Thus Spake Moses

"Sacred stuff resides in that wooden stock and blue steel, something that gives the most common man the most uncommon of freedoms."
"When ordinary hands can possess such an extraordinary instrument, that symbolizes the full measure of human dignity and liberty."
[the late] Charleton Heston, spokesman, National Rifle Association, U.S.A.

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Second Amendment, United States Constitution

The civil-rights, gun-ownership lobby in the United States is a precision instrument of defiance against the logic that when people are in possession of guns, bad things happen. Guns, not people may be the killing factor, but it is people who use the guns to advance whatever agenda for good or for ill, who are responsible for the carnage of deathfall, from young children playing with their parents' prized possessions, or psychopaths using their legally-gotten guns to create a modern-day massacre.

The history of gun ownership in the United States is the history of the making of the United States of America, when in the westward march to claim the abundant land awaiting the arrival of European settlers the aboriginal population of the geography felt compelled to respond to aliens insisting right of ownership to land held sacred by the nations that pre-dated their presence. Guns were needed to defend against the rain of arrows that made the statement that the land was the first-comers'.

Guns were required again when those former Europeans-turned-North American revolted against the edicts of Great Britain and the American Revolution made its historical entrance in the formation of the United States. But history has a habit of marching on, and the American Civil War entered the scene and not only were weapons required to enable the South to defend its ownership of black slaves against the interference of the North with its mistaken belief that all people should be free, but post Civil War, guns were needed to protect good white folk against the emancipated black hordes.

A pioneering nation needed its firepower. And when the American Constitution was being created, there were those among the founding fathers, suspicion of a national army that might become an instrument of tyranny, who felt that armed Americans who were capable of rising up against an unjust government might represent the best possible assurance that the people ruled, in a free and democratic society.

Today, America is a free and democratic society, one with the highest ratio of guns-per-population, and outbreaks of carnage are all too frequent, bringing horror and condemnation to the issue of gun ownership. Inciting the National Rifle Association's ire to defend its values on behalf of the people who love their guns, whether for sport shooting, game hunting, target practise or other lawful gun interplay. And this is why it is anything but uncommon to see gun racks in the cabs of half-ton pickups.

It's an attention-getter, is it not?

The popular gun-culture Guns & Ammo magazine informed readers in 1967 that the gun control movement represented a plot hatched by "criminal-coddling do-gooders, borderline psychotics, as well as Communists and leftists who want to lead us into the one-world welfare state." The National Rifle Association, once merely a club for sportsmen became a political organization warning members of "jack-booted government thugs."

This week, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld a Florida law dating from 2011 making it an illegal practise for doctors to enquire of parents whether they keep a gun in their homes. According to some experts, the presence of such weapons in a home make it "43 times more likely to be involved in the death of a member of the household than to be used in self-defence."  

And this week, too, as it happens, James Brady, wounded in the 1981 attempted assassination of then-President Ronald Reagan, who was a tireless campaigner for gun control, has died.

James Brady was left paralyzed after being shot in the 1981 attempt to kill then-U.S. president Ronald Reagan. (Evan Vucci/Associated Press)

Legislation was signed by Georgia Governor Nathan Deal earlier in the year permitting residents of that state to carry guns into bars, government buildings and gun-friendly churches. Not to be outdone, Sam Brownback, the Governor of Kansas, signed a bill to ban any local government from enforcing restriction ordinances on the open carrying of firearms. "Kansans have long believed the right to bear arms is a constitutional right", he asserted.

Facebook: MomsDemandAction

 

In Texas "Open Carry Texas" members have been enabled by law to take their children into toy stores, their fathers armed with assault rifles. C.J. Grimsham, Open Carry Texas founder feels such proud openness shows Americans how "irrational" liberals' collective fear of guns really is.

The Inventor's Sting

"The pain in my soul is unbearable. I keep asking myself the same unsolvable question: If my assault rifle took people's lives, it means that I, Mikhail Kalashnikov ... son of a farmer and Orthodox Christian am responsible for people's deaths.
"The longer I live, the more often that question gets into my brain, the deeper I go in my thoughts and guesses about why the almighty allowed humans to have devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression. Everything changes, only a man and his thinking remain unchanged; he's just as greedy, evil, heartless and restless as before!"
Mikhail Kalashnikov, Russia

When small arms are spoken of and particularly in the context of rebellious insurgents, of terrorists, of third-world militaries, this is the rifle of choice, the AK-47 assault rifle, more familiarly known as the Kalashnikov. Mikhail Kalashnikov achieved celebrity status when, as an amateur designer, inventor, craftsman, tinker, he designed his infamous assault rifle. He died last month at age 94, his enterprise acknowledged in the wild popularity of his weapon.

