| Volume 2, #9 | November 4, 1997 | POLITICS WITH BITE! | CONTACT | HELP | 
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Letters (a rant against gun nuts) Making Our Freedom PossibleGeov, You publish ETS!, write a weekly column for The Stranger, and get to speak out on KCMU every Saturday morning. You're trying to maximize the rights granted to you under the First Amendment. I appreciate what you do and also enjoy reading and listening to what you have to say a majority of the time, especially when you stand up for the injustices happening around us on a daily basis. Sometimes your personal biases get into a story and tend to sway you to the wrong side of the truth in order to stress your point. I can understand that because it happens with most writers. But, I can't understand your lack of support for the Second Amendment. I do not even own a gun but, I like the fact that it is available to me if I am ever so inclined. Why? Because, the First, Fourth and the remainder of the first Ten Amendments are the corner stone of our rights. We are quickly losing the rights granted to us under the Fourth Amendment. As we lose more and more of these rights, the whole foundation starts to crumble and at that point you will not be writing what you feel and believe in but what someone else wants you to write and believe. --Robert J. Carman, via e-mail G.P. replies: My brief endorsements, in the venues Robert cites, of this year's gun safety initiative brought several letters, of which this was one of the more polite. It also alludes to or states themes common to most of them. The liberal argument for gun control is irrefutable: it saves lives. That argument doesn't address, however, the erosion of individual rights that is the essential (albeit unstated) purpose of most governments. Since you asked: Neither the U.S. nor any other entity granted me, or anyone else, the right to free speech. We were born with it. Governments don't give rights; they only take them away. Often at metaphoric or literal gunpoint. I support regulating guns; that has, so far as I can tell, not a damn thing to do with the Second Amendment, which as I recall says something about well- regulated militias. I have nothing against the Second Amendment; I also don't think it's very relevant to the reality of nation-states 208 years later, which don't have militias but *do* have monopoly control over weapons of mass destruction. NRA-style rhetoric has it that private gun ownership is our final line of defense against the Totalitarian State. Poppycock. We have a government that is willing, even eager, to support genocides of whole peoples in various parts of the world. For smaller, more personal examples, see Waco or the bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia. Returning small arms fire was a fair fight in 1789, but today it won't help. People who literally want to fight the government cannot and never will be able to compete with its level of violence, either practically or (as with the Oklahoma bombing) in public opinion. Instead, our country's levels of private gun ownership, the highest in the world, serve rather than prevent totalitarianism. Guns are both a symptom of and a further cause for our culture's distrust of others. Guns won't stop corporate or government abuse. Massive numbers of people, working together, refusing to consent to their own enslavement, will. Guns discourage that. Our culture is one of the worst in the world for knowing how to work together. Instead, the "freedom" to own a gun is the "freedom"--unless you're planning to use it to hunt for food, which I doubt--to engage in only one pragmatic purpose, namely, to plan to kill another human being. Our willingness to do that is crippling us. We're pointing those massive numbers of guns at each other. (Ask any inner city resident.) We're taking each other out--not to mention, far too frequently, ourselves, ex-lovers, kids, and anyone else at the wrong end of the barrel. We're also providing justification for the use of even more violence and bigger kill toys for cops. If I were a would-be modern despot wanting to crush dissent, I'd want the rabble to have lots and lots of guns, all pointed at each other, all protecting what little they have rather than demanding more. Until all the folks under the heel of our emerging global economy-- maquilladora workers, inner city bangers, Montana rednecks, suburban office workers, and everyone between--get out of the "me against the world" mentality and sense of false safety that guns promote, break down those divisions, and start working together to create our security, we're gonna keep making the job of the corporate state very much easier than it should be. P.S. Of course we're biased. So is everything else you read, and none of it has a lock on the truth. Get used to it! Other editor gets in her licks, too: I grew up with two gun nuts in my immediate family, one of whom was also an alcoholic. Not fun. No, not at all. I'm ardently anti-gun, and I'm very relieved that I was born female, so that I never had my dad thrust a rifle into my hands on my 15th birthday and say ~you~re a man now, son!~ I'm biased. Yes. Trigger locks are not enough. Obey!Dear ETS!, Please stop telling me to think for myself! If I obey you, I'm disobeying, and if I disobey, I'm obeying! So confusing! And besides, it's too much work. Your disciple in crime, Davis "Forgot My Prozac" Oldham, Seattle No. 1 in Hypocrisy, TooHi! We thought you guys might enjoy this, or at least put it to some good use! America--We're Number One (from "We're Number One: Where America stands--and falls--in the New World Order" by Andrew L. Shapiro, Vintage N.Y., 1992) Among industrialized nations, America stands number one in: (in terms of rates per 100,000 or per capita):
Yeah, we're really #1! Have a nice day and please keep on getting the word out! Peace, Lynne and Ferntree, via email |
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