Guns in America is a topic of undying interest, and we can be assured that many thousands more innocent lives will be sacrificed to the Gun Moloch God to keep it that way. This web-page is a collection of all my writings on ‘Guns in America,’ in an easy-to-read format that minimizes click-digressions to other web-pages and web-sites.

While I have offered solutions to America’s (U.S.A.’s) gun violence problem, in truth there is no need to do so because the solution is obvious and already in daily practice in civilized countries around the world. Unfortunately for the random targets of gun violence in the U.S.A., this country has allowed itself to become an open-air asylum for people afflicted with the ‘viral’ mental disease of Gun Cling, and worse still the U.S.A. has allowed the untreated mental patients with this disorder to run the asylum!

Gun Cling is an auto-erotic mental disorder of arrested development into emotional infantilism and sociopathic isolation. At best its sufferers are harmless “gun nuts,” and at worst they can be suicidal mass atrocity perpetrators.

The best cure is of course prevention, which involves kind and enlightened upbringing and education. The next best remedy is self-cure by the individual becoming motivated to improve their knowledge about life, people and society, and to strive to improve their intellect and moral character by confronting their fears and eliminating their hatreds and fantasies (e.g., racist and/or crudely religious).

Beyond that, it may be that there are no reliable enforced cures or ‘deprogramming’ methods. The ultimate elimination of an individual’s guncling disorder is the blunt instrument of superior firepower by law enforcement. Ideally, we would want to arrange our society to make this violent sanction unnecessary.

A FLOWCHART for the progression of guncling might be as follows:

A vulnerable individual —>

Ignorance —>

Fear —>

Low self esteem, lack of confidence, sense of inadequacy, loneliness —>

Denial; cowardice about facing/beating fear by self-educating —>

Bravado-mask; suppression of empathy, being racist —>

Want-get gun(s) —>

Gain comfort and companionship in fear-minded gun herd/church/cult —>

Gun-crutch to maintain a stunted intellectual and character development: an inability to deal with emotional reactions to life challenges and disappointments —>

NRA infantile single-issue tantrum of security-blanket gun-clinging —>

Reason, logic, morality are not involved; all words are distractions and lies, and also just loud outbursts and threats; guncling is an all-encompassing emotional life-lock —>

A lost and imprisoned soul.

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Warren Burger “2nd Amendment Fraud” – 1991 PBS News Hour
https://youtu.be/Eya_k4P-iEo

The Second Amendment

The 2nd Amendment specifically states the “right to bear arms” is for the ability to maintain “a well regulated militia.” So the missing pieces of legislation are the requirements for each state that gun owners must be members of well regulated – by the Federal Constitution – state militias.

That means gun owners would have legal requirements on levels of training for the weapons they wish to own (more training and periodic testing for more powerful weapons), retesting (to maintain their qualifications to keep and bear arms – like periodic testing to keep drivers’ licenses), and the storage of those arms in armories.

When these militias are needed for local defense activities, or scheduled for required training exercises, then the members would have to assemble (as with jury duty, another civic duty) and follow the orders of their commanders in the use of their weapons. In fact they would be under disciplined military authority – not freelance or loose cannon unsupervised solo action.

Gun “patriots” would have no problem with adhering to this “strict interpretation” of the Constitution, and following the intentions of the sacrosanct Founding Fathers. The point of the 2nd Amendment is that everyone – young, old, sound-minded or insane – has the right to apply to prove they can meet the qualifications for being a member of a “well regulated militia,” or continue to participate in it – armed – so long as they maintain their required performance in it.

The failure to produce this necessary “regulating” and “supervisory” legislation is a dereliction of constitutional duty by both Federal and State legislative bodies, and executives, whose oath of office states they must “protect and defend the United States” and its Constitution.

Please refer to the comments (legal opinion) on this issue by former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Warren E. Burger (15th Chief Justice of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1986 – appointed by President Richard M. Nixon).

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Superheroes Require Mega-Victims

During the Roman Empire
crowds flocked to the Colosseum to see
their favorite gladiators kill many disposable victims,
so these fervent fans could experience
an ecstasy of entertainment
and fantasize about being would-be heroes
of glorious combat followed by popular acclaim.

In the American Empire
crowds flock to the big-screen Colosseums to see
their comic-book superheroes kill mega-evil super-villains
who kill many disposable victims,
so these fervent fans can experience
an ecstasy of entertainment
and fantasize about being would-be heroes
of glorious combat followed by popular acclaim.

