reality people face. That is the real profile and threat of violent crime in America, not media hype describing one or two kooks that go nuts. Until recently, in years such as 1985, a person killed in a homicide had half as much statistical chance of being killed with a knife as with a handgun-- and 1,000 people were clubbed to death. In recent years handguns have become a completely arbitrarily convenience employed in homicides, but are not by any stretch of healthy imagination a critical factor in commission of homicides or any other violent crime. For millions of people who are victims of violent crime each year, it's absolutely clear that complete banning of all guns in America will have little or no effect upon their becoming victims other than depriving them of any means to protect themselves, and criminals will be assured of it.
Nevertheless, a distraught columnist hysterically advocating absolute gun banishment writes, "So far 59 people (as of late September of 1999) have been gunned down this year in schools, synagogues, offices and now, a church. Dozens more have been injured, including victims left wheelchair-bound for life."
In the adult real world, in a nation with 275,000,000 people, if one person in ten million has some sort of psychotic break -- and 100 people are killed each year as a consequence -- it is simply an unpleasant fact of life inherent in an imperfect human psychological world. There have been, and will always be, a few such people and they will choose another method if a particular one is not available or not to their liking. (There was the Boston strangler. Ted Bundy killed in the order of 100 women without use of a firearm. I know of a woman who uses her car as a weapon in random attacks upon other people driving on streets and freeways.)
While such people and acts of rarity such as the Columbine incident can be sensationalized and used for generation of anti-gun hysteria and ideological profiteering, they are neither a quantitative or qualitative representation of violence or crime in America, nor illustrate a problem with the availability of small arms. Indeed, such incidences, although tragic to the people involved, are not a serious statistical threat, and they result in far fewer deaths than falling off stepladders or choking on food. To seize upon, or magnify the significance of, the actions or methods of 10 or 15 erratics using guns per year in a country of 275,000,000 people is an exercise in demogogery. From a statistical point of view, such rare incidences are a reasonable expectation on all counts (12,000 people in America die each year from falls, often in the home; 4,700 die from suffocation, about half from ingestion; in the real world, there is as much chance of being struck by lightening as becoming a victim in the situations the columnist is using as leverage in wild attempts to generate hysteria).
Violence Without Firearms
What is beyond permissible statistical incidence, and beyond any reasonable dismissal as being practically insignificant, is the far more grim reality that (according to the published DOJ figure) more than 6,200 people a day are raped, beaten, maimed -- or violently robbed, and killed -- in violence committed without firearms and from which victims are without possibility of police protection and have no way of defending themselves. But the politically correct demonstrate their cleverness, and indulge their streak of sadism, by diverting attention away from this reality in order to focus primary attention on the actions of 10 or 20 psychotics a year. If there is serious reason for intimidation on the streets of America, the 6,200 figure is the stark reality. However, an attempt has been made to transfer the realistic fear from this area into a statistically irrational fear of .0001 percent of the population, and a hysteria against firearms that leaves victims helpless and defenseless against the real threat -- one which is not even acknowledged.
The mid 60s saw an explosion of violence in America correlating with numbers of homicides that more than doubled between 1965 and 1975 and have remained more than twice as high as the predominant level seen in the 50s since that period. Close to 50 percent of murders during that period did not involve use of handguns. To some extent the homicide rate is deceptive as a measure of violence because medical procedures and means of transport have improved -- resulting in substantially fewer deaths. If medical science and equipment were at the same levels as in the 20s, the number of deaths would have been much greater.
But homicides and guns were the least of problem. Virtually all kinds of violence and destructiveness increased equal to or beyond the homicide rate. Here is an extract from Department of Justice figures since 1959.
No. 335. Crimes and Crime Rates, by Type
[Data refer to offenses known to the police. Rates are based on Bureau of the Census estimated resident population as of July 1, except 1980 and 1990, enumerated as of April 1. Annual totals for years prior to 1984 were adjusted in 1984 and may not be consistent with those in prior editions. See source for details.
