This past week, Alex Jones dominated Piers Morgan Tonight with a rant over two segments before being cut short and escorted out of CNN headquarters where agents of the Department of Homeland Security had him stalked and surveilled. “1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms,” Jones exclaimed with almost as much vitriol as when Cuomo called for his gun control plan in his State of the State Address.
Jon Stewart mocked Jones that night on The Daily Show. “Now I see what’s happening,” Stewart said. “So this is what it is. Their paranoid fear of a possible dystopic future prevents us from addressing our actual dystopic present.”
The thing is, while Alex Jones and the former Marine whom Stewart was mocking during the segment seemed paranoid and hysterical, they were not wrong. The cause of the battles of Lexington and Concord were a raid on firearms in 1775. So Jones is probably correct in his statement.
Currently, it is codified into law that American citizens can be indefinitely detained, tortured and even killed without so much as being charged with a crime by the government. FEMA camps are kept hidden from the public and when discovered are said to only be for emergency relocations. Why hide them then? Why does the barbed wire face in? They look more like prisons than refuges.
“When that constitution was written, people had muskets,” Stewart said. “So okay, you can have all the muskets you want. You can even have assault muskets for all I care. Jazz it up with a bayonet, go f***ing nuts.”
He misses the point. The musket was the standard-issue military weapon of the day. This is the weapon with which the militia was to be armed. Today, the people have a right to defend themselves from crime, foreign invaders and a tyrannical government with the standard-issue military weapon of the day, which would be an M4 style rifle.
Stewart was right in a way; the present is dystopic. When the meaning of our founding documents are so far removed from the national consciousness and the principles and foundations of the country are now considered fringe and radical, the day truly is dystopic.
It is interesting to see the arguments of the left when it comes to decriminalizing drugs and keeping abortion legal. If marijuana were legal, they argue, it would be sold in well-regulated dispensaries and taken off the street. If abortion was outlawed, women would still get the procedure done; only it would take place in the back alleys where a junkie was buying his dope. When it comes to guns, many on the left jump to the other side of the argument; if guns were outlawed, they would just go away. With 300 million guns in America, that is unlikely. Guns are already bought and sold illegally in those back alleys. If guns were outlawed, only outlaws would have guns.
The real problem with the mass-shootings we have seen have been mental health issues. Adam Lanza, James Holmes, and the Columbine shooters were all on serotonin reuptake inhibitors. These drugs are rarely mentioned by lawmakers when talking about these events. Instead of blaming the shooters themselves or pharmaceutical industry, they blame guns. Currently, one in five Americans is on some form of psychiatric drug. Has mental illness really been that much of a problem over the course of history? How did we survive for thousands of years without such drugs? Perhaps these drugs with powerful and dangerous side-effects are being pushed on us a little too heavily?
Guns have been around for hundreds of years, psychotropic drugs have been around for a little over fifty. Mass shootings along the line of Sandy Hook and Columbine did not begin until after psychotropic drugs were introduced into mainstream society. Perhaps the correlation of these common characteristics can shed more answers to the question of from where all this madness comes.
If the Government sincerely believes that guns are the source of violence and carnage and think that less guns and only allowing access to less advanced weaponry is the answer, they should lead by example. The White House should be a gun-free zone with all secret service agents being disarmed in order to save lives. If Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg really want to lead the nation in gun control, they should start by disarming their personal body guards. If they want gun control, they should go first.
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