The location of the camp in Burlington is in a small city park adjacent to the City Hall building. This park has been a traditional gathering spot for some of the homeless, transient and out-of-work population of the city for decades. After Occupy moved in, some police and city officials attempted to blame the long-term situation of the homeless in the park on the presence of the Occupy tents. Years of alcohol abuse by a few individuals and accompanying crude remarks, arguments and the occasional fight were suddenly blamed on the Occupy camp. Police told the local Gannett media outlet that these folks and the incidents they created were only occurring because the occupiers had set up their camp. Of course, this was nonsense and was quickly rejected by the bulk of Burlington’s residents. However, the issues associated with a few of the park’s more-or-less permanent denizens remain for the Occupy encampment to deal with.

In economic terms, the homeless represent the ultimate failing of the capitalist model, especially its neoliberal form. Those that lost their homes in the housing/credit default crash of 2008 are but the most recent examples of what’s wrong with this model of finance capital. However, even those that social service agencies label as hard core homeless are homeless because monopoly capitalism has failed them. Perhaps they lost their job when the corporation moved overseas. Perhaps they served in the military fighting some war for capital that destroyed their ability to function without drugs and alcohol. Perhaps they are mentally ill and have no support system beyond the SSI check they get (if they get one at all). This latter can be seen as an exaggerated form of what Marx termed social alienation. In other words, that process exacerbated by the emphasis that capitalism places on individualism as the agent that drives history and society, whereby people become foreign to the world they are living in.

The presence of the homeless in the camps is eye-opening for many of the occupiers that have a place indoors to return to. For many, it is an exercise in reversing the “otherness” of the homeless. No longer are they men and women one might have crossed the street to avoid or dropped a coin in their cup. Nor are they mere demographic statistics or anecdotal people that shore up one’s theories of government policy and its shortcomings. In the camps, the homeless become people with whom one must figure out a way to get along with. For those very few that just don’t want to get along, other avenues of dealing with them must be made apparent. Key to this process is forgetting the label and seeing the persons.

Other media reports about the Occupy movement seem to work overly hard at separating the long term homeless from the occupiers. These “real” homeless, state these articles, resent the presence of the occupation while acknowledging that the tents in the park make it easier for them to exist without police harassment. In other words, this type of press represents an attempt to create class divisions between those whom the neoliberal economy has already discarded with those that are fighting to prevent that economy from destroying more lives. This reportage is nothing new. In fact, the mainstream media has long represented those without homes in the capitalist world as creatures whose existence deserves at best pity and the occasional meal. For those with less compassion than your average member of the church social justice committee, the homeless deserve nothing. Not even dignity. Then again, handouts that demand access to one’s soul (like those provided by Salvation Army and many other faith-based organizations) don’t leave one with much dignity either. My anecdotal evidence suggests that most of the homeless involved with Occupy are glad for the camp not only because it makes it easier for them to survive on the streets, but because it gives them something meaningful to do beyond mere survival.

In occupations I was involved with in the past–most notably at Berkeley’s People’s Park in 1979–it was the homeless that protected the space from police and other ne’er-do-wells. Unafraid of the violence they knew the police and their unofficial allies (usually right wing frat boys in the case of Berkeley) to be capable of, these men and women stayed in the camp for weeks. They excised threats of physical violence with words, intimidation and the occasional fist. When fellow campers stepped out of line regarding women or fighting, the occupiers chosen by the rest of us to enforce certain levels of respect did so.

It seems rougher on the streets now then back in 1979. Times have changed and issues are somewhat different. Generally speaking, the men and women without homes who are with the Occupy movement are not symbols to be romanticized nor individuals to be ostracized. Besides being witness to the harm capitalism can do to a person’s livelihood, they are allies and, like the rest of us, come with their own suppositions, hopes and problems. While we try to effect change in the world we can also effect change in ourselves and those we occupy with.

The Iowa legislature last year approved a dove hunting season, the first in more than nine decades. However, the state’s Department of Natural Resources and the Natural Resources Commission (DNR) banned the use of lead shot and bullets.

That led to a massive all-out assault by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the U.S. Sportsman’s Alliance (USSA).

In a letter to Gov. Terry Branstad, the NRA underscored its opposition by waving a veiled threat that banning lead ammunition is an “attack [on] our freedoms.”

“Absurd,” replied Robert Johns of the American Bird Conservancy, who explained that “the NRA continues to deliberately miscast the lead-versus-non-lead ammunition issue as an attack on hunting.” There is nothing in the Constitution or in any federal court decision that would prohibit the banning of any specific kind of ammunition.

The NRA blatantly suggested the ban on lead shot “is designed to price hunters out of the market and keep them from taking part in traversing Iowa’s fields and forests.” For its “evidence,” it pointed out the cost of non-toxic ammunition is higher than ammunition made of lead. However, the use of non-toxic shot results in only a 1-2 percent increase in total costs for hunters, according to a study conducted by the National Wildlife Research Centre, certainly not enough to justify the NRA’s paranoid panic that non-toxic bullets will lead to a decrease in hunting.

Iowa’s DNR, the NRA claimed, was echoing not just environmental extremism but “the unscientific battle cry of the anti-hunting extremists.”

Contrary to NRA and USSA statements, there are several hundred scientific studies that conclude that lead shot is a health and environmental danger. Lead can cause behavioral problems, learning disabilities, reduced reproduction, neurological damage, and genetic mutation. For those reasons alone, the U.S. bans lead in gasoline, water pipes, windows, pottery, toys, paint, and hundreds of other items.

“Wildlife is poisoned when animals scavenge on carcasses shot and contaminated with lead-bullet fragments, or pick up and eat spent lead-shot pellets[,]mistaking them for food or grit,” the Center for Biological Diversity points out. As many as 20 million birds and other animals die each year from lead poisoning, says the CBD.

Humans can be poisoned by eating animals that have eaten the pellets from the ground or which have eaten decaying carcasses of birds that have been shot with lead ammunition. Iowa is one of only 15 states that doesn’t have some regulation that bans lead in shot and ammunition. Most European countries ban the use of lead shot for hunting.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1991 banned the use of lead shot in all waterfowl hunting. The NRA screamed its opposition at that time. However, the ban didn’t lead to a reduction of hunting or hunters, nor did it violate any part of the Constitution.

R.T. Cox, in his column, “The Sage Grouse,” notes that “bird hunters can leave 400,000 pellets per acre of intensely hunted areas.” About 81,000 tons of lead shot are left on shooting ranges each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Part of the reason for so much lead shot on the ground is that doves, which can fly up to 50 miles per hour and make sharp turns, are difficult to hit. While hunters may claim they shoot the birds as a food source, such claims are usually blatant lies meant to hide the reality that the 20 million doves killed each year are nothing more than live targets. The five ounce mourning dove, hit by shot, provides little usable meat. The NRA even advises hunters that for health reasons, they should “cut away a generous portion of meat around the wound channel.”

Lead on the dove killing fields isn’t the only problem. An investigation by the North Dakota Dept. of Health in 2007 revealed that 58 percent of venison donated to food banks by the Safari Club contained lead fragments. During the past decade, 276 California condors were found to have had lead poisoning; there are fewer than 400 in the state. A ban on lead shot was enacted in 2007.

There are alternatives to using lead. Non-toxic bullets and shot are made from tungsten, copper, and steel, without the negative health problems. While some hunting advocates maintain that lead bullets are significantly better in the field, there is no evidence to suggest that “green” ammunition results in fewer kills.

Nevertheless, disregarding scientific evidence and facing NRA wrath, Branstad said he agreed with a legislative panel’s decision to ignore the findings of the state’s professional wildlife conservationists, who he said exceeded their authority, to restore lead shot hunting.

Andrew Page, a senior director for the Humane Society of the United States, has another opinion, one far more logical than the NRA/NSSA rants: “If hunters are conservationists as they say they are, they should be the first to stand up and say they won’t poison wildlife or the ecosystem.”

The officers’ conviction on all 25 counts (on two counts, the jury found the men guilty but with partial disagreements on the nature of the crime, which could slightly affect sentencing) comes nearly six years after the city was devastated by floodwaters and government inaction. The verdict helps rewrite the history of what happened in the chaotic days after the levees broke. And the story of how these convictions happened is important for anyone around the U.S. seeking to combat law enforcement violence.

The results of this trial also have national implications for those seeking federal support in challenges to police abuses in other cities. New Orleans is one of four major cities in which the Department of Justice has stepped in to look at police departments. Any success here has far reaching implications for federal investigations in Denver, Seattle, Newark, and other cities.

The Danziger Bridge case begins with Hurricane Katrina. As images of desperate survivors played on television, people around the world felt sympathy for people waiting for rescue after the storm. But then images of families trapped on rooftops were replaced by stories of armed gangs and criminals roaming the streets. News reports famously described white people as “finding” food while depicting black people as “looting.” Then-Chief of Police Eddie Compass told Oprah Winfrey that “little babies (are) getting raped” in the Superdome. Then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco announced she had sent in troops with orders to shoot to kill, and the second in charge of the police department reportedly told officers to fire at will on looters.

Evidence suggests that the NOPD acted on these instructions. On Sept. 2, just days after the storm, a black man named Henry Glover was shot by a police sniper as he walked through a parking lot. When a good Samaritan tried to help Glover get medical help, he was beaten by officers, who burnt Glover’s body and left it behind a levee. The next day, a 45-year-old named Danny Brumfield, Sr., was killed by officers in front of scores of witnesses outside the New Orleans convention center when he ran after a police car to demand that they stop and provide aid.

The following morning, two families were crossing New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge, which connects Gentilly and New Orleans East, two mostly middle-to-upper-class African American neighborhoods. Without warning, a Budget Rental truck carrying police officers arrived and cops jumped out. The officers did not identify themselves, and began firing before their vehicle had even stopped.

Officers had heard a radio call about shootings in the area, and according to prosecutors, they were seeking revenge. James Brisette, a 17-year-old called studious and nerdy by his friends, was shot nearly a dozen times and died at the scene. Many of the bullets hit him as he lay on the ground bleeding. Four other people were wounded, including Susan Bartholomew, a 38-year-old mother who had her arm shot off of her body, and her 17-year old daughter Lesha, who was shot while crawling on top of her mother’s body, trying to shield her from bullets. Lesha’s cousin Jose was shot point-blank in the stomach and nearly died. He needed a colostomy bag for years afterwards.

Further up the bridge, officers chased down Ronald Madison, a mentally challenged man, who was traveling with his brother Lance. Ronald was shot in the back by one officer and then stomped and kicked to death by another. Lance was arrested and charged with firing at officers, and spent weeks behind bars.

At the time, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that officers “sent up a cheer” when word came over police radios that suspects had been shot and killed.

A cursory investigation by the NOPD justified the shooting, and it appeared that the matter was closed. In fact, for years every check and balance in the city’s criminal justice system failed to find any fault in this or other officer-involved shootings from the days after the storm.

Eddie Jordan, the city’s first black district attorney, pursued charges against the officers in late 2006. When the cops went to turn themselves in, they were greeted by a crowd of hundreds of officers who cheered for them and called them heroes. Before the case could make it to trial, it was dismissed by a judge with close ties to the defense lawyers, and soon after that Jordan was forced to resign.

After the dismissal of Jordan’s charges, the story of police violence after Katrina remained untold. Jordan believes an indifferent local media bears partial responsibility for the years of cover-up. “They were looking for heroes,” he says. “They had a cozy relationship with the police. They got tips from the police; they were in bed with the police. It was an atmosphere of tolerance for atrocities from the police. They abdicated their responsibility to be critical in their reporting. If a few people got killed that was a small price to pay.”

Other elected officials, like the city coroner, went along with the police version of events. For example, the coroner’s office never flagged Henry Glover’s body, found burned in a car, as a potential homicide.

But the Madisons, the Bartholomews, and the Glovers, along with family members of other police violence victims, refused to be silent. They continued to speak out at press conferences, rallies, and directly to reporters. They worked with organizations like Safe Streets Strong Communities, which was founded by criminal justice activists in the days after Katrina, and Community United for Change, which was formed in response to police abuses. Monique Harden, a community activist and co-director of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, helped to bring testimony about these issues to the United Nations. Another post-Katrina organization, Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, presented the charges to an international tribunal.

Activists worked to not only raise awareness of specific issues of police violence, but to say that these problems are structural and that any solution must get at the root causes.

