Wednesday, March 20, 2013
About "Gun Control" in these United States
About the present "gun control debate" in the USA; a few points worth considering. It is perhaps one of the more poorly known realities of the 1960s' Civil Rights Era that many members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (or "SCLC," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's organization) had rifles and shotguns at the ready, a practical necessity for defending their homes and churches against Ku Klux Klan attack. It wasn't just the Black Panthers, my friends, who practiced armed self-defense 40-50 years ago. And while I do, in theory, vehemently agree as to the "merits" ("demerits" would be a better choice of words) of America's "gun-toting culture..." the more "extreme" proponents of gun control fail somewhat to see the broader picture when they neglect to survey the wider "culture" more comprehensively.
Example: A rather high percentage of Native Americans - probably the most oppressed of all "America's" minorities - possesses firearms. If you do a "google" for "Wounded Knee 1890/Wounded Knee 1973," you might discover why this is. Actually, many "American Indians" own rifles and shotguns, mainly for hunting deer, game birds and small game. It's an aspect of their hunter/gatherer culture, going back several centuries. But it also has to do with a marginalized subgroup having experienced actual genocide directed at them from the White Power Structure. There is also a pretty high incidence of firearms ownership among African Americans, for better or worse. When one considers the long-standing, deadly historical repression brought to bear against America's black population, the reasons behind that high incidence of gun ownership become evident in short order. So while I'm not praising the phenomenon of individual gun ownership in this "Armed Madhouse" known conventionally as the United States, I'm not unilaterally condemning gun ownership on the part of the civilian population, either. I would concede, though, that as a matter of Constitutional Law, there is nothing in the language of the Second Amendment that explicitly confers to the civilain population a personal right to own guns. What the Bill of Rights actually sanctions, verbatim, is a Right to Bear Arms on the part of a "well-regulated militia."
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P.S: I'm going to go off on a tangent, and let the chips fall where they may. This is going to be one big blast, pun intended, of a non-sequitur. I'm just stating the facts surrounding an incident from my own past, in the most bare-bones fashion possible.
ReplyDeleteSeveral decades ago, a "friend" of my household came into our apartment well past Midnight (we had neglected to lock the front door - that was our fault) and started trying to play my trumpet, which I'd left sitting around in the living room. "Rupert" didn't know the first thing about trumpets, and only succeeded in waking all five of us; I shared the first-floor apt. plus a room in the basement with four other guys. To make a long story short, "Rupert" (not his real name") refused to leave. My room-mate kept demanding, then ordering him out. He gave my roomie a bunch of drunken BS in return. After many furious commands that fell on intoxicated, if not deaf ears, "Rupert" either threatened, or actually did pull a knife. I'm not sure, 'cause I've never really brought it up with my former roomie since. In any case, my roomie ended up going into his room and retrieved a legal, 45. or maybe 44. caliber semi-automatic pistol. Then, when he brandished that fearsome weapon and demanded that Rupert leave, he had significant success. It took a while to convince the drunk to quit the premises, but the drunk did leave.
All in all, it was a pretty extreme way to get an obnoxious friend to get the fuck out, but it worked, eventually. No shots were fired, and no one was injured. You might ask "Why didn't roomie call the police?" Answer: in the heat of the moment, it just didn't occur to any of us, and none of us believed in calling the police anyway. We believed in defending our selves and our property by other means. Some of us had even done jail time, though for non-violent offenses. Interestingly, my roommate and "Rupert" even remained friends as things turned out. Our drunken acquaintance (He was just that to me, and I remained in my room throughout the disturbing incident) later got help, got sober, and lived the rest of his life in a much better condition. He even thanked my roomie for possibly saving his life, if you can believe it. At the time, "Rupert" was getting into all kinds of trouble that might conceivably have gotten him badly hurt or even killed. I'm sharing this just to point out that in my lifetime, I've witnessed an event when a handgun may have SAVED, rather than ended, a life. Just something to consider.