Connecticut Slaying: A Means to Truly Honor Those Little Children

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Connecticut Slaying: A Means to Truly Honor Those Little Children

16Dec2012

By coto2admin

by Bruce Weldon

 “We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media,  because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.”
Jimmy Carter

After the slaying of children in a kindergarten in Connecticut, there are calls for gun control and a focus on the violence in the society.  But private gun are so far from the leading cause of deathin the US and violence by individuals with small weapons no comparison to the horrifying weapons used by the US, including against children, that the proportionality calls out for attention.  The destructiveness of military weapons is so stark as to make one wonder why those calling for gun control are not first and foremost demanding a ban on these weapons instead. In that stunning disproportional logic and the silence around any call for bans on massively deadly military weapons, one wonders what is the real driver of gun control in the US and whether it isn’t in fact driven by the same forces that pushed through the NDAA and the Patriot Act, removing most of the amendments of the Constitution, leaving the 2nd amendment standing as te people’s obstacle to utter power over every citizen in the US.One hears Gandhi’s comment on holding onto private weapons as a warning.

“Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.”
– Mahatma Gandhi (An Autobiography OR The story of my experiments with truth, by M.K. Gandhi)

http://www.abhijeetsingh.com/arms/india/

As the whole country is deploring the violence against the children in Connecticut, it might benefit us all to remember that the Amish, faced with a similar loss of its young children, met violence in a way that transformed it into a moment of transcendence.  The Amish forgave.  “One just simple thing that the whole world got to see was this simple message of forgiveness.  …. because the Amish can express that forgiveness, and because they hold no grudges, they are better able to concentrate on the work of their own healing.”

So, we are left with series of problems with the great push for private gun control:

1.   It oddly ignores a reality that the number of deaths from cars and most especially pharmaceutical drugs (which may themselves be the trigger for the use of guns) far outstrip the deaths from private arms, instead creating a fear that is unwarranted and severely disproportional to greater threats.

In 1999, there were 28,874 gun-related deaths in the United States …. Of those, more than half were from suicide, which means that less than 14,000 people a year die from gun violence as we tend to think of it.”There were an estimated 6,289,000 car accidents in the US in 1999. There were about 3.4 million injuries and 41,611 people killed in auto accidentsin 1999.

“The Democratic Party does not point to 41,000+ deaths a year from cars as cause to ban them nor suggest that just in owning them, a person should be thought of as violent, criminal or racist.

“More than 100,000 people a year die from the pharmaceutical industry’s prescription drugs (Journal of the American Medical Association, April 15, 1998), far exceeding the number of people killed by car and guns. 2.4 times as many people die from drugs as die from car accidents … “

But, worse, and even more ignored, the drugs themselves are actually linked to the gun attacks.

2.   It puts control over small weapons that are not even a leader killer in the US, known for its violence, ahead of large weapons which threaten the world with war, and thus are horrifying in their impact on children,  – nuclear weapons, drones, depleted uranium, land mines, rockets, etc.

US drones killed 178 childrenin Pakistan and Yemen.  So, where are the calls to stop US violence and remove drones from the US military?The killing of children is even defended.US depleted uranium is creating severe birth defects in babies and cancers in children in Iraq.  Where are the calls to stop this grotesque US violence against children using weapons (or mass destruction)?

3.  It violates the 2nd Amendment which is especially crucial at this moment in US history when the government is stripping away Constitutional protections for all citizens, through the Patriot Act, the NDAA, the pandemic laws that allow for the forcing of untested and unknown vaccines on the public, exactly what the Nazis did during WWII, the same pharmaceutical industry that George Bush relied on in office.

“The pharmaceutical departments of the IG Farben cartel used the victims of the concentration camps in their own way: thousands of them died during human experiments such as the testing of new and unknown vaccines.” http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/PHARMACEUTICAL_BUSINESS/history_of_the_pharmaceutical_industry.htm

4.  Number 3, above, indicates there is yet another form of weapon that gun control advocates are silent about – bioweapons in the form of vaccines.  The US has used such weapons on its own military and it even affected their children.