“This is about an entire system that was completely broken and in crisis,” says former Safe Streets co-director Rosana Cruz. “Everyone’s job in the criminal justice system depends on there being a lot of crime in the city. The district attorney’s office doesn’t work on getting the city safer, they work on getting convictions at any cost. As long as that’s the case, we’re not going to have safety.”

Former District Attorney Jordan feels that investigators should pursue charges up to the very top of the department, including Warren Riley, who was promoted to police chief shortly after Hurricane Katrina and served in that role until 2010. “Riley, by his own admission, never even read the report on Danziger,” Jordan points out. “It’s so outrageous, it’s unspeakable. It’s one of the worst things that anyone can do. It’s hard to understand why he’s not on trial as well.”

“Fish starts rotting at the head,” adds Jordan. “This was all done in the backdrop of police opposition at the very top. It’s not surprising that there was a cover-up. You just have to wonder how far that cover-up went.”

In 2008, journalist A.C. Thompson did what New Orleans media had failed to do, and seriously investigated the accusations of police violence. His reporting, published on ProPublica and in The Nation, spelled out the shocking details of Glover’s killing and pointed toward police coordination with white vigilantes in widespread violence. It brought national attention to the stories that had been ignored. Activists took advantage of the exposure and lobbied the Congressional Black Caucus and the Justice Department for an investigation.

In early 2009, a newly empowered civil rights division of the Justice Department decided to look into the cases. Federal agents interviewed witnesses who had never been talked to, reconstructed crime scenes, and even confiscated NOPD computers. They found evidence that the Danziger officers had radically rewritten their version of what happened on the bridge that day. When FBI agents confronted officers involved in the Danziger case, five officers pleaded guilty and agreed to testify about the conspiracy to cover-up what happened. They revealed that officers had planted evidence, invented witnesses, arrested innocent people, and held secret meetings where they worked to line up their stories.

Before last week’s verdict, the Justice Department had already won four previous police violence convictions, including of the officers who shot Glover and burned his body, as well as of two officers who killed Raymond Robair, a pre-Katrina case in which officers beat a man to death and claimed (with the support of the city coroner) he had sustained his injuries from falling down. About half a dozen other investigations are ongoing. The Justice Department is also looking at federal oversight of the NOPD, a process by which they can dictate vast changes from hiring and firing to training and policy writing.

The Danziger trial has been the most high-profile aspect of the federal intervention in New Orleans, and this verdict will have far-reaching implications for how the effectiveness of federal intervention is perceived. The convictions and guilty pleas in the case reveal a wide-ranging conspiracy that reaches up to sergeants and lieutenants. Marlon Defillo, the second-in-charge of the NOPD, was recently forced to retire because of his role in helping cover-up the Glover killing.

Most importantly, the verdict has helped shift the narrative of what happened in those days after Katrina.

The defense team for the Danziger officers was steadfast in describing their clients as heroes. Attorney Paul Fleming described the cops as “proactive,” saying, “They go out and get things done. They go out and get the bad guys.” Police attorneys in the Glover and Danziger trials also sought to use the so-called “Katrina defense,” arguing that the exceptional circumstances following the storm justified extra-legal actions on the part of officers. With these convictions, the juries have definitively refuted this excuse.

In her closing arguments, Bobbi Bernstein, deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, fought back against the claim that the officers were heroes, saying the family members of those killed deserved the title more. Noting that the official cover-up had “perverted” the system, she said, “The real heroes are the victims who stayed with an imperfect justice system that initially betrayed them.”

Officers went out with a mission to deliver “their own kind of post-apocalyptic justice,” she added. “The law is what it is because this is not a police state.”

In comments immediately after the verdict, family members of those killed on the bridge expressed gratitude for those who had helped them reach this point, but stressed that their pain continued.

Speaking outside the courthouse after the verdict, Sherrel Johnson, the mother of James Brisette, said that the officers, “took the twinkle out of my eye, the song out of my voice, and blew out my candle,” when they killed her son.

Jacqueline Madison Brown, the sister of Ronald Madison, told assembled press, “Ronald Madison brought great love to our family. Shooting him down was like shooting an innocent child.” Commenting on officers who had testified for the prosecution in exchange for lesser charges, she added, “We regret that they did not have the courage and strength to come forward sooner.”

Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Anthony Villavaso, and Faulcon, the officers involved in the shooting, could receive life sentences. Sergeant Arthur Kaufman, who was not on the bridge, but was convicted of leading the conspiracy, could receive a maximum of 120 years. Sentencing is scheduled for December, but will likely be delayed.

•  This article was first published in Colorlines

Much of the defense relied on the scenario that there were armed civilians on or near the bridge firing at officers, or that officers could reasonably have believed that was the case. Shawn Gasaway, a paramedic on the scene that day, testified that he saw people on the grass beside the bridge firing up at officers. The defense also read grand jury testimony from Heather Gore and Donald Haynes III, two officers on the scene who have not been charged in the killings or cover-up. Haynes testified that he saw two Black males “facing the officers with their hands extended.” Haynes admitted he didn’t actually see weapons in their hands, but he insisted the males must have had guns that they were firing at police. “Standing toe to toe with the officers like that I believed he was shooting,” said Haynes.

Gore, who was the last cop to exit the Budget rental truck that carried officers to the bridge, testified that she saw a “Black male with an assault rifle” pointing his weapon at officers and then running up the bridge. Gore said she only saw the man briefly and couldn’t say for sure he was not an officer; however, she insisted that he couldn’t have been with law enforcement because his gun had been pointed in the direction of police.

However, the prosecution repeatedly raised doubts about the credibility of defense witness accounts, pointing out that the various stories did not match up and accusing Haynes and Gore of lying to protect their fellow officers. Prosecutor Cindy Chung also said that the other paramedics traveling with Gasaway that day disputed his version of events and had said that gunfire had ended by the time they arrived on the scene.

Perhaps the most powerful testimony for the defense was a recording played in court of a conversation between officers Barrios and Villavaso. Barrios, who pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the prosecution, secretly recorded a conversation with Villavaso, his friend and former partner. On the tape, Barrios repeatedly tries to get Villavaso to admit that civilians on the bridge were unarmed, but Villavaso refuses to budge, insisting that the victims had guns.

The taped conversation also revealed that Villavaso and Barrios feel that the alleged cover-up crafted by Sergeant Kaufman and others unfairly directs the blame at them, as well as at Officer Faulcon. Some observers at the trial have speculated that the cover-up exonerated white cops at the expense of Black officers, although there are other factors aside from race that divide the officers, such as rank, place of work, and social circles.

This element of the story also unfolded earlier in the trial, during the testimony of Jeffrey Lehrmann, a former NOPD investigator and current government witness. Lehrmann admitted that the report he helped write noted that Villavaso fired an AK47, but failed to mention that Bowen also fired the same type of weapon.

The so-called “Danziger Seven” includes three white cops; Sergeant Kenneth Bowen, Sergeant Robert Gisevius, and Officer Michael Hunter; and four Black officers; Robert Barrios, Anthony Villvaso, Robert Faulcon and Ignatius Hills. Villavaso and Barrios were the only two officers not from the seventh district. Faulcon had been with the seventh, but left the force weeks after Katrina.

Hunter, Hills and Barrios have since pleaded guilty, while the four remaining officers are currently on trial along with Sergeant Arthur Kaufman, who was not part of the shooting but is accused of leading the cover-up.

Officer Faulcon was the only defendant to take the stand. Speaking confidently, Faulcon testified to seeing armed men firing at him, saying that he returned fire “until the threat was neutralized.” During a contentious cross-examination by government prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein, Faulcon refused to admit to almost any laws or restrictions on police use of deadly force.

Asked repeatedly about situations when an officer may or may not fire or whether it was necessary to shout a warning first, Faulcon responded, “It’s hard to say yes and it’s hard to say no, that’s up to that individual.” When asked if an officer should follow guidelines on use of force he had been trained on in his years in the military and NOPD, he responded, “According to textbook, yes. According to reality, not necessarily.”

Bernstein also questioned Faulcon’s denial that he had collaborated with the other defendants in conspiring to change their stories. She listed several dates when Faulcon had apparently spoken on the phone with the other defendants, including several calls during the days in January of 2006 when officers gave their official statements for the NOPD internal investigation of the incident. When Faulcon claimed to not have the phone numbers of some of the other officers, Bernstein asked, “Can you sometimes talk to people on the phone even if you don’t have their phone number?”

While we won’t know until the verdict comes down what the jury thought of Faulcon, his testimony may have damaged other officer’s cases, especially Kaufman’s. When asked by Bernstein if he agreed that there was a cover-up, Faulcon responded, “Based on what I learned now, yes.”

Around the same time, a “hit list” of American executives, officials and companies appeared on jihadist websites. “Security analysts,” reported FoxNews.com, “believe the two messages are related and underscore a shift in terror strategy—from top-down, mass-casualty events to smaller-scale attacks taken up, in some cases, by freelancing, lone-wolf jihadists.” According to one of Fox’s security analysts, Aaron Weisburd, the founder and director of the revealingly named Internet Haganah, the discussion originated on a password-protected, members-only site, to which he has access, known as the Shumukh forum. Describing Shumukh—which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Yiddish word for “idiot”—as “the number-one Al Qaeda-supporting website on the Internet today,” Weisburd suspiciously added that it was “most frequented by Palestinians.”

On the very same day that Gadahn’s video was released, the Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) coalition issued a press release in response. New York City Mayor and MAIG founding co-chair Michael Bloomberg said that Gadahn’s statement was “absolutely accurate,” adding that the video “may help Washington understand that weak gun laws aren’t just a crime problem, they’re a national security threat.” Helpfully pointing out that legislation had already been introduced to address the problem, Bloomberg, an uncritical supporter of Israel’s seemingly unlimited “right to defend itself,” urged Congress to pass the Fix Gun Checks Act of 2011 and the Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2011. Then on June 16, Ben Rattray’s Change.org breathlessly alerted subscribers to its MAIG-sponsored “Stop Al-Qaeda From Exploiting Gun Law Loopholes” online petition. This was followed by a June 17 editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times entitled “Terrorists buying guns? There ought to be a law.”

In fact, it was Mayor Bloomberg’s coalition that had initially proposed the legislation to fix gun background checks. On February 23, Bloomberg and his New York Police Commissioner, Ray Kelly, had joined Israel’s self-described “guardian” in the Senate, Charles Schumer, to announce the introduction of legislation that would provide greater reporting to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) for individuals with mental illness, domestic violence records, and drug abusers, by increasing the penalties for states that fail to adequately turn over records for those who are prohibited from owning a gun. The legislation would also require that all gun sales, including those by private sellers, be subject to a background check, effectively ending the so-called “gun show loophole.”

On May 12, the 550-member Mayors Against Illegal Guns—more than three-quarters of whom come from California, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York—issued a statement decrying the House Judiciary Committee’s vote that day against an amendment to close the “Terror Gap” by giving the Justice Department discretion to deny gun and explosive sales to terrorists. “Hopefully, last night’s arrest in New York City of two terrorists plotting an attack using guns and explosives,” Mayor Bloomberg said in a statement, “will help convince Congress that this is a national security issue and they need to do the right thing and pass this legislation.”

On that same day, at a high-profile City Hall news conference, the New York Mayor and his steadfast NYPD Commissioner accused Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh of “planning to blow up the largest synagogue in Manhattan and to kill as many Jews as possible.” The FBI, however, had their doubts about the police undercover who investigated the two alleged “lone wolf” terrorists and refused to get involved in the case. Those doubts were confirmed on June 15 when a grand jury rejected the top terrorism charge against the two Muslim immigrants from North Africa. “This is a political case, brought by political people, for their own political purposes,” Elizabeth Fink, a lawyer for Ferhani, said outside court.“You will see that this case is bogus.… It’s total entrapment.” She added that Ferhani had a history of mental illness and had been institutionalized up to 30 times, and that the police were aware of this because of 911 calls his mother had made to subdue him.

The grand jury’s rejection of the NYPD’s exaggerated claims of a dastardly anti-Semitic plot came just days after the White House announcement of the Jewish Federations’ new partnership with the Department of Homeland Security (a post 9/11 goldmine for the Israeli security industry) “dedicated mainly to the state of threats posed to American Jewish institutions.” Notwithstanding the strong evidence pointing to FBI entrapment as the source of earlier media-hyped “synagogue terror” plots, Michael Gelman, chair of the Executive Committee of the Board of The Jewish Federations of North America, said: “The American Jewish community and the places we gather are, unfortunately, often targets for terrorists. This new partnership with the Department of Homeland Security will empower us to counter this threat as we become more actively involved in our own protection.”

