Violence is Here to Stay

--Lisa and Paul

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[Ranger has lots of meaty posts regarding recent events ... but as we're on the road for the holidays, posts will be meted out in a helter-skelter manner.]

Today, we enjoyed lunch with Ranger's friend Paul Longgrear and he shared his thoughts on the most recent shocking (sadly, no) school shooting.  What follows are Paul's written thoughts on the matter:

The evil, demonic-inspired massacre at the Newtown elementary school is a terrible thing, but we can prevent it from happening ever again.

Am I angry about all those dead kids? Yes, and I want a real solution.  The question is, do we want to prevent the next occurrence?  Do we want to protect innocent children and their caregivers?  Do we want them to come home unscathed at the day's end, or do we want to keep an assault rifle out of the hands of an evil nutcase?  The two are not commensurate; the first is almost 100% doable; the latter is not.  While the matter is juggled as a political hot potato, more lives hang in the balance.

In the 1950's and 60's Muslim terrorists targeted Israeli schools and children on field trips.  Yet it has been almost 40 years since the last school massacre at Ma'alot.  The Israeli's attacked the problem, not the origin of the problem. Israel saw the problem as endangered children, not assault rifles in the hands of their enemies.  

They fenced in their schools and stationed armed guards at the gates.  It is embarrassing that we do not have a politician to front this immediate solution.  The guards could be trained soldiers in civilian clothing.  It is not an impossible solution, and is one fairly quickly emplaced.


Pragmatism demands we decide: Do we love our political agenda more than we love the immediate preservation of life?  We can play politics with guns, or protect our children.  We have never been able to ban drugs, so why think we can ban anything?  You can criminalize it, but once people are dead, you cannot make them undead (no matter how many zombie films you watch.)

If you are in the first camp, brace yourself for the consequences of your inaction: decades of violence while "assault" weapons (possibly) work their way out of the system due to obsolescence.

If you want your children safe, petition you elected representatives and declare that you want their schools protected.

--Paul Longgrear, Col. USARMY (ret'd)

addendum:  Paul proposes stationing armed guards outside the school at the exterior entrances. He does not propose placing armed guards in school. LF
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Ranger would add:

We already have metal detectors at most schools, but they are worthless once someone breaches the detector.  We also have Officer Friendlies on the school campus, so the idea of police has already been integrated into the culture.

The next logical step (which does not encroach upon our civil rights but DOES protect our right to self preservation) would be to secure the entrances to schools with an armed guard, either at the entrance or at a remote post.  The logical personnel for this position would be retired military veterans or Homeland security personnel.

Take some HSA personnel out of the airports and put them on-task to do a necessary job -- protecting Americans from their own.  This is the real and present danger ... not frisking citizens who might be carrying more than 3 ounces of shampoo or handing out Ziploc baggies.

Zombie Apocalypse

I'm shocked! 
--Casablanca (1942) 

War is the spectacular and bloody projection
of our everyday life
--J. Krishnamurti 

When the fight was over, nothing was solved,
but nothing mattered. We all felt saved. 
--Fight Club (1999) 

Tell me with the rapture and the
reverent in the right - right.
You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright
light, feeling pretty psyched. 
--It's the End of the World as We Know It,
 R.E.M.

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The Global War on Terror and the predictable knee-jerk reaction to the recent grotesque elementary school shooting share similarities. Both events will have elicited emotional responses that resulted in national policy based upon a feeling of vulnerability and demand for a response.

The terrorist attacks of 9-11-01 birthed the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©), a self-proclaimed generational war the hoped-for success of which is based on no solid academic study.  The 9-11 Commission's report was an emotional cover-up for the failure.  The shouts to "Remember Newtown!" will lead the march to gun control laws, which will always be ineffective.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have thrown billions of dollars at an external threat, not an existential one as we were led to believe.  The real threat was containable and achievable without the declaration of war. So too addressing the tragedy of mass murder in America will require more than curtailing gun ownership rights.

"We Need to Protect Our Children!" is analogous to, "We must fight them there to keep us from fighting them here," or, "We must not let a mushroom cloud form over our cities." Effective policy cannot be based upon fear and irrational thought; emotionalism is not leadership.

We should trust our system of government and allow the Congress to do what they are constitutionally required to do, rejecting a unilateral Executive Order which would be created from the chaos of emotional reaction.

The problem is not high-capacity magazines or incorrectly defined assault rifles -- the problem is that our culture is death-oriented rather than life-affirming.  We have weak-minded members of society playing games disgorging blood splattering heroics, so valuable that developers stay at the top of the stock market weeks after new releases and parents line up in holiday queues to gift their young ones with this antithesis to the spirit of yuletide cheer.  We love to ask what guns should we use during the zombie apocalypse, funnin' with the idea of having power enough to shoot the undead. It would seem, by all the current renting of garments, that the Apocalypse is upon us.

Even our down time -- our relaxation mode -- is spent watching or engaging in ersatz gun violence in our commerce with various forms of media. Scientists now know that on some level, the brain assimilates ersatz actions (even gossip) as actual, lived events. We swing from angst over not being able to procure these simulacrums of violence to angst over the thought of being unable to protect our children and ourselves from the actuality of the thing.

In a monumental height of hypocrisy, those same actors in the violent films, or the makers of the violent games, then campaign for gun control.  They make millions portraying gun violence then wash themselves off with their morally superior attitudes, which amounts to some more acting. An example would be Angelina Jolie who portrays gun-toting action heroine Lara Croft, and then murdered journalist Daniel Pearl's wife -- she plays both victim and perpetrator. There is no coherence here in a mind which seeks to make understanding; it is schizophrenic, at best.

All the while we wallow in violent representations our proxies -- called soldiers and contractors -- are waging actual violence around the planet while we celebrate their handiwork, the bloody and broken bodies plastered on the front of our erstwhile dignified national news magazines.We celebrate the non-judicial murders executed at the behest of our President, while crying crocodile tears when the same President abhors violence, performing as a penitent at the site of the recent school murders.

This is hypocrisy in the highest. The United States has been shooting civilian children and innocent adults since September 2001. We are no strangers to extrajudicial, indiscriminate death.

We are comfortable, or at least impassive, about the deaths committed overseas in our name, yet we get incensed when this violence settles on our doorstep. Are the lives of Connecticut kids more valuable than those of kids in Afghanistan of Iraq, or any country that carries assault rifles given to them by U.S. foreign military aid programs?  When our Defense policy is based upon the concept of overwhelming and non-proportional violence, how can we say that gun violence is a discrete and perplexing phenomenon?

We love cage fighting, and boxing and every blood-lusty thing we can sink our teeth into, yet have the temerity to act shocked when our more vulnerable members of society act out their revenge fantasies.  Maybe we should be listening and talking to each other as opposed to getting lost down the rabbit hole of self-indulgent video pursuits.  We can claim to have thousands of Facebook and Twitter friends who consume our ersatz self, but who knows our soul?  Who can feel anothers fear and react accordingly?

We are victims of our gluttony, gullibility and fear, and guns merely facilitate the problem.