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| -Land of the Free | |||
| Saloon: Our sick gun fetish is destroying us | |||
| 2013-12-27 | |||
| The author, Richard Escow, is associated with the Center for America's Future, a think tank so far to the left if it was a ship the captain would be sending out damage control teams. Maybe you've heard about the "bullet fee" that was supposedly charged to the families of prisoners executed by gunfire. The fee, which is almost certainly an urban legend, has been attributed at various times to Bolshevik revolutionaries and the governments of Iran and China. But even if the bullet fee is mythical, there is a very real price to be paid when a society becomes intoxicated by gunplay. What price have we paid for the bullets fired at Newtown and in the year since that tragedy? The financial estimates only scratch the surface. The Cost Researcher Ted Miller estimates the direct cost of intentional gun injuries at more than $8 billion per year, and the total societal cost at roughly $174 billion per year. A more focused study that concentrated on medical costs concluded that gun injuries lead to 31,000 hospitalizations each year at an annual cost of approximately $2.3 billion. More than 80 percent of that cost is borne by the government through Medicaid and other public assistance programs. In case you didn't do the math, that comes to more than USD $75,000 a stay. Dunno how much it costs for a hospital room stay for a gunshot wound, but I do not think we lost 31,000 to shootings. Mexico had to exist between 2007 and 2010 to reach those numbers of violent deaths in a country one third the population of the US.
Oh the horror, making money in a growth industry. Leftists are all about destroying profit, but only the profits they don't like. Cerberus Capital, an investment fund, created something it called the "Freedom Group" to invest in gun manufacturers. That investment became politically toxic after the Newtown shooting, especially with large institutional investors like teachers' pension funds. But then, when you name your fund after the two-headed dog that is said to guard the gates of hell, you're not exactly presenting yourself as a socially responsible investor. So far they haven't been able to sell it. I don't blame Cerberus Capital. It's a terrible time for investors with a political class absolutely bent on destroying every vestige of personal liberty they can find. And where there's money, there's lobbying. As the Sunlight Foundation reports, more than half of the new members of Congress elected last year received NRA funding. The school shooting didn't make politicians any more reluctant to attend gun fundraisers. Good news for us. People of the Gun But that doesn't begin to get at the heart of the matter -- or to the true extent of the cost. To estimate that, we first need to understand: We are the People of the Gun. We own more guns per capita than any other nation on earth. Only Yemen comes close, and Yemenis reportedly have an ambivalence about their guns that Americans don't seem to share. Something about an Islamic infected sh*thole that could conceivably make free people less ambivalent about guns. Our love of the gun is as old as the nation itself. We needed our guns in the beginning. The long-range accuracy of the Pennsylvania Rifles used by colonists in the Revolutionary War contributed to a number of victories against the Redcoats, who carried shorter-range Brown Bess military muskets. Maybe that helped create the uniquely American algebra that says that "Guns = freedom." We still need the rifle and the handgun and the shotgun, as well as most variants available. Fascists who have seen a growing government, all too willing to press an anti-liberty, freedom destroying agenda wonder why free men want to arm up. Keep going and they will soon find out. A dispersed agrarian people made up of homesteading farmers and ranchers needed guns -- to protect the livestock from wild animals and themselves from marauders and thieves. Guns were a tool. We are a people who take pride in our tools, and in our ability to use them. We take our quotidian tasks and make them sport -- and art, and adventure. Guns are mostly a bulwark against tyrants, like the writer who wrote this Saloon article. It is baked into the Constitution because the men who wrote it knew that even a democratically elected government can be a tyranny. A tool is but one of the uses. But then, as the railroads and industrialists and combines began to steal the American dream away from the farmers and ranchers, the cowboys and settlers, the gun became our consolation prize, our sublimated revenge, a symbolic instrument of power to distract us from the real power -- the economic power -- that had been taken from us. Here comes the dialectic, and the historical materialism of Marxism. Do try to stay awake for it. It has been a century since the United States became an urban-majority country, according to the Census Bureau. When a healthy need or desire lingers too long or gets out of control, it becomes a fetish. So says someone likely