The Divine Mr. M

“2020 is the first Presidential election since 1860 and 1877 to see a potential situation that could escalate all the way into an outright civil war. I don't think such a thing would remotely resemble 1860 because the scenario is different. I see it as somewhere between Mexican cartel war and the Colombian Civil War in real terms and that it would take a long, long time for the American public to accept the shift from Kyle Rittenhouse and Dylan Roof style terrorism to a full fledged war and to admit that there is one.

1860 was a completely different era and political culture where it was easy to create well armed forces on the fly, if not to command them well and this did a lot to play into just how many people died in the battles that followed precisely because it was that easy. Here? It wouldn't fit that model well but it's the closest scenario of any and I'm not sure what happens, but the civil war prospects have become much starker and more real than they used to be”

~Tamar Denny

“I have been telling Leftists to arm themselves for over twenty years now and got treated like I was David Duke for my troubles. Some are starting to listen now.”

~Nebris

~In the wake of the recent Mass Shootings, many of you are still rattling on about the NRA and Gun Control.

Folks, the NRA is largely a spent force, both politically and fiscally, so that noise is swinging at ghosts.

APX 90 million Americans own, at a minimum, 350 million guns, so forget about 'control'.

But I see more and more of y'all are talking about White Males and White Nationalism. Still hard issues to tackle, but at least now we're in the right ballpark...

~I went to check the numbers on school shootings in 2017 to make a point about the number of gun deaths in Chicago, about half of which are Drug War related. I was honestly surprised. 650 people were shot to death in Chicago in 2017, so let's say about 300 Drug War deaths. In Chicago.

Fifteen people died in 'school shootings' in 2017. That's right, fifteen...in the entire country.

Four of them where the shooters themselves. One was an estranged husband who there went to kill his ex wife and then shot himself. One was a random shooter who didn't manage to kill any students, but all his five off campus victims were listed anyway, so the real total is actually ten, but we'll stick with fifteen.

So school shootings are not the 'new normal', but Drug War killings most certainly are, because we do not even notice them. Maybe because they happen in poor Black and Brown neighborhoods, and not in the mostly White Middle Class suburbs.

See how easy racism is, kids? You can be racist without a second thought and feeling full of Moral High Purpose. God Bless America.

"Every call to ban AR-15's just makes more of them fly off the shelves. And 3D printer tech is reaching the point where they'll be able to make them 'on the DL'.

We've always had guns and semi-auto battle rifles, too. Millions of M1 Garands and M1 Carbines flooded the market during the 50's and 60's, but mass shootings have only been a social phenomenon for the past few decades. Clearly something else besides the availability of weapons is going on here. My take is that this is a fundamental social breakdown...

...and the average American is still roughly ten times more likely to be shot by a cop than a mass shooter."

"Gun Control is a sad little White Liberal band-aid upon the gaping wound of Corporatist Capitalism. White Liberals cling to it as a panacea for a collapsing Social Order because they lack the moral courage to face the possible loss of the cruel and unjust system that they themselves still profit by.

So White Liberal point to Guns and say, "This, this, we must purge this and we shall be whole again!" And then utterly ignore the rot and corruption that drives that violence to begin with, because to do so would mean looking at their own culpability in these horrors and giving up much of their own comfortable lifestyle..or what is left of it anyway.

The flood is not coming. It is here. It just has not risen high enough to drown you yet...but it will.

PS In case you're too dense, 'flood' is a metaphor for Collapse, which is not tattooed barbarians roaming the highways, but the steady, relentless erosion of the economy and public services by the rapacious greed of The Corporate Confederacy...which gives no fucks about your 'positive attitude'."

[As you can tell, I'm in a 'mood' today and was 'debating' Gun Control before I had my coffee.]

"There are roughly 32,000 gun deaths per year in the United States. Of those, around 60% are suicides. About 3% are accidental deaths (less than 1,000). About 34% of deaths (just over 11,000 in both 2010 and 2011) make up the remainder of gun deaths. Sometimes the 32,000 and 11,000 figures are used interchangeably by gun control advocates. Clearly, the 32,000 figure is a far more dramatic number and is often used for impact. These numbers are also regularly compared to other countries' gun statistics. But are they true? Here, we will examine some of the most common gun control arguments used and put those figures into perspective.

