By Chris Hedges / Special to ScheerPost

Guns were a ubiquitous part of my childhood. My grandfather, who had been a master sergeant in the army, had a small arsenal in his house in Mechanic Falls, Maine. He gave me a 2020 bolt action Springfield rifle when I was 7. By the time I was 10, I had graduated to a Winchester lever action 30-30. I moved my way up the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Marksmanship Qualification Program, helped along by a summer camp where riflery was mandatory. Like many boys in rural America, I was fascinated by guns, although I disliked hunting. Two decades as a reporter in war zones, however, resulted in a deep aversion to weapons. I saw what they did to human bodies. I inherited my grandfather’s guns and gave them to my uncle.

Guns made my family, lower working-class people in Maine, feel powerful, even when they were not. Take away their guns and what was left? Decaying small towns, shuttered textile and paper mills, dead-end jobs, seedy bars where veterans, nearly all the men in my family were veterans, drank away their trauma. Take away the guns, and the brute force of squalor, decline, and abandonment hit you in the face like a tidal wave. 

Yes, the gun lobby and weapons manufacturers fuel the violence with easily available assault-style weapons, whose small caliber 5.56 mm cartridges make them largely useless for hunting. Yes, the lax gun laws and risible background checks are partially to blame. But America also fetishizes guns. This fetish has intensified among white working-class men, who have seen everything slip beyond their grasp: economic stability, a sense of place within the society, hope for the future and political empowerment. The fear of losing the gun is the final crushing blow to self-esteem and dignity, a surrender to the economic and political forces that have destroyed their lives. They cling to the gun as an idea, a belief that with it they are strong, unassailable, and independent. The shifting sands of demographics, with white people projected to become a minority in the U.S. by 2045, intensifies this primal desire, they would say need, to own a weapon.

There have been over 200 mass shootings this year. There are nearly 400 million guns in the U.S., some 120 guns for every 100 Americans. Half of the privately-owned guns are owned by 3 percent of the population, according to a 2016 study. Our neighbor in Maine had 23 guns. Restrictive gun laws, and gun laws that are inequitably enforced, block gun ownership for many Blacks, especially in urban neighborhoods. Federal law, for example, prohibits gun ownership for most people with felony convictions, effectively barring legal gun ownership for a third of Black men. The outlawing of guns for Blacks is part of a long continuum. Blacks were denied the right to own guns under the antebellum Slave Codes, the post-Civil War Black Codes, and the Jim Crow laws. 

White people built their supremacy in America and globally with violence. They massacred Native Americans and stole their land. They kidnapped Africans, shipped them as cargo to the Americas, and then enslaved, lynched, imprisoned, and impoverished Black people for generations. They have always gunned down Black people with impunity, a historical reality only recently discernable to most white people because of cell phone videos of killings. 

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer,” D.H. Lawrence writes. “It has never yet melted.”

White society, sometimes overtly and sometimes unconsciously, deeply fears Black retribution for its four centuries of murderous assaults.

“Again, I say that each and every Negro, during the last 300 years, possesses from that heritage a greater burden of hate for America than they themselves know,” Richard Wright notes in his journal. “Perhaps it is well that Negroes try to be as unintellectual as possible, for if they ever started really thinking about what happened to them, they’d go wild. And perhaps that is the secret of whites who want to believe that Negroes really have no memory; for if they thought that Negroes remembered they would start out to shoot them all in sheer self-defense.” 

The Second Amendment, as the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes in Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” was designed to solidify the rights, often demanded under state law, of whites to carry weapons. Southern white men were not only required to own guns but serve in slave patrols. These weapons were used to exterminate the indigenous population, hunt down enslaved people who escaped bondage and violently crush slave revolts, strikes and other uprisings by oppressed groups. Vigilante violence is wired into our DNA.

 “Most American violence – and this also illuminates its relationship to state power – has been initiated with a ‘conservative’ bias,” the historian Richard Hofstadter writes. “It has been unleashed against abolitionists, Catholics, radicals, workers and labor organizers, Negroes, Orientals, and other ethnic or racial or ideological minorities, and has been used ostensibly to protect the American, the Southern, the white Protestant, or simply the established middle-class way of life and morals. A high proportion of our violent actions has thus come from the top dogs or the middle dogs. Such has been the character of most mob and vigilante movements. This may help to explain why so little of it has been used against state authority, and why in turn it has been so easily and indulgently forgotten.”

Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old white shooter in Buffalo who killed ten Black people and wounded three others, one of them Black, at the Tops Friendly Markets in a Black neighborhood, gave expression in a 180-page manifesto to this white fear, or “great replacement theory.” Gendron repeatedly cited Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old mass shooter who in 2019 killed 51 people and injured 40 others at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Tarrant, like Gendron, live streamed his attack so, he believed, he could be cheered on by a virtual audience. Robert Bowers, 46, killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old, in 2019 drove more than 11 hours to target Hispanics, leaving 22 people dead and 26 injured in a Walmart in El Paso. John Earnest, who pleaded guilty to murdering one and injuring three others in 2019 at a synagogue in Poway, California, saw the “white race” being supplanted by other races. Dylann Roof in 2015 fired 77 shots from his .45-caliber Glock pistol at parishioners attending a Bible study at the Black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. He murdered nine of them. “You Blacks are killing white people on the streets everyday and raping white women everyday,” he shouted at his victims as he was firing, according to a journal he kept in jail.

The gun enforced white supremacy. It should not be surprising that it is embraced as the instrument that will prevent whites from being dethroned.

The specter of societal collapse, less and less a conspiracy theory as we barrel to climate breakdown, reinforces the gun fetish. Survivalist cults, infused with white supremacy, paint the scenario of gangs of marauding Black and brown people fleeing the chaos of lawless cities and ravaging the countryside. These hordes of Black and brown people, the survivalists believe, will only be kept at bay with guns, especially assault-style weapons. This is not far removed from calling for their extermination.

Historian Richard Slotkin calls our national lust for blood sacrifice the “structuring metaphor of the American experience,” a belief in “regeneration through violence.” Blood sacrifice, he writes in his trilogy Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier,  The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, is celebrated as the highest form of good. Sometimes it requires the blood of heroes, but most often it requires the blood of enemies. 

This blood sacrifice, whether at home or in foreign wars, is racialized. The U.S. has slaughtered millions of the globe’s inhabitants, including women and children, in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Libya, as well as in numerous proxy wars, the latest in Ukraine, where the Biden administration will ship another $700 million in weapons to supplement $54 billion in military and humanitarian aid.