What he invented has become the weapon of choice for millions around the world. The AK-47 has the distinction of being the world's most popular firearm, certainly one of the world's most dependable in conditions that bogged down more sophisticated and elegant weapons. There is an estimated one hundred million of them to be found in use around the globe. Initially the Soviet Union helped to disperse it to Third World insurgents, and licensed production in 30 countries.

National liberation fighters, revolutionaries and their ilk swore by its attributes. Not as accurate as more technically developed rifles of its type, it is reliable, guaranteed to perform in sandy or wet conditions posing an operational risk to most other weapons that tend to jam, like the American M-16. "During the Vietnam War, American soldiers would throw away their M-16s to grab AK-47s and bullets from dead Vietnamese soldiers", Mr. Kalashnikov said with pride in 2007.

"I sleep well. It's the politicians who are to blame for failing to come to an agreement and resorting to violence", he said defensively in 2007 during an interview with The Associated Press, on the 60-year anniversary of his dreadful creation. In that same year, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke of the AK-47 as a "symbol of the creative genius of our people". Presumably no one in close listening space to its utterance shuddered over the statement.

Closer to the time of his death Mikhail Kalashnikov felt far less certain about his role in designing a weapon that has been used to bring death to countless numbers of combatants and innocents alike. His simple and reliable device was a source of great pride to him, a humble man who had never received any measure of monetary reward as a result of its use since his invention had never been patented, and had become the property of the country he served.

The honours he received which included that of the Hero of Socialist Labour, and the Order of Lenin and Stalin Prize, sufficed to persuade him that he had served his country well. And that sentiment was emphasized before he died when Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church responded to the letter written to him by Mikhail Kalashnikov: "If the weapon is used to defend the Motherland, the Church supports both its creators and the servicemen using it."

The future, however, has overtaken the past to become the present. Just as the genie representing the genius of scientific molecular enquiry into atomic properties unleashed nuclear destruction on the world, an advance in mass destruction that cannot be recalled to its former state of a process waiting to be discovered, the genie of Mr. Kalashnikov's automatic rifle refuses likewise to take up its former, mysterious abode.

 Moral Obloquy

"UN Watch calls on U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice, EU High Commissioner Catherine Ashton, and UN chief Ban Ki-moon to make clear that when the United Nations imposes four rounds of sanctions on Iran for illicit nuclear activities, condemns it for illegally arming the murderous Syrian regime, and denounces Tehran's massive abuse of human rights, this kind of appointment just defies common sense and harms the UN's credibility.
"We urge world leaders to declare that allowing Iran to chair a UN disarmament body is simply unacceptable, given the fundamentalist regime's illicit activities in precisely the opposite direction."
Hillel Neuer, UN Watch, Geneva

If any one single act of mindless complicity might be pointed at to effectively demonstrate the utter and absolute uselessness of the United Nations as a world-class institute of universal human rights and global peace being held in contempt without an utterance of denial, it is that the Islamic Republic of Iran, a truly abhorrent regime, has been named to chair the United Nations' most vital disarmament conference.

"This is like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of a women's shelter", Hillel Neuer, executive director of Geneva-based NGO UN Watch, stated with disgust. "Any member state that is the subject of UN Security Council sanctions for proliferation -- and found guilty of massive human rights violations -- should be ineligible to hold a leadership position in a UN body."

This is, after all a conference funded from the UN budget. It reports to the UN General Assembly. But this by no means represents a unique occurrence in crudely inappropriate UN activities.

 Yet, in his years of monitoring the events that take place within the United Nations and the ghastly antics of many of its members, this must surely represent the ultimate in cynical oblivion to reality. This is moral bankruptcy at its most unappealingly vivid, in bruised purple shades of blessing the devil among us to go forth and spread the evil that comes most naturally to its black soul.

Iran, working alongside its soul-mates North Korea and Syria, last week blocked the passing of a treaty in the UN to prohibit the sale or transfer of arms leading to acts of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes.And for obvious reasons, since it is precisely these regimes who hold the value of committing acts of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes in the highest esteem, as usefully utilitarian acts of tyrannical dominion over others.