“The “exposures” in Kuwait and Iraq and the chronic infections picked up by our troops just didn’t “happen” like a flu infection. These men and women were actually “bombed” and “sprayed” with a chemical and biological soup from missiles and sprayers unleashed by Saddam Hussein’s forces. They were also inoculated during their deployment with questionable vaccines. What makes this even more horrific…in the soup of vaccines and environmental exposures were biological agents not created by some mad Iraqi scientist or some rogue ex-Soviet scientist hired by Saddam as part of his “Weapons of Mass Destruction” arsenal.”No. This deadly soup was actually created in the United States by our own scientists; some of whom were trained by the “Operation Paperclip” scientists brought back from Nazi Germany after World War II. And it was tested in our own prisons using unsuspecting prisoners long before the first Gulf War.”  http://www.projectdaylily.com/book.htm

As gun control advocates express horror at what has happened to the children in Connecticut, they might want to rethink their definition of weapons harm children, that since 30% of children of Gulf War vets are born with severe deformities:

“And unfortunately, the suffering is not limited to vets. Reed West, daughter of Gulf veteran Dennis West from Waynesboro, Mississippi, was born prematurely with collapsed lungs and a faulty immune system. Joshua Miller, the son of veteran Aimee Miller, constantly suffers from strange colds, pneumonia, and high fevers. There are many more cases, including children who are dying of heart defects, liver diseases, and other rare disorders. It’s been estimated that 30 percent of Gulf War veterans’ babies are born with deformities; this is ten times higher than the number of birth defects one would expect to find in the general population. In Waynesboro, Mississippi, the site of the National Guard quartermaster’s corps, 13 out of 15 children born to Gulf veterans suffer from serious disorders. Infant mortality rates have dramatically escalated in four counties in Kentucky and Tennessee, where the Army’s 101st Airborne Division is based, in three counties in Georgia, where the Army’s 197th Infantry Division is located, and at Ft. Hood, in Texas. [5] According to Dr. Ellen Silbergeld, a molecular toxicologist at the University of Maryland, men pass toxic chemicals on to their unborn children through their semen. A whole new generation is being affected by Gulf War Syndrome. [6]”   http://www.vaccineinitiative.org/?p=332

And there is evidence to indicate that vaccines are responsible for SIDS, in which case they are routinely killing infants in large numbers, and the government is hiding the data.

5.  And it turns a blind eye to the fact that immediately following the removal of small arms from populations,f there is a history o government controlled genocidal slaughter of their own populations.  Was Germany’s children safe from harm because Hitler ordered gun control?

“Here’s a short list of government mass murder carried out throughout history, almost always immediately following the disarmament of the public (and usually involving staged false flagevents to justify the disarmament):50+ million dead: Mao Ze-Dong (China, 1958-61 and 1966-69, Tibet 1949-50)
12+ million dead: Adolf Hitler (Germany, 1939-1945) – concentration camps, civilian deaths and dead Russian POWs
8+ million dead: Leopold II of Belgium (Congo, 1886-1908)
6+ million dead: Jozef Stalin (USSR, 1932-39)
5+ million dead: Hideki Tojo (Japan, 1941-44)
2+ million dead: Ismail Enver (Turkey, 1915-22)
1.7 million dead: Pol Pot (Cambodia, 1975-79)
1.6 million dead: Kim Il Sung (North Korea, 1948-94)
1.5 million dead: Menghistu (Ethiopia, 1975-78)
1 million dead: Yakubu Gowon (Biafra, 1967-1970)
900,000 dead: Leonid Brezhnev (Afghanistan, 1979-1982)
800,000 dead: Jean Kambanda (Rwanda, 1994)
See more at:
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.htmlDeath by government:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.CHAP1.HTM
http://www.infowars.com/democide-government-killed-over-260-million-i…

6.  Finally, the gun control advocates are silent on the reality that armed attacks can be and have been stagedand if the aim is the removal of arms from the American people for utter control over the population already threatened by the NDAA and a president claiming the right to assassinate citizens without a trial, there is a great deal at stake.  The slaughter of small children would certainly create an environment that might be conducive to introducing legislation to overturn the Gandhi-valued protection of the 2nd amendment.

