US gun wars, from polling booths to mass killings

We will keep our suspicions to ourselves and move on, noted for further investigation.

Fear

People are afraid, afraid of each other, afraid of new anti-gun laws, more truthfully, afraid for their own souls, afraid of whom we and our children may have become. His father retired Army, mother a prominent “socialite,” the “profilers” are going to have to reopen their books on this one.

Pandering

In an election year with gun owners being consistent voters and the National Rifle Association (NRA) lobby a stealth pro-Israel front group disguised as a “gun rights organization,” politicians and their “handlers” are vying for the perfect “sound bite” that will make them sound like they love guns but aren’t in favor of crazed mass murders.

    Mitt Romney, the Israeli/Mormon candidate, this is how he must be honestly described unless you choose to add “gangster” or “money launderer” to his other capabilities, was recently caught concocting a personal history of gun ownership and life-long hunting.

    Romney is a lifelong liar. At least he has found a job where this skill will serve him well.

Though never having owned a gun and his claims of “hunting” are considered equally fictitious, he has been endorsed by the NRA. His only “pro-gun” stance thus far is to support shooting Muslims, particularly Iranians and Palestinians, a personal obsession.

Chickenhawks

Others, of course, will have to do the shooting. Romney, during the time he should have served in the Vietnam War, fled to France yet maintains that he has a personal history of a “warrior.”

The term “Chickenhawk” comes to mind, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and so many others who support war have personal histories of avoiding national service during wartime. Almost all are supporters of Israel also. Is this a statement as to lack of personal character?

Average Joe, the American gun owner

America is a nation of gun owners, always has been. For generations, America was rural, hunting a birthright and the growth across the American continent involved continuous skirmishes with those whose land we were “borrowing” without their permission.

Until the post-Vietnam era, gun ownership was typically a shotgun or bolt or lever action rifle, weapons used with more regularity by rural owners and less often by urban owners. Victims were deer or ducks and weapons were thought of as akin to fishing gear and sold as sporting goods.

Today, post-Vietnam

Then things changed. I will place responsibility with the Nixon administration. He gained the presidency by playing one generation against the other while the country was in the midst of the disastrous Vietnam War.

Those returning from the war, the real combat veterans, felt, in reality, abused by the military, more abused by veteran’s organizations that openly criticized their service as “dishonorable,” abused by a government that refused to treat their illnesses, hundreds of thousands with cancer from exposure to poisonous dioxin laced Agent Orange.

Denying a real American Holocaust

Between one and two million died from the effects of Agent Orange. Another figure, between two hundred thousand and twice that or more died of the after effects of Post Traumatic Stress, both from health issues and many tens of thousands of suicides.

The government’s response has been to suppress figures, obfuscate and falsify. An entire army died, some taking decades, while others continue to hold on, fighting crippling illnesses and government bureaucracies dedicated to increase their suffering.

This generation began to see guns as needed, not for hunting but, quite realistically, as a necessity to protect themselves from what they learned in Vietnam. Vietnam taught a generation of Americans that their own government wanted them dead.

Awakening, the enemy is us

This was the first American army to learn that it served a police state that was likely to see its own veterans, its own citizens as targets as much as the “Viet Cong” or “Taliban” or whatever poor agricultural people America’s government chooses to put the “black dot” on and subject to “shock and awe.”

This is also the time when government tripled in size, not once but three times, new agencies, new laws, police became increasingly military in nature, privacy laws disappeared, constitutional protections dissolved and government agencies began infiltrating independent political organizations, in many cases convincing them to arm and train and then arresting or simply killing them all.

New weapons for new times

The new American weapon is no longer the shotgun or deer hunting rifle. It is the AR 15, the AK 47 or the Glock. Weapons that once held less than 6 shots, often only 3, now have magazines of 30, 50 or drums of 100 rounds.
Add electronic sighting systems, muzzle flash hiders and compensators, even night vision scopes and 20 million Americans are armed for full scale combat. Ammunition sells by the case. It may be America’s most valuable commodity.