Our bipolar dualities of superheroes and super-villains
require the mega-deaths of innocent mega-victims
– both real and imagined –
so our patriotic gunmen,
whether in police, the NRA, militias, or just lone sociopaths
– all in their closeted secret fears –
can fantasize about being would-be heroes
who will one day kill a bad guy and blaze to glory
to the ecstatic popular acclaim
of the telescreen-mesmerized masses
jammed into our handheld and big-screen Colosseums.

The reason we have so many guns in America
is because we have so many frustrated ignorant people.

21 February 2018

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https://manuelgarciajr.com/2018/02/22/superheroes-require-mega-victims/

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When Life Is A Crime

The excrement of legalized racketeering by the vampire parasites on the nation’s life-blood
cultures the growth of murderous sociopaths who massacre the bright hopes
of our emerging and redeeming innocents, and our collective soul.

The raw cry of justice screams up from the blood-soaked streets and floors of our schools,
for retribution’s purge to sweep through the corridors of power, the temples of mammon,
and the sanctuaries of privileged bigotry and greed.

The peace of the nation is being blood-sacrificed in a raging war for power over life,
by our materialistic egotists of soulless privilege.

The warmth of kind hearts is freezing into the hardened prayer
for a just God to loose It’s avenging angels.

17 February 2018

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https://manuelgarciajr.com/2018/02/17/when-life-is-a-crime/

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Why the Columbine and Las Vegas Massacres?

After the 1999 school massacre in Columbine, Colorado – an exurbia community – by two disaffected teenage boys (who also killed themselves), I came to the conclusion that the killers’ “motive” was not at all a purposeful urge, goal, revenge or obsession, but instead a complete self-abandonment into nihilism – a giving up – and the horrible eruption of that destructive nihilism was a symptom of those boys’ lack of culture – an abysmal lack of culture. I see the same about Stephen Paddock, the shooter in Las Vegas; his fury to kill emerged out of a profound lack of culture.

It seems to me that these rapid-fire suicide-killers had been born into and raised (probably somewhat thoughtlessly) in a cultural void. Their world was a generic beyond-suburbia commuter outpost of sprawl, malls, video games and Internet pablum and porn, instead of real books of literature, real art instead of plastic flamingo-level decorations, and real music instead of throwaway canned between-commercials pop. They had never absorbed real culture, which is the emotional and intellectual glue that binds an individual to the wider human communities both in the present and through the long arc of time.

Those boys (young and old) had lives of material ease, but they had absolutely no spirit because the nurturing and feeding of the spirit – the essential purpose of culture – was absent from their lives. I believe the spiritual-cultural hollowness of their cores was a reflection of the spiritual-cultural desert that was their environment.

By their late teens the two Columbine killers had had enough of it, and could see nothing in their possible 60 to 70 years of future living except more of the same. That “more of the same” is the listless life Stephen Paddock lived until he too had had enough, at age 64. As they looked into their futures the Columbine teens could have thought that maybe they could become insurance agents or realtors, or some other “normal” occupation that would see them harnessed to the spinning wheels of pointless money-making. And they would have their free time to be just as hollow as their comfort-providing work would be: more video games or video poker?, hanging out at the same beer joints with the same kind of empty-headed crowd?, watching another game on TV?, getting married and keeping up the same kind of families they had grown up in?

What would be the point? It was like looking down an arrow-straight empty four-lane freeway across a dry-lake salt-flat that stretched out to their 80th year and led to nothing but a dead end. Why spend the better part of a century bored, waiting to get to nowhere after having spent the whole trip doing nothing because nobody cared anyway, and end up just as useless as they were now, then die unnoticed and thereafter remain forgotten? Why not cut out all the slow stuff, the boring, tiresome waiting and pointless work, and just get one incredible orgasmically exciting machine-gun humping high, and then check out in a blink before the let-down set in?

I think it is the deep, personal absorption of and sensitivity to culture, and even tradition, that fills a psyche with the substance needed for living life joyfully; and the substance which occupies what would otherwise be a spiritual-cultural void that can only produce interminable lassitude or explosions of destructive nihilism erupting out of deeply submerged despair.

I think the appreciative absorption of culture, along with the received gifts of affectionate nurturing, kind friendship and confident love, are the necessary courses in a complete education of the human heart. I see major tragedies like the Columbine and Las Vegas massacres, as well as so many little-noticed murders of the same sort, to be the result of our society’s many failures at providing all our people with that necessary education of the heart.

I was prompted to write these comments after reading the following article, pointed out to me by Anthony Tarrant.