And given Mayor Bloomberg’s support for legislation to prevent the mentally ill from buying guns, it’s also worth noting that the “Manhattan synagogue” plot is far from being the only instance in which the NYPD has used people suffering from mental illness to make terrorism cases. In 2004, police arrested a Pakistani immigrant, Shahawar Matin Siraj, and charged him with plotting to bomb the Herald Square subway station on the eve of the Republican National Convention at nearby Madison Square Garden. After paying an informant $100,000 to spend more than a year encouraging Siraj in the plot, the police persuaded his schizophrenic co-defendant, James Elshafay, to testify against Siraj. Despite being described by acquaintances as “borderline retarded,” Siraj was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

In spite of the fact—or perhaps because of it—that investigators couldn’t find a connection between Siraj and Elshafay and any terrorist organization, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence, David Cohen, later described the mentally ill pair as “lone wolves” who were “homegrown, but inspired globally.” After a brief 2001 stint at insurance giant AIG (a $40 billion beneficiary of the increased demand for bonds in the wake of the September 11 attacks), Cohen had been tapped for the newly created position at the beginning of 2002. Despite his extreme unpopularity and a less than reassuring record in a 35-year career at the CIA—he once wrote a report, later dismissed by an internal CIA review, blaming the Soviet Union for the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II—Cohen’s appointment was warmly endorsed by Mayor Bloomberg. Describing his role as chief of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division, Cohen later said, “It’s like starting the CIA over in the post-9/11 world.”

Indeed, it seems that Cohen set about starting over not only the CIA but the FBI as well—the latter’s investigations on occasions being frustrated by his Intelligence Division’s “Lone Cowboy behaviour.” But cowed by post-9/11 criticism from Congress and the media, the Feds passively watched the creation of a troublesome rival. Early on, Cohen suggested to Commissioner Kelly that New York police officers be assigned overseas. By 2005, NYPD Intelligence had seven detectives deployed in cities around the world, including London, Singapore and Tel Aviv, which perhaps predictably received the NYPD’s first foreign liaison. While Cohen’s man in Tel Aviv, Mordecai Dzikansky, had virtually no contact with his American counterpart from the FBI, which opposed the creation of the post, the Orthodox Jew and former IDF volunteer enjoyed close relations with his Israeli hosts. A few months before her 2005 “resignation,” Judith Miller wrote in the New York Times: “[A]s the New York detective walks through the corridors of police headquarters in Jerusalem, home to Israel’s 27,000 police officers, he is invariably greeted as Morty, in the Hebrew he now speaks fluently, with a quip and a smile.”

Although most liberals would be inclined to support calls for tighter gun control, the source of those calls should give them pause for thought. It’s more than a little ironic that the most ardent advocates of gun control for Americans such as the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League are the very same people who demand that American taxpayers continue to lavish Israelis with as much weaponry as they desire “to defend themselves,” i.e. by slaughtering Palestinian and Lebanese civilians with impunity. Leaving aside arguments over the relative legitimacy of state terrorism versus non-state terrorism, one can hardly imagine the likes of Bloomberg and Schumer advocating background checks as passionately for Israeli settlers to prevent a Jewish extremist like Baruch Goldstein from acquiring a gun to massacre Palestinian civilians.

So, how do we account for such blatant double standards? Could it be that Israel’s fifth columnists are worried that if enough Americans ever become aware of how much their “unbreakable bond” with Israel has cost them in blood, treasure and credibility, they might have an American Intifada on their hands? Better, then, to preempt the possibility of such “domestic extremists” coming up with their own “hit list” by closing the “Terror Gap” now, while they still can. In the meantime, the fear and loathing of America’s maligned Muslim community engendered by scary tales of “lone wolf” jihadists ensures the perpetuation of America’s wars for Israeli hegemony in the Greater Middle East for the forseeable future—or at least till they completely bankrupt the country.

Even if Adam Gadahn had become a board member of the ADL like his beloved paternal grandfather, Carl Pearlman, he could hardly have served their gun control agenda better.

Since 9/11/2001, due to the lust for revenge of the people of the U.S., hundreds of thousands of innocent Islamic people are dead. These human beings were killed in our name. Be very careful when you proclaim: “I’m glad ‘we’ got bin Laden. He deserved it.” Be very grateful most of us don’t get what we deserve.

To appropriate a classical understanding of the situation: Aeschylus, in his Oresteia trilogy, dramatized that civilization begins when (in fact, civilization is not even possible until) retribution yields to justice; i.e., The Furies, goddesses adorned with serpent-seething headdresses and an abiding passion for retribution, must be transformed into the Eumenides (the kindly ones). They must cease their seeking of revenge (which engenders endless revenge cycles, inflicting a trauma-wrought callowness on the people of a culture) and become the enemies of those who bear false witness and stand against the democratic process.

In contrast, in the U.S., a state policy of genocide against its native inhabitants determined the geographical dimensions of the nation itself, and, in many ways, determined the inner dimensions of its collective mindscape, which created and maintains the death cult calculus of U.S. militarist imperium. (The U.S. military still envisages its enemies as “Red Indian savages.” Witness: Osama bin Laden having been given the moniker, “Geronimo.”)

Hence the isolated, alienated U.S. populace (its males in particular) clutch, to the point of fetishizing, their guns, because they feel powerless before the deprivations of an exploitative system rigged to benefit a small class of privileged insiders. Much damage is done by this compensatory fantasy: Vulnerable children and teens are bullied by their troubled peers to the point of clinical depression and suicide; in domestic situations, crimes of passion take deadly turns; and episodes of mass shootings erupt across the landscape of exploitation, alienation and anomie.

The collective mode of mind of the corporate consumer/militarist empire leaves both the hoi polloi and the privileged unable to even approach the problem of their alienation; thick walls of self-protection must be breached… In the U.S., individuals have become so withdrawn into themselves, it seems as if Home Depot outlets sell ready-to-assemble, prefab bubbles of self-enclosure, with optional mounted gun turrets.

How is it possible for troubled individuals to live in a culture in which the response of their government (mirrored in its movies, television programs, and video games) to almost every problem abroad involves military force and imperialist coercion — and not have these death-leveling policies leave their mark on the psyches of the populace?

All too frequently, in the increasingly desperate and denial-ridden nation, deranged chickens come home and reap havoc in the roost (also known as The Law Of Perpetual Poultry Return). As above with its government, so below with its populace: With troubling frequency, in shooting rampages, unhinged individuals stage freelance, military-style commando raids, defending (in the tormented perception of their besieged minds) their internal homeland.

The rigid hierarchical structure of U.S. corporate oligarchy (but veiled by the internalization of its upward class mobility hagiography) imposes a type of domination and control compulsion (and attendant low-level hysteria) in the psyches of the nation’s males. Hence, the need for disproportionate amounts of control to displace their own sense of being dominated by brutal power (e. g., they feel so deeply diminished by their own submissive position in the economic order that the men and boys of the nation are driven to taunt other males by bandying demeaning invectives, such as, “You’re my bitch.”)

What they are expressing is the displaced anger, engendered by their helplessness before the dictates of the corporate state. An insidious order that determines the course of their day: At what hour, they will rise (at the insistence of an alarm clock) to meet the day; what they will eat (generally, processed or fast food); the roads and routes they will travel (stranded in the grinding limbo of commuter traffic); who they will be in contact with during the day (the dharma-decimating exigencies of the workspaces of the neo-liberal economic order). In short, how their day unfolds (exploited for the benefit of the oligarchs of the corporate state) and how their day ends (on edge, enervated, muck-brained, in hyper-attenuated communion with some form of the mass media hologram).

The inimical effect of this mode of being has come to be known as “the American way of life.” Therein, individuals, reduced to mere assets of the economic elite, grow bereft of the means and motivation for personal transformation. Moreover, the culture — always an organic, collaborative effort between individuals and the collective mind of an age — withers into an economic, as well as, psychic wasteland, because the means of social engagement have been denuded due to the full-spectrum domination of both cultural real estate and individual mindscape by the corporate state.

Corporate domination of everyday life has left the soul with a scant amount of wiggle room. But it has not always been so, even in the Deep South, in the belligerent ignorance and staggering naivety, of my youth.

Homer counseled that we should straddle time with our backs to the future, our faces to the past. Thus this digression:

In the year, 1970, in the summer I turned fourteen, in Piedmont Park, in Atlanta, Georgia, the Allman Brothers, among other bands, would perform free, impromptu concerts for a tie-dye clad, reefer reeking, bell bottoms-caressing-the-Georgia-red-dirt gatherings of “freaks,” — which was the preferred tribalist term, as opposed to the media-created, socially pejorative — hippies…which, when bandied among counterculture insiders, was generally applied ironically.

Although the park was located only a few miles from my family’s home, undertaking the trip presented a degree of peril. To make ones way to the park included traversing a tough, in-town, white working class neighborhood (now a gentrified into soul-sucking blandness, yuppie enclave) where, from the perspective of its denizens, their world, and all they held in reverence and reference, was under siege. And, although inchoate, their animus was instantly distilled, simply upon a glimpse of the untamed tresses of a singular, thin of wrist, dirty hippie, commie faggot — whose mere presence was considered an affront to their pomade-crowned, muscle car-thundering parcel of redneck paradise.

Accordingly, the locals were pledged to do their part to fight the scourge…by increasing their intake of PBRs and Jack Daniels, and, upon sight of said dirty hippie interlopers, bestowing ass-stompings — and for no-extra-charge — involuntary haircuts upon errant longhairs caught in their midst.

Yet as the era progressed, the savage dance between hippie freak and redneck belligerent changed in tone and tempo, an extemporaneous type of metaphysical jiujitsu occurred, in which the predator was subdued and seduced by the prey…as if by cultural contact buzz, redneck fury yielded to counterculture insouciance.

“When the individual feels, the community reels.” — Aldous Huxley

Briefly, this was the anatomy of the seduction: In their pursuit of fleeing freaks into the park, the young males of the cracker tribe happened upon a few of the things of this vast and vivid world even more compelling than the possibility of ass-kicking…in the form of attractive young women.

Yet to the young men, the hippie sphinxes, sirens, waifs, and gypsy queens were baffling, unapproachable; these women were less than taken by their greasy, pompadoured forelocks and aggressive bearing. In short, and to appropriate the parlance of the era, the hippie chicks didn’t get off on their “bad vibes…it, like, really harshed their high.”

But these great, great grandsons of the Lost Cause proved much more malleable in countenance than the ossified in memory, now enshrined in marble statuary, of their confederate forefathers.

Consequently, a kind of cracker Lysistrata started to unfold. The pomade lacquer faded from stiff pompadours, yielding to lank, draping locks of hippie plumage. The habit of rebel bellicosity was sublimated into an avidity to “boogie.” The zealots of ass-kicking became the acolytes of acid and devotees of the gospels of kicking back and getting down.

As time passed, on weekends, as the Allman Brothers preached Sunday sermons vis-a-vis guitar and drum solos, these newly minted freaks could be found in positions of repose and reflection upon the grassy hills of the park, eating Orange Sunshine and drawling, “aw mahn, Dwayne’s guitar is shootin’ sparks into mah brain…”

Or as Marcel Proust put it, “The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.”

Yet, in our time, the fervor of the 1960s seems, in the words of a Latin proverb: “Parturiunt montes nascetur ridiculus mus.” — (“The mountains have labor pains and a ridiculous little mouse is brought forth.”)

As the psychedelic nimbus of the early nineteen seventies transmogrified into a Nixonian shit-storm, and the long, silent war waged by Disaster Capitalists on the US working class dissipated their hopes and buffeted their sense of well-being, a familiar class system wrought aura of misery and meanness began to reassert itself.

The Dixieland Woodstock Nation increasingly began to resemble a southern-fried Weimar Republic, as the Corporate State Altamont grew increasingly pervasive, punitive, and imposed more and more demeaning demands upon the lives of working class Americans.

Yet the present paradigm and its dependence upon a corporate consumer/militarist mindset persists because: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” — Thomas Paine.

