Arms against the government

**With every mass shooting we learn that the shooters have arsenals of weapons that they acquired under the Second Amendment:

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. - See more at: http://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment2.html#sthash.0SbjNXB5.dpuf

How anyone could read that amendment and justify the accumulation of many weapons requires such an extensive stretch of interpretation that's it's ludicrous. That justification is often cloaked in the assertion that if ordinary citizens aren't allowed to have guns then the "State" would exert oppressive power and eliminate the freedom of citizens. So granting people the right to bear arms would allow them to band together and form "militias," presumably to engage in military combat against an invader. At first glance, it might seem reasonable, especially considering the times during which those words were drafted into law. "Militias," groups of citizens who banded together for defense, were common, especially during the time of the American Revolution against the occupying British. But the world has changed so radically since then that every concept stated in that amendment is obsolete.

Lawyers and scholars may argue the parsing of that brief statement but what strikes me is that the technology of weaponry has developed so much that the idea of defending against an encroaching government through military force is completely unrealistic. How many guns would it take to keep an army, any modern army, from completely overrunning a "people's militia?" More than could be procured from all the gun shows and stores in the country. Witness the ridiculous show of force in Ferguson,

where a few pieces of surplus military equipment were brought out to intimidate the citizenry. It's clear that if a government wanted to attack any group of citizens, it could do it almost instantly. A citizen "militia" is a fantasy that lives only in the imaginations of paranoid people who use it to rationalize the comfort they receive from their collections of weapons.

We have had misguided amendments in the past, most recently the Eighteenth Amendment, or "Prohibition." Thirteen years after its enactment, when wiser heads prevailed, the Twenty First amendment repealed it. Now it's long past time for the antiquated Second Amendment to be repealed, perhaps with a new amendment that specifies exactly who can possess appropriate weapons for personal self defense if they so choose. However such an amendment is phrased it needs to recognize the speciousness of militias in today's world. Perhaps then meaningful legislation to limit the proliferation of guns will ensue and America will join the rest of the world in reducing and eliminating the plague of mass shootings.

Heres a good statement of the issue: http://crooksandliars.com/2015/10/what-if-second-amendment-didnt-exist

The folly of prayer

**Whenever there's a high-profile tragedy, especially if it involves kids and guns, there are two voices that rise to the top of the clamor. The gun advocates. The prayer advocates. Many of my friends and family are in the latter category so I'm reticent to be more public with my opinions about that silly and useless practice. But here, in the safe confines of blogscurity, I can rant all I want and only those die-hards may know.

I practiced prayer for over 35 years. Not just prayed but advocated it, taught it, explained it, actually believed it myself. True, my brand of prayer was the Christian Science variety, which has a veneer of intellectuality about it. "Scientific prayer" was seen as not an appeal directly to a deity but as a way to neutralize "erroneous beliefs" in the minds of those who are experiencing or witnessing bad things. The underlying assumption is that everything in existence is in good harmony everywhere and that disharmony is the perceptual result of conclusions that assume the possibility of disharmony. The standard scapegoat is "matter," or that which the senses perceive. In other words, the physical world – the constituents of everything from the sub-atomic to the astronomical realms. Furthermore, these illusory items are considered to be only the phantasmagoric projections of something called "mortal mind," or a mental state so limited that the possibility of evil, or "error," can seem to exist. In other words, you'd see everything as perfectly good and happy if it weren't for your mental state, which you inherited from the false beliefs that your parents gave you by causing you to be conceived and born in the first place. A loser from the beginning, you have no hope except through the use of "scientific prayer." Such prayer, by focusing on the concepts of goodness, benevolence and perfection that refer to the "real" spiritual world you can break the spell of illusion that makes you believe that somebody shot a lot of kids in an elementary school. You will not only feel better, but the effect of this "prayer" can ripple out and help sway the receptive minds of everyone so that they will in turn believe in evil less and feel better and – eventually in some vague future – all false belief will be corrected and the world will appear in its naturally perfect state. Which, by the way, is also the definition of heaven.

