It's amazing that as a completely non-violent pacifist who doesn't believe humans need guns, or your judgements, all I get thrown at me for it is negativity. Why are we as Americans so violent? Let's look at the possibilities. How does it make sense at all to use violent rhetoric and fear mongering to change the mind of someone who firmly believes in peace? The propaganda during WWII and the Cold War has greatly changed the lives and minds of every American ever since. The death tolls that were justified and continue to be justified by the Military Industrial Complex keep us numb. We should never be ok with the rampant killing of innocent civilians. Warriors or soldiers have chosen to fight. There should be no justification to attack someone who doesn't anticipate the need to defend oneself.
Second amendment advocates seem to think that for some reason when the 2nd amendment was written, while we were still trying to organize into states and support a government without the rule of any European nations, the founding fathers wanted us to be able to take up arms against our government. This is ludicrous for multiple reasons, the first being that the federal government had no standing army because it was just being created. The second reason being that to take up arms against their federal government would be to take up arms against the men writing the constitution. "why on earth would they want to encourage citizens of their new nation to attack them?" oh yeah, they wouldn't. The 3rd reason is that England, France, and Spain were still arguing over who was going to control the land in North America, we needed a well regulated militia to protect our own states and local governments from invasion since the federal government could not. Thus negating the common defense of the 2nd amendment that suggests it means arming ourselves to any level we see fit. Well regulated seems to imply that laws about fire arms, what kind are available and who can be trained to use them, are perfectly legal.
Why do we allow gun manufacturers and the NRA to advertise to us a culture of violence? The only reason to own a gun is out of fear. Fear of the government, fear of your neighbors, fear of animals, fear of robbers, and rapists, or fear of anything different than us. It gives us a false sense of security because it is anger and fear that spur violence. Fear dominates the culture, that is what all the silent wars are about, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror are wars that can never be won for a reason. The World Wars and the Cold War have ended but the silent wars that tear at the very cords of our being have continued on unabated. Choosing to ignore the 16,000 children who die of starvation every day or the 25,000 child brides (girls under the age of 18) who are wedded in arranged marriages a year does not make those things stop affecting your life. Just because you are too hurt to see the correlation between atrocities and the system which we have established that values profit over human life does not make it go away. No amount of someone arguing with me and berating me will convince me that the right answer is to throw my hand up, buy a gun (like the gun manufacturers want me to), and give in to fear.
I will never believe that we as humans are inherently violent. We could not have come this far if we were. Humans make advances through communication and collaboration. In the last century our advances have been inspired by war and violence instead of advancement of humans and that is why we are suffering now. We have harbored the sociopaths and rapists of our culture and allowed them to take so much control. They actually have us convinced it is in our very nature to want to harm one another. It is with violence and division that they can continue to control us all. You get out of life what you expect from people and your experiences. Your life is entirely your perception of what is happening from only your point of view. You can only assess your life through the experiences you have had, and how you consciously chose to react to them. When you realize that if you expect violence and anger that is all you will get, you will start to expect love and harmony. How can we convince more people to live in love instead of hate?
