Tag Archives: Gun culture

Fear created by the media to make profits

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Someone asked: “It’s weird that people have to stop feeling safe anymore.”

The media drives that. “If it bleeds, it leads” has always been their mantra. it gives an impression of a world that in a state of violence. That’s actually not true for almost all people almost all of the time.

The media also requires people to keep coming back, because they are funded by advertising. Telling happy stories does not do that, whereas keeping readers in a perpetual state of anxiety and fear does. Hence all the fear-mongering they produce.

And now we can have videos of violence and pictures of bleeding women and blown-up babies and dismembered perpetrators, that has made it all much worse for us. We did not evolve to be constantly bombarded with images of dismembered people, but as social animals living in family groups working together collaboratively.

We are being conditioned to fear. And it is totally unrealistic compared to the statistical reality.

For example, more Americans get shot by other Americans in America every few months than all the Americans ever killed by terrorism by any method in the entire world ever put together. So what is the real threat – terrorists or other Americans with guns?

Ducks, planes, horses, teacups and tanks

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You must have been on a fairground merry-go-round as a child.  Was it a traditional carousel with horses that go up and down as it goes round?  Or a toddlers’ one with teacups?  Maybe it was zoo-themed with lions and zebras and elephants?  Emergency service vehicles such as police cars and fire engines?  Trains are quite common, such as a Thomas the Tank Engine themed ride.

Talking of tanks, how about this?

Image taken from Children in Peace site https://www.childrenofpeace.org.uk/news/

The campaigning body ForcesWatch worries about the militarisation of society in the UK, with lengthy arguments as to why it is not right to encourage guns as playthings.

But even they have not got started on the concept of toddlers in tanks.

UPDATE:

I did email Children of Peace and ask them via their contact form what that image was supposed to be.  I got no response.  Within a few hours they had changed the image on the news page.  I presume they have realised there are links to it and removed it from the media section of their site – hence it appears broken above.  This was the image:

This is the email I sent on 26th Jan 2020, as at 3rd Feb 2020 I have had no reply:

——– Forwarded Message ——–
Subject: A query regarding an image on your site
Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2020 17:02:26 +0000
From: Simon Reed
To: contact@childrenofpeace.org.uk

 

Can you tell me what is going on in this picture?

I am referring to the headline photo for the news story “/A new group joins us. The Palestinian group SHAMS joins us as an affiliate./”

It appears to be small children on a merry-go-round of tanks. It looks like one of the most appalling images of child military indoctrination I’ve ever seen.

What is the place and who are the children?

 

American gun jokes

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Thank you America, for just creating a whole new genre of jokes. The rest of the world can now go from crying for you, as we were when the children were marching in protest against guns, to laughing at you.
– – – – –
Q. What do you call a blonde who doesn’t know how to use a gun?
A. An American. Probably a Cop. In a classroom.
– – – – –
An American suspects her boyfriend of cheating on her. She goes to his apartment and finds him in the arms of a redhead. She takes out her gun and points it at her own head.
 
The boyfriend yells, “No, honey, don’t do it.”
 
“Shut up,” she says. “You’re next.”
– – – – –
Q. Where do Americans learn how guns work?
A. In school. Briefly.
– – – – –
Q. Why did the blonde take a gun to the wedding?
A. She was told to hold up the bride’s train.
Q. Why did the American woman take her gun to the wedding?
A. She was American.
– – – – –
Q. What do you can an American with a gun?
A. A danger to themselves.
– – – – –
The NRA has declared today the first annual Gun Appreciation Day. So don’t forget to set your clock back 200 years.
– – – – –
Thousands of dead fish have washed up on the coast of South Carolina. The NRA said that this wouldn’t have happened if those fish had guns.
– – – – –
Try putting a teacher in every gun shop.
– – – – –
Q. How many NRA spokesmen does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. More guns.
– – – – –
The one country in the world where even the gun-trained people are too stupid to own a gun, is the one country in the world where everyone is stupid enough to own a gun.

The USA is happy with itself as it is: frightened

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Having wasted most of the weekend online arguing with pro-gun people in the USA, I have given up.  I have tried this before and keep coming to the same conclusion: they are happy as they are.

They believe the level of violence and gun-related deaths is quite low compared to other causes of death, and so is quite acceptable.

They believe there is a huge threat to society waiting to get them and, unless there is a ready civilian militia armed to a military standard, it could get them at any time.  They need to be ready.

They believe that people being armed is why their society is so peaceful, that it is only unarmed people that are victims of crime, and it is their own fault for not being armed.