Osama bin Laden was taken out by a rival gang of terrorists: And, across the land, the parade of death-reveling fools prattles onward. Hence, the desperate, diminished souls of the empire are driven to contort themselves, collectively, into all manner of positions of casuistry, in a vain attempt to rationalize being complicit in the crimes of the state. Thus, in the compulsion to see ourselves as good and decent folk, we mistake the involuted course of our own dim and brutal thoughts for the darkness and evil of others.

Therefore: This is why self-knowledge is crucial: “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.” — Carl Jung.

Over the last few days, witnessing the blood-dimmed spectacle of witless celebrants frothing in glee at the news of the revenge killing of Osama bin Laden, I feel as though I’m having the dubious privilege of peering into an alternative universe where annoyances such as common decency whither into extinction, as all the while, vile, lurid delusions bloom like hot house flowers.

The noxious redolence of these fleur du mal can have an enervating effect on one’s will to resist and fight back.

But resist one must. And remember to savor the glorious failure of even a hopeless cause. The most naive and banal response would be to propagate the tired canard of the vacuous, crackpot realist mindset that: “That’s just the way it is; that’s just how things work; that’s the way it is, always was, and always will be.”

Dead ass wrong: That is the way a particular system is being operated at a particular time. Moreover, no system operates in stasis therefore are open to systemic change and random fluxes, by a host of variables, known and unknown. Although outcomes, for better or worse, and all combinations therein, are uncertain, thus the world before us remains an extraordinary thing to behold.

“Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.” — Carl Jung

Even though the earthly remains of Osama bin Laden are now entombed in the sea, the U.S. empire will continue to founder, its people have been made no safer nor have we been placed in an enhanced position to prosper. What would prove helpful would be to cease engaging in this constant, tedious dance with our homicidal shadow self, because every written-in-blood name, listed on every dance card at the Empire’s Ball, bears one’s own name.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s ruling last week that the names of the 1.3 million people with Firearm Owners Identification cards (FOID) in the state is public information has gun owners up in arms, pun intended.

The same groups that declare no one would put a sign in front of their home saying NO GUN now fear the opposite. They’re no longer worried about their right to bear arms, they’re worried about their right to bear arms anonymously. Their right to privacy.

1,000 to 1,500 gun owners converged on the Statehouse this week in Springfield to oppose the decision and push for conceal and carry laws. In Peoria, Circuit Judge Scott Shore halted disclosure with a temporary restraining order. And in a related privacy concern, Amish Illinois residents lobbied their state representatives and law enforcement officers to keep their photos off their FOID cards after former Illinois State Police Director Jonathon Monken said the policy would be reversed.

The Illinois State Police’s Firearms Services Bureau conducts background checks and updates FBI databases on the 230,000 gun owner applications it receives a year. That amount rose to 326,000 in 2009 says bureau chief Lt. John Coffman which he attributes to last year’s Supreme Court decision that overturned Chicago’s handgun ban and extension of the card’s validity to 10 years, reports the State Journal-Register.

In 2005 Illinois State Police procedures were also under scrutiny when an employee with guns in his truck at the agency’s training academy shot his girlfriend and himself says the Chicago Tribune. A state police firearms official said the agency could have confiscated the man’s weapons but didn’t in a different court case.

Two years ago a similar name disclosure flap occurred when the Memphis Commercial Appeal decided to publish a searchable base of state firearm permit holders, despite gun owner identity protection laws in states like Florida, Ohio and South Dakota that sealed names. The Appeal found that 70 of 154 state permit holders had criminal records including Bernard Avery (arrested 25 times with a murder charge dismissed on mental competency) and Reginald Miller (a felon with 11 arrests). Oops!

Chris Cox, then executive director of Illinois’ NRA, wrote the Appeal after the disclosures and called the decision “dangerous” — as if gun safety advocates and employers were armed instead of gun-owners. Hello?

Even though 25 other states call gun owner information public or do not specifically call it private, pro-gun Illinois politicians say the public has no right to the information and have introduced counter legislation to Madigan’s ruling. The Illinois State Police has also refused to release the information, which it has held confidential for forty years, in defiance of Madigan’s ruling and a Freedom of Information Act request from the Associated Press.

Pro-disclosure and gun safety activists, on the other hand, say knowing whether a neighbor, daycare worker or the kid sitting next to your son or daughter at community college is armed is very much their business. Especially since 10,222  firearm  applications the Illinois State Police received in 2009 were denied and 5,952 were outright revoked.

Though the firearm owner information which Madigan wants to release would not include addresses, phone numbers or photos, gun activists worry they will be harassed in their community, by gun control activists or by anti-gun employers. They also worry that criminals will break into their houses and steal their weapons.

In fact, gun activists are so worried about others knowing they’re armed, you have to wonder if the weapons make them safe — or unsafe. And if they need to buy more weapons to defend their weapons.

The NRA holds steadfast, at the slightest court challenge it is there to defend the 2nd Amendment. It will not allow any tinkering however slight let alone a repeal of such a sacred Constitutional right.

The NRA is obviously well aware that there are accidents, murders, assassinations and other crimes with the use of arms, but holds that it is not the gun that kills or commits the crime; rather it is a person. It further argues that there is no need for a constant barrage of new laws let alone changes to the 2nd Amendment; it’s a matter of vigorously enforcing existing laws.

Their position is based on the logical sequence were there not to be such vehement defense. More restrictive laws would either slowly or rapidly erode the 2nd Amendment and would eventually lead to Constitutional changes or its abolition. So it becomes imperative for the 2nd Amendment’s preservation to not allow encroachment.

I agree with their stance, and suggest to the NRA that attacks to other Constitutional amendments follow the same logic of sequences that would also begin the process against the 2nd Amendment. It follows, if a group successfully challenges any Constitutional amendment, the door opens to challenges on other amendments. And part of the argument that there should be no changes or tinkering with Constitutional rights would be met with the case in point of a successful challenge.

The NRA approach is correct – do not allow the start on such a road. The NRA must also realize that an assault on one Constitutional Amendment is an assault on all and vigorously oppose attacks to the 14th Amendment, which in part reads:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

A group of state and federal elected officials are attempting to resolve an immigration issue with ill-advised attempts at weakening the U.S. Constitution by introducing legislation calling for denial of citizenship to certain children born within the jurisdiction of the United States.

The attempt or passing a law with such exclusion is an affront to our Constitution, as the 14th Amendment’s Section 1 clearly commands that “no State shall make or enforce any law,” which would abridge the privileges of citizens – birthright citizenship is one such Constitutional privilege.

Such officials undertaking this task are clearly misguided in their attempt at challenging and rewriting the Constitution out of their own biases and extremist mentality. In their state of blindness they do not see their assault on the Constitution.

As unlikely as it would be, suppose a law is enacted denying certain children birthright citizenship as provided by the 14th Amendment. Further, assume that the court challenges take the case to the Supreme Court and once there the Court upholds the law and denies such citizenship. Now what?

Let’s not discuss whether ICE personnel will surround hospitals, handcuff babies and escort them to the border or to the nearest airport to get them out of the country.

Rather let’s discuss the door that is opened to further assaults to the Constitution.

There would come the day when the political inclination of a state regarding the right to bear arms would pass a law banning arms in their state. Then the process of court challenges leading to the Supreme Court final ruling begins its march. Or it may not be about arms, it could be about making exceptions to “due process of law” or about limiting free speech, or excluding other groups of children from birthright citizenship, or any other challenge to Constitutional rights.

Shudder that the Supreme Court would then have a majority of Justices be of a political philosophy favoring such changes and have at their disposal precedence of legislative and judicial Constitutional changes.

NRA we await your voice.

The “defend freedom” argument is laughable. Gun owners, as an organized political group, have been invisible in the defense of freedom in the U.S., and they have had many opportunities to do so, from defending civil rights in the 1960s right up to today: fighting against the Patriot Act, fighting to end the Iraq and Afghan-Pakistan wars, fighting to stop the ongoing “renditions,” fighting to close down U.S. military torture prisons like at Guantanamo, fighting to deconstruct the prison-industrial system and black confinement gulag. You can look in any direction today and find a freedom that needs defending immediately. The gun owner PACs have only shown an interest in defending their own freedom to play with their guns, regardless.

However, one pro-gun argument I received was mildly creative, and deserves a response. The argument states that 120,000 (120K) accidental deaths occur every year because of mistakes by some of the 700,000 (700K) U.S. medical doctors. This is a ratio of medical accident deaths per doctor of 1/5.83, which we can round to 1/6. So, for every 6 U.S. doctors there is one medical-accident death per year. However, for 80,000,000 (80M) gun owners (in a total U.S. population of 311.9M) there are only 1500 accidental gun deaths a year, or one per 53.3K gun owners, annually. The claim is then made that “statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.”

I guess this proves you should quit going to the doctor (and taking any prescriptions, which might just poison you), and you had better pack a gun. That way you can be sure that any gun accident occurring near you happens to somebody else (since you’ll be doing the pointing), and you can also protect yourself by shooting any doctor that comes too close.

This silly comparison of (and obvious joke on) iatrogenic and gun-caused accidental deaths does suggestion one idea, which is amplified in what follows: gun malpractice insurance.

Consider the following data:

75.7K non-fatal gunshot injuries per year in the U.S., of which:
52.5K are deliberate,
23.2K are accidental (statistics for 2000, from the US-CDC);

16K homicides/year in the U.S., of which:
9K by hand guns,
2K by other guns
(11K for gun homicides, total),
2K by knives,
2K by other methods,
1K by blunt objects;

17K suicides/year by guns (2004).

So, about 28K gun-deaths/year in the U.S.

For 311.9M people (U.S. population), this works out to:

gun homicides/person (or, probability of being murdered by a gun): 1/28K,

total homicides/person (or, probability of being murdered by any means): 1/20K,

gun suicides/person (or, probability you’ll shoot yourself dead): 1/18K,

gun deaths/person (or, probability of being killed by a gun): 1/11K,

gunshot injuries/person (or, probability of getting shot, and living): 1/4K.

Now, lets see how this comes out per gun owner (using 80M U.S. gun owners):

gun homicides (in general population)/#owners: 1/7K,

gun suicides (in general population)/#owners: 1/5K,

gun deaths (in general population)/#owners: 1/3K,

gunshot injuries (in general population)/#owners: 1/1K.

So each year:
for every 1000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person is shot,
for every 3000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person is shot dead,
for every 5000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person shoots themselves dead,
for every 7000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person is murdered by gunshot.

Recall that for every 6 doctors there is 1 medical-accidental death per year. The hazards of medical practice have long been known and form the basis of the malpractice insurance industry (which, by the way, does a lot to raise the cost of “medicine,” this cash flow overhead going to insurance companies; how about nationalizing those companies to lower the cost of health care?)

A U.S. human is worth about $2M for a “reasonable” wrongful death damages/insurance settlement (the equivalent of $50K for a 40 year working life). (Yes, this is all very crass, but we are restricting argument to the absurdist confines of U.S. capitalist realpolitik.) However, court challenges to wrongful death claims, and legislation for protecting many industries like the airlines, set ridiculously low limits on settlements for fatal accidents, nearer $250K. So, I’ll use an average settlement of $0.5M to estimate the cost of malpractice insurance:

120K medical-accidental deaths/year, at $0.5M/per = $60B.

In fact the cost of medical liability insurance in the U.S. is about $55.6B/year, close to our estimate. However, since insurance companies probably absorb 30% to 50% of revenue for profit and overhead, the actual “average” settlement paid out must be closer to $250K to $350K.

For the 700K U.S. doctors, the average cost would be: $60B/700K = $85.7K = $7K/month. So U.S. doctors making $170K/year may spend up to half their income on their malpractice insurance (and or legal fees).

Fine.  Now let’s apply the same principle to gun owners. Let us allocate the cost of gun injury and death to “gun malpractice,” to be paid for by gun malpractice insurance, which gun owners would buy to compensate gunshot victims.

To estimate the cost of gun malpractice insurance let’s use measly settlements of:

$250K per gunshot death (paid to family members, obviously),
$100K per gunshot injury (paid for victim’s medical/rehabilitation & job/pay-loss expenses),

then for:

11K gun homicides/year, at $250K/per = $2.75B,

17K gun suicides/year, at $250K/per = $4.25B,

(28K gun deaths/year, at $250K/per = $7B),

75.7K gunshot non-fatal injuries/year, at $100K/per = $7.57B.

