Author Topic: Blaming guns is ridiculous - we are in a collapsing society  (Read 624 times)

Soul Crusher

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Blaming guns is ridiculous - we are in a collapsing society
« on: December 17, 2012, 10:01:40 AM »
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/society-is-crumbling-right-in-front-of-our-eyes-and-banning-guns-wont-help



Society Is Crumbling Right In Front Of Our Eyes And Banning Guns Won't Help

 By Michael, on December 16th, 2012   


What in the world is happening to America?  I have written many articles about how society is crumbling right in front of our eyes, but now it is getting to the point where people are going to be afraid to go to school or go shopping at the mall.  Just consider what has happened over the past week.  Adam Lanza savagely murdered 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.  42-year-old Marcus Gurrola threatened to shoot innocent shoppers and fired off more than 50 rounds in the parking lot of Fashion Island Mall in Newport Beach, California.  After police apprehended him, he told them that he "was unhappy with life".  Earlier in the week, a crazy man wearing a hockey mask and armed with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire on the second floor of a mall in Happy Valley, Oregon.  He killed two people and injured a third.  On Saturday morning, a lone gunman walked into a hospital in Alabama and opened fire.  He killed one police officer and two hospital employees before being gunned down by another police officer.  So have we now reached the point where every school, every mall and every hospital is going to need armed security?  How will society function efficiently if everyone is constantly worried about mass murderers?

In response to the horrible tragedy in Connecticut, many in the mainstream media are suggesting that much stricter gun laws are the obvious solution.

After all, if we get rid of all the guns these crazy people won't be able to commit these kinds of crimes, right?

Unfortunately, that is not how it works.  The criminals don't obey gun control laws.  Banning guns will just take them out of the hands of law-abiding American citizens that just want to protect their own families.

Adam Lanza didn't let the strict gun control laws up in Connecticut stop him from what he wanted to do.  Connecticut already has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, and Adam Lanza broke at least three of them.

However, if there had been some armed security officers or some armed teachers at that school, they may have had a chance to protect those dear little children from being brutally gunned down.

If gun control was really the solution to our problems, then cities that have implemented strict gun control laws should be some of the safest in the entire country.

But sadly, just the opposite is true.

For example, Chicago has very strict gun laws.  But 10 people were shot in the city of Chicago on Friday alone.  Chicago is now considered to be "the deadliest global city", and the murder rate in Chicago is about 25 percent higher than it was last year.

So has gun control turned Chicago into a utopia?

Of course not.

And it won't solve our problems on a national level either.

You can find more statistics about the futility of gun control right here.

Well, how would things be if we did just the opposite and everyone had a gun?

Would gun crime go through the roof?

That is what liberals were warning of when the city of Kennesaw, Georgia passed a law requiring every home to have a gun.  But instead of disaster, the results turned out to be very impressive...

In March 1982, 25 years ago, the small town of Kennesaw – responding to a handgun ban in Morton Grove, Ill. – unanimously passed an ordinance requiring each head of household to own and maintain a gun. Since then, despite dire predictions of “Wild West” showdowns and increased violence and accidents, not a single resident has been involved in a fatal shooting – as a victim, attacker or defender.

The crime rate initially plummeted for several years after the passage of the ordinance, with the 2005 per capita crime rate actually significantly lower than it was in 1981, the year before passage of the law.

Prior to enactment of the law, Kennesaw had a population of just 5,242 but a crime rate significantly higher (4,332 per 100,000) than the national average (3,899 per 100,000). The latest statistics available – for the year 2005 – show the rate at 2,027 per 100,000. Meanwhile, the population has skyrocketed to 28,189.
When criminals know that everyone has guns, they are much less likely to try something.  And often armed citizens are able to prevent potential mass murderers from doing more damage.  You can find several examples of this right here.

But of course most of our politicians are not interested in common sense.  Instead, they are obsessed with the idea that gun control will make our country "safe" again.

Senator Diane Feinstein says that she is ready to introduce a strict gun control bill in January that will "ban the sale, the transfer, the importation and the possession" of many types of firearms.