When the national mythology inculcates into a population that it has the divine right to kill others to purge the earth of evil, how can this mythology not be ingested by naïve and alienated individuals? Kill them overseas. Kill them at home. The more the empire deteriorates, the more the impetus to kill grows. Violence, in desperation, becomes the only route to salvation.

“A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them, though the world around that people may change and demand changes in their psychology, their world view, their ethics, and their institutions,” Slotkin writes.

America’s gun fetish and culture of vigilante violence makes the U.S. very different from other industrialized nations. This is the reason there will never be serious gun control. It does not matter how many mass shootings take place, how many children are butchered in their classrooms, or how high the homicide rate climbs.

The longer we remain in a state of political paralysis, dominated by a corporate oligarchy that refuses to respond to the mounting misery of the bottom half of the population, the more the rage of the underclass will find expression through violence. People who are Black, Muslim, Asian, Jewish, and LGBTQ, along with the undocumented, liberals, feminists and intellectuals, already branded as contaminants, will be slated for execution. Violence will spawn more violence.

“People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become,” James Baldwin writes of the American South. “The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For, in the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today.” He added that he “was not struck by their wickedness, for that wickedness was but the spirit and the history of America. What struck me was the unbelievable dimension of their sorrow. I felt as though I had wandered into hell.”

Those who cling to the mythology of white supremacy cannot be reached through rational discussion. Mythology is all they have left. When this mythology appears under threat it triggers a ferocious backlash, for without the myth there is an emptiness, an emotional void, a crushing despair.

America has two choices. It can reintegrate the dispossessed back into the society through radical New Deal types of reforms, or it can leave its underclass to wallow in the toxins of poverty, hate and resentment, fueling the blood sacrifices that afflict us. This choice, I fear, has already been made. The ruling oligarchy doesn’t take the subway or fly on commercial jets. It is protected by the FBI, Homeland Security, police escorts, and bodyguards. Its children attend private schools. It lives in gated communities with elaborate surveillance systems. We don’t matter.

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

Gun control is going nowhere, face facts.

Biden is practically begging the Republicans to help him pass some flatulent nothing-ball he can put on Democratic party campaign literature.

The only way gun control will come to America is when a fully empowered socialist government mandates and enforces it — wiping out “militias,” gun advocacy leaders, shutting down companies and altering the racist, violent culture that is a deeply rooted part of the American tradition.

This will not be done voluntarily, it has to be a multi-generational effort backed up by deadly force.

In the meantime, REAL progressives need to arm themselves for the likely outbreak of civil conflict that’s highly probable after the end of abortion rights and the reimposition of Jim Crow voting laws and all the other meager advances of the 50s and 60s, likely to include desegregation laws.

Good news: Black people are arming themselves: white liberals can onanize themselves with endless discussions and pacifist drivel — Black folks understand what’s happening — because as Buffalo shows, the deranged white nationalists see them as the nucleus of all their “woes.”

Black Americans flock to gun stores and clubs: ‘I needed to protect myself’ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/us-gun-ownership-black-americans-surge

While virtually all white “militias” are unchallenged, this group has already been suppressed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xo9P6CgDVQ

Their “NFA” moniker gets it right.

They terrified armed Confederate memorialists, who had to screech for police protection.

Possibly some of those MANPADs, RPGs and other sophisticated stuff dropped like confetti in Ukraine will make their way to American streets –a REAL answer to police militarization. The Ukrainians have a well-earned reputation for illegal arms sales. Viva entrepreneurship!

Eric Liebler We’re afraid to face the obvious fact, guns kill people! This claim that people need to be armed to protect themselves: so we can have shoot outs? Is this the wild, wild west? I think guns should be abolished all around, including from the police. And before you call me a liberal, I don’t think they’re truly addressing the issue. In-so-far as liberals have mentioned the issue, I think it’s to reinforce their voting base.

Advocating to disarm Americans while arming Ukrainians. You do realize that is counterintuitive right?

Gun control should go nowhere. The reason we have a second amendment is to protect from invasion, intrusion into your home, and from a tyrannical government. You realize America was founded on insurgency – rising up from a tyrannical government (England)… correct?

I find it interesting that even after we saw tyranny on video “due to Covid” from semi-socialist countries such as Australia and Canada – and socialist countries such as China who have no gun rights – that anyone supports gun rights. Even in American society a lot of people were locked down for 2 years straight with great restraint.

Well just reading this crap shows with no doubt the person that authored this article is a bitter leftist woke Dumbasscrat and or just ignorant of the ACTUAL Gun culture!!!

A GREAT post, Chris! Sadly, it is so so true!

As always Chris gets right to the heart of the issue and says what all others are afraid to or ignoring. thank you

I am in Canada, where the poison from south of the border has some effects, but we have more potential to resist and overcome it.

The problem with you is that you are focussed on the right wing degenerates. What frightens me about the US culture is the people who think they are ‘left’ and ‘progressive’. They are actually more dangerous than the rednecks.

What is needed is for sane people to get control of the state and begin transforming the American society on a logical basis. That will require some type of revolution which will be armed. That of course creates a contradiction for you.

It is like the old saying of Machiavelli; “an unarmed prophet is soon a dead prophet”. In other words, whoever or whatever tries to change a corrupt society will either be able to defend itself or will be killed. In the case of the USA, they will probably need some external support as the military power of the US state disintegrates.

You need to discard this idea of “journalism”, which always was a liberal delusion. People with the ability to bring about a new order need to establish secure communication with each other. Forget about trying to convince people who cannot be reached.

There is not much which needs to be debated. There are plenty of good models of what the western countries need to be transitioned to. What will have to be done to achieve this is very clear.

Time to stop talking and start preparing. https://yaxls.wordpress.com/

“Forget about trying to convince people who cannot be reached.”

Exactly Tim. Thank god I’m not the only one who realizes this (but you’re in Canada so that explains it). From Hedges and others like Jimmy Dore who think you can build bridges with these thugs, to Ralph Nader who believe in such a thing as “enlightened billionaires”, the left is so alone and on an island by itself, squabbling over bullshit, that they’re willing to offer the scorpion a ride over the pond in exchange for their friendship. I have no problem reaching out to those who are merely conservative; but the fact is they are far and few in between in America. Most “conservatives” today in America aren’t just mere conservatives; they’re outright fascists and Nazis. Japan is a very conservative culture, they don’t have these kinds of problems.

Operating on these kinds of myths do not keep the ship from sinking. Moreover, it destroys what remains of a left in America.

“What is needed is for sane people to get control of the state and begin transforming the American society on a logical basis”

I find it funny when people talk of taking control of other’s lives, removal of liberty and then of logic. Not much logic to be found among the leftists. Not much logic to be found among the sheltered, either.