Yes, it's convoluted and tautological and unverifiable –in other words, not really as "scientific" as it claims to be. But because it comes dressed in intellectuality, it is believed in by those who consider the kind of prayer everyone else practices to be plebeian . Also, because it lets the pray-er feel better and often has a placebo effect. Countless "testimonies" of "healing" are based on this gut feeling that because the pray-er did the right thing by thinking the right thought then a bad situation was "healed." Oh, and if an individual victim of evil isn't spiritual enough to do it for themselves, they can hire someone else, a "practitioner," to do it for them and in some way nudge their mentality in the right direction. That's what I used to do, and teach, and preach about. And which for the past ten or so years have come to know is pure bullshit.

This doesn't mitigate the folly of prayer as the hoi polloi views it. Theirs is a much simpler, and probably more natural response to evil. It's based on the power structure in families. Kids learn that there are people out there who have the power to do them good or do them harm. Parents, at first. It's natural for a kid to run to a parent for comfort and healing when bad things happen, and that's because parents usually feel compassion and obligation to take care of their kids. As adults, many still cling to the habit, but instead of their too obviously fallible and undependable parents (and other adults) they run to a Super Parent figure, the conventional "God." But it's still folly. When people call for prayer at times of ghastly tragedy, like Sandy Hook, what are they actually expecting? That their divine friend will suddenly change the situation so that it didn't really happen (a la Christian Science)? Probably not. That their Big Friend will stop what It's doing and run over to the "souls" of the kids killed and make them feel better (assuming they exist in a state where they still have conscious feelings) or save them from Big Friend's nemesis, the Devil)? Probably some do. That their Big Friend, who didn't or couldn't stop the tragedy in the first place will now rush into the feelings of everyone else grieved by the event and make them feel better? Probably many.

Folly. All folly.

Instead of going into a dreamy state of wishing, people should get off their knees and do something practical. Like raise hell with legislators and stop the gun lobby's warping of the 2nd amendment to allow practically untrammeled commerce in the sale of weapons (we don't need citizens with assault rifles protecting us against a government with drones and cluster bombs and all sorts of mayhem-producing products from that same industry.) An interesting story surfaced recently where a madman in China broke into an elementary school and wounded a number of children with a knife. Guns are illegal in China. And the kids were WOUNDED and will recover. Not quickly KILLED en masse by a nut with guns made available by a warping of the 2nd amendment by a huge industry that profits from the mass marketing of weapons.

So, stop with the pious folly and realize we don’t live in a perfect world and probably never will. DO stuff, not just believe stuff.

Guns & Revolution

** The NRA and its apologists claim that the Second Amendment has to do with citizens having weapons to fight an oppressive government. But look at what is happening in the Middle East these days. The rebellions aren't armed conflicts - well, the rebels aren't armed anyway.

In order for citizen uprisings to have a chance at armed conflict they have to be as well equipped as the governments they are trying to combat. But this is never the case. Governments always have more and better guns, more and better-trained troops, better intelligence, etc. Even with a roomful of assault rifles, Mr. Joe Rebel will be no match against even one military tank, much less against one accompanied by a platoon of soldiers, helicopters, satellite communications and observations systems and the whole panoply of stuff we have empowered the government to own and operate on our behalf. After all, we want the most and the best armaments. So if, as Second Amendment evangelists claim, the Constitution allows the citizenry, as individuals, to be armed, it has set them up to be losers in any encounter with the government in power.

That's not the kind of thinking that imbues most of the rest of the constitution. Instead, if the Second Amendment is about local militias, as it clearly states, then it would seem to be providing for states, as governing entities, to defend themselves against small uprisings - maybe by people like today's gun hoarders. It's about states, not individuals. Individuals may be allowed to be armed, but to protect themselves against other individuals, not massed attacks such as would be part of a government's oppression.

In the Middle East, Tunisia and Egypt and Yemen so far, it is not "Second Amendment Remedies" that are working. It's the UNarmed populace taking to the streets, with the aid of the social media.

Face it, people want guns because they're afraid of other people with guns - but only a few people, not whole armies. Their Constitutional arguments don't really address this basic fear.