I went to School with the Vegas Shooter
Greg Palast
13 October 2017
https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/10/i-went-to-school-with-the-vegas-shooter/

See Anthony’s comments at his blog page:

Why Stephen Paddock Snapped In Vegas
15 October 2017
https://anthonytarrant.wordpress.com/2017/10/15/why-stephen-paddock-snapped-in-vegas/

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The photo above is of John F. Kennedy’s grave as it appeared in April 1964. My photos of this grave are the only ones I have with any relation to guns and gun violence.

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Above now published at Dissident Voice:

Why the Columbine and Las Vegas Massacres?
18 October 2017
https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/10/why-the-columbine-and-las-vegas-massacres/

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https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/10/16/why-the-columbine-and-las-vegas-massacres/

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Guns Are America’s Masturbation

The US news at the moment is dominated by the deep and shocking tragedy of the rampage killing on December 14 in Newtown, Connecticut, where a lone gunman (a 20 year old male) first killed his mother in their home, then went to the Sandy Hook Elementary School to randomly shoot 20 children (ages 6 and 7) and six adults dead, wound one other person, and finally kill himself. Total casualties: twenty-eight dead, one wounded.

The acrimonious debate on “gun control” versus “2nd Amendment rights” in the United States has been momentarily reignited. While this particular massacre is the evil work of one particular sociopath, undoubtedly precipitated by a lack of psychological soundness and moral strength completely disintegrating under the pressure of resisting some personal realization too shameful to confront, the fact that such a disintegration could so easily access modern semi-automatic weaponry and use it at will is a searing indictment of the abysmal state of the collective character of the American people.

So long as guns are America’s most fiercely held form of masturbation, there can be no rational discussion of how to keep shooting sports and mental illness separated, nor of the crafting of intelligent regulatory procedures for keeping the public safe from the pathological misuse of guns.

In 2011, I wrote two articles whose aim was to prod discussion toward such a rational solution. But, I have no hope such is possible until (if ever) a major change occurs in the collective character of the American public. The root of the problem is who we are as a people, not what we do with guns nor how we regulate them. We have to be, individually and collectively, a radically different kind of people in order to maintain a safe, orderly, intelligent and minimal use of firearms. Our debates and arguments about guns — “control” versus “rights” — are all excuses and denials because we don’t really want to admit to the root failure, nor take responsibility for it. We just want to masturbate no matter who has to die for it.

[The following two DV articles are given in full further below.]

Gun Malpractice Insurance
25 January 2011
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/01/gun-malpractice-insurance/

Gun Freedom, or Owning A Gun The Way The Constitution Intended You To
12 January 2011
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/01/owning-a-gun-the-way-the-constitution-intended-you-to/

Looking back on these articles, I see them as retreats into the absurd in desperation to find some effective procedure to prevent such overwhelming and unnecessary tragedies. One can only hope.

15 December 2012

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https://manuelgarciajr.com/2012/12/15/guns-are-americas-masturbation/

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Gun Malpractice Insurance

In response to my recent article [next below] on “gun freedom”, I received several disapproving letters from people with a “pro-gun” attitude. Most of their arguments centered on the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and the taken-for-granted assumption that having a gun close at hand would always offer them greater protection. Another pro-gun argument is that gun owners are prepared to “defend freedom” and the “constitution” at a moment’s notice in the event of some attack, invasion or national catastrophe — so long as they haven’t been “disarmed” in advance by “gun control.”

The “defend freedom” argument is laughable. Gun owners, as an organized political group, have been invisible in the defense of freedom in the U.S., and they have had many opportunities to do so, from defending civil rights in the 1960s right up to today: fighting against the Patriot Act, fighting to end the Iraq and Afghan-Pakistan wars, fighting to stop the ongoing “renditions,” fighting to close down U.S. military torture prisons like at Guantanamo, fighting to deconstruct the prison-industrial system and black confinement gulag. You can look in any direction today and find a freedom that needs defending immediately. The gun owner PACs have only shown an interest in defending their own freedom to play with their guns, regardless.

However, one pro-gun argument I received was mildly creative, and deserves a response. The argument states that 120,000 (120K) accidental deaths occur every year because of mistakes by some of the 700,000 (700K) U.S. medical doctors. This is a ratio of medical accident deaths per doctor of 1/5.83, which we can round to 1/6. So, for every 6 U.S. doctors there is one medical-accident death per year. However, for 80,000,000 (80M) gun owners (in a total U.S. population of 311.9M) there are only 1500 accidental gun deaths a year, or one per 53.3K gun owners, annually. The claim is then made that “statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.”