This is a mad, mad world, you see. Hidden away from the realities that others face regularly leads you to a false sense of security. Small minds like the author are too blind on the reality that it’s not power over others that these ‘rednecks’ covet. It’s the power to protect and stand up for themselves.

How people like you would gladly place a boot over their head to instill your ideals on the world, as you look down on them for wanting to protect themselves from it: I laugh. Oh, do I laugh.

Such great ‘logic’ there is in the minds of so many. To those who have no respect for free agency, and think their ideas should be forced: first pick someone you don’t like and don’t agree with. Have them force you. It’s an imperfect world, buddy. It’s not all going to work out great. Have an idiot you disagree with make half of the decision for your life first. So pretentious and assuming, are those that seek to fix the world through control.

And while we’re at it what is the deal with age of consent laws?

@A handful of trouble at every turn I have no problem with an idiot telling me I will be punished for abusing children.

How do you feel about an idiot forcing medication or drugs on you? Or an idiot being responsible for your retirement? Go look up the pension crisis and social security failure date and get back to me.

Chris, a compounding of the ‘Issues’ of; Abortion, Guns, Gas, and Inflation — can be employed to destroy the neo-fascist Republican Party in the 2022 Election, and lead the way to destroying the corrupt corporate Democratic Party in the 2024 Election:

First, the most dangerous, violent, proto-fascist, and ‘Pro-Empire’ Republican Party can be dispatched in 2022 by combining the overwhelmingly positive women’s rights issue of controlling their own bodily rights, along with the overwhelmingly positive people’s and children’s rights not to be killed by AR-15 (M-16 Vietnam designed weapons of War), along with instituting FDR and John Kennith Galbraith’s Second World War of Empire’s “Gas Price Limits” imposed on the gouging of gas prices by the totally corrupt and illegal in ‘War-time’ (of our proxy-WAR in Ukraine) by our Disguised, Global, Crony, Capitalist, Racist, Propagandist, Criminal, Ecocidal, ‘Children-Killing’, & War-Starting EMPIRE, controlled by the ‘Ruling-Elite’, UHNWI, <0.003%ers, TCCers, arrogantly self-appointed "Masters of the Universe", and "Evil (not-so) Geniuses" [Kurt Andersen] — which hides Empire behind their totally corrupted dual-party Vichy-facade of faux-democracy.

The overall 'issue' of Gas Prices is clearly the most serious 'mind-set' Issue, that Bye Bye Byeden could easily employ to gut the factor of any inflation arguments other than 'Gasoline Prices'.

The specific 'Issues' of the corporate capitalist screwing of 'We the American people' beyond the 2022 exposure of the weaker standing fascist Republican Party after the 2022 rout can decimate the lying and corrupt 'pro-Empire' un-Democratic Party in 2024.

Then, by 2025, instead of having TWO ‘Pro-Empire’ Parties we can progress to a seriously progressive and ONE United ‘Anti-Empire’ democratic socialist party — which was within sight, nearly a century ago, in 1944 with FDR’s brilliant socialist VP, Henry Wallace, who was torpedoed by the OSS & DNC, and which even Albert Einstein’s 1949 letter, “Why Socialism” sent to the little gutless and captured 'un-Truman' corporate faux-President — and the “Double Government” [Michael Glennon] exposed in his book of the same name.

America the beautiful? The number one movie this week Top Gun, The NY Times #1 book is Killing the Killers from his “Killing” series O’Reilly. It doesn’t give one much hope. AHHHHHGGGG

Big profit in guns. Big profits in ammunition. Big profits in emergency medical procedures and attorneys. Big profits in the prison industrial profits. Big profit in security. Big profit and nothing else, except pain, suffering, misery and despair.

There are 20 million Americans with concealed carry permits; they have a much lower homicide rate than America’s average (which is lower than the vast majority of Western hemisphere countries). There are about 20 million hunters in the US; they also have a much lower homicide rate than America’s average. Black men (6% of the population) commit most murders; their victims are overwhelmingly Black. It is a problem created by War on Drug Crime bills. Many Black men (and the Poor more generally) have become felons (1 in 3 Black men) due to often victimless crime sentencing (such as the 100-fold sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine; this was racist and aimed at Blacks, as were other drug laws). Once a convicted felon, jobs are almost impossible to get; many get back into illegal drug trafficking and most have guns — illegal for felons (but otherwise their “competition” would remove them from the “game”). The NY Times recently claimed that 55% of mass shootings are by White Supremacists (and Biden has repeated this nonsense). They then listed 18 mass shootings (defined as four deaths) ending with the Tulsa Hospital mass shooting June 1. Curious, I looked for White Supremacists among the perpetrators. Four mass shootings were in predominantly black sections of Baltimore (2), St. Louis, and at a birthday party in Los Angeles. Police have no suspects; no one could, or more accurately, WOULD identify the suspects. Witnesses are often in danger. Ten Blacks were involved in 6 of the 18 shootings: Travis Lamar Birkley, Antoine M. Legrande Jr, Dandrae Martin, Smiley Martin, Daviyonne Dawson, Mtula Blake, Jeremy Alexsunder Reynolds, Ojego Ofieo, Ajang Ruach, and Michael Louis. Two Hispanics were involved in 2 of the 18 shootings: David Mora Rojas and the now infamous Salvador Ramos. There were 7 white shooters arrested in 6 of 18 shootings. Clearly the Buffalo Shooter, Payton Gendron, who copy-catted the Christchurch shooter’s (Brenton Tarrant) manifesto and the Black Sun symbol which Tarrant picked up in Ukraine from the same NAZIs, (who Biden keeps throwing $billions at) is an 18 year old White Supremacist. Looking closely at the other 6: Dalton Emmanuel Laperriere and Kerry Helms Lawing, were arrested for another crime, but involved in a mass shooting between four motorcycle gangs. White supremacists? Or just another gang shooting? There were no reports of racial motivation. Brandon Taylor Cole-Skogstad (mentally ill), Donnie Trammell (registered sex offender, felon), Kevin Milazzo (felon), and the father (name withheld by police) of three children named Gillard and his (ex?-) wife in Michigan. All killed their family members;, horrific domestic murders, but not involving white supremacists. So of the 18 mass shootings listed by NYT in 2022, only 1 in 18 (5.5% not 55%) involved a White Supremacist. There were 21,570 homicides in 2020 and few were covered by the NY Times. Maybe 55% of those covered involved White Supremacists? This has been a huge problem for Black (and Poor) communities and has become worse (not coincidentally) since Biden and his many crime bills in the ’80s and ’90s. But like immigration and abortion, such issues as Black victims of shootings, are important for Elections, and must not be solved.