It is a belief system.  Facts and statistics are immaterial and disregarded.  You cannot argue using logic against a belief system.

Essentially what they have developed is a Gun Faith.  Guns are worshipped, adored, protected by the constitution and idolised.  ‘Idolised’ being the operative word.  Some people carry a St Christopher, some wear a cross, some carry a picture of Mary and some wear a birthstone crystal.  In the USA people carry a gun for the same reason: faith it will protect them.  Despite the factual evidence to the contrary.

A funny thing about religions is how people take it to extremes to prove their faith: growing a couple of locks of hair really long, totally covering their women, refusing to shave.  In the USA Gun Faith the extremists carry semi-automatic rifles simply as symbols of devotion.  The NRA is the church of this religion.  I get all that now.

That’s why people have started referring to the pro-gun lobby online as The American Taliban.

Would an anti-apartheid style campaign work regarding guns?

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I’ve just been cheerfully posting this in various groups’ pages on FaceBook:

Idea: someone maintain a site of what international companies support the NRA so those of us in the rest of the world can boycott them in our countries.
We’re sick of this insane gun mentality too – what starts in America usually spreads elsewhere and the insane gun-worship mentality needs to stop.
So let’s start an international NRA boycott campaign like the anti-apartheid campaign!
We just need to know who to boycott, starting with any of this lot with overseas divisions:

Those companies are, of course, all arms manufacturers or retailers.  Yes, the NRA really is the marketing and political arm of the arms industry.

The Kalashnikov assault rifle as “a sacred weapon”

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I can understand why the Russians want statues to The Great Patriotic War, fought for survival against a treacherous Nazi Germany that was hugely important in the eventual end of World War 2 for the allies.

I can also understand the desire to recognise the tools of this victory, such as the remarkably effective T-34 medium tank.

But a statue to the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle seems a bit odd.  Firstly, because it was produced after WW2, but especially because of its history since then for unlicensed production, illicit black market trade and as the weapon of choice for revolutionaries, terrorists, drug cartels, pirates and criminals.  It made the BBC news because the statue’s designer put the wrong parts diagram on a plate on the statue.

What the BBC did not say was the statue is unpopular locally and the unveiling of the statue to the AK47’s inventor resulted in the arrest of the sole protestor,  link, proclaiming “a creator of weapons is a creator of death”.

But I am puzzled by the words of Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin of the Russian Orthodox Church who describes it as “a sacred weapon”.  What a strange Christian.  But then, he also endorses female genital mutilation, so his opinion is not that worthwhile.

Incidentally, the roughly estimated 100 million genuine and copied AK-47s in the world are responsible for about a quarter of a million killings every year.

Wars cause terrorism and make people rich

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In a discussion about removing civil liberties to combat terrorism, I liked this comment:

 

If we did not openly and actively sponsor fanatics waging civil wars on the Russian periphery and in the Middle East for the last 20 years the AK47s (actually, most of them are AK72 nowadays) would not have been there to be sold in the first place.

.. and nobody would have made a bean off arms deals.

Wars are simply there to convert tax money into private income without too many questions asked – profit is the cause of war. The rest is IMHO just camouflage and fluff to hide the bigger picture.

 

Bullet tracing – tracer bullets

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There’s an interesting comment by DLee4144 on the Jeff Danziger cartoon of 18th December 2012:

It’s totally true that guns don’t kill people, or at least rarely – about the only way you can kill someone with a gun is to beat them to death with it.

There is no point in outlawing guns.  They are out there, there are millions, they are made of metal and will last for a thousand years if they are kept oiled.  Failing that, I could find materials in my basement that would produce a workable gun, and it doesn’t take much knowledge of the subject to figure out how to do it.

BULLETS on the other hand, are time consuming to make and require specific equipment.  Production of enough to do serious damage would require planning and patience that are not characteristic of those who shoot up elementary schools.  And, working on such a project might attract the attention of someone sane.

Bullets can be individually stamped, and their sale can be registered and entered into a computer base.  They can be tracked from production to use, so that every bullet can be traced back to the person who purchased it.  This way, a guy who wants to buy a couple boxes of bullets to go shoot deer, or the woman who wants a box to keep with the gun in her bedside drawer, won’t set off any warning bells.  But the guy who is buying an arsenal will attract attention before he finds a more lethal way to do it.

Now there’s an interesting idea: unique identification of bullets.  That would be inconvenient for all sorts of gun-related bad behaviour.  Including mercenary activity.