-------------------------------------------------------------- VIOLENT CRIME --------------------------------------------------------------- Forcible Aggravated Total Murder 1 rape Robbery assault ----------------------------------------------------------------- YEAR Number of offenses (1,000's):
1960 288 9.1 17.2 108 154 1961 289 8.7 17.2 107 157 1962 302 8.5 17.6 111 165 1963 317 8.6 17.7 116 174 1964 364 9.4 21.4 130 203 1965 387 10.0 23.4 139 215 1966 430 11.0 25.8 158 235 1967 500 12.2 27.6 203 257 1968 595 13.8 31.7 263 287 1969 662 14.8 37.2 299 311 1970 739 16.0 38.0 350 335 1971 817 17.8 42.3 388 369 1972 835 18.7 46.9 376 393 1973 876 19.6 51.4 384 421 1974 975 20.7 55.4 442 456 1975 1,040 20.5 56.1 471 493 1976 1,004 18.8 57.1 428 501 1977 1,030 19.1 63.5 413 534 1978 1,086 19.6 67.6 427 571 1979 1,208 21.5 76.4 481 629 1980 1,345 23.0 83.0 566 673 1981 1,362 22.5 82.5 593 664 1982 1,322 21.0 78.8 553 669 1983 1,258 19.3 78.9 507 653 1984 1,273 19.0 84.2 485 685 1985 1,329 19.0 88.7 498 723 1986 1,489 20.6 91.5 543 834 1987 1,484 20.1 91.1 518 855 1988 1,566 20.7 92.5 543 910 1989 1,646 21.5 94.5 578 952 1990 1,820 23.4 102.6 639 1,055 1991 1,912 24.7 106.6 688 1,093 1992 1,932 23.8 109.1 672 1,127 1993 1,926 24.5 106.0 660 1,136 1994 1,858 23.3 102.2 619 1,113 1995 1,799 21.6 97.5 581 1,099 1996 1,682 19.7 95.8 537 1,030
Rate per 100,000 population:
Forcible Aggravated Total Murder 1 rape Robbery assault
1955 4.1 (from other government source) 1960 160.9 5.1 9.6 60.1 86.1 1961 158.1 4.8 9.4 58.3 85.7 1962 162.3 4.6 9.4 59.7 88.6 1963 168.2 4.6 9.4 61.8 92.4 1964 190.6 4.9 11.2 68.2 106.2 1965 200.2 5.1 12.1 71.7 111.3 1966 220.0 5.6 13.2 80.8 120.3 1967 253.2 6.2 14.0 102.8 130.2 1968 298.4 6.9 15.9 131.8 143.8 1969 328.7 7.3 18.5 148.4 154.5 1970 363.5 7.9 18.7 172.1 164.8 1971 396.0 8.6 20.5 188.0 178.8 1972 401.0 9.0 22.5 180.7 188.8 1973 417.4 9.4 24.5 183.1 200.5 1974 461.1 9.8 26.2 209.3 215.8 1975 487.8 9.6 26.3 220.8 231.1 1976 467.8 8.8 26.6 199.3 233.2 1977 475.9 8.8 29.4 190.7 240.0 1978 497.8 9.0 31.0 195.8 262.1 1979 548.9 9.7 34.7 218.4 286.0 1980 596.6 10.2 36.8 251.1 298.5 1981 594.3 9.8 36.0 258.7 289.7 1982 571.1 9.1 34.0 238.9 289.2 1983 537.7 8.3 33.7 216.5 279.2 1984 539.2 7.9 35.7 205.4 290.2 1985 556.6 7.9 37.1 208.5 302.9 1986 617.7 8.6 37.9 225.1 346.1 1987 609.7 8.3 37.4 212.7 351.3 1988 637.2 8.4 37.6 220.9 370.2 1989 663.7 8.7 38.1 233.0 383.4 1990 731.8 9.4 41.2 257.0 424.1 1991 758.1 9.8 42.3 272.7 433.3 1992 757.5 9.3 42.8 263.6 441.8 1993 746.8 9.5 41.1 255.9 440.3 1994 714.0 9.0 39.3 237.7 428.0 1995 684.6 8.2 37.1 220.9 418.3 1996 634.1 7.4 36.1 202.4 388.2
----------------------------------------------------------- 1 Includes nonnegligent manslaughter.