Will such a law keep the criminals from getting guns?

No way.  Just look at what is happening with the cartels down in Mexico.  The criminals are always able to get guns.

If our "leaders" were really interested in stopping these mass murders, they would take a look at the role that mind-altering pharmaceutical drugs play in these incidents.  If you look at the mass murders that have occurred over the past several decades, in the vast majority of them the murderer had been using mind-altering pharmaceutical drugs...

The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) has raised concerns about severe acts of violence as side effects of anti-psychotic and antidepressant drugs not only on individuals but on society as well.

Just a month ago PRWeb described drug induced violence as "medicine's best kept secret."

And the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHRI) is calling for a federal investigation on its web page which links no less than 14 mass killings to the use of psychiatric drugs such as Prozac and Paxil.
And guess what?

According to the Washington Post, one neighbor says that Adam Lanza was "on medication".

But will our politicians ever consider a law against such drugs?

Of course not.  The big corporations that produce those drugs give mountains of money to the campaign funds of our politicians.

So the focus of the debate will remain on guns.

And a lot of liberals would have us believe that our society could be transformed into some type of "utopia" if we could just get rid of all the guns.

Unfortunately, that is simply not true.  Our society is in an advanced state of moral decay, and this moral decay is manifesting in our society in thousands of different ways.  The corruption runs from the highest levels of society all the way down to the lowest.

For those that believe that gun control would somehow "fix America", I have some questions for you...

Down in Texas, one set of parents kept their 10-year-old son locked in a bedroom and only fed him bread and water for months.  Eventually he died of starvation and they dumped his body in a creek.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

A pastor in north Texas was recently assaulted by an enraged man who beat him to death with an electric guitar.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

Police up in New Jersey say that a man kept his girlfriend padlocked in a bedroom for most of the last 10 years.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

A 31-year-old man up in Canada was found guilty of raping an 8-year-old girl, breaking 16 of her bones and smashing her in the face with a hammer.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

According to the FBI, a New York City police officer is being accused of “planning the kidnap, rape, torture and cannibilization of a number of women”.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

A Secret Service officer that had been assigned to protect Joe Biden’s residence has been charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

Over in Texas, a very sick 29-year-old man stabbed his girlfriend to death and then burned his one-year-old baby alive because she had gone to court and filed for child support.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

Over in Utah, a 21-year-old man is accused of stabbing his grandmother 111 times and then removing her organs with a knife.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

There are more than 3 million reports of child abuse in the United States every single year.

Would banning guns keep that from happening?

An average of five children die as a result of child abuse in the United States every single day.

Would banning guns keep that from happening?

The United States has the highest child abuse death rate on the entire globe.

Would banning guns keep that from happening?

It is estimated that 500,000 Americans that will be born this year will be sexually abused before they turn 18.

Would banning guns keep that from happening?

In the United States today, it is estimated that one out of every four girls is sexually abused before they become adults.

Would banning guns keep that from happening?

If there was a way to take all of the guns away from all of the criminals, I would be all in favor of it.  Unfortunately, no government on the planet has been able to do that.

Instead, we have seen that criminals thrive whenever gun bans are instituted and the guns are taken away from law-abiding citizens.

But the bottom line is that our social decay will not be solved either by more guns or less guns.

Our social decay is the result of decades of bad decisions.  We have pushed morality out of our schools, out of government and out of almost every aspect of public life.  Now we are experiencing the bitter fruit of those decisions.

And this is not a problem that our government is going to be able to fix.  Violent crime increased by 18 percent in 2011, and this is just the beginning.

As our economy gets even worse, the rot and decay that have been eating away the foundations of America are going to become even more evident.  The number of Americans living in poverty grows with each passing day, and millions upon millions of people are becoming very desperate.

Desperate people do desperate things, and crime, rioting and looting are going to become commonplace in the United States in the years ahead.

So you can pretend that the government is going to be able to keep our society from crumbling all you want, but that is not going to help you when a gang of desperate criminals has invaded your home and is attacking your family.

