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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIt's the Guns – But We All Know, It's Not Really the Guns - byMichael Moore
TUE JUL 24, 2012 AT 05:29 PM PDT
It's the Guns But We All Know, It's Not Really the Guns
by Michael Moore
[font color=red]"Guns don't kill people, Americans kill people."[/font]
.....here's the difference between the rest of the world and us: We have TWO Auroras that take place every single day of every single year! At least 24 Americans every day (8-9,000 a year) are killed by people with guns and that doesn't count the ones accidentally killed by guns or who commit suicide with a gun. Count them and you can triple that number to over 25,000.
................ why us?
1. We Americans are incredibly good killers. We believe in killing as a way of accomplishing our goals. Three-quarters of our states execute criminals, even though the states with the lower murder rates are generally the states with no death penalty.
Our killing is not just historical (the slaughter of Indians and slaves and each other in a "civil" war). It is our current way of resolving whatever it is we're afraid of. It's invasion as foreign policy. Sure there's Iraq and Afghanistan but we've been invaders since we "conquered the wild west" and now we're hooked so bad we don't even know where to invade (bin Laden wasn't hiding in Afghanistan, he was in Pakistan) or what to invade for (Saddam had zero weapons of mass destruction and nothing to do with 9/11). We send our lower classes off to do the killing, and the rest of us who don't have a loved one over there don't spend a single minute of any given day thinking about the carnage. And now we send in remote pilotless planes to kill, planes that are being controlled by faceless men in a lush, air conditioned studio in suburban Las Vegas. It is madness.
2. We are an easily frightened people and it is easy to manipulate us with fear. What are we so afraid of that we need to have 300 million guns in our homes? Who do we think is going to hurt us? Why are most of these guns in white suburban and rural homes? Maybe we should fix our race problem and our poverty problem (again, #1 in the industrialized world) and then maybe there would be fewer frustrated, frightened, angry people reaching for the gun in the drawer. Maybe we would take better care of each other (here's a good example of what I mean).
http://ayoungmomsmusings.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/how-i-lost-my-fear-of-universal-health.html
.................
the rest:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/its-the-guns-_b_1700218.html?utm_hp_ref=yahoo&ir=Yahoo
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/24/1113384/-It-s-the-Guns-But-We-All-Know-It-s-Not-Really-the-Guns
xchrom
(108,903 posts)dickthegrouch
(3,169 posts)formercia
(18,479 posts)and remember...It takes a Village to make an Idiot.
whatchamacallit
(15,558 posts)Thanks Michael!
abelenkpe
(9,933 posts)sabrina 1
(62,325 posts)Not once since the Bush gang sent the troops off to invade Afghanistan and Iraq did I ever see a sympathetic story about an Iraqi mother whose children were blown away in our MSM.
I saw footage with literal rivers of blood running down Iraq's streets, but it was not even commented on.
Worse, half the country cheers all this killing on and calls it 'heroism'.
MM is one of the few who does get to speak on the national media every once in a while, who has had the courage to even the issue of the slaughter that continues each day since it began over ten years ago, and anyone who talks about it, is 'unpatriotic'.
Good for him for not remaining silent.
AtheistCrusader
(33,982 posts)Michael Moore is dead on the money here. Even if you completely deduct out firearm-related homicides from the total, the United States is still SHOCKINGLY violent compared to most European nations.
Something wrong here...
jerseyjack
(1,361 posts)order, "The Power of Nightmares" from Netflix. It is a BBC documentary and covers the basis for the Red Scare and other uses of fear to increase power and profit.
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)sabrina 1
(62,325 posts)other countries? Or just the victims of decades of fear-mongering from the media?
awoke_in_2003
(34,582 posts)Yep
LWolf
(46,179 posts)are drawn into the mass distraction of a battle about gun control.
kpete
(71,956 posts)peace, kp
BlancheSplanchnik
(20,219 posts)boy, he is so damn smart!
Tierra_y_Libertad
(50,414 posts)A people too frightened by the lurking bogeymen to venture out of their homes without a security blanket gun to fortify them.
Kaleva
(36,238 posts)Our homicide rate would still be higher then that of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Spain, Ireland and England's total homicide rate (including homicides that involve a gun) and about the same as Canada's.
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)Going from 4.7 to 1.7* would be a huge, historic, cultural change. Why the heck would anyone be against that?
*wiki per 100,000 persons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Kaleva
(36,238 posts)Just saying that our non-gun related homicide rate is comparable to Canada's homicide rate including guns and it's higher then many Western European nations homicide rate (including firearms).
Moore's assertion that Americans, with or without guns, are a violent people is pretty much correct.
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)FredStembottom
(2,928 posts)Then stay for the comments. Thoughtful, rational comments mostly.
Invigorating!