[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]N[/dropcap]ote to those who believe the Fairytale for the Dim and Deranged that the Nazis were able to maintain power due to the restriction of the private ownership of guns.
My grandfather (a veteran of WW I) was in the anti-Nazi resistance and was knowledgeable in regard to both guns and the hearts of men. He maintained that the lack of guns were not the problem; the problem stemmed from the complicity of the general population with The Third Reich.
When the people of a nation have had enough and take to the streets en masse. It does not matter how big its army is or how brutal the operatives of the police state are… the government falls.
And a major reason the U.S. corporate/national security/police state continues to grow, all but unchallenged, is the palliative, psychological effect bestowed by firearms. Year after year, loss of liberty after loss of liberty, gun fetishists do nothing (but secure more guns for themselves).
[quote]the palliative, psychological effect bestowed by firearms[/quote]
They are like cokeheads who blather on about all their grand schemes and designs, but are too busy securing and using their drug of choice to bother with the task at hand. This is why guns apologists are constantly bellyaching about their loss of freedom, but, in reality, seem quite adapted to the hyper-authoritarianism of the corporate state, of which the gun lobby (financed by big money weapons manufacturers) is part and parcel of.
I’ve noticed a pattern emerge (i.e., a repeating emotional dynamic that comes into play) in responses by gun apologists to my FB posts and my online articles that discuss the psychological dimensions of gun possession.
Almost immediately, the fantasy is posited that the government is planning to confiscate their guns. The emotional dynamics of this issue involve feelings of control and power. And that is why any attempt at holding a reasoned discussion on the topic quickly devolves into a litany of the psychological projection and emotional displacements of the gun apologist mindset.
[quote]the fantasy is posited that the government is planning to confiscate their guns[/quote]
These discussions (and that is a generous term for the dismal discourse) remind me of the conversations I engaged in with rightwing, cold war apologists before the fall of the Soviet Union, who insisted that the U.S. continue to build and stockpile nuclear weapons. They truly believed that if the U.S.S.R. could destroy the U.S. 10,000 times over, but the U.S. could only destroy the U.S.S.R. 9999.99 times over none of us were safe in our homes from the global communist threat to life and liberty.
Yet, all along, the Soviets were a paper tiger, and the true threat to life and liberty came from the military industrial complex/national security state itself (a threat that has increased exponentially since the end of the so-called Cold War).
As is the case, at present, when the true threat to freedom comes from corporatist control of government, of which the gun lobby (who create the extant “the Fed’s are coming for your guns” hysteria) and the large, greed-besotted weapon manufacturers are members.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