Gang Violence Driving Force of Gun Violence

To hear gun control advocates speak, one would be led to believe that gun violence is a widespread problem whereby the mere existence of a gun is as much a problem as the person who intends to wield it. But the reality is that gun homicides are overwhelmingly tied to gang violence. In fact, a staggering 80% of gun homicides are gang-related. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), gang homicides accounted for roughly 8,900 of 11,100 gun murders in both 2010 and 2011. That means that there were just 2,200 non gang-related firearm murders in both years in a country of over 300 million people and 250 million guns.

Cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and New Orleans all have very high per-capita murder rates. Individual police estimates usually find at least 65% and often more than 80% of all murders in those cities are gang-related. Solve the problem of gang violence, and a huge chunk of the gun homicide and violence problem is solved. And what national gun control measures would slow the gang violence problem, when local gun control laws have failed in cities like Chicago? If politicians were really worried about gun deaths, wouldn't they be specifically targeting where a majority of the problems exist?

2,200 Gun Homicides Per Year Beyond Gangs

The 2,200 figure is perhaps the most relevant of all gun statistics in the gun control debate given that the gun control laws are specifically targeted to this segment. If the government were interested in stopping gangs - and as a result also stopping the major contributor of gun violence - the gun laws would be more targeted. Yet most gun control legislation would do little-to-nothing to slow the growing gang problem. Most of the gun laws are aimed at a segment of the population that is mostly law-abiding and outside of the gang culture and would likely do little to stop any of the violence.

The United States is one of the most gun-friendly countries in the world. Roughly half of American households have a gun. There are almost as many guns in America as people. It's common sense to know that, yes, the United States will probably have more gun murders than a country with almost no guns and no households with guns. I'd would also assume that Florida will have more swimming pool drowning deaths than, say, Michigan. But unlike swimming pools, guns can also be used for self-defense reasons. The reality remains that in a country of 315 million people (and almost as many guns) very few of the guns are ever used in any crime. If arguments that the mere existence of guns made people more violent, more likely to murder, and more likely to commit crime, than the gun problem in America would be much worse.

Suicide Rates

Suicide is often a secondary reason gun control advocates use for wanting to "control" guns. It is true that roughly half of suicides in America are done by use of a firearm. Gun control advocates argue that suicides are often a momentary impulse and the availability of a gun makes people more likely to act on those impulses. Japan is probably the opposite of the United States in regards to a gun culture. With few guns and gun-related deaths, Japan is one of the most heavily cited countries by gun-control advocates. But while the cultural differences between Japan and the USA (and resulting gun violence comparisons) make a gun control argument hard to realistically swallow, one thing stands out: the suicide rate in Japan is more than twice the United States' suicide rate. The US suicide rate is about the same as Great Britain, Canada, Denmark, Switzerland, and Iceland and well below France and Greenland. In reality, suicide rates seem to have little to do with the availability or accessibility of guns. It just so happens that in the US guns are the suicide weapon of choice, while in Japan it might be jumping in front of a train or poisoning. The method of "jumping" is so common in Japan that the families of train-jumpers are often charged a fine for clean-up.

Mass Shootings Remain a Rarity

The reason that horrible tragedies like the Newton, Connecticut and Aurora, Colorado shootings are so gut-wrenching and shocking is rooted in a reality that such incidents are extremely rare. Unfortunately, politicians often aim to stir up emotional reactions and exploit these tragedies for political gain. With the incredible number of statistics that get thrown around and abused, it's important to sometimes step back and actually look at what the numbers say. Are the gun laws being proposed anything more than window dressing and "feel-good" legislation that will have little actual impact? Should more efforts actually be used in a results-oriented way, targeting the actual concentrated areas where gun crime occurs? Politics is often a processed-based and not results-oriented exercise, where "doing something" is often rewarded more than actually ever accomplishing anything." By Dustin Hawkins

...and Gang Violence is Drug War Violence.

Gun Control Logic is *always* about Gun Elimination because it is trying to stop humans from being the violent creatures that we are and since that is *always* doomed to failure, 'control' keeps including more and more types of guns until *all* guns are banned, except for those owned by The State. That's called Fascism.

The UK proved that back in 1987 when it finally banned handguns. The result? In the following decade violent crime went from 650,000 to 1.2 million incidents per year, even though the UK is one of the most surveillance intensive country's in the world. BTW the ratio of violent crime in the UK is 950 per 100,000 while in the US is 449 per 100,000.

It's a lot like gay marriage. You don't want to have one? Fine. Don't. Just do not try to deny me the Right to have the ones I want.