So what do people and organizations do that genuinely abhor violence and are devastated by the slaughter of children in Connecticut, and yet recognize the peril of removing weapons from people, especially as the government has removed the most fundamental rights of Americans?

They can demand that the greatest of threats to our children and children in the world – wars – be ended.  The weapons of mass destruction from biologic weapons of every sort (including DNA-altering GMO vaccines created by the bankers/pharmaceutical industry involved in WWII, and GMO crops that do not qualify as foodbut literally as bioweapons), to nuclear weapons, depleted uranium, chemical weapons, drones, landmines, etc.must be the weapons the country puts its attention on, not private weapons.  If the country must do something here, it should be to investigate the drugs that are killing so many people and leading others to kill from psychotic rage.

The country can come together behind Gandhi’s warning, deciding solidly now that it will not let go of the 2nd amendment.  And it can honor the little children who died in Connecticut, by remaining peaceful, refusing to hate or to fear, and demanding – a long with people around the world – that the US government finally sign international treaties seeking to ban weapons of mass destruction.

In the name of the children who died in Connecticut and of children everywhere, it is time to demand that the US wars which have dragged on into the longest wars in US history, come to an end.  Let our soldiers come home to their own children and families in the rest of the world no longer fear our government’s extreme violence.

Let our hearts bring peace, at the season of love and peace.  Let us all come together to save children from the worse violence in the world – war.

http://foodfreedomgroup.com/2012/12/16/connecticut-slaying-a-means-to-truly-honor-those-little-children/

December 17, 2012

A Culture of Violence

Behind the Connecticut Massacre

by JERRY KROTH

Each time there is an outbreak of homicidal mania, whether Columbine, Virginia Tech, or Adam Lanza’s slaughter of twenty eight innocents in Connecticut, the media directs us to stories about gun control and the need for better policing of individuals with mental illnesses.

The larger context—that America is a society brimming over with violence—is entirely lost in the discussion.

Let’s take a look at the forest for a change, shall we:

There are 192 million firearms owned by Americans, more than any other society in the world.Our rate of death from firearms is three times that of France and Canada, fourteen times greater than Ireland, and two hundred and fifty times greater than Japan, where firearms are aggressively controlled.

The U.S. has more prisoners, per capita, than any country on earth—three times more than Cuba, seven times more than Germany—and, indeed, we house twenty-five percent of all the prisoners in the world.

As for media violence, by the time the average American child leaves elementary school, they will have witnessed 8,000 murders and over 100,000 other acts of violence, and, to rub more salt into these open wounds, the U.S. also leads the world in the sale and rental of violent video games.

That litany of statistics comes to us compliments of our gratuitous interpretations of the First and Second Amendments.

But the forest we are talking grows ever larger.

Since World War II, the United States engaged in over fifty military operations abroad killing some four million people (Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, the list goes on). If you add in to that total massacres by proxies and surrogates, the number flirts with five million (Indonesia, Chile, Guatemala, and elsewhere).

We are the only country in the world seemingly perpetually at war. In 2011-2012 alone, the United States was killing people in nine different countries: Iraq and Afghanistan with troops, Libya with rockets, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen with drones, Honduras with raids against drug cartels, the Philippines with air support against insurgents, and most recently in Kenya as 150 Special forces started their operations. No other country in the world can boast of so many military involvements.

To remedy the horrors we saw in Connecticut should not be limited to screening mentally ill individuals from purchasing Glocks—which is about as far as our craven mainstream media wishes to venture. Instead we need to recognize the massacres of Jonestown, Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Connecticut are merely symptoms of a much more ubiquitous cancer.