closely aligned with those with fetishes. The Fantasy The Second Amendment crowd is misreading the amendment in whose name they struggle, but they're not wrong about everything. There is a cultural divide over guns. He wants the conflate the Constitution with the culture as the gatekeeper to owning a gun. Nice one. Dishonest and irrelevant. This was probably for the Saloon crowd who will lap up everything liberals have to say about guns. As one who has used guns recreationally off and on for many years (mostly off in the year since Newtown), Awww, they shamed him into putting down his BB gun, poor baby! and who has lived in the major capitals of the East and well outside them, I've seen that divide firsthand. It didn't happen by accident. Urban Americans were the first to experience the immediate and devastating impact of gun violence. And with the passage of the Sullivan Law of 1911, the "liberal elites" of New York State became the first Americans to live under some form of gun control. They've lived that way for generations now, and have never experienced the gun culture so common to other parts of the country. And yet, some of the most horrific mass murders have taken place in those places where, as the author puts it, the "residents live under some form of gun control". Much of the rest of the country is still living out the pioneer fantasy forged in the 1800s -- and that fantasy is still fulfilling the same economic purpose: to distract them from the true imbalances in power that rob them of agency and economic power. They may not have money or a good job. But with a well-stocked gun cabinet they can feel that personal power is, in the words of the Rolling Stones song, "just a shot away." Dick can stack this crap until it is a sh*t mountain, but it changes nothing. Gun and the Constitution are separate from the culture and justifiably so. He can add references to declining economics until he is conditioned to say "comrade", but that doesn't change the basic argument. Americans have the right to own a gun, regardless of the reason or the utility. We're not here to judge them, but there is a through-line that reaches from their innermost fantasies to the deaths of children in Newtown. F*cking prick. This very article is nothing but judgment, bad judgment at that. We've all been programmed with internal fantasies, with consequences we can dimly understand at best. Fantasies such as gun control. and speak for yourself, Dick. But theirs is an especially deadly fantasy. It fuels Tea Party rage with a violent individualistic ethos that rejects collective action, even when that action is in their own interest. And it prevents the kind of legislation that could prevent future Newtowns. Dja get that? TEA Party = deadly fantasy about guns. I wonder if Dick got paid to insert that bit about the TEA Party. The architects of this particular fantasy have been constructing it inside our psyches for generations. It was projected in the "spectacular" special effects of Buffalo Bill's sideshow, which included simulated prairie fires, a sunset and the cyclone. It has flickered before our eyes at 64 frames per second for nearly 100 years now, from "Birth of a Nation" to cowboy movies, from Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood to the more stylized and nerd-friendly dogfights of "Star Wars." You will note that 90 percent of the folks who brought this "fantasy" to the silver screen would like nothing better than to seize guns from your cold, dead hands, and attribute that the the "culture". More money and resources for them. Sure there's a solution to your problems, pardner. It's just a shot away. More culture. What a maroon. The Price On my office wall is a framed photograph of Buffalo Bill and his troupe given to my grandfather when he was a young boy attending Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. The American strain runs in the blood. Your grandfather would probably beat the tar out of you for writing this. What price have we paid for the many bullets that have been fired in the year since Newtown? To answer that we need to know: What's the value of a human life? What's the cost to a society for allowing itself to be distracted from decades of economic plunder? What's the value of a child's lost future, which lies like some subatomic phenomenon in a field of potentiality? Most of all: What does a society lose when it values its children's lives so cheaply? Newtown is a tragedy, and I don't want to get into the wherefores, unless it is to state the f*cker that did the shooting was crazy. I don't attach costs to children, nor do most of the people who have them. It is a loss and a tragic one but the loss of liberty simply means your means of dealing with that loss are gone, likely forever. As of this writing, one year after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, they are interrupting regularly scheduled programming to report on another school shooting, at Arapahoe High School in Colorado. That's shouldn't surprise anyone. We are the People of the Gun. We are, but the man who did the shooting was also crazy.
