America’s Twisted Notion of Freedom

In America, freedomnow means the right to inflict harm on the community, whether its the freedom of Wall Street bankers to gamble recklessly, the freedom of the rich to shut factories and off-shore jobs or the freedom to swagger around with deadly weapons. That freedom has struck again in Colorado, writes Lawrence Davidson.

By Lawrence Davidson

Well here we go again. Late in the evening of July 20, a masked gunman entered a Colorado movie theater playing the new Batman movie and opened fire killing at least 12 people and wounding 50. The gunman was not a large anthropomorphized bat but rather a young white male, and he was armed with a rifle, a shotgun and two handguns all of which he had legally obtained.

This is nothing new in the Land Of The Free. Among the more notable victims of the nations love affair with deadly weapons have been Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan (wounded) and, of course, John Lennon.

College photo of James Holmes, 24, who allegedly opened fire during a screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" at an Aurora, Colorado, theater early Friday, killing 12 people.

Then there are the recent (and periodically ongoing) mass murders among the population at large: the Columbine High School shootings, the Beltway sniper incidents, the Virginia Tech massacre, and the 2011 Tucson killings. To this can be added the daily shootings that occur in every city in the country. Taking the representative year of 2007, there were 31,224 deaths from gunshots with 17,352 of them (56 percent) being suicides. The numbers have, generally, been going up.

Those who stand against tightening up the nations presently useless gun laws have a variety of arguments most of which are in good part delusional. Thus:

1. EXCUSE NUMBER ONE Guns dont kill people, people kill people.

a. It is certainly true that while sitting on a shelf, locked in a draw or carried in a holster, guns are inert pieces of machinery and, ultimately, it takes a finger to pull the trigger. Yet this fact is actually irrelevant. Its irrelevant because guns are not manufactured to stay on shelves, in draws or holsters. That inert status has nothing to do with why they exist. So, we can go on and ask:

b. Why are guns manufactured? Why do they exist? Primitive firearms were invented in China sometime in the 12th Century. They were invented to be used in warfare, that is to kill and injure other people. As the technology spread westward, first into the Arab lands and then to Europe, the technology was improved, but its raison detre (its reason for being) to kill and injure others stayed the same.

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America’s Twisted Notion of Freedom