America’s Lying and Ignorance Crisis – Fueled by Fake News Media

Opinion

USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- In the midst of an “epidemic” of emotion and disinformation, let’s have a national discussion about “gun violence,” their words.

But first a couple of ground-rules:

1. Only one side gets to talk.
2. That side gets to make up their own “facts.”

That’s the gist of an op-ed piece by Marianne Williamson in a guest editorial in the Washington Post. Williamson, my absolute favorite among the crowded field of truly bizarre Democratic candidates for President, is a latter-day hippy and High Priestess of the Church of Spiritual Self-Enlightenment and Warm-Fuzziness (okay, I just made that last part up). In the piece, she shares her “peace-based” wisdom, discussing America’s “gun crisis,” which she says is just part of a more significant “culture crisis.” She’s right that America has a “culture problem,” but as to the nature of the “problem” and the “culture,” she’s all wet.

Williams epitomizes the hard left turn the Democratic Party has taken in recent years. A late Baby Boomer child of the ’60s, who, after what she refers to as “her wasted decade” of drugs, self-indulgence, and depression, found her calling in a self-help course that she interpreted to promote a reinterpretation of “Christian values.” Of course, her interpretation was free of the discomfort of sin, guilt, God, or Christ. She went on to turn her Godless religion of non-religiosity, into a multi-million dollar empire of feel-good books and lectures.

Williamson is remarkably bright, articulate, and crazy as a bedbug. She is a perfect progenitor of the spoiled and triggered, “snowflake” generation that contends that being offended amounts to oppression, and that victim-hood deserves deference and reparations. She represents the philosophy that has doomed a significant portion of a generation to helplessness and dependence.

Ms. Williamson starts her WaPo diatribe in accordance with current dogma, lamenting a tragic and horrific act by a deeply disturbed individual, then goes on to further regret the aftermath of these atrocities: heavy media coverage, widespread outrage, political calls and promises to “Do something,” followed by a subsiding of emotion and reporting, and no substantive action being taken.

We all know the cycle, and we all know the article opening that describes the cycle. Those of us who follow the gun issue as supporters of the Second Amendment also can anticipate the distortions, half-truths, over-simplification, false conclusions, and flat out lies.

Ms. Williamson doesn’t bother with suggestions or explanations, but rather, jumps right in with a series of declarations that she suggests are self-evident and irrefutable:

“Of course, we need universal background checks; we need to close all loopholes; we need to outlaw bump stocks; and we need to outlaw assault weapons and the bullets needed to shoot them.” And, of course, this whole issue, she doesn’t need to tell us (but does anyway), is a “horrific and uniquely American problem.”

Of course, we need to do these things, and of course, crazy people killing people is “uniquely American.” Everyone knows these things – except for the few, gun nuts and industry shills who don’t – because the media and politicians have repeated these “truths” over and over, and over again, with little to no counter to the claims.

Ms. Williamson and the dominant media have perpetrated a hoax on the American people. She may be just another victim of the deception, but I think she may be smart enough to see it for the lie it is. At least she might if she had any interest in doing so. It is the sad truth that, if you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth – at least until the truth eventually prevails.

So let’s explore some truths.

Murder, mass murder, terrorism, domestic violence, workplace violence, political violence, etc., is not unique to America. It’s not even uniquely more frequent here. Even though the widespread availability of firearms of all sorts is relatively unique to the U.S., yet the phenomenon of mass public shootings is not unusual to us. As with most things firearm-related, some people like manipulating the data, but in any real comparison, the US is always well down on the list, so not only are we not unique, we’re not even number one.

Williamson then says; “It is not just our gun policy but our politics that fails to free us of this insanity,” before pointing the finger of blame at money in politics, and the favorite bogeyman, the NRA.

Well sorry, Ms. Williamson, it’s not our gun policy or our politics that are at fault. It’s our humanity. Unfortunately, criminals and madness are part of the human condition. Perhaps some policy or political solution can be found to address this, but so far in all of human history, no one has found a solution. The odds are against us.

