Probably
the two most emotional issues in America are abortion and the second amendment.
Let’s set aside abortion for now because it is an emotional, religious and
ethical issue.
I have
had different attitudes about the second amendment, but the first time I rode across
the American West I realized how individual firearms ownership made America
virtually invasion proof so I became a believer. It is claimed that after Pearl
Harbor Admiral Yamamoto said “I would never invade North America; there would
be a rifle behind every blade of grass.”
Both
sides of the gun ownership issue make claims. More guns more violence, or less.
The second amendment implies individual ownership, or not.
So I did
my own research. The correlation between tough or lenient gun laws is weak. You
can find data that supports either point of view. What did they mean when they
wrote the Second Amendment? The answer is in the Federalist Papers. There is
nothing in there about hunting or sport shooting. It is about defense against
tyranny from within or without. Now I hear the anti-gunners saying things like
the people in those days did not have military weapons. No, their rifles were
considerably more effective than the muskets the Armies issued. Membership in
the militia required gun ownership, not the other way around. Irregulars with
small arms have held off, and even defeated mighty armies. The mujahedeen
kicked the mighty Soviet Red Army out of Afghanistan.
Guns do
facilitate violence, but so do fists, knives, pitchforks, cars, explosives, and
accelerants, e.g. gasoline. The unarmed part of the world is experiencing an
increase in suicide bombing. Violence is cultural. Unarmed Britain and Japan
are peaceful because that’s the kind of obedient people they are. Switzerland
is heavily armed, but peaceful. Every adult male there is required to maintain
an assault rifle and ammunition. America was founded on violence: The French
and Indian War, the Revolution, the Whiskey Rebellion, etc. Many early “settlers”
were convicts given a choice between America and the gallows. For 200 years the
troublemakers from all over the world emigrated. Going to America looking for a
home where they could escape the shackles and limitations of “civilization”.
Most of
the violence in America today is related to the War-On-Drugs. Think about it,
what does WAR mean, it means killing people to impose your will on their
survivors. Take away the war, take away the violence; simple as that! Take away
the drugs, good luck with that one. Prohibition was a dismal failure. We learn from history the government never
learns from history. The war on drugs has had no perceivable reduction in drug
use. Forbidden fruit is especially attractive to teenagers. Take away the guns,
how? There are more than 300 million, most of them unregistered and easy to
conceal. There are many countries where guns are illegal. The level of violence
has no correlation with the laws. And like whiskey and drugs, those who cannot
buy them, or steal them will figure out how to make their own. In Afghanistan
village blacksmiths were making fully functional copies of Lee-Enfield army
rifles and AK47’s!
If you
examine the war on drugs objectively, as Judge Gray has:
Or Ethan
Nadelman:
Or LEAP
: http://www.leap.cc/
You can
only conclude that the War-On-Drugs is a bigger mistake than Prohibition and
wonder about the sanity (Or Motives) of its proponents.
Perhaps:
(Previous post Nov 7)
I now
see the error of my ways. I thought
of the war on drugs as pointless and ineffective. I now see it as perfect for what it is intended to do.
Look what would happen if we ended the war.
We have
built the world’s largest prison system; we have to keep it and all the people
and contractors it employs busy. What would we do with all those people
warehoused in prison? Would they join the ranks of the unemployed, or
become just be petty criminals? In addition to prisons we have courts,
judges and their other employees that depend on the jobs it creates.
Without
low level drug users to plea bargain prosecutors would have to work much harder
to maintain their important win/lose ratio. Thousands of defense lawyers
depend on the drug trials for easily earned income with no remorse for
failure
Police
at every level from local departments to FBI have become dependent on the
opportunities it provides, advancement, excitement, publicity, overtime, free
drugs, bigger budgets and the assets that civil forfeiture provides: cars,
boats, aircraft, electronics, weapons, and cash.
The
small arms industry depends on equipment, gun and ammunition sales to police
and organized crime to stay in business and employ thousands of people.
The
economies of several countries, and counties in the US, are dependent on the
high prices they get for crops that produce an illegal product. What will they
do when cocaine and marijuana bring the same price as oregano and tobacco?
Legal drugs would deprive independent vendors of a major source of tax
free income.
All the
hoopla about illegal drugs distracts people from the tobacco and alcohol
industries, and the pervasive and harmful effects of their products. Constant
news coverage of the War pushes news about the harmful effects of alcohol and
tobacco off the front page. Celebrity scandals about illegal drug usage
are almost as interesting as sex. Rehab is so much more newsworthy when
it is paralleled with a threat of jail time.
Pharmaceutical
companies can justify the high prices of their mass produced product on the
comparably high price of street drugs. How could oxycodone compete with
legal codeine or even safer, more effective marijuana? Hundreds of
chemists, now busy designing drugs (prescription and illegal) around the
controlled substances act would be redundant.
The
drug test industry employs thousands. Employers need a simple reason to
reject minority applicants "You failed the drug test". Since
marijuana usage is somewhere between 50 and 80% and can be detected for months,
this is almost always credible, and impossible to rebut, although
meaningless.
Political
contributions from all those with vested interest in the drug war would stop,
then what would all the campaign service providers do without the
Mothers-milk of politics? War of any kind provides speech material for
polidioticians, “We need to work harder, we're seeing the light the end of the
tunnel, can't stop now.” Gets more votes than, “300 million
Americans are quietly behaving themselves.”
In
fewer words, the war on drugs has so thoroughly pervaded our culture that we,
or at least our ruling class, can't live without it any more than they
could live without their own hypocrisy. It is a small part of the basis of
popular politics: keep the public alarmed with an endless series of boogie-men
preferably imaginary, or manufactured as necessary to the needs, of the
reelection cycle.
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