We definitely should mourn for the victims in Connecticut.  It was a horrible national tragedy.

But this is just the beginning.  The fabric of our society is coming apart at the seams.  The feeling of safety and security that we all used to take for granted has been shattered, and the streets of America are going to steadily become much more dangerous.

I hope that you are ready.


Soul Crusher

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Re: Blaming guns is ridiculous - we are in a collapsing society
« Reply #1 on: January 08, 2013, 01:40:07 PM »

syntaxmachine

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Re: Blaming guns is ridiculous - we are in a collapsing society
« Reply #2 on: January 08, 2013, 02:57:33 PM »
"Moral decline" is an explanatory variable certain sorts of people like to posit for specific instances of terrible violence, but it isn't clear exactly what they mean. Since such people tend to be religious, one way they make sense of the term is something like "distance from God"; the idea being that society is severing its ties with divinity and that this is an inherently bad thing, causally responsible for specific instances of terror. Yet we commit less crime and are far less violent towards each other than in over a century. Apparently (as far as violence is concerned), distancing from God is a good idea.

(Some of the decrease in crime can be attributed to increasing incarceration rates, but not all.)








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Re: Blaming guns is ridiculous - we are in a collapsing society
« Reply #3 on: January 08, 2013, 03:27:38 PM »
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/society-is-crumbling-right-in-front-of-our-eyes-and-banning-guns-wont-help



Society Is Crumbling Right In Front Of Our Eyes And Banning Guns Won't Help

 By Michael, on December 16th, 2012   


What in the world is happening to America?  I have written many articles about how society is crumbling right in front of our eyes, but now it is getting to the point where people are going to be afraid to go to school or go shopping at the mall.  Just consider what has happened over the past week.  Adam Lanza savagely murdered 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.  42-year-old Marcus Gurrola threatened to shoot innocent shoppers and fired off more than 50 rounds in the parking lot of Fashion Island Mall in Newport Beach, California.  After police apprehended him, he told them that he "was unhappy with life".  Earlier in the week, a crazy man wearing a hockey mask and armed with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire on the second floor of a mall in Happy Valley, Oregon.  He killed two people and injured a third.  On Saturday morning, a lone gunman walked into a hospital in Alabama and opened fire.  He killed one police officer and two hospital employees before being gunned down by another police officer.  So have we now reached the point where every school, every mall and every hospital is going to need armed security?  How will society function efficiently if everyone is constantly worried about mass murderers?

In response to the horrible tragedy in Connecticut, many in the mainstream media are suggesting that much stricter gun laws are the obvious solution.

After all, if we get rid of all the guns these crazy people won't be able to commit these kinds of crimes, right?

Unfortunately, that is not how it works.  The criminals don't obey gun control laws.  Banning guns will just take them out of the hands of law-abiding American citizens that just want to protect their own families.

Adam Lanza didn't let the strict gun control laws up in Connecticut stop him from what he wanted to do.  Connecticut already has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, and Adam Lanza broke at least three of them.

However, if there had been some armed security officers or some armed teachers at that school, they may have had a chance to protect those dear little children from being brutally gunned down.

If gun control was really the solution to our problems, then cities that have implemented strict gun control laws should be some of the safest in the entire country.

But sadly, just the opposite is true.

For example, Chicago has very strict gun laws.  But 10 people were shot in the city of Chicago on Friday alone.  Chicago is now considered to be "the deadliest global city", and the murder rate in Chicago is about 25 percent higher than it was last year.

So has gun control turned Chicago into a utopia?

Of course not.

And it won't solve our problems on a national level either.

You can find more statistics about the futility of gun control right here.

Well, how would things be if we did just the opposite and everyone had a gun?

Would gun crime go through the roof?

That is what liberals were warning of when the city of Kennesaw, Georgia passed a law requiring every home to have a gun.  But instead of disaster, the results turned out to be very impressive...