To finally address this problem is to begin a long and arduous process of cultivating a culture of peace. Such collective psychotherapy begins by treating the patient on many fronts and in a multi-dimensional way: To forbid the sale of handguns, nationwide; to ration the sale of ammunition; to prohibit the sale of violent toys to children (Greece already does), to aggressively control the sale and access of violent video games to children (Australia, Venezuela, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and Brazil already do), and to prohibit the broadcast of violent scenes, explicit or implicit, on network television during family viewing hours, a practice already in effect in many European countries

And, who knows, we might even take it one step further and retreat from our aspirations of empire and global hegemony, close down our military operations, and bring our vast armies and armadas home —over 400,000 Americans at last count stationed in almost 1,000 overseas military bases.

Russia has ten overseas military bases. China none.

So much room to grow!

Imagine our progressive President, instead of limiting his compassion to the shedding of a tear at a press conference, actually proposed comprehensive and revolutionary changes and legislation that focussed not on the symptoms but, at long last, finally started to address the disease itself.

Jerry Kroth, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor Emeritus from Santa Clara University and the author of Duped! Delusion, denial, and the end of the American Dream, 2012. He maintains a website at collectivepsych.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/17/behind-the-connecticut-massacre/

December 17, 2012

Our Major Global Export

America’s Addiction to Violence

by MARK GRAHAM

The United States is the number one supplier of weapons on the planet, its military the world’s largest employer.  Violence has become America’s major export to the world and we have reaped the financial rewards.  The only problem is we’re addicted to the drug we’re peddling beyond our borders.  The addiction passes on to the next generation through the discursive bloodstream and into the collective womb of culture.  Throughout their early years we saturate our children with violent images and language:  First person shooter games.  Action heroes.  Military heroes.  Heroes with guns.  Men with guns.  Men using guns on other men and women and children and animals.  We teach them the path of aggression, competition, and the joys of humiliating your opponents.  Our entertainments provide orgies of righteous vengeance and self-piteous victimhood.  And when one of our children unleashes his monstrous hate on other children we should be horrified—but we should not be surprised.  We have taught our children well

As a teacher and a parent, I could readily imagine the full horror of the massacre in Connecticut.  I struggle to keep my children safe from any kind of danger.  At my job, I have had to practice lockdowns and deal with bomb threats.  I also know how fragile our sense of security is.  Inevitably in the wake of tragedies like this, people call for stricter security.  Make us safe, they implore.  Add more cops, more metal detectors, more guns to protect us from guns.  All in vain.  No matter how much we surrender our freedom for safety, how much we try to turn our homes and schools into fortresses, we will never be able to keep death from making that appointment in Samarra with us if he’s hell-bent on being there.

In the wake of the tragedy, my wife and I went out for some mindless entertainment—the latest James Bond film.  Despite the critical accolades, it left a bad taste in our mouths.  Fifty years of James Bond, the film proclaimed in the final credits—and I wondered why I still bother to entertain myself with such tedious and joyless orgies of violence.  It has
become a habit—one acquired over decades of constant exposure—an addiction that no longer provides pleasure or even numbness.  It’s more on the order of a repetition compulsion.  The Dream Machine plays back the same spectacles of hypermasculine bodies and pyrotechnic destruction from one year to the next.  The events in Connecticut make it easier than ever to see these films are lies: Shots fired and no pain, no disfigurement, no real danger.  War with no fear, no trauma, no lingering nightmares.

The most warlike nation with the least number of people ever having felt the terrible impact of war, America entertains itself with killing.  Our sports feel like combat, while the fantasies of combat we consume look like sport.  The mascot of the school district where I teach in rural Pennsylvania is a bullet.  Not a bulldog or huskie or owl or canary.  A bullet—the same thing that killed twenty-six people in another school on Friday.  Where I work many of us try our best to promote peace and tolerance, to expose students to different points of view, different cultures, different visions for the future.  Nearby my school, there’s a shooting range.  When I go for walks during my lunch break I can almost always hear someone firing automatic pistols, shotguns, and rifles, the gunshots echoing off my school’s feeble walls.