Source: U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States, annual: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucreports.htm.
Typically 12-13 percent of rapes, robberies, and assaults involve guns while 10-11 percent involve knives.
The Great Crime Jump
Beginning in about 1965 there was a sudden astronomical increase in the entire spectrum of violent crime in which guns played a marginal role. By 1970, a sane law-abiding environment in America was a thing of the past. By 1975 America had plunged into violent madness which eventually resulted in violent crime numbers six times that seen in the early 60s and which in spite of recent minor decreases continues into the present at rates that would have been considered science fiction in the 50s. Most of it did not involve firearms. Of interest are rape statistics which are not gang or economically motivated, and seldom involve guns.
Why did homicide increase 100 percent in a 10-year period? Homicide increased for the same reason other violent criminality increased by more than the same amount. Basically, American society and institutions were becoming characterized by serious absence of conscience, discipline, rationality, or consideration of other people. That absence could get you killed, raped, robbed, or beaten without reason or conscience and with increasingly less concern for expectation of, including argued demand against, serious consequences of actions to be experienced by offenders -- and with increasingly less opposition either from victims or institutions supposedly protecting victims. Conscience, morality, discipline, rationality, or consideration of other people were being declared, or viewed as, arbitrary impositions or trivialities in America -- with predictably destructive consequences.
The consequences were seen not only in casually-committed violence, but throughout the entire spectrum of personal and public American life. It affected the illegitimacy rate, the divorce rate, the level of sexually transmitted diseases, levels of drug addiction, attitudes toward education, personal work habits, and virtually everything else.
Under an assault by the political and lifestyle left, conscience, morality, discipline, rationality, and consideration of other people were being declared, or viewed as, arbitrary impositions, obsolete anachronisms, or trivialities in America. Within this environment there were, and still are, no longer sufficient serious cultural or personal limits to behavior of any type including, coincidentally, widespread violence on the streets. Respect and inhibition by conscience was replaced by a mentality of infantile rebellion, lately seen to have worked its way into the White House.
Many of the people who complain about irrational violence and handguns also seem to be people who tolerate or advocate the cultural climate of irrationality and mindlessness that fundamentally produce it. To some extent this may be the result of intellectual deficiency. To great extent these are people who practice irrationality and mindlessness in their own values-free personal lives and seek to create and impose a society of such mentality. To greater extent they seem to be playing a sadistic game which they think is cute and in which they are determined to perpetuate the cause while simultaneously inflicting irrational totalitarian and destructive cures as part of the oppositional-defiant sadistic game of entrapment characteristic of modern liberalism.
Contemporary liberalism is a proponent of values-free education and values-free or values-neutral everything else. When the predictable result is conscienceless disturbed personalities who engage in values-free or values-neutral killing, liberals mock stammering critics objecting to the process by claiming the problem is with handguns and assault rifles. In fact, the liberal controlled, approved, and engineered social and educational environment produces carefully prepared deficient, disturbed, confused, and often-angry personalities that are extended destructive alter-egos of the people producing them and who act out accordingly throughout the broad spectrum of their lives, and specifically as violent agents leveraging liberalism--in an atmosphere of cute denial.
The two arrogant spoiled brats who killed their classmates in the Columbine, Colorado incident had long been defiant walking advertisements for their attitude and intentions in a local and national psychotically permissive social environment. Everyone in the school had been absorbing their escalating levels of arrogant guff for far too long. There were no surprises involved. They had been skirting the line and pushing the limits for some period in a national atmosphere where setting them straight was a prohibited politically incorrect imposition upon their right to self-expression. In the weeks succeeding the killings, more brats in other schools began wearing the same clothing and other paraphernalia to become a center of attention and importance and push the limits in taunting the sane world, and were allowed to do it without intervention.
The pampered processed self-expressionists will kill you, or each other. Liberalism will knowingly provide the corrupt or values-free environment to encourage or enable them to do it. Co-conspirators in determined social destruction in the ACLU will bring suit to protect them while they are preparing and advertising they are going to do it. Leftist journalists on TV and throughout the media will label people as being right-wing kooks when they recognize the obvious and view the situation with alarm. At the last second when the one of products of the process arbitrarily picks up a firearm to complete the mission of madness, liberal commentators barely suppress a smirk of superiority and triumph while claiming the firearm is the problem or accuse you of being the problem. In the majority of instances where firearms are not used, nothing's a problem, it's not reported, and it doesn't exist.