Total gun malpractice liabilities/year = $14.57B, round to $15B.

Now divide the cost among a total of 80M owners:

gun malpractice insurance premium (cost per owner) = $15B/80M = $188. A bargain, round generously to $200/year.

So it is entirely fair to charge gun owners about $200/year for “gun malpractice” insurance, which would help defray the costs to victims of gunshot. If the average awards were higher by a factor of 5 (to $1.25M per death and $500K for non-fatal injury), then the insurance premium would be $1000/year (and profit overhead for the insurance companies would raise premiums further).

Charging gun owners $1000/year for mandatory gun malpractice insurance does not seem unfair by comparison with what is done with M.D.’s, and it would not in any way infringe on gun owners’ sacred 2nd Amendment right to “defend freedom” personally. Such insurance would do a great deal to rein in both the private and public costs of U.S. trauma-response and health-care. Also gun malpractice insurance would be a great new capital industry, and such companies would probably be desirable investment vehicles.

It is obvious that the people of the U.S. accept the costs in gunshot injuries (76K/year) and deaths (28K/year) in the general population (312M), for the maintenance and convenience of unrestricted (or nearly so) gun ownership (80M owners). While no individual wants to be a victim of gun violence, we accept possibly having to make such personal sacrifice in order to uphold the higher social benefit of preserving the 2nd Amendment right of almost anyone being able to have all the guns of their choice as soon as possible.

However, some less-indulgent people, who do not have as high a regard for the U.S. Constitution as to accept this socialist accommodation, may agitate annoyingly for “gun control,” the restriction to gun ownership by legislation, even constitutional amendment. One argument they can use favorably is that the costs of gun violence are now borne unfairly by members of the public, gun owners or not, who happen to get shot.

This argument can be met by issuing gun malpractice insurance to gun owners, the proceeds of which will help compensate victims of gun violence (and create a new line of profitable insurance products). The existence of such insurance could be used by gun owners to indemnify them, individually and collectively, from “gun malpractice” liabilities. Indemnification would undoubtedly be set by legislation making gun malpractice insurance mandatory, in a similar way that medical malpractice insurance and automobile driving liability insurance are mandated.

Gun malpractice insurance would make maintenance of our 2nd Amendment freedom a win-win for both gun-owners and the non-gun members of the public, so long as you personally didn’t get shot up too badly. But if you did find yourself randomly chosen to participate in the socializing duty of gun action absorption, then you would have the comfort of knowing that the gun owners of America had provided for you to receive an immediate award of insurance money to help defray your medical expenses, and whatnot. That, and the red badge of courage pride you would have for your part in upholding the 2nd Amendment, would make you happy to be able to live with such freedom as we have in this country. Freedom carries responsibilities.

With the Tucson massacre, we witnessed in microcosm the two dominant forms of our contemporary politics: discourse, and force. One of the reasons for the immediate pushback against the incendiary rhetoric used by certain influential figures is that it blurs the line between the two forms, conflating a central tenet of democracy with the disfavored impetus to use violence and, in so doing, inviting greater resort to the latter. For many, there remains a profound sense that we have “peaceful revolutions” in America by virtue of our democratic processes and aren’t plagued by the overt political violence oftentimes on display elsewhere. The impact of vitriol as a tool of politicking has given us pause to consider if this is indeed so, and likewise to explore the prospect of a potentially short path from shouting to shooting. Indeed, it might be said that we’ve moved from a worldview that prioritizes First Amendment strategies to one that increasingly seems to be fixated on “Second Amendment remedies.”

If we take a slightly broader view, however, it isn’t just rhetorical belligerence that has come to dominate the landscape in recent times. In Arizona in particular, though certainly not exclusively, the use of “force” hasn’t merely been of the verbal variety. Through various legislative attempts to reinforce an ethnic caste system, austerity measures aimed at decimating the state’s public infrastructure, the evisceration of life-saving healthcare programs, and the intentional adoption of “attrition through enforcement” policies designed to displace certain segments of the population, Arizona has coupled vitriolic political discourse with the tangible control of bodies, livelihoods, movements, and even existence itself. Largely unreported in this context have been the attendant “hate crimes” across the state, as well as a culture of intimidation that includes lawmakers carrying firearms in session. In this case, the use of force includes both the inherent power of words and the legislative power of the state, fostering a climate of alienation and antipathy that can (and does) have tragic consequences.

On the national and international levels, the news isn’t much more encouraging. U.S. foreign policy has by now devolved primarily upon the deployment of brute strength to secure resources and advance the national interests. The machinations revealed by WikiLeaks further indicate the widespread use of “soft force” tactics of subterfuge, infiltration, and potential blackmail as tools of “diplomacy.” Internally, the burgeoning emplacement of surveillance technologies and the blithe acceptance of even physically intrusive forms of unwarranted search and seizure have emerged as the leading edge of domestic social control. On a daily basis in America, the structural violence of homelessness, poverty, racism, and more continues to proliferate. Youth are everywhere bombarded with violent imagery, and the schools look more and more like pipelines to prison or proving grounds for military recruitment. In essence, we have realized the rapid onset of a culture that embodies the combined impact of rhetorical and soft force with the tangible, pervasive deployment of the technologies of war and control.

An evenhanded assessment of this culture indicates that the use of force in both words and deeds is not limited to one side of the political spectrum. While one faction may come off more crassly in its “reload” rhetoric and “shock and awe” syllogisms, it’s equally true that the pro-war perspective is plied by both major parties, and that the cultivation of cultural violence for purposes of social control and economic advantage are likewise fairly well distributed across the political spectrum. Thus, while the President may give a sincere and moving speech in Tucson, he will also promptly return to condoning drone strikes and militarizing our borders, just to name a few of the myriad ways in which force and governance regularly correlate. As Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in denouncing the war in Vietnam, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

The use of force, both subtle and overt, is in many ways the political rule, whereas the practice of democratic discourse has become the exception. Our cultural appurtenances feed back into this narrative by constructing the “bring it on” ethos as strong-willed, bold, and part of the hero’s stock-in-trade. Discursive displays of reasonableness, outreach, and a willingness to seek understanding are coded as forms of weakness, naivete, and even appeasement. Exhortations to “reload,” “grab a torch,” and “take out” one’s adversaries tap into this sensibility, as does the invocation of graphics placing targets and bulls-eyes on those with whom we disagree. This may be symbolic in most cases, but as we’ve surmised from the Tucson massacre, it can contribute to a climate in which horrific actions occur. Words and images do have an impact on behavior — after all, the entire advertising industry is based on this very premise, and it clearly works.

The cultural referendum on the pervasive and escalating use of vitriol in politics is essentially about which side of the line these tactics fall on: force, or discourse? Is it a legitimate exercise of free speech, or does it cross over into an unacceptable form of hate-baiting that suggests at least moral if not legal culpability? The question seems to turn on whether such incendiary rhetoric is part of what a vibrant democracy must accommodate, or whether it more properly belongs in the camp of violence that we claim to disavow. The danger of calling it out as the latter is that partisan expediency can serve to cloud the fact that vitriol (and its cousins propaganda, manipulation, and fear-mongering) is an equal opportunity political tactic.

As such, while the dichotomy of force/discourse is largely false, as most dichotomies are, it certainly feels real in the aftermath of Tucson. Culturally and politically, we have so conflated discourse and violence in America that the difference is no longer readily apparent. The Tucson shootings were uniquely characterized by a scenario that presented us, starkly and graphically, with the two extremes of our current political landscape, namely the dialogical display of democracy versus the deafening silence of brute force. Malcolm X once spoke of America’s dilemma as turning upon “the ballot or the bullet,” and there remains an instructive resonance to his words a half century later as we struggle to navigate this fine line.

The condemnation of vitriolic rhetoric perhaps is a starting point for a deeper engagement with these issues. But if we stop there, and mistakenly politicize the matter by making it solely the province of one party or another, we will have missed the larger point and in the process squandered yet another opportunity to promote sanity in the wake of tragedy. To do justice to the victims in Tucson and, increasingly, across America, we must revisit the ways in which force and violence are condoned at all levels of our politics and governance. This reexamination will be difficult, and will in the process call into question much of the societal architecture that has become normalized in our post-9/11 world. However, if we fail to undertake it, the resultant escalation is likely to be even more painful, as we cascade from one calamity to another.

It is not a mere coincidence that our latest national tragedy has occurred in Arizona. The state has been openly courting catastrophe for some time now, both through incendiary rhetoric and overtly divisive social policies. Perhaps the recent tragedy will someday be remembered as the turning point at which we consciously rejected the politics of “bait and hate,” and replaced it instead with a new national ethos grounded in respect and mutuality. Civil discourse may be a laudable aim, but if it is accompanied by inhumane policies then it will merely serve to stifle resistance to an inherently violent status quo. Tucson provides us with a compelling impetus to step back from the brink and embrace a form of politics that is less adversarial, and to establish peaceful concourse as the cultural norm both in terms of the rhetoric we employ and the policies we enact. The fact that this may seem far-fetched doesn’t make it any less necessary.

The desert is often known as a place of solitude, but in meeting the challenges before us, it might equally be said that we’re all in this together. We can continue to let force and violence (in all of its forms) guide us, or we can look to the virtues of measured, meaningful discourse as a potential alternative. Recent events squarely frame the choice, and we are called to respond.

When those who support our imperial wars become victims of aggression themselves, they need to examine their role in the acceptance of brute force as a tool of foreign policy. Ours is a nation which glorifies violence. It is taken for granted that our government has the right to kill with impunity. Our President has even declared he can assassinate anyone, including U.S. citizens, whenever he deems it necessary. Yet when a similar mindset results in violence more close to home, when it impacts us directly, we become outraged. Representative Giffords, the primary target of the recent attack in Arizona, is a supporter of war. She has voted to fund the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the so-called war on terror. As a proponent of global violence herself, she should not be surprised when this heritage of belligerence touches her life and the lives of those around her.

Last weekend, 15,000 people flocked to a stadium to listen to Barack Obama tell us how important it is that we speak to each other, “…in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.” They were listening to a war criminal preaching hypocrisy. Like every U.S. President for the last 100 years, Obama has ordered the deaths of uncounted numbers of innocent people. He targets whole families and communities using deadly robot drone aircraft. He is the current steward of one of the most far reaching and destructive empires on earth, and we are his enablers. Our Pentagon doesn’t even know how many military bases we have on the planet, and most of us don’t care to ask.

While our unbridled military is “guarding” us from alleged threats in more than 170 countries around the globe, who is guarding the rest of the world from us? We demand protection from random fury such as that which was unleashed in Arizona, yet we seem chronically indifferent to the fury we unleash on other people in other countries. This is neither moral nor rational behavior, only blind, jingoistic denial and self-aggrandizement.

Martin Luther King had the courage to point out that our own government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. No other nation in history has ever maintained as far-reaching and destructive an apparatus of war as the United States. We invade countries, overthrow governments, install and enable cruel despotic regimes. We imprison people without charge or trial, torture and degrade them. We force-feed them with tubes, denying them even the right to starve themselves to death rather than endure the horror we inflict. We assassinate people extrajudicially, mindlessly killing anyone who happens to be near them, wives, children, friends and neighbors. Slaughter is a great American tradition. Jared Loughner’s actions were prototypical of our system of values.

Our President was correct when he suggested that no one can know what is in the mind of a killer. Indeed, none of us knows what Barack Obama himself was thinking when he last signed an order for a drone attack. Was it weeks, days or only hours prior to standing up before our nation to denounce senseless violence? So-called progressives have fawned over his speech as if it were a new moral manifesto for our times. Innocent people died at the hands of a ruthless killer. We must stand up and condemn the inflammatory rhetoric which encouraged such a tragedy. But perhaps those who would speak so eloquently about the need for a more civilized public discourse should first wash the blood from their own hands

While those who died in Arizona certainly did not deserve such a terrible fate, neither do the millions who have suffered as a result of our behemoth corporate empire’s campaign of hegemony. Barack Obama said that we should, “…make the debate worthy of those we have lost.” How about instead we make the debate worthy of those we have murdered, whose societies we have devastated, whose countries we have vandalized, plundered and “Americanized” with our own special brand of callousness and deceit. The power elite who control our country are themselves maniacs with guns who randomly kill people every day. How do they differ from some crazy person with a pistol at the mall?