I guess this proves you should quit going to the doctor (and taking any prescriptions, which might just poison you), and you had better pack a gun. That way you can be sure that any gun accident occurring near you happens to somebody else (since you’ll be doing the pointing), and you can also protect yourself by shooting any doctor that comes too close.

This silly comparison of (and obvious joke on) iatrogenic and gun-caused accidental deaths does suggestion one idea, which is amplified in what follows: gun malpractice insurance.

Consider the following data:

75.7K non-fatal gunshot injuries per year in the U.S., of which:
52.5K are deliberate,
23.2K are accidental (statistics for 2000, from the US-CDC);

16K homicides/year in the U.S., of which:
9K by hand guns,
2K by other guns
(11K for gun homicides, total),
2K by knives,
2K by other methods,
1K by blunt objects;

17K suicides/year by guns (2004).

So, about 28K gun-deaths/year in the U.S.

For 311.9M people (U.S. population), this works out to:

gun homicides/person (or, probability of being murdered by a gun): 1/28K,

total homicides/person (or, probability of being murdered by any means): 1/20K,

gun suicides/person (or, probability you’ll shoot yourself dead): 1/18K,

gun deaths/person (or, probability of being killed by a gun): 1/11K,

gunshot injuries/person (or, probability of getting shot, and living): 1/4K.

Now, lets see how this comes out per gun owner (using 80M U.S. gun owners):

gun homicides (in general population)/#owners: 1/7K,

gun suicides (in general population)/#owners: 1/5K,

gun deaths (in general population)/#owners: 1/3K,

gunshot injuries (in general population)/#owners: 1/1K.

So each year:
for every 1000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person is shot,
for every 3000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person is shot dead,
for every 5000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person shoots themselves dead,
for every 7000 U.S. gun owners, 1 person is murdered by gunshot.

Recall that for every 6 doctors there is 1 medical-accidental death per year. The hazards of medical practice have long been known and form the basis of the malpractice insurance industry (which, by the way, does a lot to raise the cost of “medicine,” this cash flow overhead going to insurance companies; how about nationalizing those companies to lower the cost of health care?)

A U.S. human is worth about $2M for a “reasonable” wrongful death damages/insurance settlement (the equivalent of $50K for a 40 year working life). (Yes, this is all very crass, but we are restricting argument to the absurdist confines of U.S. capitalist realpolitik.) However, court challenges to wrongful death claims, and legislation for protecting many industries like the airlines, set ridiculously low limits on settlements for fatal accidents, nearer $250K. So, I’ll use an average settlement of $0.5M to estimate the cost of malpractice insurance:

120K medical-accidental deaths/year, at $0.5M/per = $60B.

In fact the cost of medical liability insurance in the U.S. is about $55.6B/year, close to our estimate. However, since insurance companies probably absorb 30% to 50% of revenue for profit and overhead, the actual “average” settlement paid out must be closer to $250K to $350K.

For the 700K U.S. doctors, the average cost would be: $60B/700K = $85.7K = $7K/month. So U.S. doctors making $170K/year may spend up to half their income on their malpractice insurance (and or legal fees).

Fine.  Now let’s apply the same principle to gun owners. Let us allocate the cost of gun injury and death to “gun malpractice,” to be paid for by gun malpractice insurance, which gun owners would buy to compensate gunshot victims.

To estimate the cost of gun malpractice insurance let’s use measly settlements of:

$250K per gunshot death (paid to family members, obviously),
$100K per gunshot injury (paid for victim’s medical/rehabilitation & job/pay-loss expenses),

then for:

11K gun homicides/year, at $250K/per = $2.75B,

17K gun suicides/year, at $250K/per = $4.25B,

(28K gun deaths/year, at $250K/per = $7B),

75.7K gunshot non-fatal injuries/year, at $100K/per = $7.57B.

Total gun malpractice liabilities/year = $14.57B, round to $15B.

Now divide the cost among a total of 80M owners:

gun malpractice insurance premium (cost per owner) = $15B/80M = $188. A bargain, round generously to $200/year.

So it is entirely fair to charge gun owners about $200/year for “gun malpractice” insurance, which would help defray the costs to victims of gunshot. If the average awards were higher by a factor of 5 (to $1.25M per death and $500K for non-fatal injury), then the insurance premium would be $1000/year (and profit overhead for the insurance companies would raise premiums further).

Charging gun owners $1000/year for mandatory gun malpractice insurance does not seem unfair by comparison with what is done with M.D.’s, and it would not in any way infringe on gun owners’ sacred 2nd Amendment right to “defend freedom” personally. Such insurance would do a great deal to rein in both the private and public costs of U.S. trauma-response and health-care. Also gun malpractice insurance would be a great new capital industry, and such companies would probably be desirable investment vehicles.