A parallel process has underwritten teen pregnancy, destruction of the educational system, venereal disease, and most of the other so-called social problems in the country--although firearms don't become an issue in these instances.
Through a process of pathological evolution, it has gone on so long and has become so reflexively habitual that some of the people engineering it have forgotten what they are doing or why they are doing it and believe their original denial. The fundamentals have been lost on focus on the secondary contest of hatred between those doing promoting the process, and those who are alarmed, angry, and trying to resist the process.
But make no mistake about it. In an act of exquisite sadism and destructiveness, contemporary liberalism has knowingly and systematically produced impulse-controlled, rationality-free, values-free walking time bombs. When these bombs go off, the people who produced them secretly laugh, then blame guns if the arbitrary choice of weapon is a firearm. It's part of a pathological game.
Another serious aspect of the problem which is a forbidden subject is the rate of out of wedlock childbearing and the no-parent family. At times in the last 30 years the rate of out-of wedlock births has approached 1/3 of all births.
Statistical Rolodex - Births to Unmarried Mothers
http://www.cdc.gov/nchswww/fastats/unmarry.htm
Out-of-Wedlock Births (most recent figures for U.S.)
Number of Live Births to unmarried women: 1,257,444 (1997) Birth Rate for unmarried women: 44.0 births per 1,000 unmarried women aged 15-44 years. Percent of all births occurring to unmarried women: 32.4 percent.
Source: National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol 47, No. 18
Reports on Birth Rates of Black Americans 1996
1970 1996 Black children born to married couples | 357,262 | 179,568 | | | | Black children born out of wedlock | 215,100 | 415,213 |
An overall national level has seen from 40 to 70 percent of black children born out of wedlock in the last 30 years. In localized demographic areas 80 percent or more of black children are born out of wedlock to young girls. There are 16 year-olds with 13 year-old mentalities raising children while continuing in an immature life style. The children can not reasonably be expected to acquire any greater degree of maturity, morality, discipline, or seriousness than the people raising and passing their values on to them. There are 15 year-old mothers, 32 year-old grandmothers, and great grandmothers in their 40s, all continuing the same mentality of the immature 15 year-olds that raised them. We are moving into the fourth generation of black "families," and even entire demographic areas, that have not had, and continue to be without, serious mature adult influence in their lives. The condition perpetuates and compounds itself in successive generations, resulting in a spiral of steadily diminishing maturity or sense of responsibility to the point where any civilizing influence is but a distant memory in the minds of a few old people cowering in hiding places.
The impulsive and irresponsible products of this hedonistic swill of immaturity blithely kill each other for the most trivial of reasons including for possession of tennis shoes or jackets. They use stolen guns on some occasions, or in other cases whatever weapons or capacities they have available. The NAACP, that is both a product of, and is protective of, that culture, and is committed to defending it through omission of criticism, has decided that the solution to the problem is to blame gun manufactures and sue them. That will accomplish the desired goal of avoiding any discomforting serious introspection within the culture while bringing in some easy money to continue the insanity.
In the case of the white community we have parents who have convinced themselves that children don't need the kind of serious supervision or discipline that would inconvenience parents while they play at life. In the case of the Columbine shooting, it should be asked what the parents were doing and why they didn't intervene when their kids, becoming progressively resentful of the demands of real life and escaping those demands by substituting strutting attention-getting membership in a clique of counterculturally important psychotics and losers, were obviously orbiting beyond the outer limits of sanity. One of the kids was given a BMW instead of parenting.
Gun Prohibition
Groups or reasons promoting gun prohibition:
The grief-motivated
There are some people who those who vehemently assert absolute banning of guns as a result of personal loss. In the case of Sarah Brady, one might understand her opposition to gun ownership as a result of the maiming of her husband.