Let’s hope that when Gabrielle Giffords recovers, she and all those who so nobly decry the recent shootings will experience an epiphany. Violence against innocents is wrong everywhere. The impact of our killing machine on the lives of people in other countries is just as devastating as the tragedy which occurred in Arizona. The difference is, our government’s shooting sprees could be prevented. Perhaps when Representative Giffords returns to the halls of Congress she will call for an end to the killing being done in our name. Maybe, though not probably, 15,000 people of conscience will show up in Washington D.C. to applaud her courage and determination.

Would our corporate media even cover such an event? Doubtful. They understand that we don’t want to know about the crimes our government commits. We don’t want to hear anything which challenges the notion of American exceptionalism. We would rather celebritize sociopaths who are no more than predictable by-products of our ethically bankrupt society. And no, I’m not just talking about Jared Loughner.

After Sulejman Talovic killed five in Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square mall and Vincent J. Dortch killed three at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard within days of each other in February 2007, the NRA was also silent.

Like Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, Stephen Phillip Kazmierczak, the Northern Illinois University killer, Latina Williams, the Louisiana Technical College killer and Jennifer Sanmarco, the Goleta postal facility killer, Talovic and Dortch were legal gun owners.

Williams might have been living in her car, paranoid and delusional and giving her possessions away in suicidal gestures but she walked right into a New Orleans pawn shop and bought a .357 revolver and a box of ammunition the day before the shootings.

Talovic may have been a Bossnian immigrant required to show a piece of second identification but bought the murder weapon at Sportsman’s Fastcash, a pawn shop chain in Utah, with just one say investigators.

And remember the Psycho Santa? Bruce Pardo bought at least five guns within five months from a single gun dealer before killing nine on Christmas Eve in Covina, CA.

Other legal gun owners were Jiverly Voong, who killed 13 in Binghamton NY and was a frequent customer of Gander Mountain, and Richard Poplawski, who murdered three Pittsburgh police officers and bought his arsenal over the Web, according to his mother.

And don’t forget Terry Ratzmann, the Milwaukee church service killer, Chai Vang the Wisconsin hunter killer and Bart Ross, who killed a Chicago Federal judge’s husband and mother — all of whom sailed through background checks.

No matter how Halloween III the rampages become — Michael McLendon kills his mother, grandmother, uncle, two cousins, the wife and daughter of a sheriff’s deputy and three more in Alabama in 2009; Terry Sedlacek shoots and kills a pastor through the Bible he is holding at an Illinois church service the same year — NRA spin doctors induce a national genuflection over the “rights” behind the carnage.

“When you begin taking away the rights of people that you don’t like, that’s the slippery slope,” said NRA lobbyist Marion P. Hammer when the Sun Sentinel reported that valid concealed weapon licenses were issued to 1,400 probable felons including a man who shot his girlfriend as she cooked breakfast, a pizza deliveryman wanted for fatally shooting a 15-year-old over a stolen order of chicken wings and six registered sex offenders.

Nor should you take away the right to amass an arsenal like McLendon, Sedlacek, Poplawski, Voong, Oakland cop shooter Lovelle Mixon and Cathage nursing home killer Robert Stewart all maintained according to publisher reports, says the NRA.

Still it’s hard to miss increasing attacks on local politicians even before Tucson like the shooting of the Kirkwood, MO mayor, public works director and two city council members in 2009 and last month’s Panama City school board shooting.

And a brochure posted on the Web in 2007 shows the NRA’s crosshairs side.

The 27-page draft called Freedom in Peril attacks former New Orleans major Ray Nagin, Sen. Hillary Clinton, Katie Couric, Rosie O’Donnell, George Soros, Michael Moore and York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg with inflammatory drawings.

Menacing African-Americans and Asians are depicted as “the illegal alien gangs” and homeowners are shown shooting at invading gangs from rooftops.

It is joked that politicians who stand up to the NRA are also known as Unelected. But thanks to the NRA arming “people that you don’t like,” even pro-NRA politicians aren’t safe anymore.

It is not about Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Michele Bachmann, Ann Coulter or Sarah Palin.  They are not the cause of this disease; they are only symptoms.

It is about that part of ourselves we do not wish to see.  It is that part of our souls that we keep hidden in the shadows and refuse to acknowledge.  It has been with us and within us for thousands of years and it will be within us until the end of time.

It is the killing spirit, the spirit of vengeance, intolerance, greed and hatred.  Its antithesis is understanding, empathy, kindness and civility.  The one poisons the soul of humanity and the other heals.

So you still think it is a good idea to allow guns at political rallies?

So you still think possession of automatic assault weapons is a god-given right and not a privilege born of responsibility?

If the latest psycho killer to claim more than his share in the fifteen-minutes-of-fame game had been a member of a well-regulated militia, he would surely have lost his membership card long ago and with it his right to bear arms.

To those who have sold their souls to the National Rifle Association it does not matter.  No amount of bloodshed is sufficient to justify any infringement on the right to purchase deadly weapons and ammunition.

I do not wish in any way to diminish the tragedy in Tucson, Arizona.  It has touched the heart of the nation in a way that few events can.  We reach out to the fallen and the wounded.  We know their faces and stories and we share their grief.

But I cannot ignore the greater picture.  The same weekend as that horrific slaughter in the border town of Tucson, fifty-one people lost their lives to drug related violence south of the border, including fifteen decapitated bodies in Acapulco.  The death toll stands at 30,000 since Felipe Calderon became president four years ago.  The city of Juarez and its surrounding area resemble Fallujah at the height of the Iraq War:  an estimated 200,000 exiles and over 3,000 murders this year alone.

Where do they get their weapons?  Welcome to the USA where anyone from drug lords and criminals to terrorists and madmen can purchase weapons of mass destruction as long as you’ve got the cash.  We have so armed the drug lords that they typically outgun the police and the Mexican army.

I would not wish to diminish the tragedy in Mexico but even the killing fields of Ciudad Juarez demure when compared to the mass graves of modern Africa, whose often genocidal wars in Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia and Nigeria were all supplied with deadly weapons made in the USA.

We may have yielded manufacturing and industry to foreign markets where labor is cheaper than dirt but we remain the chief supplier of weaponry to the world at war where blood is cheaper than water.  What else can we do with yesterday’s killing machines?

How can we expect to close down Guns and Ammo shows when our nation supplies missiles to every dictator who comes looking?  How can we expect to ban cop-killer bullets when we sell Apache gunships to genocidal maniacs?

I make no bones:  I don’t believe in the individual right to carry arms and I don’t care what our founders said about it.

I believe that societies like species undergo a process of evolution.  At an advanced stage of civil society, government disavows the state’s right to kill.  At an advance stage, government delivers universal health care, ensures a minimum standard of living, provides security for the aged and infirm, and limits handguns and assault weapons to officers of the law.  At an advanced stage, nations will come together to ban the international weapons trade.

The world is perhaps half a century away from disarming its most dangerous members and the nation is likewise half a century away from civilized gun control.

The killing spirit will not be defeated in a day.  It will, from time to time, emerge from the shadows with acts that shock and appall us, like the murder of an innocent child or the attempted assassination of a promising leader.

The killing spirit can never be destroyed, not completely, for we cannot as a species survive without it, but those who believe in the better part of human nature must believe that it can and will be subdued.  It is the process of civilization that will ultimately defeat the killing spirit by nurturing the better part of our nature: the healing spirit.

There are many who would scorn or sneer at such a notion and I have walked among them long enough to learn that that collective cynicism, a cynicism often born of fear, may be as great a barrier to civil evolution as the intolerance and vitriol of politicians and talking heads.

We Americans like to consider ourselves the most advanced of nations but we are in this fundamental sense severely behind.  It is not a problem that religion or education can resolve; it is a problem of collective consciousness.  When we can envision a world in which violence is as rare as a lunar eclipse on winter solstice, we will have taken the first step toward fulfilling that vision.

Meantime, let us all share a moment of silent contemplation, remembrance and mourning.

Most folks are tiptoeing around the partisan nature of the shooting of U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tucson, but count me among the uncouth. There is blood on conservative hands and they should be called out. Another homicidal nut-job has brought their irresponsible rhetoric to fruition and they should answer for it.

I don’t want to hear Republicans saying there’s no place for this kind of violence in this country or condemning Loughner as an isolated, incidental mad man. Especially as if it’s something new or unexpected. Conservative rhetoric has been cranked up way past the “stun” setting ever since the Bush Administration was on its last crooked legs. And the target audience for their hate-speak has clearly been compelled.

Lest we forget, it was a conservative who walked into his former church in Knoxville, Tennessee on July 28, 2008 and shot eight people (killing two) because liberals “were ruining the country” (and his church had gotten too liberal). It was conservatives who were brandishing firearms at political events in the 2008 presidential campaign. It was a conservative evangelical Christian who shot abortion doctor George Tiller at his church in Kansas on May 31, 2009. It was a conservative white supremacist who shot security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns at the Holocaust Museum on June 10, 2009. And it was arguably an anti-government conservative that flew his plane into the IRS office in Austin, Texas on February 10, 2010.

There is no reason to mince words. Violence is implicit in conservative rhetoric because its audience honestly believes dissenters should be vilified and punished, and it thrills the Republicans’ conservative base to see its philosophical opponents squirm. Threatening language is necessary for their cause because fear and hatred are presently the load-bearing joists in their political platform. And what’s more, deep down, they’re not even ashamed of it.

Rush Limbaugh once blamed John Edwards’ affair with Rielle Hunter on Elizabeth Edwards, now deceased.  He said that John Edwards sought companionship with Hunter because, unlike his wife, Rielle “did something with her mouth other than talk.” It was callous and repugnant, but it wasn’t scripted, and it didn’t diminish Limbaugh’s ratings one iota. The comment was telling about who Limbaugh is and how he thinks, but also about who his audience is and how they think. The truth is, it’s not hard to imagine Limbaugh serving up something equally asinine about Congresswoman Giffords. Right now, he wouldn’t dare because there’s too much heat. But just because he isn’t saying it doesn’t mean he’s not thinking it.

And this is why Limbaugh is the voice for so many conservatives in this country. He touches a nerve with his listeners; he teases a brutish, authoritarian strain in them that reveres clichés like “my country right or wrong,” “ love it or leave it,” etc. And these folks take comfort in implied threats for people who disagree with them. That’s why they can rationalize the notion that the ends justifies the means.

Deep down, they’re not really bothered by the combustible letter that was sent to Janet Napolitano; she’s from the wrong side of the aisle. And somewhere inside they’re not terribly upset by what happened to Giffords, because she’s the ideological enemy. They can’t help themselves. It’s just who they are.

But one of these days a sharp contrarian will finally expose it. It will be like that showdown scene from “A Few Good Men.” The contrarian will get a Limbaugh or a Beck or a Palin or an Allen West on a “stand” and challenge their methods and their authority and their warped world view and badger them and demand the truth; and that Limbaugh, Beck, Palin or West will say the rest of us can’t handle the truth and launch into a blustery diatribe explaining that heathens like Tiller and liberals like Giffords got what they had coming to them and the country is a better place with every less one them around.

And everyone will be shocked and offended except those in gun-toting red states who, deep down, can see what Limbaugh, Beck, Palin and West were really trying to say, before they were misquoted or misinterpreted.

If you have ever masturbated or been hosted to an orgasm with a living or even an artificial phallus, or you have experienced the deep satisfaction of a nitrocellulose-warmed and jolted Muladhara chakra, as described by John Lennon in his primal scream song “Happiness Is A Warm Gun,” then you know that the gun control debate is impervious to logical assault.

Nevertheless, I wish to make a suggestion.

First, let me say that I have no problem with anyone owning all the guns they want, so long as they don’t actually kill anyone (or anything) with them. Actually, that is too stringent; I don’t mind if a gunslinger absolutely hellbent on killing someone kills themselves — and no one else. This is a clean solution to the problem of finding a target for the killing urge and simultaneously safeguarding the public. I admit the result may not be entirely satisfactory to the family members of the killer, but I think it the best compromise short of avoiding a killing entirely.

Some have suggested that it is remotely possible that on rare occasions a shooting death would be a humanitarian blessing. This type of thinking usually seeps out of militaristic and war-games fantasies. However, I think such possibilities are so rare in civilian life that we can discount giving this excuse further consideration.

Proponents of unrestricted gun ownership and use usually base their argument on the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and the further argument of applying a “strict interpretation” to the Constitution: “following the intent of the framers,” or the intent of “the founding fathers,” without allowing for any re-interpretations — “deviations” they would say — as informed by later historical developments and evolved social thought.