This treatment of a very complex relationship between “mankind and it’s tools”, with all the mythology, psychology and intellectual generalization, is hard to swallow.

Most any tool can be misused as a weapon, by anyone of any skin tone, for any reason, gun, knife, hammer or bare hands.

In this nuclear age we collectively live with “guns” pointed at each other’s heads 24-7, is it any wonder that the population would have a “fetish” of scale in this insane situation?

Could it be that secretly the real purpose for many gun owners is not so much about survival, as it is about mercy?

The idea of survival in a remote compound with dead bodies piling up at the perimeters, when thoughtfully considered, appeals to no one with a shred of humanity. Anyone in such a situation would not be likely to persist for very long so far removed from the possibility of meaning, purpose and connection to life and happiness.

Thanks again Mr. Hedges, can’t wait for your next book by the way, please continue to speak truth to power . I hope you and your family are doing well.

” The gun enforced white supremacy. It should not be surprising that it is embraced as the instrument that will prevent whites from being dethroned.”

The gun didn’t enforce white supremacy, it enforced Capitalism, which enforced white supremacy, and it should not be surprising that it is embraced as the instrument that is desperately being used to prevent Capitalism from being dethroned. As long as Hedges continues to obfuscate his readers by steering them down the path of racial and gender division, and not the path of International working class solidarity, without explaining that it is Capitalism that has created those divisions, he can blather on all he likes, like a broken NPR, CNN, MSNBC record, nothing will ever change. Hedges, like a carnival barker, once again leads his readers to believe that if the races and genders can all just get along we could have a humane capitalism with altruistic oligarchs who care about the peace and health of society and our environment.

Hedges can let the world be run by Blacks, Latino, Asian, LGBTQ all he wants, but if they run it without eradicating capitalism for an International Socialism, where the working class of all colors and genders control their destiny, he is using his pen as a cookie cutter stamp instead of a weapon for change.

In his last paragraph, Hedges says we have two choices. His choice of ” radical New Deal types of reform ” is just more hammering of splints into the broken system of capitalism. He should remember, Roosevelt was only out to save capitalism. Hedges is trying to prop up an amoral system with obscurantism. In a sense, he is codifying it with his dead end of religious moralism. His other choice, is the ruling class allowing the underclass to, ” wallow in the toxins.” If Hedges thinks it’s just the underclass wallowing in the toxin he should take a step out of his bourgeois lifestyle and turn his ear to the proletariat.

Why are “Americans” ie US -ans always assuming they are right and they need to act violently against anyone else? Why is diplomacy considered a sissy behavior? Why are all disagreements met with attacks? Why does the USA bully or bribe countries to join in its wars against its designated enemies? I know that many other countries have faults, but the USA seems to pretend it has some sort of moral authority, that is is a democracy and that it has freedom, which includes “self-defense so broadly defined.

Great comment as usual Rosemerry – thanx. The US has zero moral authority in my view too. Reading “An Indigenous People’s History of the US” by Rozanne Dunbar-Ortiz, helped me to understand the roots of our violence and aggression. The violent march started on the east coast and never ended on the west coast – then spread all over the world. 850 military bases around the world, a broken infrastructure, no universal health care and a broken gun crazed economy. Karma. Not surprised by any of it.

“Guns made my family, lower working-class people in Maine, feel powerful, even when they were not. Take away their guns and what was left?”

Yes, there are guns as physical objects themselves. But much bigger than that reality is what guns represent… Power to Regular People living within a Predatory State society and culture.

Guns are the last vestige of Power not totally in the centralized hands of Those-Who-Don’t-Have-Your-Best-Interests-At-Heart.

Total surrender of mind, body, and spirit. That’s always been Their goal. The complete installation of ‘Full Spectrum Control!’ by the Predator State.

You will own nothing… have no thoughts of your own… have no bodily autonomy… your soul will be extinguished forever… and YOU WILL LIKE IT! OR ELSE!

Yes, we will. In a pig’s eye.

There are only two choices here. Weapons that regular people can possess and have access to. Or weapons only for The Predator Class and their hired strong-arms for pay.

And when in all of History has there been a good outcome for the citizens/subjects when weapons were only in the hands of a branch of The Predator Class? That would be never. And that will always be… never.

Many people have reasons to hate guns. But take guns away from regular people, and suddenly there will be even worse outcomes to hate. To hate — that is — as long as you retain that base human feeling on the wide spectrum of human feelings that The Predators are trying to narrow down to just one idea: FOLLOW ORDERS!… AND LIKE IT!

The old saying goes, “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried…”

And today, some might observe that ‘Guns are the worst human form of settling forms of human conflict… except for when ‘They’ leave you NO OTHER CHOICE.’ In other words… the Founding Fathers’ original idea behind the Second Amendment.

There are many reasons to hate guns. And many other reasons not to.

Maybe some day our Society — and the Pred Class — will develop the wisdom that people don’t need to feel they need guns… and the Preds don’t give us any more reasons to know we DO.

Yeah, I wonder if Chris is ready for unpleasant truths? He seems to be at an end, in despair. Nothing left, ‘the choice has been made’, ‘we don’t matter’.

And then his own personal armageddon – can’t continue without support.

The answer to the first is in the second.

The second asks for support and that means, excuse the dirty word: love.

Now we all know love can’t be the answer because it’s just a bullshit thing in this real nitty gritty world. Yep. Exactly.

Check the NDE people in their growing numbers of easily accessible videos and learn the truth that in fact love is all there is. That the basic energy of the universe is love. That consciousness itself is love. That we all came from love and all go back to love.

Got it? Unpalatable, isn’t it? Propeller head talk.

Nope. What it means is the resurgence, the rebirth, of belief and this time not a mumbo jumbo pile of bull serving the ends of the priesthood etc.

This time the living testimony of thousands of experiencers. Requiring no priesthoods or catechisms or posturings or ceremonies…. requiring in fact nothing at all.

Learn the truth, know it and live on just as you desire.

These experiencers coming back and relating their experiences perfectly matches what we know of the ancient seers, prophets, gurus, holy men – beginners of all the religions. They ‘came back’ and tried to tell what they’d learned.

Enough. I cannot convince anyone and I don’t mean to try.

I just want to say that I think there’s an indisputable truth beings revealed all over the place nowadays mainly perhaps by the NDE things and when it reaches critical mass it’ll explode into a mass awakening and new kind of world.

That can bring people together. That can make a new future. That can fix everything.

NOT that it’ll be easy. Loving is not the hearts and flowers blissful easy thing of Hollywood as all real people know. Love is a hard grind of doing your best for the ungrateful, for copping nasty experiences, for tolerating those you find repugnant, for forgiving when you’d dearly love to kill, even.