Iran is busy supplying rockets to terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, ferrying them through Syria and Sudan. Where on several occasions Israel has seen fit to bomb the rocket shipments to disrupt their journeys into terrorist possession. And nor is Russia also any less guilty of supplying barbaric totalitarian regimes like Syria with weapons. Yet it is the State of Israel that is held within the United Nations to represent a universal pariah.

The United States imposed increased sanctions on Iranian companies in assistance and complicit with their country's nuclear program. Iran's banks and oil industries have been hit with crippling economic sanctions in an obviously futile attempt to pressure the country's theocratic rulers from their goal of building nuclear bombs. The international pressure brought to bear on Iran has been to little effect.

Iran does have its friends within the global community, and two powerful such friends sit on the permanent Security Council.

And it is without doubt that Russia and China are themselves quite complacent about the prospect of Iran taking up the presidency of the Conference on Disarmanent on May 27 holding the position for four weeks until June 23. Described by the United Nations as "the single multilateral disarmament negotiating forum of the international community".

A moral farce so absurd as to make the devil fall off his perch in amazement that a mere mortal entity could be as evil as the fallen angel.

Singing To The Converted

"Frightened citizens sheltered with no means to defend themselves. How many Bostonians wish they had a gun two weeks ago? How many other Americans now ponder that life or death question?
"Lying in wait right now is a terrorist, a deranged school shooter, a kidnapper, a rapist, a murderer waiting and planning and plotting in every community across our country, lying in wait right now"
Wayne LaPierre, executive vice-president, National Rifle Association, U.S.

Of the 340-million people in the United States, it is highly likely that almost three-hundred-million would eschew the right to bear arms for the purpose of personally tracking down supposed killers in their midst. The United States is a civilized country, due process of law is vital to its honour and its reputation, its respect for justice and its commitment to law and order. Wayne LaPierre boasts that the lobby group he represents will soon have ten million members.

The 'bad' people who illegally have possession of firearms and spend all their time plotting attacks on the 'good' people who legally own firearms, must be confronted before they are able to commit their atrocities on the innocent. How does one confront someone you don't even know exists, much less is busy plotting crimes of mass murder? Presumably, you take great care to take along with you wherever you venture, an reliable arsenal of weapons which will enable you to respond swiftly to any threatening situations.

Perhaps discovering, when a threat has been perceived and responded to, that no threat existed at all, and innocent people, who were assumed to be 'bad' have been looked after by armed thugs who have been dispatched through vigilante action to protect the community. Trayvon Martin, a young black man in Florida was shot to death by community volunteer George Zimmerman, who took him for a thug. Such suppositions are fallacious and their fallout fatally irreversible.

The National Rifle Association, regardless, is eager to cite instances where armed homeowners have acted in self-defence against the incursions of home invaders, righteously proving without a scintilla of doubt that one must be prepared to react against all instances of supposed and actual invasions of personal space and with armed resolve, when encountering potential threats to body and soul.

"The freedom of all mankind is at stake", right-wing television/radio host Glenn Beck told NRA members at their "Stand and Fight Rally". "They feel they must regulate us until we comply, but I will not comply. Weapons will always find their way into the hands of bad people, always. But we must declare this, that guns must remain in the hands of good people." Obviously, members of the National Rifle Association are the good people.

Those who oppose their standards of social responsibility and reasonableness are most obviously the bad people, though they are the greater majority.

Confronting Crime

"Just like any other city in Arizona and in the nation we have our issues but it is not crime-ridden. I would never say you have to carry a gun or you have to be afraid for your life."
Tucson, Arizona, Vice-Mayor Regina Romero

"People don't want to confront an armed person at home. But, separately, there is solid evidence that in communities with higher rates of gun ownership, burglary rates are up, not down, and that's because guns are hot loot."
Garen J. Wintemute, director, University of California, Davis Violence Prevention Research Program

Everyone has an opinion. Gun ownership in America is a bitterly contentious issue. The founder of The Armed Citizen Project, a University of Houston graduate student, claims to know otherwise. Kyle Coplen insists: "It is our hypothesis that criminals have no desire to die in your hallway. We want to use that fear."

And so, the campaign promises free shotguns for people to enable them to have the confidence to protect themselves. Residents of Tucson are divided on the issue, understandably. It was here in 2011 that six people died in a shooting rampage that almost also killed Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and the congresswoman along with her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, are now leading an effort to make gun ownership more responsible.

