Monday, May 21,
2018
The Winning War the NRA Is Waging on
American Kids
By Dr. Rodrigue
Tremblay
(Author of the
books “The
Code for Global Ethics”, and “The
New American Empire”
“It’s like the front lines of a war.” A student at the Texas Santa Fe High
School, where 8 students and 2 teachers were shot and killed on Friday May 18,
2018, (less than
two weeks to go before the end of the school year.)
“We are devoted to creating an America
free from gun violence, where all Americans are safe at home, at school, at
work, and in our communities. As the Brady Campaign, we work to enact and
enforce sensible gun laws, regulations, and public policies through grassroots
activism, electing public officials who support gun laws, and increasing public
awareness of gun violence.” Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Mission statement, 1974.
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a
group of men living together in society, they create for themselves, in the
course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that
glorifies it.” Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850),
French
economist, statesman, and author.
American schools have increasingly become
shooting galleries in a war that the National
Rifle Association (NRA) is winning, with the help of venal politicians
and clueless Supreme Court Justices, against American students and teachers. In
the U.S., criminals, crazies and angry types alike can buy attack weapons of
any kind, at will. As a consequence, when students and teachers go to school in
the morning, they and their parents are never certain if they are going to come
back home, after school. If you follow the news, you may have gotten the
impression that American schools have become a lottery of death. Students and
teachers have become the innocent pawns whose lives are being cut short to
please the fanaticism and the gun idolatry of
the NRA.
This
was not the case fifty years ago. What has changed for the worse is an
increasing lack of moral responsibility on the part of people in authority in
the United States, and a rise in political
corruption, which has allowed private organizations and entities, such
as the NRA and the makers
of guns,
to buy up politicians to replace the common good in favor of narrow private
interests. The editorial boards of newspapers and other media are also to blame
for their lack of moral fortitude in not taking clearer stands against this
widespread corruption. They are all accomplices, to a certain degree, in the
epidemic of mass murders of children and teenagers in American schools.
Between
2012 and 2017, there has been no less than 239
school shootings in the United States—more than three gun shootings
each month—and the massacres continue, month after month, relentlessly. The
most irresponsible-in-chief is the current U.S. President, Donald Trump, who
cowardly and publicly echoes the NRA propaganda motto that “guns don’t kill
people; people kill people”. Such statements sweep under the rug another
evidence, and that is that the instruments of killing do matter. In fact, guns
are front and center in all mass killings. Military style automatic weapons can
kill hundreds of people in a short span of time. This was well illustrated in
Las Vegas, on October 1, 2017, when a heavily armed killer assassinated 58
persons attending a concert, and wounded 851 others, before he was found dead
in his hotel room. He could not have done so much killing and wounding with his
fists or with a knife! The type of weapons used was responsible for the high
number of victims.
Of
course, it takes a wicked, or a deranged or troubled individual, to kill
another human being. That is a universal truth. However, given that evidence,
the easiest it is for an evil or a deranged person to have access to deadly
instruments of killing, the more killing there will be. This is a truth that
some people refuse to accept, even though it is only pure logic. They pretend
that they need an arsenal of heavy automatic weapons to protect themselves and
their family against attacks. From whom? Is this paranoia or not? What can be
said is that such a stand is illogical because when everybody is heavily armed,
everybody is in mortal danger, even policemen who are entrusted with law
enforcement to keep public order.
Indeed,
many policemen are killed each year while being ambushed by heavily armed
individuals. Between 2006 and 2016, some 1,500
police officers have been killed on duty, in the United States. As
consequence, police officers are increasingly on their guard and may have
become trigger-happy, because so many people are roaming the streets and
highways while being armed to the teeth. This may have encouraged police
officers to become more prone to overreact in some dangerous situations, to
protect their own lives, but in so doing, they may threaten the lives of
unarmed citizens. Arming every citizen, as some have proposed, not the least
being U.S.
President Donald Trump, would only make a bad situation worse, and it
would risk bringing the United States to the threshold of an anarchic civil
war.
But
pure logic seems to have somewhat disappeared from the public discourse in the
United State, and it has been replaced by a twisted and deranged logic, especially
when the
issue of easy access to sophisticated military-style automatic weapons is
concerned.
The
original constitutional guarantee, in the United States, to own a musket in
order for ordinary civilians to dutifully join “a
well-regulated militia” to defend the land, at a time when most people
lived on a farm and at a time when the United States had only a small
professional army, has been exploited and corrupted, a few centuries later, and
has been elevated to the status of an absolute and unregulated right, for any
individual, to have as many military-style attack weapons as he can afford,
even in a close urban environment. This is a clear abuse of language and would
seem to be far remote from the initial intention.
For
some gun enthusiasts, indeed, the right to own lethal weapons would seem to
supersede the right to life for everybody else, and private interests would
seem to trump public interest. A society that accepts those crooked principles
in this day and age is well on its way to social decay and disintegration.
Since
the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado on Tuesday April 20, 1999, there
have been no less than 139
American students,
teachers and others who have been assassinated in American schools, and close
to 300 other people who have been injured, by disgruntled and heavily armed
killers. Only three months ago, this time at a South Florida High School, on
Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2018, seventeen people, (14 students and 3
instructors) were murdered at the hand of an expelled student, armed with an AR-15-style assault weapon.
While
the problem persists, people tend to forget and move on to other preoccupations,
that is, until the next mass killing in another school occurs.
Conclusion
Young Americans are
reported to be increasingly eager to register to vote. This is a good sign. The
political pendulum has swung too far in favor of the private right to own
automatic guns for some and not enough in favor of public safety for all. Maybe
the American youth will bring back sanity, in due time, to that deadly debate.
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______________________________________________
International
economist Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is the author of the book “The
Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles” and of “The
New American Empire”.
Posted, Monday,
May 21, 2018, at 8:30 am
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© 2018 by Dr.
Rodrigue Tremblay: The New American Empire Blog.