My heart and prayers go out the victims and families that were affected by this horrible incident at the elementary school. This is a tragedy and I believe it is very important that we examine why so many of these shooting have occurred. One cannot simply blame it on the weapons that were used to take these lives. That’s like blaming a knife and fork because you are obese. If America has more knives and forks than any other country, would you use that to explain why so many Americans are fat? Of course not. I hear statements from our elected officials attacking our second amendment rights to bear arms. I see thousands of posts on facebook attacking guns and even ones saying they want them banned. Well, this is my response to it.
The solution to this problem is not more regulations and tighter gun control laws or “gun free” zones. People do bad things and will always do bad things no matter how much we try to control them or how many regulations we impose on them. Do the drug laws prevent people from getting drugs? My liberal friends tell me if we just had less guns, there would be less gun deaths. And, mathematically, that would be true. If you have less arsenic in the water supply, it will kill less people. Less of anything bad – calories, smoking, reality TV – will kill far fewer people. But here’s the problem – there are plenty of guns in Canada (mostly hunting rifles) – and yet the annual gun murder count in Canada is around 200 deaths. In fact, because of its proximity, Canada’s culture is very similar to ours – the kids play the same violent video games, watch the same movies and TV shows, and yet they don’t grow up wanting to kill each other. Switzerland has the third-highest number of guns per capita on earth, but still a low murder rate.
I find it fascinating how many people are willing to simply just blame the guns – it is such an easy way out. Just blame the guns and call it a day, no further inquiry, thought or research. These are the same people I meet who are driving around with Obama stickers on their cars, having no idea that they are endorsing a man who has killed over 2500 people in Pakistan alone, many of whom are woman and children. Or that he has waged war in Libya without congressional approval and violated so many amendments, that I cannot keep track any longer. They are the same one’s who speak to me in sound bites and then when I engage them in a dialogue, have nothing more to say but the same one or two lines they have memorized from the tv.
We have to look deeper into this problem and ask ourselves why America leads the world in school shootings. I will tell you why: we believe in killing as a way of accomplishing our goals.
Three-quarters of our states execute criminals, even though the states with the lower murder rates are generally the states with no death penalty. Our killing is not just historical (the slaughter of Indians and slaves and each other in a “civil” war). It is our current way of resolving whatever it is we’re afraid of. It’s invasion as foreign policy. Look at our current situation – we are mired in wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are deploying drones in Pakistan, we have covertly unleashed the CIA, the FBI and teams of mercenary assassins across the world, to hunt down and kill anyone we don’t like, and now, we are waging a war in Libya. We kill people at will, with drones flying over their country because we can. We have over 900 military bases in over 140 different countries. We always have enough money for wars, but never enough to feed the homeless or for education.
We are addicted to war.
To violence. To bloodshed. To greed. To hatred. Our leaders believe that we can bludgeon the world into obedience. There is no question that can be posed, no query submitted, to which Washington cannot answer with bombs, missiles, tanks, guns and mechanized death. Our violent, destructive, counter-productive, terrorist-recruiting, manic desire to control the Middle East and its oil, and to rule the world as the empire-heirs of Ancient Rome. It’s killing us and it’s killing them–literally killing countless thousands of innocents in many different countries and economically killing America. Our roads and bridges are in disrepair. Our schools are a shambles. Our people can’t find good work. Over 50 million Americans are below the poverty line. AND WE LEAD THE WORLD IN SCHOOL SHOOTINGS.
These shootings are symptomatic of the fear based paradigm perpetuated and promoted by the leaders of our country. Every day, we hear about all of the people that hate us, all of the “terrorists” who want us dead. We somehow justify all of our warmongering and destruction in the name of security and protection, while not realizing that our actions actually make us less safe and more hated across the globe. Our incessant interference in the internal affairs of other countries is the biggest threat to our national security, not a group of terrorists in the middle east. We spend over $1,000,000,000,000.00 (1 trillion dollars) per year, on war, death and destruction, bombs and missiles and guns, and tanks and helicopters and nukes and assassins, mercenaries, torture chambers, prisons, spies, and dictator-support, and god only knows what else.This is utter madness. A complete obscenity. It is the very essence of The Pornography Of Power and it is destroying America and it is effecting our children.
Even our system of taxation employs this same violence and coercion. Theft is defined as “the taking of another person’s property without that person’s permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.” I never gave my consent for the government to take my money. Did you? Extortion is defined as “a criminal offence of unlawfully obtaining money, property, or services from a person, entity, or institution, through coercion.” We must pay this money or else we will eventually find a gun pointed at our heads and then we will be thrown in prison. Our government obtains money through theft, force and coercion – a criminal offense. We endorse using a third party to forcefully impose our will on others. Is this the lesson we want to give to our children? Can we then be so surprised, shocked and dismayed when our children act on the same rage and violence that was endorsed by the culture they grew up in?
There will always be people who commit violent acts in the world, this is part of life. But we cannot base our entire society based on these violent principles and expect peace and prosperity! We need to change the paradigm we are living in. We need to end the senseless wars. We need to stop using force to tell people how to live their lives, what to put in their bodies and how much of their paychecks they are entitled to keep. We need to rid ourselves of an authoritarian government that attempts to police the world and our lives. Many people in this country are now ready for this shift and this growing movement is called the LIBERTY movement. We want to be able to live in a society based on voluntary mutual consent and cooperation, instead of one based on violence and war. This is not a pipe dream, it is a possible reality, but it can only happen when we – the people – demand it. See the 5 minute video below.
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