James Palka/Associated Press

Emergency personnel used a stretcher to carry Representative Gabrielle Giffords outside a shopping center in Tucson, Ariz.    Published: January 8, 2011

"If you are not willing to protect the citizens of Tucson, someone is going to do it, why not me? Why not have armed citizens protecting themselves", insists a local real estate agent planning the distribution of shotguns in his community to be initiated by May. The state's gun supporters have donated an initial $12,500 to fund the gun giveaways.

Those who sign on to the program will be scheduled to receive training on the proper use, handling and storage of their free giveaway weapons. They will be given trigger locks. The cost works out to roughly $400 for each participant, representing the cost of the weapon and the associated training.

Ms. Gifford and her husband are gun owners. They don't advocate not being able to access guns at all, but they do advocate for responsible gun ownership. Although still recovering from her wounds, Ms. Gifford champions universal background gun checks and additional gun restrictions. The absurd thing is that a majority of National Rifle Association members support those basic restrictions as well.

But the National Rifle Association is out there, front and centre, a minority special-interest group with great political clout, representing the views and the values of a relatively small number of its members, albeit those in leading positions, that Congress should keep its hands off the right of the nation to own guns, and that no legislation is required or should be considered to update Second Amendment rights.

Tucson City Council moved to approve a measure that would require universal background checks at gun shows on city property. The gun giveaway program as far as they're concerned, appears legal, and as a result they have no reason to outlaw it. Their own police statistics indicate that violent crime appeared at a 13-year low in 2010. Violent crimes; homicides, sexual assaults, robberies are down.

But Tucson experiences roughly fifty  homicides yearly. Whether defensive gun use impacts on lower commissions of crime is not definitively supported by research. Some research results suggest guns are responsible for more suicides and accidental deaths. There are studies that lead to the impression criminals are loathe to confront gun owners.

Some residents of the area are concerned and upset by the campaign to offer free guns to those who wish to take part in the program. "We could take that $400 per shotgun and give it to these people so they could go buy groceries, pay rent, pay their utility bills, something useful. Vigilantism is not the answer", counters neighbourhood association president Cindy Ayala.

Priorities misplaced.

Making Friends and Influencing People

"I've got a five-year-old son who went to preschool on the Sandy Hook Elementary School campus. And this was a really hard week for me on a lot of levels. These calls were the very last thing I needed."
Newtown resident, Christopher Wenis

AP Photo/Jessica Hill

Now, there's an object lesson in responsible sensitivity on the part of a gun-lobby enterprise. Oh not just any gun lobby; this is the influential National Rifle Association, battling the sensibilities of the non-gun-owning and responsible-gun-owning American public alike, in wishing to have some measure of societal/governmental control over the casual spread of assault weapons within the country.They simply will not have it, if the NRA has anything to say about it.

Christopher Wenis still has his son, and he still has nightmares about the danger his child had been exposed to; had he been a year older, he might have been among the 20 first-graders to be shot to death along with the six educators in December of 2012 by a deranged, armed killer. None of the parents of those children whose lives were so horribly extinguished on that fateful day, nor the families of the adults who joined them in death require reminders of the atrocity.

Living with the nightmare absence of their beloved children, none of the people involved, nor the other shocked and grieving residents of the town in Connecticut that made American history and global news through the horror of the event, might have imagined that a mocking reminder of their loss would visit them through automated telephone calls and postcards, courtesy of the National Rifle Association.

In their massive and costly public relations campaign to "support gun owners' rights", the zeal of circulating the good word as deeply and as widely as possible to awaken the American spirit of sanctimonious 2nd Amendment rights has led to the distribution of the calls and printed material directly within the wounded heart of the affected community.

There are many Americans who might add that they too were profoundly affected, their hearts too ache for the loss of those children and their educators. Adding to their voices would be the heartsick tragedies of all the mass shootings that took place prior to the Newtown massacre, and the many that have struck since, demonstrating the mass psychosis that exists within a society conflicted between the 'rights' of gun owners and the existential rights of all others hoping to be able to live out a normal lifespan.

While the NRA, through the distribution of its voice and print messages urging recipients to inform their state legislators that they are expected to oppose gun control proposals, debated in Connecticut along with other states, including New York and California, many of those on the receiving end of those messages feel rather less than grateful for the sentiments expressed.