And in the end the politicians understand the numbers. 146,000,0000 Americans own 310,000,000 guns. There will be a lot of noise and not much will happen, basically because they want to keep their jobs.

All this Gun Control noise is likely to do is breathe fresh life into The Tea Party. But most Progressives are pretty clueless about that. Hell, a lot of y'all still think Obama is 'your guy'. He ain't.

I believe The Corporate State has learned The Hitler Lesson, that once a political radical grasps the levers of power, you can no longer control him with money. [It'll be a 'him' every time] That is why they ran all of the loons the GOP base favored off the road with cash early on. Mittens was always a sacrificial candidate. The Corporate State is perfectly happy with that smart accommodating black chap.

But I digress...

As I said a while back: "If the American Left would fully embrace the 2nd Amendment and the concept of The Armed Citizen, they would wipe the GOP Right Wing [and Blue Dog Dems] off of the political map in a single season."

And that is the core issue, 'the concept of The Armed Citizen'. In the past half century, the single worst political mistake of The American Left, tactically and strategically, was in surrendering that ground to The American Right.

There are many 'middle of the road' Americans who like their Social Security and Medicare and Public Services and would happy to see some more of them. Many of them don't really care about, or would comfortably ignore, the establishment of Gay Marriage or the expansion of Women's Reproductive Rights or a host of other progressive issues.

But they will vote for one nasty Fascist asshole after another if he or she promises faithfully to protect their Gun Rights because they don't trust The Gubmint aka The State. That distrust is the heart of 'the concept of The Armed Citizen' and while The American Left also distrusts The State on so many levels, it has adopted this bizarre attitude that it is just fine for The State to posses all the guns.

The Armed Citizen is truly the last best defense against the power of The State. And that is the essence of our Liberty here in The Republic. But The American Right taken almost total control of that concept and has reframed it terms that benefit their true masters, The Corporate State.

Let us do some reframing of our own. Think about Concealed Carry Permits and 'Stand Your Ground' laws. It has been ALEC, possible the most insidious operation of The Corporate State in recent memory, that has largely been the author and lobbyist for those issues. That gave us Travon Martin.

However, what if Occupy had taken the concept of The Armed Citizen to heart. Not for violent revolution, but simply to 'stand their ground'. Think about how the police treated Occupy at Zucotti and in Oakland, with violence and brutality and a near total abrogation of their Civil Rights.

Now think about they might have 'shifted' their policies if it were possible that in each instance there were hundreds of handguns and dozens of assault rifles legally present in each encampment and that there was legal justification to use them, even against law enforcement, within a 'Stand Your Ground' context.

How many American politicians really have the stones to use mass military fire power against crowds of our young Citizens in our urban centers? How many of them would be willing to inflict that kind of a deep wound on the American Body Politic? I doubt any who actually *have* the power to order such a massacre. Even Corporate Media could not ignore State Violence and bloodshed on that scale. The sociopolitical consequences would be extensive and unknowable and politicians deeply dislike those.

That is how the concept of The Armed Citizen really works. Yes, it is scary and uncomfortable. Not only might you yourself die, but you also might kill someone else. Both are profoundly disturbing ideas. But what is your Liberty worth to you? If you're not ready to die, or kill, for it...well, just Submit to The State and shut the fuck up.

Again, this not about armed revolution. We're really not at a place where such is necessary, no matter what the alarmists on the Left and Right say. The Armed Citizen is about Deterrence, about informing The State that pushing certain matters too far will result in civil insurrection and therefore that it needs to respect its Citizens and Negotiate.

For those that sneeringly summon the whole 'tanks versus deer rifles' canard, besides telling you to take a hard look at your own tendencies to fall back on brutal authoritarian solutions, I also advise you to look to our recent adventures in Iraq.

No matter how Washington spins it, the US Military ultimately lost there and it was a fully unified organization in that war. A civil war here would fracture it badly, which is why the Pentagon quails at the thought. I have little doubt that such has held Martial Law at bay several times in recent history. [can you say Dick Cheney?]

For those whom the concept of The Armed Citizen is too difficult, too uncomfortable to embrace, I say Just Let It Be and try this: If you really truly want to reduce gun related homicides in this country, instead of Gun Control, fight just as hard to end The War on Drugs, which is also a multifaceted Social Justice fight. That would reduce those deaths by at least half. Many many more black and brown children are dying in our Inner Cites from gun violence, nearly all Drug War related, than are white children in our suburban schools.

Such also has the moral benefit of Fighting FOR Rights, not against them.