Teach your parents well,
Their children’s hell
Will slowly go by
And freed them on your dreams
— Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, “Teach Your Children,” from their 1970 album “Deja Vu”
As U.S. bombs and gunfire continue to fall on the Middle East, Southwest Asia, many nations in Africa and across much of the third world, corporate media remind us that Halloween is just ahead, and after that, the “holiday season,” so we should ignore anything but our primary purpose as consumers, to buy stuff, throw it away and replace it with new stuff.
This consumer job makes the rich richer, which is what America is primarily about. After all, the rich own most of the elections, mass media, and investments. This includes shares of stock in weapons, the primary reason we make “defense” arms, so the bountiful wars will go on as long as they are profitable, and little is ever done about domestic gun violence, the worst in the industrialized world.
It doesn’t really matter how our wars are waged– with American troops, proxy troops, or sanctions which often kill thousands. These are waged against nations that do not cooperate with Wall Street objectives. They are punished for denying the lion’s share of their GNP to the fat cats who see the planet as their private plantation, although accompanying lies about concern for imposing freedom and democracy are fabricated with which to pacify ignorant onlookers.
And so, the U.N. told us, over 500,000 Iraqi children under age five died because of the sanctions pushed mainly by Presidents Bush and Clinton. Iraqi children don’t matter to The Empire. We know that because the ice cold Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, said of these deaths, “We think it was worth it.”
We are usually told when children are bombed by US forces that they are “collateral damage,” but sometimes they are targeted, like when President Obama murdered 16 year old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.
There is always a pretense in corporate media that one cannot know, when dropping bombs into a residential neighborhood, that children will likely be killed. They always report that the deaths of children are accidental, if indeed there is any mention of child casualties at all.
Killing at home
Domestically it is done with psychopaths who enjoy shooting children in our schools, using weapons made readily available to said psychopaths from sea to shining sea. Like the gunman who killed twenty small children and six teachers at Sandy Hook elementary school after killing his mother. Sometimes the killers are children themselves, as at the Columbine High School massacre.
Ten thousand American small children and teens are killed by guns in the USA each year.
But the rich make money from the gun sales, and their own children are protected in private schools. Some of them may, in fact, attend schools where there are tight gun laws, such as Switzerland, and after all, our do-nothing-about-it government works for the rich, who rent our elections and profit from privatized government activities.
Little is ever done after domestic massacres to prevent future occurrences. Although, in many of them, the gunman has weapons with large clips of ammunition necessary to kill large numbers of people, no law is ever enacted to restrict the size of ammo clips.
No laws about universal registration are enacted, identifying dangerous people in a national data base and requiring that nationally, all gun sellers do not put guns in the hands of such people. This would hurt sales.
We are often told by corporate media representatives that we can do nothing because of the “powerful” National Rifle Association (NRA), but this is a canard. The NRA inflates its membership, pretending that it has 4.5 million members when it likely has less than 2 million. If all of its members are registered voters and all of them vote, it has about 1% of the American vote.
Both Sides
The massacres continue largely because corporate media present “both sides” of the argument as though this is good journalism, making it all sound sane to the masses and pacifying them into seeing it all as normal, merely protecting Second Amendment rights.
Although corporate media like to pretend that there are two sides to every argument when it helps to perpetuate the propaganda, at times only one view is acceptable, and at other times several views might be given.
For example, to cut off the public interest side of political debate, corporate media say they are “allowing both sides” by giving Democrats and Republicans a platform. These two parties represent one side, corporate greed at any cost to the public interest. Never is the Green Party side, the public interest side, allowed to be heard by them.
But when corporate media do a news report on a child molester, they allow condemnation, but do not (obviously) allow the child molester to rant about how pretty the little girl was, and how she flirted with him and tempted him.
So the corporate media claim that “both sides” is always provided or necessary is a canard employed when useful for propaganda purposes. They “balance” the gun control debate with those supporting the right of any psychopath to buy guns and shoot as many children as they desire to shoot.
Solution: more guns
Watching several “news” programs on CNN or other major TV news networks over the past week (where most Americans get their news) since the massacre in the Oregon school, one gets from the pro-gun lobby (their viewpoint is always presented as a rational “balance” in giving “both sides”) that what is needed as a solution to America’s obsession with school massacres is more guns. If more people had guns, they say, the psychopaths would be stopped.
Never though, is this “solution” pointed out in corporate media to be completely ridiculous as I will demonstrate, following.
To refute it, one must have a particular circumstance with which to show an example. I will use schools, as the place of the shooting, (although, of course, we have massacres everywhere in the Land of the Free), and call the armed person who is supposed to stop a mass murder simply “The Guard.” The Guard is armed with a gun, like a police officer, but without the training.
Where would The Guard be sitting when the school massacre began? In a building on the campus? Which building? After The Guard heard the gunfire and ran to the building where the shooter was, how many children would be found dead?
Let’s say we put “A Guard” in every building. Would A Guard be in the particular classroom where the shooting began, when it began? Or would The Guard simply arrive on the scene after all the children had been killed?
Or we could say A Guard is placed in every classroom in every school in the land. When the shooter came into the room, how would The Guard know this was a shooter? Ostensibly, the shooter would know there was A Guard, and shoot The Guard first, then proceed to gun down children.
But what if The Guard sat there all day with gun cocked and pointed at the door, finger gently squeezing the trigger? Would The Guard know the next person to enter the room was dangerous? I’m thinking a shooter, pistol held behind his back, could walk in and shoot The Guard before The Guard knew what was happening.
These shooters are psychopaths, not subject to reason. They do not fear guns, in fact, they often shoot themselves in a suicidal act after they shoot their victims.
Conclusion
This argument for more guns is as nonsensical as the claim that nothing can be done about the shootings in the USA. No other country has this problem at this magnitude. It is obvious that laws must be passed to require registration so that psychopaths may be screened, and certain types of weapons made only for killing large numbers of people, such as assault rifles, should be banned, together with large ammunition clips.
This goes on because the primary function of the USA is making the rich richer, at any cost. It’s okay to kill children in wars abroad, and it’s okay to kill children domestically, as long as this doesn’t impact on the rich, who are special under American capitalism, so may profit from the slaughter of other people’s children, as they do.
It would be easy for corporate media to make this understood, if they weren’t the submissive butt-kissers they are, serving the interests of the wealthy and corporations at any cost to the public interest. Nothing makes it clearer who our government works for than its inability to stop the out-of-control bombing of schools abroad and curtail the increasing slaughters in schools here.
If the children of the super rich were at risk, you can bet something would be done about it, but most of the victims here and abroad are poor and working class. If profits from weapons were denied to the wealthy, they and the companies making guns would quit funding the National Rifle Association and contributing to the political campaigns of those who will not act to protect children.
This week, after Somalia ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, the USA remains as the only member nation of the U.N. not to join the convention. Is it any surprise that such a government lacks concern for the rights of children, when through its inaction, it allows so many children to die?
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