A fantasy that your ideological allies have fomented for 100 years. That doesn't change the calculus: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. [Loads] | |||
| Posted by:badanov |
| #15 But then, when you name your fund after the two-headed dog that is said to guard the gates of hell where every Mayan New Year Thor would ride out on Anansi the Spider, armed by Shiva with a high capacity assault rifle shotgun, you're not exactly presenting yourself as a socially responsible fish tank filter. Cerberus is Greco-Roman, Hell is Judeo-Christian, and you are a failure. Think tank, guess they need the sucker fish as well. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2013-12-27 22:06 |
| #14 PX4 Storm, nice. I have one in in .40 S&W full frame. And the CX4 Carbine, same caliber. Both weapons use the same magazine. Beretta or SIG, those are my hand gun choices. |
| Posted by: Secret Asian Man 2013-12-27 20:30 |
| #13 When the state is disarmed then it could be time to think about it. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2013-12-27 17:45 |
| #12 What's the value of a human life? To who? The thug, (Who obeys NO laws, or the human who fights against them) Thug, has an illegal gun. The Person, who must Defend against thedm. And The people who would Disarm him.(Like this twit) There's a saying "When seconds count, the Police are Minutes away, and will get there AFTER it's all over. I for one, would rather be standing, maybe with the perp at my feet, (Alive, or dead) maybe he's fled. Either way, I'm standing. (Yes, I'm always armed and i'm friendly too.) Nobody feels scared talking to me. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2013-12-27 14:00 |
| #11 Cerberus played it well. After the Newtown shooting protestors showed up at the CEO and CFO's home. Their kids received death threats. They had to move the families because the threats were real. The CEO Came out and said they would sell all of the Freedom works firearms. The wacko's stopped the harassment and Freedom was never sold. A well played plan. |
| Posted by: 49 Pan 2013-12-27 13:39 |
| #10 I wonder how many massacres there were back in the 1800's, when everyone owned a gun. The per-capita murder rate must've been sky high, eh? And everybody in Wyoming should be murdered off by next Tuesday. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2013-12-27 13:31 |
| #9 Many years ago my wife was asked by her liberal family just why she wanted a gun; her answer - "Because THEY don't want me to have one." |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2013-12-27 13:24 |
| #8 Unarmed Good People vs Always Armed Bad Guys Van Gogh was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri as he was cycling to work on 2 November 2004 at about 9 o'clock in the morning, in front of the Amsterdam East borough office (stadsdeelkantoor), on the corner of the Linnaeusstraat and Tweede Oosterparkstraat (52°21′32.22″N 4°55′34.74″E). The killer shot van Gogh eight times with an HS 2000 handgun. Initially from his bicycle, Bouyeri fired several bullets at Van Gogh, who was hit, as were two bystanders. Wounded, Van Gogh ran to the other side of the road and fell to the ground on the cycle lane. According to eyewitnesses, Van Gogh's last words were: "Mercy, mercy! We can talk about it, can't we?" Bouyeri then walked up to Van Gogh, who was still lying down, and calmly shot him several more times at close range. Bouyeri then cut Van GoghÂ’s throat, and tried to decapitate him with a large knife, after which he stabbed the knife deep into Van Gogh's chest, reaching his spinal cord. He then attached a note to the body with a smaller knife. Van Gogh died on the spot. The two knives were left implanted. The note was addressed, and contained a death threat to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was subsequently forced to go into hiding, threatened Western countries and Jews and also referred to the ideologies of the Egyptian organization Takfir wal-Hijra. (Wikipedia) |
| Posted by: Threreling Munster6125 2013-12-27 12:09 |
| #7 Gov. Nikki Haley finds new Beretta PX4 under the Christmas tree. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2013-12-27 11:29 |
| #6 I never wanted a gun until there was all this talk about guns. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2013-12-27 11:17 |
| #5 yes, it never dawns on the gullible lead by these wannabe tyrants that if the ruling class actually delivered a safe and relatively just society, the resistance to 'gun control' would shrink to unimportant levels. The tyrants know they can't so deliver, but they need the arms out of the hands of those they desperately want to rule. |
| Posted by: P2kontheroad 2013-12-27 09:43 |
| #4 Connecticut gun owners rush to register. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2013-12-27 09:42 |
| #3 We are the People of the Gun. No, we 'are the People' of a failed justice system. Convicted horse thieves were once hung by the neck until dead. A man's (or woman's) horse was the way they earned a living. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2013-12-27 09:32 |
| #2 The sick lust for power fetish by progressives, formerly known as communists, has destroyed us. FIFY They just can't finish it till they confiscate any means of resistance. |
| Posted by: P2kontheroad 2013-12-27 08:41 |
| #1 A more focused study that concentrated on medical costs concluded that gun injuries lead to 31,000 hospitalizations each year at an annual cost of approximately $2.3 billion. More than 80 percent of that cost is borne by the government through Medicaid and other public assistance programs. The author should delve in more depth into these statistics before coming up with knee-jerk solutions. A gun-free society is one that invites unbridled tyranny and lawlessness. Those who are doing many of the intentional shootings are also those who have illegal firearms. BTW, they also do many of the unintentional collateral damage shootings. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2013-12-27 08:25 |