Guns, Culture and Government

Leaving our emotions at the door to get to the bottom of a complex issue.

Needless to say it has been impossible to avoid discussions, information, and, especially, disinformation and propaganda over the issue of mass shootings in America. There are outright lies, statistics, statistics out of context, statistics purposefully distorted, appeals to emotion, idiots sawing their rifles in half, and emotionally damaged people coming out of the woodwork to talk about how they almost became a killer. Hardly any of it, hardly anyone, has the courage or the energy to discuss the root of the problem. I think it can be safely said that anyone who tries to say this is a problem that can be solved by infringing on access to guns for private citizens is not a serious person. At all. Becoming hysterical is not an expression of seriousness.

I cannot honestly or seriously proclaim myself as someone who understands everything that is wrong with society or can prescribe a cure. However, although I am not an old man, I have been alive long enough to know that this is a relatively new problem, and have lived through times when this sort of thing never occurred, even though there were more guns and more dangerous types of weapons (fully automatic guns were only banned a generation ago). What has changed these last couple of decades?

I can only speak to my own observations and experience, and apply what I know and form a hypothesis. What I can prove beyond doubt is that the problem has not arisen due to easier access to guns, or more deadly guns being available. The laws are stricter. These weapons are not new. People kill every day, and in large numbers, using weapons other than guns. Hijacked airplanes come to mind. Fertilizer-based explosives. Automobiles at high speed driven into crowds. Knives. This occurs everywhere.

I suppose I should take a step back before moving on and talk about the undesirability and impossibility of living in a safe society. This #neveragain movement strikes me not only as an exercise in futility, but of derangement. Is there anyone who seriously believes they can eradicate violence from a society of hundreds of millions of people and growing? Or would it simply comfort them, would they not care at all, if the violence and death didn't end, just as long as it wasn't done with scary looking, noisy weapons known as guns? Safety provided by government is and has always been the alibi of tyrants. This argument is almost always completely lost on the gun grabbers. The gentle government who holds your hand as you cross the street refuses to let go on the other side. This is the natural consequence of generations of people who've systematically had their sense of ownership and responsibility beaten out of them. You don't own yourself, so you demand your owners provide safety and security. And when they fail, flagrantly, miserably, one could say purposefully, most people ignore it. Just keep blaming the guns. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch.

And, just as an aside, I have no desire to live in a society that is absolutely safe, even for "the children". I am not a head of cattle. Freedom is risky. And you do not have the right to impose your fears, warranted or otherwise, onto my life. 


A Culture of Death

Before I begin let me make clear that these suppositions are not broad in their scope. Not everyone who has a vaccine gets a reaction. Lactose intolerance varies from individual to individual. Et cetera. There are people who live exposed to this culture who grow up to be perfectly morally adjusted and sane individuals. This of course makes it difficult to pinpoint these problems as definitive. They are simply for your consideration, as we know, if we are honest, that the problem is not with the guns and cannot be solved by limiting gun access.

Moral, sane individuals see that we have progressively become a culture that worships death and destruction. The media does a very good job of sanitizing this; they are perfectly happy to show you pictures of bombs destroying a building with precision, but are careful not to show you the devastated bodies of the victims, many of them children. The language used to describe these "people", if they are discussed at all, is sanitized. It's not murder. It's collateral damage. This says nothing of our inability, or unwillingness, in general, to consider the morality or practicality of these missions in the first place. What is the objective? What are the unintended consequences? Are they fighting for "freedom" in these countries? How many times does the government have to lie to get into conflicts before people stop blindly worshiping the troops and start demanding they no longer kill and die for no good reason? These do not matter. Because we are not shown the personal toll. You do not see the grieving father holding his child, shredded to pieces by a predator drone attack. When the veterans return home they are discarded, useless. Only lip service is paid to their welfare, if at all.

Correlation does not always mean causation, but a telling item you will rarely hear discussed in establishment circles is the fact that many of these killers were or aspired to be members of the US military. It seems almost stupid to point out the common sense that if you train people to be killers and then unleash them among a population, some of them may carry out what they were trained to do. And many of them become police, where their crimes become "legal" and not a topic for polite discussion, much less statistically documented.

At home, our police have become militarized adjuncts of the Pentagon, both in weapons and tactics. This has received little scrutiny among the general population. Most people are very happy that these officers of "the law" are being given better tools to keep them safe in their job of enforcing mostly ruinous laws that have no victim and only one purpose: to extract revenue for the State. Many of them are joyous that veterans, trained to kill an enemy, are actively recruited to "serve and protect". Point out that they have become an occupation force, the citizens a hostile insurgency, and much spitting and gnashing of teeth ensues. Some of us said, rather naively, "Put cameras on our police and they will be less likely to murder people." And we watched as they continued to murder, and continued to get away with it. And many people find any excuse, no matter how absurd, to justify their actions. He should have complied. He was reaching for his waist. Meanwhile the majority of them are unarmed. And the fact that many of these officers take "killology" courses that teach them to shoot first and ask questions later, that that first piece of ass you get after killing a man will be the best ass you've ever had, is completely ignored.

These are uncomfortable or even taboo subjects to many gun rights advocates, who have a cursory understanding of the importance of the right to bear arms yet give unflinching love, loyalty, and even cult-like worship of the very agents who would kick their doors in if they were ordered to seize their weapons. Out of one side of their mouth, they proclaim their ability and willingness to kill an intruder or otherwise implement their arms in the defense of their lives, their family, and their property, or fight against the government if it ever turned tyrannical (bit late for that, champ!), while out of the other side of their mouths spit at and mock anyone who suggests "law enforcement" is an immoral and unnecessary institution - "Don't call the police if someone breaks into your home!" Well, no duh. Isn't that why we own guns? What will you do if the police come to your home to take your guns? Isn't that why you own an AR or an AK? They know this is why the second amendment exists in the first place (as if a piece of paper can define or protect their rights), yet somehow cannot make the connection between a tyrannical law maker, who they hate, and its order followers, who they love. These are very confused people.

