Aquarian Weekly 4/5/00
REALITY CHECK

GUNS IN AMERICA:
POP GOES HISTORY

“And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand.”
- Genesis 4:11

Western civilization uses a tome known as the Holy Bible to define its structure. This collection of tales, truths, and mayhem is well known for a great deal of events, not the least of which is murder. The first one takes place in the pages of Genesis where a man by the name of Cain rubs out his brother Abel. Nowhere in the telling does a gun come into play.

However, some 4,000 or so years later the job can be done much quicker with the use of one. And now that humans of all ages have taken to party with such tools of death in the land of the free and home of the brave, it has come to the attention of the courts and one prominent gun manufacturer that something radical must be done.

Chagrin of the National Rifle Association and its intellectually stunted mouth pieces aside, a hellfire of backlash led to Smith & Wesson being the first manufacturer of firearms to agree to child safety locks. This is considered a controversial act of insurrection and surrender, and the kind of shock and debate resulting from it, speaks to humanity’s inability to admit that it is the only species on earth that massacres its own at the drop of a hat.

This is, after all, a country built on two key elements; anger and violence. In fairness to the birth of the United States of America, most republics are born this way. Citizens of Europe migrated here to escape law, taxes, and the status quo. When the status quo leaned hard, the vagabond infantry beat them back with the time honored tradition of savage warfare. When the King’s Army was defeated, a new element crept in: fear.

Thus explaining why the same guns that produced freedom became an integral part of holding on to it.

So in 1787, four years after the last British soldier staggered back to the mother country, the sweaty few intellectual land barons and statesmen crowded into a room in Philadelphia and made damn sure no one would take those precious freedom tools away. Three years later the Constitution of the United States included a 2nd amendment to Thomas Jefferson’s document: “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.”

It stated loud, but not so clear. For 15 years later in his sixth annual presidential message, its author issued another rather cryptic statement: "The criminal attempts of private individuals to decide for their country the question of peace or war, by commencing active and unauthorized hostilities, should be promptly and efficaciously suppressed."

You see, from a place of authority the hunter becomes the hunted, and sparing no pun, this is where the tale gets sticky.

Jefferson was afraid of the people he governed. Why wouldn’t he be? He handed them a document of wild freedom built on the backs of loonies and drunks who ran ragged from the tightly wound culture of England to a whooping barn-dance of ambiguous laws. Then he turned around and bought a huge chunk of land from the French at dirt cheap, where this crazed musket-toting gaggle set up shop and began murdering one another for as little as ten feet of land.

There was a manic migration due west, replete with the slaughtering of anyone sporting darker skin, a bloody Civil War over the enslaved imports with even darker skin, assassinations, coups, riots, demented children picking off tourists from clock towers, the Black Panthers, the Hell’s Angels, Bernard Goetz, Mark David Chapman, Waco dissidents, and exploding federal buildings. Then, at the end of what was deemed the American century, two lost mutants with daddy’s uzi’s and an Internet arsenal walked into school and laid down some misery.

Throughout the madness the federal government has added over 20,000 gun laws to its books. In most cases they were innocuous, based solely on the fact that individual states are responsible for enacting them, even in the most dire situations. This has made those in charge a mite worried. Jefferson’s reticence not withstanding, the amount of violence in the American heart has increased with nauseating speed.

Somewhere in the midst of this sordid history arose the NRA, formed ostensibly to “provide firearms training and encourage interest in the shooting sports.” Incorporated in 1871, and now grown to over three million, it is the haven for those clinging to the notion that as long as people have a blood lust and an ounce of that ol’ “fear and anger” there will be a buck to be made on its most effective tool. And as long as those bucks stay more than solvent, there will be political agenda to formulate.

Like most organizations, the NRA is a joke. The government has enough trouble delivering the mail. Neither has what it takes to exorcise Cain’s demon. That would be our job.

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