Let me acknowledge that Joey King former VFP Board Directors and S. Brian Willson author of Blood on the Tracts both have influenced my current position and my comments reflect their wisdom and gentle souls.
When commenting on Gun Regulation, I get the same answer I have used myself — I am more afraid of our government being armed than the masses — it was just thrown back in my face, here is where I am today.
I know the false argument about guns for the proletariat (the masses), that is the position I held for most of my life. I am not a Pacifist, I am not that strong or courageous. I said I did not want to own a gun because I didn’t want to kill another human being. That does not mean that I wouldn’t if my immediate family were in danger. I have in the past, even after Viet Nam picked up a gun to do exactly that, to protect my family, lucky no one was killed. I also don’t want to own a gun because as a PTSD vet – I would be more prone to use it on myself because I barely stomach the crap people will spin to hold on to weapons of death and destruction in the name of some militant revolution when the government comes to get us.
First: I am not advocating get rid of all guns like hunters and maybe collectors. I am advocating sensible regulation, training, and licensing.
Second: Unless you are a machinist making your own gun, you’re are not a proletariat revolutionary but a consumer of a pro-profit military and gun manufacturing industrial complex.
Third: If you are afraid of our government’s trend toward Fascism, you should be, we are already a Fascist Police State but I haven’t seen the men with guns do a damn thing about it. If guns were going to make a difference then they would already have been employed. It is not happening. If you don’t believe me read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow or Naomi Wolf’s Fascist America — If you are Black or Brown in America you better not have a gun on you or you will be dead or in prison — the only folks privileged enough to get away with it, are White folks, Left, Right & Middle on the political spectrum.
Fourth: Most militants in Latin and Central America, Viet Nam, Africa and other places in the world, didn’t start their revolutions with guns, when they were finally forced to declared war — civil war against their oppressive governments they often stole their weapons from the police and military that came after them. Most of these military revolutionaries included deserted soldiers and officers that became underground organizations and Guerilla warriors – most failed in the end and those that won left a blood bath of innocents on their march to seize power.
Fifth: The most successful revolutions were not violent, in the book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict for the first time, we have empirical, peer-reviewed data studying every major civil war, revolution and social movement throughout the world since WWII. The answer: non-violence works twice as often as violence. If non-violence can bring down the USSR, the Mubarak regime in Egypt, and British rule in India, it can work most anywhere.
Sixth: If you we are forced to resort to weaponize our self defense, we will need the proletariat machinists, the GI resisters and deserters, engineers, bomb makers, and skilled craftspersons of every profession who I believe have the intelligence and ingenuity to make guns and any kind of weapon that would be needed but in this kind of war you will need doctors, medics and nurses most of all, because nobody will come out of it, without blood on their hands — if they still have hands.
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I should add I would not presume to tell any other nation’s people how they should defend themselves against a violent oppressor.
I am a citizen of the greatest terrorist nation in the world, an oppressor who is so good at it that most of its’ citizens are blind to its’ concentration camps. They are called prisons and detention centers in the largest prison industrial complex in the world where people are enslaved in prison work at slave wages for life. If they are released they too often are disenfranchised, can’t vote, can’t get food stamps, barred from jobs, schools, housing, family and friends.
No we do not need guns we need a movement, a human rights movement that Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. both spoke so eloquently about.
I am a liberal thinker in the classical sense — that is a profound belief in the goodness of humanity, open to new ideas, favoring more individual freedom and less government control.
But I am no political liberal as now defined by the American political structure of reform more and more to the right, where freedom seems to be expressed only in economic terms for the owners of the means of production while the workers have little.
No, I am a resister, a non-conformist, an activists, a revolutionary and I hope and am working for a revolution without guns, without violence