The Stop-the-Worlders and Hysterics
There is a sincere stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off mentality. Some inhabitants of that mentality are overwhelmed, confused, and crippled in their understanding of nearly anything, and are grasping at what little they can in muddled desperation. They live in an internal world approaching generalized panic attacks in fear of life in general and almost desperately seek a blandness they can handle. In recent decades major portions of the American population have existed in a condition of panic or near-panic as they displace the anxiety over potential realization of the condition of dysfunctional personal lives and other problems into agoraphobia, bulemia and other eating disorders, or whatever, and now anti-gun hysteria disorder.
Americans were once self-confidently independent self-reliant mentalities. As a predominant American characteristic, that died out with the demographic and cultural descendency of the last of the great generations of Americans born in the early 1900s. In the last four decades Americans have become highly suggestible conformists who fear what they are told to fear, and accept what they are told to accept. They have been conditioned to live in absolute fear of even minor social criticism -- reality doesn't control their thinking, social fear does. In their lack of confidence and softness they need the entire world as a psychological support group. If someone in a TV studio 1,000 miles away representing what is presented as the cultural consensus stamps his foot, many Americans move to get on the latest wave of hysteria portrayed in a virtual reality that is kept uncontested by any other allowed presentation, even though what is being said is an obvious lie or completely irrational.
The American population has become a collection of programmed hysterical unthinking herds. They are being programmed to believe guns are somehow the problem while they are being diverted from examining reality and the real problem.
When we go beyond these two groups we enter into a polarized world. It is a world of deep division polarized on everything along social and political lines. Much of that division occurs along the complete array of liberalism determined to impose itself and demand enforced compliance to its agenda throughout society, versus its antithesis determined to resist that imposition. Essentially, the ultimate purpose of gun control is to render people incapable of the ultimate form of protest and resistance to that imposition. Both sides know it.
Practicing Sadists
Many gun control advocates are sadists who practice indirect or psychological violence or aggression, but want to immobilize physical retribution. They want a passified world of bland immobilized victims where sadism can not be contested.
One of the subtle forms of sadism is to impose a humiliating and controlling conformity. The form is a little like the character of Nurse Rached at the mental hospital in the movie One Flew Over the Coo Coo's Nest. She ran therapy groups that kept her patients in a chronic state of subtle controlling humiliation and repression. She finally sentenced the one man in her therapy group who showed any independent spontaneous liveliness to a crippling surgical lobotomy to prevent him from questioning or escaping her stifling sadistic control. In the same way, sadistic liberalism seeks to impose an intrusional condition of humbling outside review and submission to declared conformity into people's lives.
The sadists know guns present no real problem. They like to maneuver people into helplessness and laugh while watching people dance at the end of a rope. They enjoy seeing people helplessly victimized by real crime statistics.
Gun Politics
In about 1996 there was a discussion in one of the national news magazines about the majority of the population in 10 or more western states being in a state of near-revolt toward the federal government.
One of the methods of preventing the growth or power of a movement is to not report its existence or report it from a view of subtle ridicule. Centralized news reporting has the capacity to confer an aura of credibility and legitimacy through emphasis or tone in reporting, or to deny credibility or even existence through deemphasis or manipulation of tone in reporting. Journalism has the ability to create a sense of isolation within a political or social movement, or to create a sense from the outside that a sociopolitical movement is an isolated aberration relative to the culture. On the other hand, journalism can magnify the sense of spirit and momentum of a movement.
Journalism can make or break a sociopolitical movement. There is a certain narcissistic exercise in display of self-importance which tempts the profession to do so, to the point of creating and maintaining movements.
Journalism, particularly since the advent of television, if centrally unified and controlled in content, is the most powerful social engineering force in the world that is capable of creating and exploiting the mentality of the people. Most utopian and other governmental theorists are keenly aware of it and intrigued by it. In America, editorial content is fiercely independent of government censorship.
The classical concern has been that government not control the press. With the advent of a highly centralized technological communications system in the last 50 years in the form of TV -- where virtual reality can be synthesized under the guidance of a small group of people and the public is channelized into receipt of that medium -- censorship, even the censorship of a society, acquires a new meaning. What has not been considered realistically is the almost Orwellian science fiction conception that journalism might somehow become its own unified de facto political machine and become the manipulating governing body that in turn creates the formal legal government as well as a manipulated social environment.