Williams goes on to suggest that taking money out of politics and having the government fund political campaigns – and along the way presumably making it illegal for citizens to spend money to express their support for their favorite candidates – will somehow remove corruption from government. There are some pretty fundamental constitutional issues involved in that idea, but if you want to do that, go for it.

The funny thing is that such a law would make the NRA and the greater Gun Lobby much more powerful than it already is because the Gun Lobby’s power doesn’t come from money. It comes from our millions of active members and supporters. While the NRA and its sister groups spend a lot of money on political campaigns, anti-rights groups and billionaires like Mike Bloomberg spend as much or more. But they don’t have the broad, loyal following that the so-called Gun Lobby has, so your plan would neuter gun control groups – because money is all they’ve got – while magnifying the power of rights advocates.

Williamson finally gets to the crux of the matter, basically admitting that the solutions she’s been talking about, won’t solve the problems, and saying that we need to address the root causes of the violence. Of course, she has to couch it using more gun control hype, referring to America’s “epidemic of violence.” Epidemic has become a very popular word in the context of crimes involving guns in recent years. That word choice is suspect at best since violent crime rates have fallen precipitously over the past three decades. According to the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent crime fell between 59% and 74% from its high in 1993, and 2017. People keep using this word, “epidemic,” but I don’t think it means what they think it means.

Williamson goes on to decry the rampant violence of our society: Violence toward the earth, violence toward people of color in the justice system, violence in movies and video games, violence against women, violence of our government helping those who don’t need help, and not helping those that do need help…. In short, she says we’re hooked on violence, and can only change that by opening our hearts to peace. She goes on to lament the disparity between what the U.S. spends on the military and what we spend on diplomats.

Seriously? How effective does she think our diplomats would be dealing with Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, et al., if they didn’t have the might of the U.S. military backing them up? As I read Williamson’s pleas and her proposal for a “U.S. Department of Peace to coordinate and harness the powers of conflict resolution; restorative justice; violence prevention…” and all sorts of peace, love, and harmony exercises, I kept flashing to an old western movie from the 1970s called “The Culpepper Cattle Company.” In that movie a group of upstanding cowboys trying to get their herd to market, stumble upon a group of people from some sort of Williamsonesque religious sect that has chosen to settle in a beautiful valley. But they’re being threatened by an evil cattle baron and his hired henchmen. The peaceful religious folks are given an ultimatum, to either move on, or be wiped out. The pacifists refuse to leave, and the good cowboys of the Culpepper Cattle Company take up arms in their defense, defeating the evil cattle baron, but losing most of their own men and a few of the settlers in the process. After the dust clears, the pacifists start packing up their wagons. The surviving cowboys ask what they’re doing and are told by the Elders that they’re leaving because they can’t stay in the valley now that it’s stained with blood.

Peace and non-violence are wonderful things, I’m a big fan, but peace can’t be achieved unilaterally. Some 100 million peaceful gun owners avoid shooting or threatening anyone every day across this land. But Ms. Williamson’s plan would, of necessity, require that a goodly percentage of those peaceful people be arrested, imprisoned, or even killed, as a way of keeping a tiny sliver of one percent of criminals from potentially having access to guns. Experience in places like Chicago and Brazil indicates that the criminals probably won’t have any problem getting guns, but will enjoy having more helpless victims.

Ms. Williamson’s solution doesn’t seem very peaceful or socially just.

The scary part though is that as wacky as Marianne Williamson’s ideas are, almost all of the Democratic presidential candidates have publicly endorsed similar gun control proposals.
There seems to be an epidemic of this sort of idiocy these days, so stay vigilant and well-armed my friends.

About Jeff Knox:

Jeff Knox is a second-generation political activist and director of The Firearms Coalition. His father Neal Knox led many of the early gun rights battles for your right to keep and bear arms. Read Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War.

The Firearms Coalition is a loose-knit coalition of individual Second Amendment activists, clubs and civil rights organizations. Founded by Neal Knox in 1984, the organization provides support to grassroots activists in the form of education, analysis of current issues, and with a historical perspective of the gun rights movement. The Firearms Coalition has offices in Buckeye, Arizona and Manassas, VA. Visit: www.FirearmsCoalition.org.

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