In March 1982, 25 years ago, the small town of Kennesaw – responding to a handgun ban in Morton Grove, Ill. – unanimously passed an ordinance requiring each head of household to own and maintain a gun. Since then, despite dire predictions of “Wild West” showdowns and increased violence and accidents, not a single resident has been involved in a fatal shooting – as a victim, attacker or defender.

The crime rate initially plummeted for several years after the passage of the ordinance, with the 2005 per capita crime rate actually significantly lower than it was in 1981, the year before passage of the law.

Prior to enactment of the law, Kennesaw had a population of just 5,242 but a crime rate significantly higher (4,332 per 100,000) than the national average (3,899 per 100,000). The latest statistics available – for the year 2005 – show the rate at 2,027 per 100,000. Meanwhile, the population has skyrocketed to 28,189.
When criminals know that everyone has guns, they are much less likely to try something.  And often armed citizens are able to prevent potential mass murderers from doing more damage.  You can find several examples of this right here.

But of course most of our politicians are not interested in common sense.  Instead, they are obsessed with the idea that gun control will make our country "safe" again.

Senator Diane Feinstein says that she is ready to introduce a strict gun control bill in January that will "ban the sale, the transfer, the importation and the possession" of many types of firearms.

Will such a law keep the criminals from getting guns?

No way.  Just look at what is happening with the cartels down in Mexico.  The criminals are always able to get guns.

If our "leaders" were really interested in stopping these mass murders, they would take a look at the role that mind-altering pharmaceutical drugs play in these incidents.  If you look at the mass murders that have occurred over the past several decades, in the vast majority of them the murderer had been using mind-altering pharmaceutical drugs...

The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) has raised concerns about severe acts of violence as side effects of anti-psychotic and antidepressant drugs not only on individuals but on society as well.

Just a month ago PRWeb described drug induced violence as "medicine's best kept secret."

And the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHRI) is calling for a federal investigation on its web page which links no less than 14 mass killings to the use of psychiatric drugs such as Prozac and Paxil.
And guess what?

According to the Washington Post, one neighbor says that Adam Lanza was "on medication".

But will our politicians ever consider a law against such drugs?

Of course not.  The big corporations that produce those drugs give mountains of money to the campaign funds of our politicians.

So the focus of the debate will remain on guns.

And a lot of liberals would have us believe that our society could be transformed into some type of "utopia" if we could just get rid of all the guns.

Unfortunately, that is simply not true.  Our society is in an advanced state of moral decay, and this moral decay is manifesting in our society in thousands of different ways.  The corruption runs from the highest levels of society all the way down to the lowest.

For those that believe that gun control would somehow "fix America", I have some questions for you...

Down in Texas, one set of parents kept their 10-year-old son locked in a bedroom and only fed him bread and water for months.  Eventually he died of starvation and they dumped his body in a creek.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

A pastor in north Texas was recently assaulted by an enraged man who beat him to death with an electric guitar.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

Police up in New Jersey say that a man kept his girlfriend padlocked in a bedroom for most of the last 10 years.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

A 31-year-old man up in Canada was found guilty of raping an 8-year-old girl, breaking 16 of her bones and smashing her in the face with a hammer.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

According to the FBI, a New York City police officer is being accused of “planning the kidnap, rape, torture and cannibilization of a number of women”.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

A Secret Service officer that had been assigned to protect Joe Biden’s residence has been charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

Over in Texas, a very sick 29-year-old man stabbed his girlfriend to death and then burned his one-year-old baby alive because she had gone to court and filed for child support.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

Over in Utah, a 21-year-old man is accused of stabbing his grandmother 111 times and then removing her organs with a knife.

Would banning guns have kept that from happening?

There are more than 3 million reports of child abuse in the United States every single year.

Would banning guns keep that from happening?

An average of five children die as a result of child abuse in the United States every single day.

Would banning guns keep that from happening?

The United States has the highest child abuse death rate on the entire globe.

Would banning guns keep that from happening?

It is estimated that 500,000 Americans that will be born this year will be sexually abused before they turn 18.