Chemically Lobotomized

I will fully admit that I have a heavy bias towards how lifestyle regarding diet and exercise affects our lives. I've been reading about it, and writing about it, for many years. It's not just about how fat you are, or how prone to chronic illness and disease you are. It's about your mental health as well.

One thing I never studied was the exact timeline this chemical assault on our bodies and minds began. Some ingredients like saccharin and aspartame have been around for generations. I wrote back in 2011 that there are over 17,000 chemicals food manufacturers can add to your food off label, because knowledge of the existence of these substances in our food might cause people not to purchase them. When I was a child I only received a handful of vaccinations, and their ingredients were probably different than today, when kids receive dozens in a relatively short period during their formative years when their minds are vulnerable. So it seems to me that this issue is something that has snowballed into the catastrophe that it is fairly recently.

Please observe, if you don't already, the consequences of this when you are out in public. The eyes, they say, are the windows into the soul. Look into the eyes of these people, your fellow human beings, and in many, many people, you'll see that there isn't much there. Even in the children, who haven't been exposed to this for very long. They are assaulted by these chemicals from the moment they are born - a hepatitis vaccine hours after birth, for a child without a fully functioning immune system (their immune system is the mother's milk) and without a functioning blood-brain barrier - there is MSG and other abominations in their formula, fluoride in their bottled water even though they don't even have teeth. Read the labels on jars of baby food. If you're foolish enough to eat fast food, observe the ages of those who are eating there, and ponder the life-long damage these "foods" are doing to a developing mind.

Even for adults, the affects are cumulative across generations. If you damage your DNA through unhealthy lifestyle, you pass those damaged genes to your offspring, who are then born with a less healthy hand than you were, making them more prone to illness. Then they very likely adopt your unhealthy lifestyle, further damaging the gene pool, which they then pass down when they procreate. And so on.

Finally, this creates behaviors in children that requires diagnosis and medication with powerful psychotropic drugs acting on, again, a mind still in development. Even normal childhood behaviors are diagnosed as a mental disorder and medicated. Every one of these killers - man and child (the fact that women rarely commit these crimes is also a factor, obviously, although one I haven't explored) was on some sort of psychotropic drug. Watch any prescription anti-depressant advertisement and pay attention to its side effects. Psychotic, manic, suicidal behaviors are almost always listed.

You will never see this discussed in establishment circles, because the pharmaceutical industrial complex is a cappo in the establishment crime family. They are the primary advertiser for establishment news channels and programs. They practically own the medical schools. This is simply a discussion that will never take place in the mainstream.

All of this results in a society infested with chemically lobotomized zombies who've had their ability to connect, to interact, to feel, poisoned out of their minds. They don't have the capability of empathy, of compassion. They are not "there". They are already dead inside, and for many, probably a statistically insignificant but loud portion of the population, having parents and relatives and peers who were too damaged to provide emotional support and nourishment for them, perhaps suffering further from physical and emotional abuse throughout their formative years, taking a life is nothing to them.

Facing Reality

The solution to this problem, if I am correct, only seems difficult because of our conditioning. Part of that conditioning is a love of and dependency on ease and convenience. Clever marketing has taught us that it's perfectly acceptable to stop at the drive-thru because you worked so damn hard; this society demands more and more of our free time to make ends meet. Parents are exhausted. I get it. Social conditioning, intentional or not, has taught us that people like me are WEIRD. I once made copies of Food, Inc. and The Future of Food and tried to hand them out to people for free. No one - not a single person - would take a free DVD from me to see what they were putting in their bodies. Not because the subject simply didn't interest them; they were literally terrified of the notion that they might learn something about their food that might force a change in their eating habits. Because they were taught that they can't live without pasta, or bread. They can't life without soda, or their favorite fast food. They are physically and mentally addicted. Alternative paradigms literally scare the crap out of them.

But if we are serious about solving the problem that has become loudly manifested this past generation, if we give more than lip service to caring about "the children", especially, ours, and society, then we must pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and make the effort and make the sacrifices. This cannot continue; the problem has been a downward spiral for generations, and someone has to reverse the course. Someone has to ignore the propaganda and the marketing and the deflections and get to the root of the problem. They have to have the courage to, with love, challenge social convention, customs, beliefs, and norms. That one person, I've endeavored, will be me, even if I am alone (I'm not alone). I know with every fiber of my being it's not the guns. Have I diagnosed the real problem? It's probably even more complex than this, but I know this is a prevalent contributor. I know what's in the food, and I know what it does to the mind; I see it every day. Having read this, being more aware of this, you will as well. You'll look into people's eyes and it will become painfully obvious to you: many of these victims are no longer even human. They're just a mindless organism, barely capable of responding to stimuli, incapable of independent thought or reasoning, unable to connect, to feel, to care.

I have no use or care for emotional pleas. No, dead children are not more important than my freedom. How many of them have to die before "we" (meaning government - no thanks) "do something" about guns? All of them. Because guns aren't the problem. And the problem will continue until individuals own their share of responsibility, and BE THE CHANGE they want to see in the world. Sawing the barrel off your rifle isn't making a contribution. Petitioning your "representatives" isn't doing anything. It's just making you smug and pompous, and guaranteeing that the problem will continue, with or without the guns.