Inevitably and appropriately, voices rise up in the wake of these mass murders and cry out for gun control laws, for an end to violence, for America to wake up.  Their counterparts froth at the mouth over the sacredness of the Constitution (which in all other cases they’re all too willing to discount).  The feedback loop stumbles along with the old gun control versus liberty debate.  The intractable points of view make for predictable and quickly-forgettable copy in the opinion columns.  Soon we let the matter die.

The Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist in discussing the origins of genocide wrote, “It is not knowledge we lack.  What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.” So watch Obama weep as he proclaims: “Our hearts are broken today. The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old. They had their entire lives ahead of them…” Then ask yourself why he doesn’t weep for the children who die at his orders from drone attacks in Pakistan—eight times the number of children horribly murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  Why are we surprised when the violence we wreak on the rest of the world should plant its poison seeds in the hearts of our children, turning them into murderers of children?  If this tragedy means anything, it’s that America must confront its addiction to violence, to entertainments that equate manhood with killing, and to an entire political and economic system that privileges war-making over the future—and the precious lives—of our own children.

Mark Graham is a high school teacher in the Lehigh Valley. He’s books include: How Islam Created the Modern World and Afghanistan in the Cinema.  

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/17/americas-addiction-to-violence/

December 17, 2012

Will Gun Control Laws Really Reduce Violence?

Some Observations on the Gun Control Debate

by KEVIN CARSON

As tends to happen after each such horrific occurrence, the school shooting in Connecticut was the occasion for reviving the debate over gun control in the United States.

Given the quality of this debate, I’m not really interested in engaging either the smug liberal challenges of “well, are you people finally ready to come to your senses” or the right-wing hysteria of “The Kenyan Marxist Muslim is coming to take our guns away!” I’ll just say for the record I’m an anarchist, and I don’t care much for the idea of the same state responsible for warrantless wiretapping and the NDAA regulating the public’s access to weaponry for self-defense. And I don’t want a new War on Guns carried out by the same lawless paramilitary thugs in kevlar who’re already fighting the wars on drugs and terrorism. At the same time, I can’t say I’m too crazy about the loudest anti-gun control voices on the right.

Instead, I’ll just make a few general observations. First, I doubt the level of gun violence in the United States has much to do with the kinds of gun laws that are in effect. This country would have a high rate of gun violence regardless of the laws on the books, just because of our culture. There’s a lot of truth in the liberal arguments against America’s “gun culture.” The United States has more gun violence than other Western countries for the same reason it has a culture of flag-worship and “supporting the troops” unequaled anywhere else in the West, for the same reason Christian Zionism is such a powerful political force in our country, and for the same reason a large plurality of our population actually believes the earth is 6000 years old.

Part of it stems from the unique role of what the late Joe Bageant called Borderers, Ulster Scots or Scots-Irish in shaping American culture. As a result American political culture is more predisposed than most to a kind of Type-A authoritarianism fixated on the use of violence to “show them who’s boss” or “teach them a lesson.” The worship of the military and the executive goes back to the Ulster Scots inside the Pale, with their adulation for King Billy.

And part of it probably stems from the Second Great Awakening, which is — directly or indirectly — at the root of so many of the ways in which American culture went off the rails in comparison to the rest of Western Christendom. The “Premillennial Dispensationalism” of John Darby, shared by the Southern Baptists and other fundamentalist sects and publicized by Hal Lindsey and the Left Behind series, traces back to this. So do our puritanical attitudes toward alcohol, and our weird attachment to Israel.

Second, I expect strict gun laws to be about as effective as the post-9/11 “counter-terrorism” police state, the Drug War, or the strict digital copyright regime in actually reducing the activity they’re ostensibly intended to reduce. Strict gun laws will hardly put a dent in either gun ownership or gun crime. In the places touted as examples of the benefits of gun control, like Europe and Japan, levels of gun ownership and violence were already far lower than in the United States even before such laws were passed.