The question is, does such a unified body exist? In answer: approximately 89 percent of the Washington press corps voted for George McGovern in 1972 and an almost identical number voted for the Clintons. The views of a George McGovern, who at times espoused a fanatically dishonest and distorted view of the world, required a distorted, even dysfunctional, and highly committed mentality on the part of those who could believe and support him. The content of TV lies and distortions night after night as dedicated expression of that mentality are presented with no possible confrontation from viewers. In accordance with this is a disinclination to present alternative, healthy views, that are perceived within the journalistic profession as utterances from right wing kooks, in any light that other than that which is undermining and as being representative of an isolated small minority. Interpretations such as appear in this series are made nonexistent by their omission from any portrayal or reference in media that has a distorted enough frame of reference and commitment to even tolerate McGovern support.
There are media-declared non-people and non-views in American society that somehow never find representation to seriously disturb the complacency of the spectrum of values and mentality that would support a George McGovern or the Clintons. Under the circumstances, one should suspect this comfortable absence to be less than impossibly mysterious.
Thus, in the 60s the civil rights movement and the so-called anti-war movement as well any other left-wing movement was reported in a way that created a prophetic sense of growing inevitability of coming as well as functioning to achieve a degree of coordination that the participants could not have achieved with a billion dollars in advertising.
Let's have a moment of realism. During the so-called Paula Jones-Monica Lewinsky affair, in which Clinton contemptuously lied to the American people, to judicial proceedings, and so forth, polls showed a consistent 35 percent rock-hard strong disapproval rating for the Clintons. While there was initially a stated much greater proportion of the population registering strong disapproval if the magnitude of the allegations and the deliberate insult to the American people turned out to be true, many such people were gradually worn down into resignation by the Clintons' tactics. The intensity of the hatred of the Clintons in particular and the political left in general within that 35 percent of the population was of a strength that could not be worn down and can not be overestimated.
The Clintons won the last election with the votes from about 24 percent of the American adult population in the lowest turnout since the 20s. Most of that 24 percent represents the extreme hard political left in America. That's enough to take the presidency against 76 percent of the population in a country where a majority of people became so disgusted with the political process that they declined to participate or vote.
Silent Rage
If the polls can be believed, 35 percent of American adults are in a condition of silent rage at a system manipulated by a virtual politics in a virtual reality to the point where they feel disenfranchised and excluded in an atmosphere of imposed increasing social madness. They are characterized by statistical consistent cluster in which they hate what they consider to be a degenerate leftist/counterculture-infiltrated educational system. They are ready to explode over law suits ruling they must install gay scoutmasters in the Boy Scouts in spite of the fact there have been several recent incidences where such leaders sexually abused boys under their leadership. They hate a political system which increasingly assumes the premise that they are now assumed to be possessions of a state where the individual increasingly exists only for totally conformist servitude to a voraciously controlling and demanding social group whose members sublimate and displace the frustrations resulting from their own conformity upon their neighbors in the form of an authoritarian sadism upon the individual rather than at the entire powerful system. They are furious over media virtual-representation by prearranged assigned voices 1,000 miles away who supposedly speak for them and are the only ones recognized. They do not want an imposed authoritarian liberal social agenda They are desperately and seriously seeking another solution and voice. They are not opposed to armed revolution if opportunity loosens things up to permit it and coordination becomes established. Guns will be their voice.
They come off like kooks because when asked what is wrong they either stammer with rage or provide a flood of a backlog of 20 years of exasperation. They've basically been driven to barely containable exasperation. When they explode, ridiculing liberals laugh and call them irrational.
Beyond the 35 percent another probable 20 percent are secretly ready, passively hoping a massive rebellion will occur, or who will become willing participants should the social condition become such that it no longer enforces their repressed condition and they feel released to act.
Basically, America is ready to explode, and has been for 35 years. The explosion has been counteracted and held in check by the liberal media.
If someone in sympathy were given editorial control of one of the major networks and were to label the potential rebellion as a constitutional or freedom-rights movement while providing articulate advocated sympathetic TV news and discussion coverage that Martin Luther King or members of the leftist movements received during the 60s, there would be armed rebellion in America within a year. There is probably no serious doubt of it anywhere.