Mainstreaming fear and militancy

Twenty years ago people with this type of weapon, some with body armor and camouflage clothing and hydration systems would be considered quite possibly insane or at least fanatical. This would be a “lunatic fringe,” militia members, separatist groups or religious cults.

Today?

The “citizen’s militia,” one interpretation of the constitution’s second amendment, the one describing the right to own guns, has a broad interpretation. It isn’t that specific groups are distrustful of police, new federal agencies or the military.

Everyone is distrustful of them

A month ago, the influential Council on Foreign Relations had General Odierno, Chief of Staff of the US Army write an article. In that missive, Odierno stated:

“Where appropriate we will also dedicate active-duty forces, especially those with niche skills and equipment, to provide civilian officials with a robust set of reliable and rapid response options.”

No thank you general Odierno

Today, President Obama stated that individuals with histories of psychiatric disorders should be prevented from owning “assault type weapons such as the AR 15.” This is a curious statement.

This weapon has been the basic US Army infantry weapon for over 40 years, designated the M 16 or the shorter barreled M 4 Carbine.

What Obama failed to mention is that, of the 650,000 troops that served in combat during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, 500,000 have sought total and permanent disability due to, as Obama would phrase it, having histories of psychiatric disorders where they “should be prevented from owning ‘assault type weapons such as the AR 15.”

Further, so much further

This is “math time.” Of the 650,000 troops, 500,000 have applied for psychiatric benefits. Of the remaining 150,000, between 80 and 100,000 were removed from the military under “less than honorable conditions,” mostly related to psychiatric disorders identical to the 500,000 that have been allowed to apply for benefits.

It gets better, you just can’t make things like this up

We forget to mention that those we would wish to remove weapons rights from while living in America were given advanced weapons while in Iraq and Afghanistan and are responsible for uncounted deaths, certainly hundreds of thousands, with continual reports that many of these incidents were not traditional combat.
Were Pat Tillman alive today, he could talk about this.

Medicated robo-soldiers

    Today, between 28 and 30 percent of soldiers serving overseas are under treatment for psychiatric conditions that, were they inside the United States, and were President Obama’s conditions for assault rifle ownership to apply, would not be allowed to possess such a weapon.

Candidate Mitt Romney favors even stronger regulations, how much stronger, we can only guess.
What the Army doesn’t say is that only a percentage of soldiers have combat assignments. We can safely assume that fewer than 20% have combat related assignments and that the majority of those on anti-psychotic medications, up to 30% of the whole, are from this 20%.

Statistically, under a worst case scenario, up to 150% of all troops who are in combat have been diagnosed with a disorder that should, under the judgment of their commander in chief, preclude them, not just from combat but from owning a weapon with a large capacity clip or magazine.

In truth, many are restricted even from driving cars once properly diagnosed.

Conclusion

Estimates are that Americans own around 200 million weapons. About a fourth of these are “high capacity,” either pistols or assault weapons, no one knows for sure. It is my approximation that 20 million Americans own both high quality assault weapons and high capacity combat pistols but the number could be higher, much higher.

    In the last half century, we have had three wars, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, with other acts of combat in up to 40 other nations. If anything, the military veterans themselves have become a core of disaffected citizens, 30% homeless, 15% or more in prison, of the non-homeless, 22% without jobs.

We do so enjoy shuffling the numbers around, moving so much money per month from the middle class to the wealthy, so many home foreclosed, so many jobs “outsourced,” the Mitt Romney “special.”

All the while the guns flow into Americas homes, more licenses to carry weapons, more military weapons replacing the hunting guns of previous years, more suspicion, of each other, of government, of police, fear of poverty, fear of job loss, fear of homelessness, fear of crime a mosaic of fear almost as though it were planned.

America has two political parties, both seen as controlled, both seen by most as too identical. Whenever Americans meet to form a new political movement, be it the Tea Party or something less structure, one of two things happens.
The wealthy and powerful hijack the movement and turn it into a totalitarian nightmare, as with the Tea Party (owned by the Koch Brothers) or everyone is mysteriously arrested for terrorism.

What is left? Americans have their guns, 200 million of them and stare at the door and wait. It isn’t the Easter bunny they are expecting.