So it will never be an accomplished fact throughout the nation, throughout the world, possibly, probably, but the knowledge of that as the nature of reality will be a direction at the least. We’ll all know what we’re supposed to be doing.

And currently we don’t even know that. We know nothing.

Arthur – thanx for the pause permitted by your mention of NDE. Takes me to what really matters in my time here.

At this low point any little token crumb of gun regulation or debt forgiveness would go a long way. Let’s watch Bennie Thompson’s 8 hearings beginning Thursday at 8pm and see how much conscience and caution the United States retains. I think Chris said this before (several times) that it is not the white underclass that led the riot, but it is persons from the white upper middleclass, persons with advantages, with status, small businesses and professional employment. You must inquire where boys like Dylann Roof, Salvador Ramos or Kyle Rittenhouse obtain or buy fairly expensive weapons and ammunition. We know where Ethan Crumbley got his, from his parents. Mass killers do not arise spontaneously but are nurtured. Hedges predicts no new gun laws, but we need to denurture this some way. I apologize if I’m just backward and stupid, but I never enjoyed the experience to shoot as an adolescent . People looked at my fragile emotionality and knew guns couldn’t help.

Truth is brutal. No one can argue with a single word in this piece.

I just read a terrific piece on Hannah Arendt’s rejection of hope as a kind of narcotic against understanding and action. Chris, you live her point over and over. Read it and weep and then get to work.

https://aeon.co/essays/for-arendt-hope-in-dark-times-is-no-match-for-action?fbclid=IwAR1uMgJCR01aLWVLFUzMxJ1p5JadZrX8HYyMbgA9eAFXMX6t_-MswgeRM9I

in civilized nations only the right wing advocates for gun control

TLDR but here goes anyway…

I have a major problem believing that if these hostile, ignorant lugnuts are “reintegrated” back into society, then they will improve as humans and society will be the better off. NO! Giving them opportunity and reliable, stable incomes will not magically make them not racist, misogynist, homophobic, ignorant, hostile, etc. Relief from economic hardship won’t make them civilized.

I’ve lived in the American south all my life, across many parts of it, let me clue y’all in: the vast majority of these people are NOT mere working class (which nowadays is the same as saying they’re poor). That’s a complete lie and I’m tired of reading that tripe. No, they’re every bit of middle class as they come. They have white collar jobs, many of them are among the PMC of the American south. Some own small businesses, others inherited their businesses from their daddies.

Those white tiki-torching Nazis at Charlottesville? They’re middle- or upper-middle class types. Those who stormed the Capitol? Same thing. Only these people have the economic ability to take off work for these bourgeois indulgences. Jenna Ryan, a Texas real estate agent who flew to the Capitol last January on a private jet of all things, isn’t an isolated example. Not by a long shot. Poor and working whites are largely not participating in these kinds of things, because they’re too busy working and can’t take off work! No, these fascists don’t need “reintegrating” back into society; they’re well integrated into (white southern) society to begin with, with its college football and all the rest of it. So don’t hand me this crap that they’ve been rendered powerless. They’re not.

I agree with Chris Hedges on just about everything else. But not this. I see these shit people on a very regular basis. Like it or not, Hillary Clinton was right about them when she said they’re “irredeemable” and a “basket of deplorables”. I disagree with her on everything, she’s a cancer to any society. But she happened to be correct about them. After all, it’s not like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about; she lived in Arkansas for many years. She’s seen these people out in public and in the Walmart board room. They’re totally lost and reprobate. A serious life trauma would have to occur to them for there to be even the slimmest chance of waking up. And even then, that’s no guarantee. Yes, they’re that bad.

Reading this kind of crap as if I’m supposed to be understanding of them and be sympathetic is insulting. It’s exactly like Major Danny Sjursen said on an SI podcast with Oliver Stone a year or so ago; the north may have won the military war, but the south won the culture war. These people are no small reason why America is what it is, and what it’s always been.

Come to the American south and see for yourself.

Thanks, Marble Rye. I think that is a point which needs to be made.tr

more proof liberals are the most fascist. as many, including fared Zaharia demonstrate in Europe, so amerika etc only the right wing advocates for gun control—like the nazis did; the left wing opposes it

America practices human sacrifice on a scale to make the Aztecs blush.

Social chaos is the perfect excuse for the powerful to enact draconian controls. Why would they want to stop it?

it is true that those supposed right wing nuts are useful idiots not true fascists as true fascists are in total power in US since long before this modern term was devised. In fact fascism is what characterized all imperial systems nominally democratic or autocratic from Greece or Rome.

In US fascism mythology of guns was devised to proliferate lies about supposed enlightenment and liberalism of US founding fascists who from the beginning set on Holocaust of rightful ancient inhabitants and rulers of this highly developed and organized land as a murderous American nation building policies and methods, accomplished on a cheap and by systemic deception.

First, the Anglo-American elites stole part of America British kings stole from native Americans, and then gave supposedly to people, immigrants economically, politically and religiously persecuted in Europe, pieces of land they did not own or controlled making of worshipped first settlers useful idiots, Indian arrow fodder as well as victims of their own stupidity and naïveté. US or state government did not defend settlers or enforced any property laws or rights they falsely claimed they had.

The settlers had to do it as de facto unpaid agents of US government and that’s why Gun manufacturers promoted arming settler population but not individually, only in context of organized militias controlled by huge local land owners that carved states to the shape of their own land ownership and by that fact alone were controlIng state governments.

That what was Second amendment all about, to let poor people hold the expensive rich owned gun and temporarily dispensed only to do dirty work for their own benefit including fighting rightful owners of land as well as fighting state or US government if necessary. Private militias ware gangs imposing will of rich on people by bullying or murder when revered US or state law could not be used to to so. American police was created as to make victims of intimidation or violence by Private militias hired and paid by industrial moguls pay for their own jailing, beatings and killings.

Possessing gun was aimed at preservation a state of committed crime and to prevent justice from being served. Ordinary people who wanted to work their land for living we duped into position of criminality when they were handed guns to defend their baseless claims to the land.

US army was used to do the same on political and military theater, to commit, to defend and preserve US crimes like Indian genocide and prevent justice to the victims of political and socioeconomic crimes of US regime.

Such tradition of effective power enforced lawlessness and impunity from top echelons of power to the bottom of gun toting retarded patriots is pure fascism. All that phony self-victimology and supposedly noble desire to defend the country or themselves.. are nothing but means to avoid prosecution for their crimes and justice for their victims. The US empire will never disarm as it is the gun that prevent victims worldwide and in US from justice to be served.