The motivation and potential is there. Large portions of Americans have been ready to explode for years. If a sense of direction and coordination develop, there could be a revolution and civil war. The angry disenfranchised sit at home cleaning their rifles in the privately held wish that one day they get a chance to send a bullet in their tormentors' direction.
When Bill Clinton is found to be getting oral sex and masturbating while making arrangements to send troops to Bosnia, and James Carville appears on TV justifying it by shouting, "It's about sex. This is Wawr, I tell you!" their eyes turn to red hot coals, they grit their teeth, then they go to buy another box of cartridges hoping the war will come to full fruition. It's the basis of the militia movement in the United States. The militia movement is purely a movement preparing for the final remaining option of possible armed resistance against imposition of the agenda of the countercultural political left in the United States. There is no real doubt about it anywhere.
A basic ploy and system of interpretation between the two sides in this war, which is non-violent for the present, is the rule of law. The radical left maintains gun confiscation is necessary in this instance to impose the rule of law. The resistance argues that what is designed to be achieved is not the rule of law, but is instead an unconstitutionally imposed rule of systematic madness where law is systematically perverted for purposes of imposing absolute obedience to a counterculteral left-wing agenda.
So far the rebellion and resistance have been controlled, or perhaps repressed is a better term. They have been controlled by the liberal media through a combination of a blackout of critical views concurrent with selective presentation of a ridiculing image of them whenever possible. The government has been effective. Every third person at a militia meeting is a federal agent. There is a maxim among the militia people that the person attending the group espousing the loudest and most extreme views is probably a federal agent trying to manipulate the group into violent moves for purposes of entrapment.
When the so-called Freemen in Montana were besieged by federal agents, militia units from around the country began to travel to the siege vowing that this time there would be no Ruby Ridges or Wacos. The confrontation was precluded when they were intercepted and prevented from establishing their own siege of government forces at the site.
In a brilliant propaganda move, Bill Clinton went to Montana, mounted a horse, and had TV footage shown of him riding about a selected secured portion of the countryside in a defiant game of singing "who's afraid of the big bad wolf" in a state where a significant proportion of the population would have given anything to have blasted him off that horse and unto the nether regions.
Gun control is a method imposed to prevent the widespread civil unrest in America from erupting. People on both sides of the issue know that's what it's really about. People on both sides of the issue deny that's what it is about. The enraged people waiting and determined to hold on to their guns are forced to deny it because not to deny it is a criminal act. The people trying to confiscate the guns to immobilize potential revolt deny it because talking about the issue both reveals their agenda and might lead to an articulate clarification that could become a motivating rallying point that would draw substantial new members to the prerevolutionary condition.
The condition of angry dissatisfaction and political unrest is such that the government can no longer allow people to own guns while it continues to impose the reasons for that dissatisfaction.
Gun control is dangerous for a number of serious reasons.
The imposition of gun control in America would be a a dangerous acceptance of the irrational arguments demanding its imposition, further creating a society where reality is displaced by irrationality and hysteria. That's an unwise idea.
Gun control is dangerous for the same reasons gun control advocates say it is necessary. As a statistical fact, in the last 35 years America has become a land filled with violence and madness. As a further statistical fact, by far the predominant amount of that violence is not committed with guns. The absolute prohibition of guns would not eliminate the violence, but would only render victims incapable of defense.
Perhaps most importantly, gun control is used:
1) to hide an existent condition of madness in America;
2) to hide a condition of imposed pervasive madness in America;
3) to repress the consequences of imposing an agenda of increased pervasive madness in America, while simultaneously prohibiting all reactive options except acquiescent compliant desperation and conformity.
The gun problem in America is not a problem with guns, but with madness and disrespect for other people.
General Reference
Lott, John R. More guns, less crime: understanding crime and gun-control laws, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Robert L. Kocher is the author of "The American Mind in Denial," as well as many other articles. He is an engineer working in the area of solid-state physics, and has done graduate study in clinical psychology. His email address is steiner@access.mountain.net.