Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Gun advocates bringing about third world American society.


For me, it’s frustrating trying to communicate with constitutional authorities like open carry and concealed gun advocates who know more than legal scholars and historians. What they say sounds good at rallies and town hall meetings, but lacks expertise, precedent and legal interpretation. There are many who don’t see a need for regulation to ensure public safety.

As a country, open and concealed carry laws have turned a page, starting a new chapter that reflects a third world vision of armed civilians and a cowering public, afraid to question our untrained gun toting authoritarians. What’s next, local war lords keeping the peace?

When I confronted a blogger about the inflammatory rhetoric and open admission that people might will be intimidated by those wearing loaded guns, he replied “I will accept that description.”

These individuals know what they're up to. They understand their power. They're attracted to power and dominance. It's there time.

But conservative David Frum recently wrote:

Nobody has been hurt so far. We can all hope that nobody will be. But firearms and politics never mix well. They mix especially badly with a third ingredient: the increasingly angry tone of incitement being heard from right-of-center broadcasters.

The Nazi comparisons from Rush Limbaugh; broadcaster Mark Levin asserting that President Obama is "literally at war with the American people"; former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin claiming that the president was planning "death panels" to extirpate the aged and disabled; the charges that the president is a fascist, a socialist, a Marxist, an illegitimate Kenyan fraud, that he "harbors a deep resentment of America," that he feels a "deep-seated hatred of white people," that his government is preparing concentration camps, that it is operating snitch lines, that it is planning to wipe away American liberties": All this hysterical and provocative talk invites, incites, and prepares a prefabricated justification for violence.

And indeed some conservative broadcasters are lovingly anticipating just such an outcome.
This is the insane trajectory of American society. What we know as "normal" now, tens of thousands of gun deaths a year, will look like an episode of Teletubbies in retrospect.

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