Very well. My suggestion is the following. Allow for the unrestricted ownership and use of guns and ammunition as they existed in 1789, when the Constitution and its first ten amendments were written. This would conform EXACTLY to the intent of the framers. It would satisfy the 2nd Amendment freedom to “bear arms,” without allowing for any deviations from ‘strict interpretationalism’ that would excuse the weaseling in of ownership of semi-automatic and automatic guns, and anything beyond ball, shot and black powder for ammunition: no full metal jackets, no nitrocellulose propellant, no late 19th century cordite-filled cartridges, not even percussion caps (from about 1830). Just flintlocks.

If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it’s good enough for you.

The weapon reportedly used in the mass murders in Tucson was an assault weapon — a Glock 19, semi-automatic pistol, with an extended magazine.  That weapon was illegal to sell in the US from 1994 to 2004 under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.  It is now legal to sell and own.  The National Rifle Association reports there are tens of millions of assault weapons is private hands in the US.

The federal background check for people purchasing such weapons only prohibits selling such weapons to people who have been legally determined to be mentally defective or found insane or convicted of crimes.  This man had not been found legally mentally defective or convicted so he was legally entitled to purchase an assault weapon.  In Arizona he was legally entitled to carry the weapon in a concealed manner.

The US has well over 250 million guns in private hands according to the National Rifle Association.  That is more, according to the BBC, than any country in the world.  In one year, guns murdered 17 people in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in England and Wales, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada, and 9,484 in the United States according to the Brady Campaign.

Does the US really need tens of millions of assault weapons and hundreds of millions of other guns?  We already put more of our people in prison than any country in the world, and we spend more on our military than all the rest of the world together.  How fearful must we be?

Question:  Why is there so little talk of terrorism?

Apparently when a mentally unstable white male is accused, terrorism is not the first thing that comes to mind.

When Clay Duke, a white male, threatened Florida school board members with a gun and shot at them before shooting himself, in December 2010, he was mentally imbalanced.

When Michael Enright, a white male, was arrested for slashing the throat of a Muslim NYC cab driver in August of 2010, his friends said he had a drinking problem

When Byron Williams, a white male, was arrested after opening fire on police officers and admitted he was on his way to kill people at offices of a liberal foundation and a civil liberties organization, in July 2010, he was an unemployed right wing felon with a drinking problem.

When Joe Stack, a white male, flew his private plane into a federal building in Austin, Texas, in February 2010, he was angry with the IRS.

When a white male is accused of mass murder, terrorism is not much talked of; rather it becomes a terrible tragedy but not one where race or ethnicity or religion need be examined.

Now if the accused had been Muslim, does anyone doubt whether this would have been considered an act of terrorism?  US Muslims could have expected increased surveillance and harassment at home and the places where they work and worship.  They could have expected a Congressional inquiry into the radicalization of their people.  Oh, Representative Peter King (R-NY) has already started that one!

Hard as it might have been to miss the news of his release, it’s not impossible.  Much more ink was spilled in the spring chronicling his trial and the run-up to his arrival in jail.  Compared to the media frenzy that followed him eight months ago, mention of his release is being treated with a shrug of the shoulders.

Maybe it’s because celebrities in trouble sell more tabloids than celebs paying their dues.  In any event, that’s how it looks.  In the wake of the relatively easy treatment of Paris, LiLo and Martha, Lil Wayne became the entertainment rags’ golden whipping boy–proof that sometimes, despite the privilege of fame, celebrities do indeed do hard time.  This wasn’t a suspended sentence, nor was it time in some white-collar, minimum security prison.  This was Rikers!  Wayne was in a cell!  He even did time in solitary confinement!

Now, mainstream writers all seem content to wax sanctimonious, saying it’s good to finally see a celeb get his and hoping that he’s “learned his lesson.” What none of them point out is that Weezy’s conviction wasn’t about fame, connections or even money.  It was about good old-fashioned American racism.

In “post-racial” America, we aren’t supposed to mention these things, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist or that the facts somehow lie.  Those who get in a huff over the insistence that race had anything to do with it should have to account for more than a few discrepancies when the whole thing is put into context.

First will be those who point out that Wayne was in possession of a pistol that wasn’t registered to him when he was arrested in July of 2007.  True, but is there any comparable police presence at the shows of arch-conservative rock musician and gun-nut Ted Nugent?  Here is a man who admits to having transported weapons across state lines many times during his tours, and yet Nugent — whose opposition to gun laws might be enough to make Chuck Heston blush and who has appeared on white nationalist radio shows in recent years – has never even been so much as pulled over by the cops.

Then there will be those who shout that the cops wouldn’t have had reason to stop and question Wayne if he hadn’t been getting high outside his bus, and that it was “stupid” for him to be doing it in the first place.  The stupidity of marijuana laws aside (and they’re pretty damned stupid!), this rationale doesn’t bear scrutiny either.

Take, for example, the recent drug arrest of country legend Willie Nelson.  Nelson was found with 6 ounces of weed on him, charged with possession, and released on $2,500 bail.  Compare this to the arrest of rapper Wiz Khalifa five days after Weezy’s release.  Khalifa had 2 ounces on him–a third of what was discovered on Nelson’s tour bus–and yet was charged with distribution (which carries with it a heftier sentence), and wasn’t released until he posted $300,000 bail!  Combine this with the NYPD’s history of “keeping tabs” on hip-hop, and the case against Wayne becomes a lot less clear-cut.

Just as absent as the topic of race from the discussion has been the shameful state of America’s prisons.  Moral sadists prattle on about Weezy getting “special treatment” by being separated from the general population at Rikers Island, but one wonders about the condition of a jail where inmates have to be separated in the first place.  Recent years have seen repeated lawsuits filed against Rikers accusing the detention center’s guards of acquiescing to or encouraging violence among the population.  Special treatment this ain’t.

Then, there’s the time — perhaps more publicized than any other episode of Lil Wayne’s stretch — that he spent in solitary.  This in particular was harped on by many a commentator with a disturbing amount of glee.  None of these same journalists bothered to point out that the inhumanity of solitary confinement have been well documented by human rights activists, psychiatrists and prisoners themselves.  As Charles, a prisoner at Tamms Supermax Prison in Illinois who had been held in solitary confinement since 1998, says: “Lock yourself in your bathroom for the next 10 years and tell me how it will affect your mind.”

Lil Wayne didn’t do ten years in solitary; he did a month.  His quick return to the studio shows that he’s been released with his mind obviously intact.  Still, if he can be separated from human contact for the crime of possessing an mp3 player, what might have happened to him if he’d been caught for a far more egregious transgression?

Of course, there are countless Black men who are suffering the brunt of the American criminal injustice system far worse than Lil Wayne.  But that’s the point; if that system can get away with all of this while the cameras are rolling, then the horrors it commits against millions of anonymous human beings are enough to boggle the mind.

This could have been an opportunity for music scribes to ask some basic questions.  Like why hip-hop gets such a bad rap while the illicit behavior of rock or country stars barely gets a mention.  Or why it is that Black men are arrested and convicted at twice the rate of their white counterparts for the same crime.  Or how it is that world’s “greatest democracy” can lock up more people than any country on the planet and allow its cops to shoot anyone they like without reprisal.

Instead, those same writers resorted to easy punchlines.  Perhaps it’s a testament to what a volatile powder-keg we all are sitting on.

* A Vietnamese immigrant in Binghamton, N.Y., increasingly paranoid about police and upset after losing his job, kills 13 people at a center for immigrants before committing suicide.

* An Alabama man who had struggled to keep a job kills 10 people in a shooting spree before committing suicide.

* A Pittsburgh man, recently unemployed and afraid that the government would ban guns, opens fire on police responding to a domestic disturbance call, killing three.

These are just some of the recent eruptions of violence to make the headlines in U.S. newspapers. In the 30-day period between March 10 and April 10, there were at least nine multiple shootings across the U.S., claiming the lives of at least 58 people.

The individual motives and stories differ widely, but there’s a common thread among these incidents — the worsening economic crisis is becoming a factor in pushing some people who are already on the edge over it.

As the Washington Post recently noted:

Criminologists theorize that the epidemic of layoffs, the meltdown of storied American corporations and the uncertainty of recovery have stoked fear, anxiety and desperation across society and unnerved its most vulnerable and dangerous.

“I’ve never seen such a large number [of killings] over such a short period of time involving so many victims,” said Jack Levin, a noted criminologist at Northeastern University who has authored or co-authored eight books on mass murder.

The simple fact, criminologist James Alan Fox said, is that more Americans are struggling. “The American dream to them is a nightmare, and the land of opportunity is but a cruel joke,” said Fox, also of Northeastern…”The economic pie is shrinking to the point where it looks more like a Pop Tart, and some feel all they’re getting is the crumbs. There’s a combination of feeling despair and hopelessness at the same time as a certain degree of anger and blame.”

A number of those who have committed recent high-profile acts of violence were either recently laid off or unable to find work after a long period of time. Add mental health issues, family stress and other factors, and violent explosions can be the result. As Jack Levin told the Post, “There are just simply more catastrophic losses than there were when the economy was in good shape.”

Jiverly Wong, the Vietnamese immigrant who committed the killings at the American Civic Center in Binghamton, is an example.

Though it appears one prime factor was Wong’s paranoia that he was being persecuted by law enforcement, his day-to-day troubles — of trying unsuccessfully to find work and a place in a society that is typically hostile to immigrants — seemingly exacerbated his despair and isolation. As the New York Times reported:

Nearly two decades after arriving in America from Vietnam, Mr. Wong still had trouble with basic English, a fact of life for many immigrants, but a problem he seemed especially sensitive about. He was an introvert who was secretive in the extreme, keeping his love of guns and target shooting — and even his marriage — hidden from his family, his oldest sister said. They had improved their English-speaking skills and advanced their careers, while Mr. Wong, now jobless, had moved back in with his parents on a dead-end street in nearby Union.

“I think he felt low and small,” said the sister, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Nga. “But he didn’t share his thoughts. He would always just say he was okay.”

Though it’s not understood — and may never be — why Wong targeted fellow immigrants, it is known that the Shop-Vac factory where Jiverly Wong had worked was shut down last year, and Wong was despondent about not finding work. He started receiving Trade Adjustment Assistance — federal aid for workers whose jobs are moved overseas — and became a regular visitor at the American Civic Center, where he was encouraged to enroll in courses in English as a second language.

Two weeks before he went on his shooting spree, Wong sent a two-page letter to a Syracuse, N.Y., television station. In it, his mental illness is evident: he claims that he was being persecuted by undercover police who spread “rumors” about him and stole money from him at night.

In the end, he apologized — not for the murders he was planning to commit, but because of his limited English. “I am sorry I know a little English,” he wrote.

In many cases, individuals who lose control turn their anger and violent impulses first on those closest to them — their families.

Michael McLendon carried out what the media is calling the worst multiple shooting in Alabama history last month, targeting his mother first before killing nine others — including his grandparents, aunt, uncle and two cousins. At the end of his spree, McLendon drove to a metal factory where he had once worked, and fired 30 rounds at police before entering the building and committing suicide.

According to Coffee County District Attorney Gary McAliley, it was clear that McLendon and his mother, who he lived with, were struggling financially. Two weeks before the shootings, McLendon had abruptly quit his job at a sausage factory.

McLendon was also, along with his mother, part of a lawsuit involving workers at Pilgrim’s Pride, a chicken processor that workers allege violated labor laws by not fairly compensating them (the lawsuit was put on hold last year when the company filed for bankruptcy). During a search of the family home, investigators found a letter informing the gunman’s mother that she had been laid off from her job at the plant.

It’s common for family members to be the first casualties in such cases. Under capitalism, the burden on families is enormous. Especially in the U.S., where the social safety net is so thin and tattered, it can be overwhelming for many working-class families to make ends meet.

Although families can provide a source of comfort in a hostile world, they can also be the place where anger and alienation are first expressed. As Jennifer Roesch explained in the International Socialist Review [1]:

The institution of the nuclear family as an economic unit is central to meeting the needs of capitalism. Under the current system, employers pay workers a wage, but take no responsibility for most of the social costs of maintaining the current generation of workers–or for raising the next generation of workers into adulthood. Rather than these responsibilities being shared collectively by society as a whole through government programs — paid for by taxing the profits of the private enterprises that employ workers — they are shouldered by individual families.