Would banning guns keep that from happening?

In the United States today, it is estimated that one out of every four girls is sexually abused before they become adults.

Would banning guns keep that from happening?

If there was a way to take all of the guns away from all of the criminals, I would be all in favor of it.  Unfortunately, no government on the planet has been able to do that.

Instead, we have seen that criminals thrive whenever gun bans are instituted and the guns are taken away from law-abiding citizens.

But the bottom line is that our social decay will not be solved either by more guns or less guns.

Our social decay is the result of decades of bad decisions.  We have pushed morality out of our schools, out of government and out of almost every aspect of public life.  Now we are experiencing the bitter fruit of those decisions.

And this is not a problem that our government is going to be able to fix.  Violent crime increased by 18 percent in 2011, and this is just the beginning.

As our economy gets even worse, the rot and decay that have been eating away the foundations of America are going to become even more evident.  The number of Americans living in poverty grows with each passing day, and millions upon millions of people are becoming very desperate.

Desperate people do desperate things, and crime, rioting and looting are going to become commonplace in the United States in the years ahead.

So you can pretend that the government is going to be able to keep our society from crumbling all you want, but that is not going to help you when a gang of desperate criminals has invaded your home and is attacking your family.

We definitely should mourn for the victims in Connecticut.  It was a horrible national tragedy.

But this is just the beginning.  The fabric of our society is coming apart at the seams.  The feeling of safety and security that we all used to take for granted has been shattered, and the streets of America are going to steadily become much more dangerous.

I hope that you are ready.



LOL @ the economic collapse blog

Is this the kind of crap you look at on the interwebs?

who the fuck is Michael and why should anyone give a shit what he thinks about anything



Soul Crusher

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Re: Blaming guns is ridiculous - we are in a collapsing society
« Reply #4 on: January 08, 2013, 05:40:26 PM »
Off With a Bang: Assault on Second Amendment Begins
FrontPage Magazine ^ | January 8, 2013 | Matthew Vadum

Posted on Tuesday, January 08, 2013 7:33:15 PM by SJackson

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com -



Off With a Bang: Assault on Second Amendment Begins

Posted By Matthew Vadum On January 8, 2013 @ 12:40 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 40 Comments


President Obama is planning an aggressive, in-your-face, blitzkrieg-style campaign against Americans’ fundamental Second Amendment right to self-defense.

After a madman murdered 26 people including 20 young schoolchildren last month at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Obama initially urged a reinstatement of the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban. The demonstrably useless law lapsed in 2004 and had no detectable impact on crime. It was designed to cater to big-city liberals and their irrational fear of firearms.

But the Obama administration’s plans to assault the Bill of Rights grew more ambitious over the Christmas holidays. The administration has now had an opportunity to brainstorm more extensively with the left-wing gun-grabbing lobby, which is heavily financed by radical financier George Soros.

The president is hoping to use the bloody Newtown massacre to impose sweeping new restrictions on firearms and to create a massive new database to track and spy on law-abiding gun owners. Americans are wise to be wary of such proposals. Governments the world over have used such databases time and time again to crack down on internal dissent, lay the groundwork for gun confiscation, and clear the way for genocidal slaughter.

Citing multiple sources “involved in the administration’s discussions,” the Washington Post reports that the Obama White House is now “weighing a far broader and more comprehensive approach to curbing the nation’s gun violence than simply reinstating an expired ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition.”

According to the newspaper:


A working group led by Vice President [Joe] Biden is seriously considering measures backed by key law enforcement leaders that would require universal background checks for firearm buyers, track the movement and sale of weapons through a national database, strengthen mental health checks, and stiffen penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors…

Vice President Biden “guaranteed” Boston Mayor Thomas Menino that President Obama would push through sweeping firearms restrictions before February.

“He said, ‘Tommy, I guarantee you, we’ll get it done by the end of January,’” Menino said, according to the Boston Herald. “They’re going to get it done.”

Obama may intend to bribe and blackmail businesses in order to win their support for his assault on law-abiding gun owners, the Post article suggests.