But third, what strict gun laws will do is take the level of police statism, lawlessness and general social pathology up a notch in the same way Prohibition and the Drug War have done. I’d expect a War on Guns to expand the volume of organized crime, and to empower criminal gangs fighting over control over the black market, in exactly the same way Prohibition did in the 1920s and strict drug laws have done since the 1980s. I’d expect it to lead to further erosion of Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure, further militarization of local police via SWAT teams, and further expansion of the squalid empire of civil forfeiture, perjured jailhouse snitch testimony, entrapment, planted evidence, and plea deal blackmail. In short, a War on Guns will take us even further in the direction of a society handed entirely over to violent criminal gangs, and the biggest gang of all: The criminal beasts of prey in uniform.

Kevin Carson is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society and holds the Center’s Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/17/some-observations-on-the-gun-control-debate/

December 17, 2012

Senseless Carnage

Yes to Gun Control…Especially in the US Military

by PATRICK BARR

I’m in favor of gun control … especially in the US armed forces.

The question of gun control gets on the front pages each time — too often — a citizen goes beserk and kills lots of innocents.  Again, we find ourselves in mourning after another tragic school shooting, this time in Newton, Connecticut, where 20 young children and 6 adults were killed by a deranged 20-year-old male.  He started his rampage by killing his mother as she lay in bed that morning.

Why is it that Americans, year after year. tend to go postal, (yes, there’s even a word for it)  killing innocents in massacres that are usually inexplicable.

And why is it that in a country, Switzerland, whose government arms its people, gun violence is quite rare?

That difference supports the meme: “Guns don’t kill people.  People kill people.”

To get closer to an answer, one has to trace the history of both countries.  And it will become quite evident that while both constitutions provide the right to own guns, their approach to using them are quite different.  While the Swiss used guns to secure their independence, proclaimed neutrality and steered clear of wars, the US grew from thirteen States, to the most powerful nation on the planet through the barrels of millions of guns, two atomic bombs, drones, blockades, embargoes, sanctions and subversion of legitimate governments.

In the US, it was the use of guns that drove the Indians off their lands; that made the armed West the Wild West; that enabled gangs to wage bloody territorial battles during Prohibition.

In the US, it is the gun that speaks louder than politicians, who speak loudest to take the country to war, who concentrate more on being re-elected and getting out far richer than when they entered.

Now America mourns 26 innocent people.  When America mourned victims of 9/11, the Iranians went into the streets with candles to show solidarity with this grief-stricken country.  However, at this moment, the US-imposed financial and gold sanctions against Iran is crippling that country, and I wonder who will now dare take candles into the streets of Teheran!

When did Americans mourn for the millions of nameless innocents in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia killed by the US government?  For those in Panama’s several mass graves following President George H. W. Bush’s excursion there to extract their leader and former collaborator-turned-enemy President Manuel Noriega.  We never mourned for either Nagasaki or Hiroshima, I’m certain; nor for any of the five million Vietnamese.

Once upon a time, the US had a Department of War, until a wise mind, leapfrogging a Department of Peace, thought a Department of Defense would be so much more apt.  And so, the country defends itself massively, even though no country has ever dared, or maybe desired to attack it.  (Do I hear the sound of readers rushing to your computers to refute that statement?  Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, with the knowledge of President Roosevelt, by the way, at 7:55 AM, 7 December 1941; Hawaii became a State on 21 August 1959.)

If this senseless carnage has any chance of stopping, I would think that the U.S. government should not pass up this opportunity to be a better example of pursuing peaceful ways of resolving differences.  Turn the clock back and set up a Department of Peace.

Mr. President, yes we can.  And you can begin by tearing up your kill list on national television!

Patrick B. Barr, formerly a reporter for Jamaica’s The Daily Gleaner, can be reached at barrybar@gmail.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/17/yes-to-gun-control-especially-in-the-us-military/