The old economic arguments are all about guns and butter, back when wars always spurred the economy with their spending.  I am not an economist, just an observer of technology, its advancement, and society as a whole (I do not limit myself to American society only, but the entire world).

 

I received one of those e-mails with some “awful truth” that I just had to read and pass on.  The carefully prepared PowerPoint presentation, probably from the NRA, pointed out the importance of citizen gun ownership, while offering unflattering caricatures of president Obama and Hillary Clinton as people who were ignorant of the facts.  The primary argument was that “gun control” was a bad thing and they proved it by references to the Constitution, quotes from notable people, including the founding fathers, and the history of atrocities that happened to people who were in countries where there was “gun control.”  Among the several historical cases mentioned was the Holocaust, where German gun control had disarmed the Jewish people and the reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge where gun-control had disarmed the people and led to their slaughter.  Noticeably not mentioned was the slaughter during the Civil War and the slaughter of theTutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda because it was done by machetes and not by guns.

 

Not only were the historical references carefully selected, I have not done any research to check their veracity, but they are very suspect, like most of the half-truths presented in so-called facts in other presentations like this that I've seen.  These strict constitutional constructionists always go back to a literal interpretation of the Constitution and the Second Amendment written in 1789 and enacted in 1791.  In those days, as Edward Phillips has pointed out, the only army that the colonists had was militia drawn from the people (similar to the draft or a volunteer army), and the only armaments that they had were their hunting muskets and pistols.  All of these were smoothbore and had to be hand loaded before firing, taking about four minutes before being able to fire again.  Because these muskets did not have any rifling, they were generally quite inaccurate over 25 yards.  I'm sure the writers of the First Amendment would be shocked at the firepower that people have in their homes today with exploding and armor piercing bullets contained in thirty shot magazines rapidly fired in a few seconds.

 

After the Civil War, when guns had rifling for accuracy and multiple bullet magazines for rapid shooting, gun toting “citizens” quickly killed off or corralled all the Native Americans and nearly wiped out the buffalo on the open range.  After that, landowners with guns waged wars with immigrants over the land.  The sixgun became, “the equalizer.”  A puny young boy who happened to be a good shot brutally killed a lot of people and, became legend as Billy the Kid.  Whenever there was a dispute or if someone wanted to take something they didn't own, they pulled out a pistol and shot––frontier justice.  If we look at the glorification of the Old West, it's mostly about outlaws wildly using their pistols to gain fame.  People have a morbid fascination for violence going back to the Circus in Rome.  Little has been written about the good folks who brought law and order to the West without using guns.  These people far outnumbered the violent ones we so honor with legions of stories.  Good folks are too boring.

 

As Edward Phillips has so accurately researched and presented, the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is rapidly growing.  Phillips warns of the dire circumstances that would occur if this disparity continues.  Those in favor of “free markets” and unregulated “capitalism,” a God-given American right, seem to fail to understand what happened when Reagan said that everyone would be better off if everything was deregulated and the wealth would “trickle down to the people doing the work.”  This was very similar to the statement that Marie Antoinette said when she learned that the French people had no bread.  She declared that there was no problem because they could, “eat cake.”  We all know the results of that statement.  While the French aristocrats had muskets and the French army at the king's command, the people rose up with pitchforks and brought the aristocrats down in the French Revolution.

 

A time similar to today occurred during the 1930s, only it was much worse.  Most of the country was rural and had guns for hunting and protection because law enforcement wasn't as good as it is today and there were people in this country of certain ethnic backgrounds who were very abused as well as poor.  During that period, again with our propensity to admire violence, many of the heroes were people like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde because they used guns to “steal from the rich and give to the poor.”  What most people today don't remember, is that many people set off on “get rich quick schemes” to overcome their poverty.  Prize fighting and betting on prize fighting and the numbers game was big time.  People even went so far as to enter dance marathons for the money like portrayed in, “They Shoot Horses Don't They?”

 

Today we see people buying lottery tickets, trying out to be a sports star, an American Idol, or get on a reality show, engaging in all kinds of “get rich quick schemes,” mostly losing their shirts in the process.  During the good times, we became a consumer society, and it's very hard for us to turn off the consumption and save.  However, as many of the middle class has learned, like in the Great Depression, saving money through owning a property like a home or with a savings account like an IRA has failed many.  The economy has stripped these assets of their value and placed the middle class in poverty in retirement.

 

Unemployment is far worse than reported.  Many have given up and are no longer counted.  Grade inflation and watering down of a college education has created a huge number of highly educated, but under skilled, people that have always been in the middle of society.  In my father's day, they could get a job at a factory, learn a basic factory skill, and make a relatively good living.  Today, only the best college students and those with special skills that are not college education at all, but advanced training like medical skills and Internet programming, have a chance at a good, high paying job.  McDonald's now requires its cashier applicants to have a college education and one year of experience.  Because the McDonald's counter computers have pictures indicating various purchases, cashiers do not even have to know arithmetic.  College-educated people in these very low-paying service jobs feel very unfulfilled and unappreciated for all the money they spent on school.  Corporations have conveniently moved all of those middle range jobs overseas where they don't have to pay benefits and job rates are very low.  Whole generations of young people are being disenfranchised in the land of the free, home of the brave.

 

The NRA wants everyone to own guns and to be educated in how to use them.  As the pressure that Edward Phillips predicts when the rich become so rich and the rest of us become so poor that we can't get out of debt and our standard of living decreases to the point of starvation, the poor will rise up, just like they did in France in 1789, and take what the rich have.  You can call it anarchy if you want, but the action will probably be the result of organized behavior like our founding fathers did in 1776, and both the North and South did in 1860.  The war will be bloody because there are so many guns in the hands of everyone––especially the disenfranchised.  The rich stand no chance even if they passed laws to confiscate all the guns of the poor because the poor will outnumber the rich by such a majority that the rich will fall even if the poor have to use switchblades and baseball bats climbing over the bodies of the fallen to get at their tormentors.

 

Of course, the rich could flee to their hideaways in other parts of the world, but by that time, the whole world will be involved and there will be no safe hiding place, anywhere, for the rich to escape what they have done to the people.  Inequality will be corrected, one way or the other.  I prefer that wealth redistribution is done by nonviolent protest and law, and not done by violence as has happened so many times in the past.  By idolizing violence and making sure that everyone in the country is armed way beyond any need for protection, we are setting ourselves up for a bloody civil war in the near future.  Perhaps nearer than we would like.

 

Copyright 2013 © Ronald W. Hull