“[T]he White House is developing strategies to work around the National Rifle Association that one source said could include rallying support from Wal-Mart and other gun retailers for measures that would benefit their businesses,” the article stated.

The Obama White House is coordinating its strategy with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an outspoken enemy of the Second Amendment. Bloomberg co-founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns with Boston’s Menino.

Biden’s working group is reportedly gearing up to present a package of recommendations to the president soon. After that the Community Organizer-in-Chief intends to head up a public-relations campaign to further inflame the public before the passions generated by the Newtown murders cool.

“They are very clearly committed to looking at this issue comprehensively,” said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which is participating in Biden’s group.

Despite ceaseless cheerleading by their allies in the mainstream media, leftists probably won’t be able to shoot holes in the Second Amendment easily.

Lawmakers from both parties are opposed to further crackdowns on the ownership of guns, which author David B. Kopel notes are already “the most severely regulated consumer product in the United States — the only product for which FBI permission is required for every single sale.”

Newly sworn-in Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said gun control proposals now being discussed –including a plan by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to create a national gun registry– are unconstitutional. The federal government doesn’t have “any business having a list of law-abiding citizens” who choose to exercise their right to keep and bear arms, he said.

After Newtown “within minutes, we saw politicians run out and try to exploit this tragedy, try to push their political agenda of gun control,” Cruz told “Fox News Sunday.”

What happened in Newtown is “a tragedy, but it’s not a tragedy that should be answered by restricting the constitutional rights of all Americans.”

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) also cautioned against taking aim at gun owners’ rights.

“I think you need to put everything on the table, but what I hear from the administration — and if the Washington Post is to be believed — that’s way, way in extreme of what I think is necessary or even should be talked about. And it’s not going to pass,” the new freshman senator said on a Sunday TV talk show.

Heitkamp said mental health-related proposals have to be part of any package aimed at reducing violent crime.

“Let’s start addressing the problem. And to me, one of the issues that I think comes — screams out of this is the issue of mental health and the care for the mentally ill in our country, especially the dangerously mentally ill. And so we need to have a broad discussion before we start talking about gun control,” she said.

Obama’s sudden reversal on gun rights shouldn’t come as a surprise. Obama has a long anti-gun track record that he carefully distanced himself from when he began running for the presidency. In his academic days he told a colleague: “I don’t believe people should be able to own guns.”

As a candidate for state office in 1996, Obama promised to ban “the manufacture, sale & possession of handguns.” Seeking his U.S. Senate seat in 2004, Obama advocated blocking citizens nationwide from receiving concealed-carry permits.

This documented antipathy toward Second Amendment rights stands in stark contrast to Obama’s statements on the presidential campaign trail in 2008 when he promised to respect Americans’ individual right to bear arms.

“When you all go home and you’re talking to your buddies and you say, ah ‘He wants to take my gun away.’ You’ve heard it here, I’m on television so everybody knows it. I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in people’s lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won’t take your handgun away.”

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Re: Blaming guns is ridiculous - we are in a collapsing society
« Reply #5 on: January 09, 2013, 05:28:14 AM »
Let's Be Honest, Guns Are Just A Small Part Of America's Real Problem
Geoffrey Ingersoll|Dec. 23, 2012, 12:12 PM|4,617|43




Let's be clear: when Congress passes an "assault weapons" ban (and they will pass a ban), it'll be pretty much toothless.
 
That the law will likely leave most things unchanged doesn't matter — the government simply has to do something.
 
Much like Clinton's ban in 1994, this new legislation will be rife with loopholes.
 
To effectively ban weapons in the U.S., a country with 90 guns for every 100 people, the government would have to outlaw all semiautomatic weapons.
 
That's not all though.
 
It would then have to double, if not triple, the staff at Alcohol Tobacco Firearms, and sweep through the nation conducting mandatory buybacks, using the FBI's gun registry as a roadmap. That's right, no grandfathered weapons allowed either (unlike Rep. Diane Feinstein's new bill, which allows grandfathered weapons).
 