Can’t wait for the war on liberals start.

Chris needs serious psychological help. He is a white dude that loathes being white and calling out his family as degenerates, wow, there is some serious hating going down.

Roundball Shaman puts thing into the correct perspective, but you useful gun hating idiots just can’t help falling for Hedges psychological neediness.

Really only white people used guns to conquer and rule.. really no other ethnic groups in the world did this an any time during human history? Spare me the Pulitzer prize.

Chris Hedges most likely approves of Kim Jung-Un’s behavior as well as the behavior of the Maduro government in now, the poverty stricken country of Venezuela. I am surprise he didn’t hale those countries as “forward thinking” in this article since there citizens are not allowed to have guns.

And for those of you that want to hold citizens responsible for all human ills committed before their innocent birth into this world, you too need psychological help or just following the instructions I offer Chris below.

Do the world a favor and go back to using a gun one last time, on yourself. You are way to pathetic to continue living.

You are the best candidate for Ministerium für Staatsicherheit

This article is missing the chicken and the egg argument, namely: do guns cause violent tendencies or do violent tendencies cause the proliferation of guns? I think Hedges assumes the former without providing his proof.

Consider this: between 2009 – 2018, there were 288 school shootings in the US. The next highest frequency of school shootings for that period was in Mexico, which clocked in 8 such incidents. Countries with triple the US population, like China and India, counted 5 or less such incidents during that period. So, the US is 36 times more likely to see a deadly assault on children’s schools than any other country worldwide.

For perspective, US News has estimated that there were 2000 school shootings in the US since 1970. So 2009-18 was not an aberration in historical trends.

And this is due to a lack of gun control? That doesn’t ring true because many countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia, et al, have no gun control. And they are awash in military grade weapons, left behind from decades-long Soviet, US and NATO campaigns, that can be bought in open-air markets for cash, with no questions asked.

If lack of gun control, and access to guns was the cause of this violence, shouldn’t those countries and their counterparts in the shattered Middle East be leading the world in mass murder and school shootings? And yet, they scored in single digits for the duration of the study cited above (NB: Pakistan suffered the worst school shooting massacre in history during a 2014 attack on an army public school in retaliation for military attacks on Taliban villagers).

So, why are Americans still looking for red herrings to deflect from examining their souls? First you need to ask why you hate your children. And it’s not white supremacists alone, as child killers belong to all races and kill children of all colours. Stop ascribing causes to parties opposed to your political position, and start being honest about your true natures.

Gun control may reduce the number of fatalities of attacks but it doesn’t explain why the violence occurs in the first place.

I could write a book counteracting most of the drivel spouted in this far, far leftist pathetic excuse for reason. Like the idea of white people running around capturing Africans for slaves, rather than simply buying them from the black slave traders. Or the cold American heart that gives so much private charity throughout the world.

Yours is a twisted perspective, sir. Lost in the fury of millions of black people that have economic disadvantage compounding the problems of a society constantly trying to convince them that all of their problems are someone else’s fault and out of their control.

Black people don’t have a collective memory drawn up from hundreds of years. They are individuals that are largely being fed hatred and animosity, lies and misrepresentations of the truth. I’ve lived in Alton, Il, worked in areas like East St. Louis, Il. and the greater St. Louis county Mo., and I doubt you’ve spent much time among the poor and suffering black or white people.

You pretend to be a part of the large number of “privileged” poor and destitute white Americans, many who have generational poverty and struggling they’ve dealt with, but I don’t see it. I lived it. You’re a pretentious pretender, imagining you understand a situation that you’re largely helping to make worse. You can’t make rich white slave owners pay for their sins. They’re dead already. You can’t blame modern problems on past sins. Echos of the past hardly write the whole page.

You know where to start? Stop with the demonizing of people that disagree with you, making everything about race, and trying to call out every single mistake made by white people the only ones in history. If you applied the same jaded view towards every single culture and people on this planet you could have just as much negative to say. In the last twenty years has race relations become better or worse in this nation? Worse. Your view isn’t helping anything but stoke the fires of division and hatred. Your words are a seething hatred and accusation of wrongdoing by large masses. You are no better than the racists that actually still are out there, but you are surely making their numbers grow. On both sides. Good job.

Do you also make unlimited apology and excuses for dear Nazi crimes??

I don’t make any apologies or excuses for any horrible thing. I simply find that it’s best to actually judge people based on their actions, not simply try to make everyone that disagrees with me a racist, Nazi, xenophobe. Do you tell all Germans that they are guilty for their Nazi ancestors and because they were Nazis in the past that their entire culture should be erased and is entirely evil and wrong?

Do you tell all Chinese that because of the tens of millions of deaths attributed to Mao and the communist origin of their authoritarian government, as well as events such as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or the current Uyghur attrocities that they should tear down the communist regime and erase everything about their culture is garbage and evil?

Do you apply the same filter equally, or are you just another leftist being led along?

I will only care about gun control after this country tackles Health Care and Offensive Warring. There’s an obvious order of operations, and creating a world where we promote and actively participate in human destruction, and non stop PTSD, we are creating sick people and sick minds. Guns at this point is the last line of defense against the tyrants that run this country.

As Chris Hedges has noted in earlier works, the only thing that scares government is people in the streets.

Gun violence is almost all young men killing other young men.

The mass public killings at schools, malls and stores is almost all young white men.

Maybe we need a Lysistrata movement.

“This fetish has intensified among white working-class men, who have seen everything slip beyond their grasp: economic stability, a sense of place within the society…”

In this author’s mind white people have no place in society. It’s obvious what this garbage is supposed to be teaching people.

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. How do these racist, insane pieces of shit actually get published?

Yeah, no kiddin. it sounds like a self hating white or some other piece of American hating garbage wrote this with no clue as how things really are in the world. The world is in a sad state with people like this writing articles. They definitely fit in with the current mess that is our govenrment.

No one wants a firearm so much as the person listening to someone break into their home at 230am….

“Guns – lots of guns” (Neo) has led the latest, breaking motifs of the mass media Matrix, where curators of news are creators of narrative for constructing the reality the owners of human society want us to see and hear, live and become.

We’ve now been recast in a society under siege, this time to a pandemic of violence. Not the violence imposed on us by the powers that monopolize its institutionalized means of rule, like lockdown on the reproduction of life by a biosecurity state out out to monopolize life on the planet. But the kind the unwashed masses and unruly mobs inflict upon ourselves, demonstrating once again our need to be governed.

