Let's just have a "meaningful" discussion about violence--or not

 

It is being reported that a man in Florida was arrested by the FBI for tweeting a message caricaturing Colorado representative Lauren Boebert’s—yes, that Lauren Boebert who sent out this as a “Christmas” card—…

 

…fanatical support of, well, I think it is obvious (damn, that's embarrassing that one of those kids is wearing a Packers jacket). Of course, we are talking about Florida, where its fascist-minded dictator, er “governor,” Ron DeSantis, has been busy establishing his authoritarian state, passing laws (or trying to) suppressing voting rights and banning protests and the freedom of speech rights of those speaking out against racism and other socially-relevant issues, especially in schools.

Of course it isn’t useful to talk about gun violence in this country either, especially mass shootings in schools, because you might upset some gun fanatics who like to show off their arsenal, like Rep. Greg Steube…

 

…who is apparently unmindful that some people might consider him a rather sick man. Gun violence has to begin somewhere, and it begins with gun culture. According to the website Statistica, 2.9 million guns were manufactured in the U.S. in 2001, then nearly doubled the first year of the Obama administration,  and from there doubled again to over 11 million in 2016 before tailing off slightly during the Trump years. Of course we can conjecture the reason for this (the most obvious being the racial paranoia of far-right whites), but as can be seen guns are a very big business in this country.

The website Statistica also shows us that gun exports have been erratic over decades as well, but there has been a steady climb over the past two decades, quadrupling from 140,000 in 2003 to over 550,000 in 2018. But the “export” of guns is actually much higher than that, given the lax gun laws in this country. If the legal adviser of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Alejandro Celorio Alcantara is to be believed, the actual number of guns illegally flowing into Mexico from the U.S. is actually half the “unofficial” export number. What can be verified is that 50 percent of the weapons seized by Mexican law enforcement that are checked by the ATF, like these weapons…

 

 

…for tracing, are of U.S. origin, and only a fraction of such weapons are traced, since many seized weapons have their serial numbers erased.

But then again, we live in a violent world. I mean, Russia is a “civilized” country like the rest of Europe, right? Well, not really because Russia considers itself a “Eurasian” country. Like Japan once regarded China as its “little brother”—although obviously those roles have been reversed—Vladimir Putin regards Ukraine as a “little brother” country that has gone astray and ran away from home and needs to be retrieved even it doesn’t want to come back, preferring to live on its own. But instead of “talking it out,” Putin went in with a club to try to beat his “brother” senseless and take everything from him and keep it for himself; maybe it's the "Asian" part of Russia talking, considering what the Chinese have been doing lately against Taiwan and Australian aircraft.

And why should we be “surprised” by this? We see this all over the world in many societies where people and governments cannot convince those they are trying to keep under their control that what they are doing is “good” for them, and if the “wrong” response is generated instead, then come in with clubs, or often, with guns or bombs. In this country, if certain people don’t like what people are saying, or they don’t like the fact that they even exist, they don’t even bother coming in with the club, but with automatic weapons.

On the other hand, you have people like DeSantis, Boebert and Steube who want to make mass shootings even more commonplace by stifling the discussion about why these things happen by refusing to even talk about the source, and what motivates people to do these things—and how to “unmotivated” people. They prefer to exist like Donald Trump, people who seem to prefer their own company, content with their own “reality,” even if this “reality” is built on baseless lies.

For many, these things tend to happen in a galaxy far, far away, and it is much easier to have an opinion about them that do anything about them. While it seems as if only people with some psychological impairment actually “act,” like doing some mass shooting or rioting inside the Capitol building, people who claim to be “normal” don’t wish to do what normal people believe needs to be done.

What makes it all the more disturbing is that a so-called “president,” Trump, continues, as Rep. Liz Cheney tells us, to feel no remorse at all about January 6, and his people perpetrated “an extremely well-organized conspiracy” to overturn the 2020 election—and he seems willing to do the same thing all over again.

The “right” thing to do is to insure that the people who are making it impossible to “fix” what is wrong with the world and society are not in a position to prevent  these “fixes,” whatever they may be. But then again you have to have the wherewithal to do what is needed, and that is a really hard thing to do, except to maybe talk about it, which is about the only thing that ever gets “done.”