It is obvious that the people of the U.S. accept the costs in gunshot injuries (76K/year) and deaths (28K/year) in the general population (312M), for the maintenance and convenience of unrestricted (or nearly so) gun ownership (80M owners). While no individual wants to be a victim of gun violence, we accept possibly having to make such personal sacrifice in order to uphold the higher social benefit of preserving the 2nd Amendment right of almost anyone being able to have all the guns of their choice as soon as possible.

However, some less-indulgent people, who do not have as high a regard for the U.S. Constitution as to accept this socialist accommodation, may agitate annoyingly for “gun control,” the restriction to gun ownership by legislation, even constitutional amendment. One argument they can use favorably is that the costs of gun violence are now borne unfairly by members of the public, gun owners or not, who happen to get shot.

This argument can be met by issuing gun malpractice insurance to gun owners, the proceeds of which will help compensate victims of gun violence (and create a new line of profitable insurance products). The existence of such insurance could be used by gun owners to indemnify them, individually and collectively, from “gun malpractice” liabilities. Indemnification would undoubtedly be set by legislation making gun malpractice insurance mandatory, in a similar way that medical malpractice insurance and automobile driving liability insurance are mandated.

Gun malpractice insurance would make maintenance of our 2nd Amendment freedom a win-win for both gun-owners and the non-gun members of the public, so long as you personally didn’t get shot up too badly. But if you did find yourself randomly chosen to participate in the socializing duty of gun action absorption, then you would have the comfort of knowing that the gun owners of America had provided for you to receive an immediate award of insurance money to help defray your medical expenses, and whatnot. That, and the red badge of courage pride you would have for your part in upholding the 2nd Amendment, would make you happy to be able to live with such freedom as we have in this country. Freedom carries responsibilities.

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Gun Malpractice Insurance
25 January 2011
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/01/gun-malpractice-insurance/

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Gun Freedom, or Owning A Gun The Way The Constitution Intended You To

Since the January 8th shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, in which 13 others were wounded and six killed, including 9 year old Christina Taylor Green who was born on September 11, 2001, there has been a renewed public debate about “gun control.”

If you have ever masturbated or been hosted to an orgasm with a living or even an artificial phallus, or you have experienced the deep satisfaction of a nitrocellulose-warmed and jolted Muladhara chakra, as described by John Lennon in his primal scream song “Happiness Is A Warm Gun,” then you know that the gun control debate is impervious to logical assault.

Nevertheless, I wish to make a suggestion.

First, let me say that I have no problem with anyone owning all the guns they want, so long as they don’t actually kill anyone (or anything) with them. Actually, that is too stringent; I don’t mind if a gunslinger absolutely hellbent on killing someone kills themselves — and no one else. This is a clean solution to the problem of finding a target for the killing urge and simultaneously safeguarding the public. I admit the result may not be entirely satisfactory to the family members of the killer, but I think it the best compromise short of avoiding a killing entirely.

Some have suggested that it is remotely possible that on rare occasions a shooting death would be a humanitarian blessing. This type of thinking usually seeps out of militaristic and war-games fantasies. However, I think such possibilities are so rare in civilian life that we can discount giving this excuse further consideration.

Proponents of unrestricted gun ownership and use usually base their argument on the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and the further argument of applying a “strict interpretation” to the Constitution: “following the intent of the framers,” or the intent of “the founding fathers,” without allowing for any re-interpretations — “deviations” they would say — as informed by later historical developments and evolved social thought.

Very well. My suggestion is the following. Allow for the unrestricted ownership and use of guns and ammunition as they existed in 1789, when the Constitution and its first ten amendments were written. This would conform EXACTLY to the intent of the framers. It would satisfy the 2nd Amendment freedom to “bear arms,” without allowing for any deviations from ‘strict interpretationalism’ that would excuse the weaseling in of ownership of semi-automatic and automatic guns, and anything beyond ball, shot and black powder for ammunition: no full metal jackets, no nitrocellulose propellant, no late 19th century cordite-filled cartridges, not even percussion caps (from about 1830). Just flintlocks.

If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it’s good enough for you.

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Gun Freedom, or Owning A Gun The Way The Constitution Intended You To
12 January 2011
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/01/owning-a-gun-the-way-the-constitution-intended-you-to/
and
https://www.counterpunch.org/2011/01/12/gun-freedom/

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