The ‘free choices’ ‘we the people’ are given in Demokracy, Inc. provide the good-cop/bad-cop routines of ruling class fronts to move us into one of two doors leading to the same destination of police-state solutions to our problems, not theirs. Reminiscent of Jay Gould’s claim of hire over one half of the working class to kill off the other, partisan political theater pits us within controlled oppositions to deflect us back upon ourselves, without digging into the roots of a social system founded upon organized crime against humanity, without uniting across the divide-and-conquer identities formed for us by the Architechs, socially engineering us resources for the “masters of mankind” (Adam Smith).

The shadow state of Pox Amerikkkana that took off after WW2 has developed into a more open conspiracy of ruling institutions exhibiting the fascist corporatism driving monopoly capital’s industrial machinery since its emergence upon the world stage “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx), from European enclosures to African slavery. What now prevails in our world is a vast psyop from post-WW2 institutions of global governance to march us into an advanced industrialized society predicated on biodigital monopolization of human resources across all cultures and manufactured identities of ruling class oppression.

The post-WW2 national security state in the US only became more militarized under neoliberal class war. Like one of its cultural gatekeepers said, “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” (Thomas Friedman) And while there’s imperial blowback and chickens coming home to roost, it’s also worth remembering the kind of counter-insurgent, asymmetric methods of population control used ‘over there’ have just as long been used in the ‘homeland’ – which after all used to be ‘Injun Country’.

Is it simply profits at work that as this post-WW2 state has become more militarized, the general population has become a dumping ground for arms industries and advanced weaponry? Is it simply coincidence that as many as one third of mass shooters are ex-military? Are any of these ‘incidents’ comparable to projects like Operation Gladio carried out by cold war warriors of US-NATO?

If it weren’t for the Amerikkkan dream machines managing our perceptions, and winning the war before a battle is fought, any 9/11 memorial would stand as a monument to never again living under occupation. Never again falling for, and into, false flags that manufacture enemies for a war of terror waged against the many by the few.

In Amerikkkan schools, working class generations traditionally have had memories erased of this nation’s institutionalized violence against labor, among the bloodiest and dirtiest of nations. This people’s history includes all people’s struggles against class rule, and against its lies of race and gender.

Hypermasculinity might just as easily qualify for the social psychology pursued by Hedges here. Nevertheless, it seems ‘white working class’, etc. has come to serve as convenient trigger words used by trigger happy gatekeepers of the liberal laptop class in particular, many of whom are ‘white’ themselves, undercutting a more common class consciousness necessary to defend ourselves from the organized crime now, and always, coming at us.

Everything Is a Weapon: The U.S. Government Is Waging Psychological Warfare on the Nation https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/everything_is_a_weapon_the_u.s_government_is_waging_psychological_warfare_on_the_nation

Mass Shootings: The Vicious Cycle Fueled By America’s Toxic Cult of Violence https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/mass_shootings_the_vicious_cycle_fueled_by_americas_toxic_cult_of_violence

Sad, Yet another individual blaming the weapon and not the person wielding it. Gun control solves nothing all the while creating more issues. If you make it harder for good people to protect themselves and easier for criminals to commit violence against said defenseless people then what does it solve. The government also gains more control with no one to keep its power in check. It would probably help if we stopped babying people who commit heinous crimes with slaps on the wrist because of “inhumane issues”. It would also help if people spent more time raising their kids right and teaching them gun safety instead of worrying more about letting them get a sex change at 3 years old. Please do the world a favor and stop spewing this non sense about gun control. If you want to be dominated so bad then move to Venezuela or China. America is the Land of the free and its staying that way.

A long time ago, 1950s, there were no school shootings and also no AR 15, assault rifles, high caliber bullets. Now, we have great technology that allow for mass, efficient killing on a large scale. Venezuela and China has just as many wachos and nuts as we do but not mass shootings, school shootings, hourly shootings. Ever wonder why?? We Americans are number one again, yes, ‘ sad’ that we also are the most creative in justifying killings. We talk ourselves into anything, everything for Guns. It is the cost, price for American freedom.

Check your history. I believe we purchased the slaves from their black slave masters. We didn’t kidnap them.

” . . . regeneration through violence . . . Sometimes it requires the blood of heroes, but most often it requires the blood of enemies”.

Here, one person’s take on the blood of “enemies”, sacrificing the blood of the Ukrainian people in the US-NATO-UK Proxy War on Russia. They don’t matter.

https://les7eb.substack.com/p/ukraine-notes-the-long-war

How to contact Hedges directly? I’m a long time fan. I think he gets some few things wrong and would be pleased with any straight answers. This is again and very provocative and thoughtful piece. My thanks.

Chris; Your obsession with specifically black males seems to be clouding your otherwise brilliant observations about the American culture. I do not mean this as an insult; rather a mention of an obvious bias which you may or may not be aware of. I am a middle aged white male, recently moved to North Carolina 4 years ago from southern California. I never had any problem with blacks in any way… that is until I moved here. Since moving here, I have experienced countless and totally unprovoked abuse from many blacks. I have personally witnessed countless and continuous violence, specifically from the blacks, while driving on the highways, while shopping in grocery stores, while waiting in doctor’s offices and while eating in family restaraunts. I would say that nearly all of the violent, physical events that I have personally witnessed have been from blacks. The most minor event seems to quickly turn to violence.. immediately, especially black versus black. I can see why so many of these people are incarcerated. I’m willing to bet that many of the blacks that you personally deal with are either incarcerated or are on probation; of course, they are at the best of their behaviour. Come on Chris, these black people are not victims of history any more than many of us white people are victims of history due to the fact that our white ancestors were indentured slaves on this continent prior to revolutionary times. Re-read your Howard Zinn history in case you’ve either forgotton or cherry picked your information.

P.S. Black or Brown Immigrants absolutely did not build America any more than the Irish, Germans, French, British, Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, Lithuanians, Swiss, and Italians (to name but a few, and all white people) did.

To cite David addressing C.H.: “Your obsession with specifically black males seems to be clouding your otherwise brilliant observations about the American culture.” “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.” Your oblivious defense of white racism smacks of ignorance rather than wisdom gained through enlightenment.

What? Your former black slaves getting out of line and becoming a little too uppity for you down there in NC! Your comment sounds like you’ve just (4 Years ago) stumbled over a touch of your own inbred white racism. “I do not mean this as an insult; rather a mention of an obvious bias which you may or may not be aware of.”

