Trending
Fred Bucheit
Howard
In Saturday's (Sept. 7, 2024) paper there was a cartoon with Uncle Sam looking dejected while asking the question, why, regarding school shootings. The answer is that the people who own large corporations aren't exactly stupid. The most important part of a corporation is a part never seen. The owners of corporations hire an aggressive team of propagandists who know how to sell things. How do you sell guns? Simple at the root -- you create fear and hate. That is all it takes, and so they devised all sorts of silly slogans that would become brain worms that convince us that, yup, guns are not only nice but absolutely necessary. They repeat those slogans and jingles endlessly. You know, like this one -- the only way to stop a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun. A minute of thought reveals the idiocy of it.
Take Lucky Charms, for example. Why are they sold by the millions of boxes? You place a highly addictive substance in them and come up with cute jingles and play them over and over forever. It works like a…charm. And there is one more step needed -- you fill the box with 30% sugar, one of the most addictive substances in the world (surprised?).
But back to guns. How do you create fear and hate? That is easy. You begin by mass producing guns to sell cheaply and use lots of jingles and grandpa's NRA to push them. Now, it takes a while, but fear not. It works. It doesn't take a genius to realize that a small number of those guns will fall into the hands of criminals, thugs, bullies, haters, the angry, the mentally short and the mentally damaged. When we realize that is the case, we naturally think, well, maybe I'd better get a gun for self protection. And the race is on. More guns are bought and more criminals get their hands on some of them. And now where are we? A society with more guns than people, and some of the best armed criminals and crazies in the world. And a nation living in fear. Where does hate come in? Guess what a hater will do when he gets his hands on a gun. Yup, he is likely to shoot someone. And, that produces more fear.
Three hundred Americans are shot every day of the year by goons with guns. No other industrialized nation in this world has that problem. Why? Because their laws are made by citizens instead of lobbyists of the weapons industry. The gun industry spends tens of millions of dollars every year making sure of that.
So, what do we do? The founding fathers gave us the ballot (one of the greatest social advances in history) so that we can change things differently than the way they were changed for thousands of years -- mass slaughter in war.
The founding fathers would be so ashamed of our abuse of the second amendment which was produced when guns fired one bullet every 30 seconds.
One of the greatest conservative judges who ever lived, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, got it right when he said " the sale, purchase and use of guns should be regulated just as automobiles and boats are regulated; such regulations would not violate the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution." He also added this important phrase "The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires. The Framers clearly intended to secure the right to bear arms essentially for military purposes." He also said, "The second Amendment has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I REPEAT THE WORD FRAUD, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime!" The special interest group in this case is the gun lobby. Now, don't believe me. Believe Warren Burger. He was the ultimate authority on this deadly matter.
Million dollar lobbyists are destroying this country.
We have lost more Americans to American terrorists with guns than we have to foreign terrorists. In fact, a million Americans have already died from gun violence and every one of them had a constitutional right to life. So, why do we spend billions to avoid the Latter when the former is our greatest threat?