"It's ridiculous and insensitive. I can't believe an organization would be so focused on the rights of gun owners with no consideration for the losses this town suffered", Newtown resident Dan O'Donnell said, disbelievingly.

Believe it.

Fox News Host Skewers NRA Chief: “That’s Ridiculous and You Know It, Sir”

By Daniel Politi

SLATE

Posted Sunday, Feb. 3, 2013, at 12:21 PM ET

NRA Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre testifies at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence last month
Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

If the National Rifle Association can’t even count on Fox News for a friendly interview, does that mean there's been a shift in the debate? On Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace interviewed National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre and wasn’t shy about calling him out on his arguments. The interview got particularly heated when Wallace brought up the controversial advertisement that criticized President Obama for providing armed security for his daughters but opposing armed guards in all schools, reports Talking Points Memo. (Video after the jump.)

"They also face a threat that most children do not face," Wallace said of Obama's daughters.

"Tell that to the people in Newtown," LaPierre responded.

"You really think that the president's children are the same kind of target as every other school child in America?" Wallace said. "That's ridiculous and you know it, sir."

At several points during the interview, LaPierre seemed to have dialed up his paranoia meter to the maximum level, saying the White House wants background checks as a way of tracking citizens. "I think what they'll do is they'll turn this universal [background] check on the law-abiding into a universal registry on law-abiding people," he said. Wallace countered that the White House hadn’t said anything about a universal registry, points out the Hill. "And ObamaCare wasn't a tax until they needed it to be a tax,” LaPierre responded. “I don't think you can trust these people.”

On ABC News, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said that the current debate about guns has revealed the NRA as an “insane organization,” reports Politico. “They have this vision that we're living in a Mad Max movie and that nothing can be done about it, that America cannot manage unless everybody's prepared to shoot intruders.”

Nightmare of Despicable Proportions

Again, out of the United States - although admittedly it could happen anywhere, considering the large numbers of incidents taking place in China with berserk men entering primary schools and stabbing young children - another hideous incident of a psychopath victimizing a child of five, after having shot a school bus driver to death in his determination to halt the advance of a madman and protect the children on his bus.

A man held to be a loner, a man who posed a threat to his rural neighbours, and who held himself aloof from others, a former member of the U.S. military, as a VietNam veteran, has run amok in his rural Alabama neighbourhood southeast of the state capital. The man, named as 65-year-old Jimmy Lee Dykes, forced his way on to a school bus delivering rural children back home after their school day. The 66-year-old bus driver's attempt to stop him, ended in his death.

And there was no one left, other than the children themselves - one of whom was a teen living nearby who had the presence of mind to shepherd the younger children to the back of the bus during the altercation between the bus driver and the psychopath, to protect themselves. They were themselves foiled when the man plucked a five-year-old developmentally delayed boy off the bus and abducted him. The autistic child has now been with the man in an underground bunker for four days.

"As far as we know there is no relation at all. He just wanted a child for a hostage situation", explained a church pastor who was aiding in the comfort of the children traumatized by this turn of events in their otherwise normal lives. The bunker is said to be equipped with electricity, and has ample food stored within it to withstand a brief siege. 

Local police have released a photograph of the man. A SWAT team is on the scene, surrounding the property in Midland City.

Jimmy Lee Dykes (Photo: Alabama Department of Public Safety)

Police are surrounding a home in Alabama - where a gunman is holding a five-year-old boy hostage.

Mr. Dykes is feared in the neighbourhood. He was to have appeared in court before the abduction, on charges of threatening his neighbours. As they drove by his house weeks ago, Claudia Davis and her family were menaced by the man. He called out and fired shots at her, her son and her baby grandson over damage he claims their pickup truck had done to a makeshift speed bump he had built into the dirt road.

On previous occasions he has threatened his neighbours, and once beat a neighbour's dog with a lead pipe for appearing on his side of the dirt road separating him from his neighbours, inflicting deadly wounds on the animal. "He's very paranoid. He goes around in his yard at night with a flashlight and shotgun. Everybody up the hill tried to avoid him", said one neighbour whose wife described how he had threatened to shoot their children if they ventured onto his property again.

This scenario plays right into the debate in the United States on the need for new gun laws, and the requirement to altogether outlaw some weapons, and certainly to keep them out of the hands of deranged individuals. A tall order in a country that prides itself on personal independence and the guarantee as they see it, of peoples' 'right' to bear arms.