That means that even in the best of times, many working-class families struggle with providing the basics — food, clothing, shelter, health care, etc. Add home foreclosures and layoffs to the mix, and the situation easily becomes volatile, leading to tragedy.

In January, Ervin and Ana Lupoe were fired from their jobs at Kaiser Permanente hospital in Los Angeles after it was discovered they had misrepresented their employment to an outside agency in order to obtain cheaper child care.

After sending a message to a local TV station, Ervin shot his wife and five children and then turned the gun on himself. In the letter faxed to KABC-TV, Ervin — whose family was drowning in debt and losing their home — said that after being fired, an administrator told the couple, “You should not even had bothered to come to work today, you should have blown your brains out.” As Ervin’s letter explained:

So after a horrendous ordeal, my wife felt it better to end our lives, and why leave our children in someone else’s hands. In addition, it seems Kaiser Permanente wants us to kill ourselves and take our family with us. They did nothing to the manager who stated such, and did not attempt to assist us in the matter, knowing we have no job and five children under 8 years with no place to go. So here we are.

This was the fifth mass death of a Southern California family by murder or suicide in the span of a year.

Nationwide reports suggest that domestic violence rates are surging. According to a survey conducted in November and December by the National Domestic Violence Hotline, 54 percent answered “yes” to the question, “Has there been a change in your household’s financial situation in the last year?”; and 64 percent also answered “yes” to the second question: “Do you believe the abusive behavior has increased in the past year?”

In Florida, the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence reported a 37 percent increase at the state’s 42 certified domestic-violence centers from August through December of 2008. “We know when perpetrators are laid off from work, there is increased severity in violence and frequency of violent assaults because he is home more often,” according to the report. “Currently, Florida’s domestic violence centers are over capacity and are faced with turning victims away.”

The situation is similar elsewhere. In Tulsa, Okla., the city’s two shelters for battered women are both full for the first time ever. Day Spring Villa Women and Children’s Shelter is turning people away for the first time in its 29-year history.

According to Cindy Meredith, the shelter’s assistant director, the economy is one reason why. “Anything that puts stress on a relationship causes men who are abusers to escalate their behavior,” she told Tulsa World. Meredith said that every day, two or three women seeking shelter are being referred to other services.

Even more troubling is the fact that at the very moment when people need more help, states are cutting back on essential social services and programs in order to save money — including domestic violence resources, child care subsidies, respite care for children and the elderly, and counselors and social workers for families in crisis.

“Ohio and other states face large cutbacks in child welfare investigations, which may mean more injured children and more taken into foster care,” the New York Times reported. “Arizona has one of the nation’s highest deficits in relation to its budget. As revenues sank late last year, forcing across-the-board cuts this spring, the child protection agency stopped investigating every report of potential abuse or neglect, and sharply reduced counseling of families deemed at risk of violence.”

One frightening sign of both the tensions running through U.S. society and the likelihood that more tragedies lie ahead is a reported increase in the sales of guns. The Christian Science Monitor described a “gun-and-ammunition buying spree — a national arming-up effort that began before last year’s election of President Obama and continues unabated.”

“There’s just so many people that would never have knocked on our doors before that are now coming in,” one clerk at a Georgia gun store told the Monitor. “There’s a level of desperation which I don’t ever recall seeing before.”

FBI statistics show that violent crime is down overall, as are robberies and car thefts. But the fact that people perceive the opposite to be true — that our homes and families are under siege — is further testament to the increased stress that the economic crisis is placing on already overburdened families.

The latest incidents of violence brought renewed calls for gun control. But this is treating the symptom, not the disease. Prohibitions on gun buying won’t stop people who are determined enough to kill from finding weapons.

Worse are the calls for putting more police on the streets. In virtually every case of multiple shootings, going back to the recent campus killings at Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois and elsewhere, law enforcement personnel have been ineffectual at best.

The calls for more cops date back 30 years and more, and all there is to show for it is an incarceration boom that has put more citizens, disproportionately minority ones, behind bars than any country in the world. Meanwhile, the real cause of these tragedies — poverty and individual despair — have gone unaddressed.

The real answer to preventing future violence — whether lethal or not, in the home or outside it — lies in providing people with the kind of resources that could make a concrete difference in their lives long before they reach a crisis point.

This includes things like national health care (including comprehensive mental health services); job assistance; an extension of unemployment insurance and an increase in the amount of benefits; restoring welfare benefits and increasing the amount of food stamp money families are eligible to receive; raising the minimum wage; providing state-funded day care and other services to help take strain off families; and full funding of domestic violence prevention programs, to name a few.

Until real help is available for those who need it, incidents of violence like those in Binghamton and elsewhere are inevitable.

The conspiracy-minded may intuit the heavy hand of Dick Cheney behind the Taliban cleric’s claim, since Cheney recently warned that President Obama’s policies were making the county less safe. No doubt it is far-fetched to believe that Cheney would employ a sheikh to mastermind a terrorist attack in order to vindicate Cheney’s dire predictions, not to mention the immoral, unconstitutional practices he embraced during the Bush era. And that would allow Cheney to blame Obama.

Binghamton Police Chief Joseph Zikuski said Wong might have been depressed because other students in his English class at the immigration center he attacked had mocked his poor language skills. Perhaps his teacher is culpable for failing to raise Wong’s fluency level. The bullies among his classmates merit blame, but they might merely have been attempting to acculturate more rapidly. The students must have noticed that ridiculing anyone slightly different from mainstream bland is as American as chop suey.

Some liberals said Wong probably suffered from the prejudice of American racists against new immigrants. Some racists blamed immigrant culture itself (them non-white foreigners) and the policies which allow disturbed or unstable individuals from other countries to compete with the disturbed and unstable native born.

Gun opponents blame the killing spree on the gun culture, of which Wong was an avid member. Second Amendment absolutists accuse the Obama regime of threatening to take away their cherished weaponry, though no such policy has been declared. Out of fear that new, more restrictive gun regulations might someday possibly be imposed under Obama, there has been a huge recent upsurge in applications for background checks to purchase more firearms. The NRA used to flaunt the bumpersticker: “When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws will have Guns.” They could amend that to read “Since Guns are Legal, Only Paranoids Hoard Guns.”

Given the recent epidemic of mass murder, with so many unbalanced individuals turning weapons on relatives and strangers alike, it is hard to understand what a “background check” actually uncovers. The week of the Binghamton shootings, a man murdered five members of his family. In March an Alabama gunner killed eleven. Last Christmas Eve in Los Angeles a lunatic dressed as Santa shot nine people and himself to death. The April 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech, in which 33 people died, still holds the modern record. We can only hope no one will try to break it.

Many officials and pundits attribute this latest rise in rampage killing to the economic downturn. Wong had recently lost his job at Shop-Vac, which manufactures vacuum cleaners. You could blame Wong’s boss for giving him the boot, but even more his former co-workers, who showed no surprise at Wong’s wanton madness. They had even joked among themselves about how he might someday show up at work with a weapon and shoot up the place. Ha. Do greedy bankers and hedge fund managers deserve the blame for Wong running amok? Yes and no but no…

Not long ago Wong’s wife left with their children, apparently adding to his embitterment. Perhaps the heartbreak of his wife’s departure pushed him over the edge. Maybe she realized she had to get away before he murdered his family. In a soon-to-be-posthumous letter to a local TV station, Wong himself blamed police harassment. Or as Wong put it: “Because undercover cop gave me a lot of ass during eighteen years.”

The potential list of contributing culprits to this senseless horror is ample, even if tangential and contradictory. In Roshomon, the classic Japanese story made into a film by Akira Kurosawa in the 1950s, each person involved in a crime conveys their very different versions of the incident. Even the dead murder victim testifies through a medium at a courtroom séance to offer his take. If we could contact Jiverly Wong through a spirit medium, he might be angry that others appear to share any responsibility for the act he alone committed.

Suicidal killing sprees are desperate outbursts against feelings of impotence that corner the killer. A murderous rampage is a final, irrational attempt to be taken seriously. Jiverly Wong wanted to make a statement in the worst possible way. And so he did. The pain he inflicted will linger long in many lives, but he himself will soon be forgotten. Who can name the Virginia Tech gunman?

Victims of the American social experiment who go down shooting are doomed to justifiable obscurity. They are but symptoms and statistics and by now, clichés. But their enablers and accomplices — human and systemic — remain among us. That is why we tend to look beyond the crazed shooters, to identify the people and problems that poisoned their brains. So they don’t poison ours.

Say that! On a month that began with the Alabama, Illinois church and Germany shootings and ended with the Oakland police killings — a Miami mass killing, a Turlock, CA church shooting and the Mexico shootings not even making the public’s radar — law makers are not thinking of gun owners as an oppressed minority.

In fact when police are killed with assault weapons it takes the wind out of the gun lobby’s Good-Guys-Need-To-Be-Armed-Against-Bad-Guys argument not to mention its AK-47s-Should-Be-Street-Legal-Because-We-Need-To Defend-Ourselves-and-Our-Families argument and its Enforce-Existing-Laws (Loopholes Though They Might Have) argument.

But even before the March Alabama, Illinois, Miami, Oakland and Turlock shootings Wayne LaPierre, National Rifle Association (NRA) executive vice president was on the defensive at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington D.C. in February.

Mad at the Obama administration, the press, the United Nations and a complacent public, LaPierre couldn’t decide whether Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was friend or foe — first quoting her to prove President Obama is a gun grabber, then showing clips in which she was the gun grabber recommending trigger locks and licenses.

Ordaining that Mexico needs more guns not less and that lawmakers shouldn’t legislate “on the fresh graves of tragedy,” you’d never know the NRA realized its wet dream last year when the Supreme Court affirmed the Second Amendment in District of Columbia vs. Heller.

Of course, for years the NRA’s Just Folks position against effete elites has conflicted with its actual deep-pocketed influence peddling with political campaigns and causes and turned off followers.

For years its hunter/rancher and rural constituents have recoiled at its paranoid secessionist/military weapon wing that drives so much NRA policy. In fact Alabama’s Michael McLendon — who killed his mother, grandmother, uncle, two cousins and the wife and toddler daughter of a sheriff’s deputy in March — and Terry Sedlacek — who shot and killed a pastor through the Bible he held at an Illinois church service — were poster boys for the right to own an arsenal.

What is changing is that gun lobby laws that used to be slam dunks — right to carry a concealed weapon in churches, on campuses and in state parks–are no longer sailing through legislatures. Nor is the D.C. Voting Rights Act that would legalize assault weapons, eliminate the city’s firearms registration system and ban all future gun restrictions airborne.

What is also different is newspapers like the Memphis Commercial Appeal are publishing searchable bases of state permit holders so people can see if their daycare worker or dentist is armed.

And even though concealed carry permits are “Good Guy Cards” that tell law enforcement they’ll have no trouble with you says Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Bryan Hendricks and even though the worst thing that can happen to you in life is that people find out you or your house is unarmed, the NRA is, well, scared.

Someone may break into your home and not hurt you or your family — that’s why you’re armed after all — but steal your firearms! In fact you better get more weapons to defend your weapons.

Even while the Arkansas state legislature is considering a bill to block similar release of permit holder public records, the Commercial Appeal found 70 of 154 permit holders it checked had criminal records including Bernard Avery — arrested 25 times with a murder charge dismissed on mental competency — and Reginald Miller — a felon with 11 arrests. Oops.

Still, worse for the gun lobby than the PR problem of helping to arm felons through the lax gun laws it pushes, is the image of it being afraid of you and I.

Or as Chris W. Cox, NRA-ILA executive director wrote to the Commercial Appeal “Your decision to publicize the personal information of Right-to-Carry permit holders in Tennessee is unjustifiable, disgraceful, and dangerous.”

And worse than that is the image of the gun lobby asking the government to protect it from you and me. Whatever happened to the tough guys who don’t need no %$#$% government interference?

And why are they so scared, anyway? Isn’t that backwards? They’re the ones carrying lethal weapons!

Why is it that people all across America get to work without the help of a gun — taking trains, working night shifts — but gun extremists are afraid to be in church, on college campuses and on state parks without being armed?

It makes you think of Larry Singleton who attacked and mutilated 15-year-old hitchhiker Mary Vincent near Sacramento in 1978 because he was “afraid of her.”