To call the strategy costly would be an understatement — even in terms of human cost — how long before the ATF is in an intense shootout with some Midwestern militia?
 
On Friday, Wayne LaPierre was a veritable one-liner parody of all the worst possible things you could say at a funeral — (yes, America is still slogging through a highly publicized, collective funeral for the 20 children and seven adults killed in Sandy Hook).
 
As we emerge from the visceral throes of mourning the deaths of innocent children, as we sober up to the idea that violence is a problem in America, we should also turn the scope of inspection upon ourselves.
 
It's easy to blame guns. Even I, a proud Second Amendment supporting Iraq War veteran, am second-guessing the necessity for ownership of AR-series rifles (even glocks and deadly pistols).
 
Gun ownership is only the surface of the problem though, and we're lying to ourselves if we don't admit it. I'll point to a few obvious examples to illustrate the complexity of violence in America — in an effort to say that we should be talking about these things as we concurrently talk about guns.
 
Kirby Dick, in his documentary "This Film Is Not Yet Rated", showed that the though the Motion Picture Association of America, a movie rating organization staffed with "moms and dads," slapped an R rating on Rambo, they also put an NC-17 rating on a movie which showed a vagina.
 
So let's get this straight, chaperoned with an adult, a kid can watch Rambo gun down a couple hundred people in five minutes with a 50 Caliber machine gun (not an exaggeration), but we must stop them from catching the merest glimpse of a vagina.
 
It doesn't stop there though, nobody seems to have noticed this recent whopper: The Atlantic wrote on Saturday that the CIA was pretty pissed about its portrayal in a movie it psychologically subsidized, Zero Dark Thirty. CIA Director Michael Morell pretty much lambasted the movie, and the media clamped down mainly on his statements about enhanced interrogation.
 
What they didn't focus on was this gem — from the Atlantic:
 
"I would not normally comment on a Hollywood film," Morell starts, "but I think it important to put Zero Dark Thirty, which deals with one of the most significant achievements in our history, into some context."
 
So killing bin Laden is one of 'the most significant achievements in our history,' grouped in there so cavalierly with curing polio, inventing flight, or building the internet. Yes, along with those, one of America's most significant achievements is spending eleven years to find a guy who's terrified to even use a cell phone, and then shooting him in the head.
 
Let's focus on torture though.
 
Even America's all out celebration of the Osama raid is somewhat troubling. Upon hearing of his death, the media and we all, myself included, actually celebrated putting a bullet into his head.
 
So guns are the problem?
 
The biggest, most popular heroes in U.S. culture are usually one of two things, Uber-filthy rich or superheroes (or both). Most superheroes are only super because of the good-violence they can perpetrate as they seek to put a stop to evil-violence — Robert Downey Jr.'s much lauded Iron Man typifies Wayne LaPierre's bizarre statement that "the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun." (Or maybe a good guy who is, himself, a gun incarnate.)
 
The late re-edit of Tom Cruise's "Jack Reacher," the delay of Terantino's Django Unchained, and the postponing of Family Guy and American Dad episodes are at least a hat tip to the fact that our culture is pre-occupied with all things violent (ever seen Bugs Bunny wrapped over the head with a hammer?).
 
Maybe that's part of the American spirit, but it should be included in the conversation, at the very least — as we prepare to kick back and watch several large men throttle each other around the gridiron every Sunday, to the delight of child and adult alike — we ought to take a larger look at ourselves, the celebrators, creators, subsidizers of stuff like the MMA, Chuck Norris, and Obama's drone program.
 
The Washington Post rightly points out (as begrudgingly as possible), that global gun violence rates, when compared with gun ownership, don't show causation between ownership and deaths. Even the correlation is somewhat of a stretch, which Ezra Klein claims is at the very least "suggestive".
 
The problem is much larger than guns. To not admit as much is willful ignorance.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/lets-be-honest-guns-are-just-a-small-part-of-americas-real-problem-2012-12#ixzz2HU6OXFZz