You wrote, “I don’t make any apologies or excuses for any horrible thing. I simply find that it’s best to actually judge people based on their actions . . . ”

I have judged my own White ancestors and other Euro-colonial invasions around the world based on their actions. In looking at history, I see that a small portion of the world – Western Europe, has invaded every square inch of the world in the last 500 years for money and power. We invaded and stole this entire hemisphere. We invaded Africa, all of SE Asia, and we’ve been invading the Middle East since the middle ages. We held India for 150 years while we plundered that, along with Hong Kong for the same amount of time – because we failed when we tried to invade mainland China, the only place we failed. We succeeded in Australia, in New Zealand, in all the Caribbean and Polynesian islands which Europeans still own to this day.

Australian aboriginal populations were reduced by at least 94% from that invasion. I’ve read both fewer and more for the Maoris in New Zealand. Millions and millions of Africans were killed in mines, and on plantations in Africa, which also had every part invaded by some European – pull up Wiki for a list of who went where. Leopold of Belgium was called the “butcher of the Congo” for the depravity committed there.

We exist in continuous invasions, war, and plunder for money, and we have for centuries. Pick a spot on the globe that is anywhere except eastern Russia and mainland China, and I can tell you which western European nation invaded it. It’s everyday normal for us. It is estimated that western Europeans killed as many as 200 million people invading and providing slavery for the western hemisphere. That doesn’t include any of the rest of it, not even the rest of what we did in Africa.

Yes, I have some judgments about such behavior. And I totally get that most White people really believe that they are no worse than anyone else, in fact, desperately want to believe it, like you with your precious fact about Africans enslaving other Africans. You hear it from White folks all the time about how they are no worse than anyone else. But, and this is what matters, they think they are better and more advanced than other people, and that everyone else would have done the same if they could have. That’s self-deception if there ever was some, not to mention completely ahistorical.

I think that collectively we might be the worst humans who ever lived based on our organized nonstop murder and warfare for money that has brought the entire planet to the brink of extinction. I think that because of our actions that are inarguable. We may have saints among us, but all together we are the biggest problem the world has had outside of the asteroid and the Permian extinction events.

And, Matt, we aren’t going to stop. We are going to kill it all for money. You can go to the bank on it.

You should pull up a ‘true scale’ map of the Earth and have a good look at it. You will notice that western Europe is really small compared to everything else. I mean, really small.

Then, consider that humans from that small plot of land on the globe have been violent invaders on every other inch of the planet, no exceptions.

Then, I want to hear all about how you judge people based on their actions. I don’t believe you can do that. I’m certain your cultural, racist entitlement will screw up your judgment.

Now factor in the advantages of advanced technology and economic advantage for almost everything that you wanted to talk about. Then start looking at the regular attrocities that are occuring in places like Africa against Africans, in China against many different cultures, and even their own people. If you look hard enough for anything, you’re going to find it. How many nations did the Ottoman Empire take over? The Ottoman Empire was an empire that controlled much of Southeast Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa between the 14th and early 20th centuries.

How about the human sacrifices of the Mayans? I suppose they were all just local volunteers, right?

Yours is a skewed perspective that wants to pretend like the world is a fine place, and would be better if white people would just stop being a-holes to everyone. I’m sorry. No shortage of horrible atrocities committed across the globe, by all races, and all cultures, for all of human history. Seriously, you’re just as bad as the ones who did it in the name of bringing civility to different cultures by your ignoring of reality.

Here’s the takeaway: just because technology has compounded the issues of the human condition, and increased the ability of man to wreak havoc: it doesn’t make it any more or less prevalent in “white” people. It just makes one side have a superior advantage in their horrible endeavors. If you people were as focused on calling out horrible behavior instead of demonizing an entire group of people we might actually accomplish something, but I no longer expect much from many of you. I fully expect more of the same. Useless programmed dribble that is entirely unaware of the wide world and the many problems that people face besides just pointing at the biggest gang on the block and saying that’s the worst one. No shortage of other gangs that are torturing, raping and murdering their neighbors. Some are just far too sheltered, programmed and biased to see it.

Why is this topic always forced exclusively through the lens of race? Obviously that is part of the issue, but another reason gun owners “cling” to their guns is because they know the history of what happens to populations—in Turkey (Armenian Genocide) and in the Soviet Union a century ago, in 1930s Germany, in 1950s Cambodia, in 1970s Uganda, and many other places—after their government disarms them.

Of late, Australia has disarmed its citizens and now wears the world’s the heaviest jackboot with its Covid tyranny, where one can be forcibly removed from their home and sent to a quarantine camp simply for testing positive. (Look it up.) And now Canada joins the train. Watch closely how these governments hand down more and more nonsensical dictates in step with greater firearms restrictions.

You have an answer for everything, and I’ve already heard them all many times and also some that you don’t know. You keep telling yourself all that nonsense about how technology did it and how bad everyone else is. Which is weird, because if you’re a Euro-American, you’re on land where the worst ongoing genocide in human history occurred. It’s like hearing grandchildren of Nazis talk about how the victims of the Nazis “weren’t perfect” and similar intellectual and moral puke.

You know why we invade everyone all the time? Because we eat, sleep, breathe and live sociopathic entitlement in our culture. We think it’s normal, but that’s because we destroy everyone who does it differently.

Tupe, and now we are destroying ourselves. Sunday, Philadelphia South Street had 3 shot dead, 11 injured, now mere days later – Friday, Chattanooga club had 6 shot dead, 25 injured. Even though there were Good guys with guns( police patrol) already there, it was not enough or quick enough. Same as Uvalde school had lots of Good guys with guns already in place, it was still a disaster.

I am old, if it is my turn to die for American freedom for shootings then there’s nothing much to do but die; and hope family members fare safely.

But if I was young, body armored and guns must be worn. It looks like shootings are an unstoppable virus and are copycat shootings and they are trying to break records.

Blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s what I read in a lot of these comments.

It’s 6am. I’ve been up since 4:30, or maybe all night, because I toss and turn and worry and think of how many students will be on campus *today* because shooters go for numbers, and it’s been this way for weeks–my sleep, or lack thereof.

I like it when I know numbers will be low. 8th graders won’t be there because they promoted yesterday. And lots in the other grades aren’t showing since the Uvalde massacre. I hoped to test positive for covid so I wouldn’t have to go in anymore, but I have work to do, so I stopped testing and have just hoped I wouldn’t have to run. And leave people behind.

I say this stuff out loud. The children (and parents and other teachers) think it silently.

To those blah, blah, blahing – the public school system is short on subs. We’re an all volunteer force. You’re welcome to join us.

Crickets??? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Yeesh. What a fucking snoozer. Paragraph after paragraph of unsubstantiated gaslighting from a mediocre mind. Yawn.

Let me make it simple for you: as long as the entire crux of your argument is “White people are meanies and should happily allow themselves and their children to be the victims of subhuman behavior from violent blacks and perverts,” gun control will remain a hard “Nope.”

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