Guns

I heard an interesting NPR segment yesterday about guns in Mexico. Some citizens of Mexico are resorting to buying illegal guns to protect themselves against the illegal guns of the drug cartels. Mexico strictly regulates gun sales through its armed forces. Mexicans have historically chosen anarchy over central government participation and reform.

Gun scarcity is not what I consider a problem. The weapons industry has been a more influential mover of international politics than freedom or democracy. National governments make money from selling weapons. It is ballistic colonialism.

Americans know the effects of the God-Gun-Greed trinity, which has ruled for most of the last decade. Guns are key to the recession we now experience. Two over-leveraged wars have turned the government into a deadbeat mortgage holder, spending too much on violence and munitions, and saving too little for its own population's education and health. The weapons moguls are laughing all the way to the bank. 

Massacres all over the world are profitable for weapons manufacturers. A gun has no ethics, no politics, no morals. It has no lust for democracy. It can be used to suppress a popular uprising as easily as fuel one. It can kill and innocent as well as a tyrant. Its intrinsic potential for evil is its capacity to kill easily, anonymously and from a distance.

A choice to turn to guns to deal with fear is a choice of violence. Peace cannot come from violence. An armed stand-off is not peace. It is simply a temporary cease-fire. Those who equate freedom with guns equate freedom with violence. Their concept of freedom is not peaceful. Their concept of freedom is a clinging to old ways of fear and violence. Disarmament is the only true way to nonviolence and peace.