Enough is Enough Mr. President!

By Dr. Henry Flores, NewsTaco

The President, in announcing his gun control executive orders, asked the American people that it required a critical mass of persons to say “Enough” to all the gun violence in our society in order to move congress toward meaningful gun control.  Well, I’ll join in the chorus.

All the “media talking heads” who are attacking the president are just creating noise to disrupt rational thinking about this issue.  As I pointed out in a previous column, I’m all for some “rational gun control.”  What we currently have is a great deal of irrational chatter proclaiming everything from “Obama wants to take our guns away so he can proclaim a dictatorship” to “Obama will be impeached if he violates our constitutional right to bear arms.”

Interestingly enough, the sorts of people creating all of the noise appear to represent extreme right wing thinking including “constitutionalists,” survivalists, militarists, mercenary-types, and conspiracy theorists.

The constitutionalists scream that our second amendment rights are being, or will be, violated.  I’m not sure they know what second amendment rights are let alone whether they are being violated.  A reading of the amendment itself will confuse rather than enlighten any conversation.  If one goes back and does some historical research one will find that the amendment was written initially to protect slave holders and those communities supporting slavery in the 18^th Century to carry weapons to protect themselves against some very angry enslaved Black people.  The militia that is spoken about was a group of informally collected individuals who happened to have guns that patrolled areas insuring order among the slaves.  There were as many as 250 slave revolts at one point and white folks in the South, even today, are afraid of angry and vengeful “slave fugitives” and rightfully so.  How would you feel if you were chained, beaten, raped, torn from your families and culture and made to work under inhumane conditions your entire life?  I’d be pretty angry too!

The survivalists/militarists I categorize under the same heading.  Many will cite the Doomsday Clock edging its way to midnight as reason enough to gather guns and provisions, go through military style emergency drills, take target practice saying that when the time comes for the end of the world they will be ready to defend themselves and their loved ones from marauding gangs of people who did not have the foresight to plan for inevitability.  Many of these are also military “fantasists” who wish they could be in the military but can’t for some reason.  When I returned home from Vietnam I encountered some of these people and they always lamented not having served saying things like “My draft number just didn’t come up or I would’ve gone” or “I would’ve gone but I got a bad back (feet, eyes, fill in the blank here).”  I always just looked at them and said “Yeah, I know.”  Now, I just tell folks “Actually you were lucky you didn’t have to endure what my brothers and I had to.  But thanks anyway.”

The mercenary-types scare the “bajeebers” out of me.  These guys, generally they are all males, simply are just out looking for a fight and being paid to do it.  I understand that federal officials pick up one or two of these every now and then trying to go to some faraway country to participate in whatever war is going on at that moment.  Two were arrested just the other day trying to get to Mali.  I’m not sure these guys even care what they are fighting about or for.  For these guys, war is just a job and fighting is their profession.

Finally, we have the conspiracy theorists.  I have never understood these folks but they can, and do, tie almost all shootings like Aurora and Newtown together as somehow these horrible, tragic occurrences were the result of planning and coordination by some revolutionary group or groups even the government.  These folks can really stretch their imaginations and can find some conspiracy behind almost any government action.

The people I didn’t mention are the criminals and those individuals who have emotional disorders but then again these folks will not be in the forefront of opposing President Obama’s efforts at controlling the most dangerous parts of our gun culture.  These are folks who will never be controlled and will present our society with ongoing problems.  These folks are the reasons why we have police departments and mental health professionals.  Still, because this latter category of people is so unpredictable we will continue to have difficulty controlling the violence they may cause.

Still, I agree with President Obama.  We need to stand up as a people and say, no shout “ENOUGH, ENOUGH!”  We need to do something about the uncontrolled weapons culture we have in the United States and we need to do it now because we are a culture where violence is just waiting to happen and as long as we don’t have a rational gun control policy we will continue to have unabated tragedies such as what we see in our schools, churches, shopping malls and streets.