Wednesday, 21 February 2018 06:05
Guns Are Just the Tip of the Iceberg When It Comes to US 🦍 Violence
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
SNIPPET:
The cliché for television news is true: "If it bleeds, it leads." That phrase says a lot about our nation's grim fascination with carnage.
Perhaps it is understandable when you consider the premise of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's
Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. As she establishes in an interview with Truthout,
the Second Amendment represents a United States 🐉🦕🦖🦀 built on stolen land and chattel slavery. The means of enforcing these goals, in relation to Indigenous people, were largely through the use of militias armed with guns and the government military:
I would call "massacres and oppression of Indigenous Americans" a government policy of genocide, total war, total ethnic cleansing. The citizens' militias [were] one aspect of that policy; the other was the formal US Army and Marine Corps, which spent the first century of US independence carrying out this project. The role of settler-colonial landowners as voluntary militias in initiating massacres to drive Native communities out and seize their land was acted out as "individual rights
".
As for Black chattel slavery, Dunbar-Ortiz asserts:By the mid-1700s, the plantation agricultural system was agribusiness and made up the primary source of wealth in the new republic. There was no debate about including the individual right to bear arms and form militias in inscribing the Second Amendment among the first 10 amendments to the constitution, as these features already existed in the colonies. Colonial citizens' militias already existed, and by time of independence, the slave-owning colonial militias had been transformed into slave patrols.
In short, many of those who worship guns do so as a legacy of how firearms were used to enact violence on two oppressed groups essential to the growth of the United States. Guns were and are a representation of a nation built upon the violence of white supremacy, as land was bloodily seized from Indigenous people, and as enslaved people were kept in bondage by militias with guns.
Full article: http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/guns-are-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-of-us-violence-2Learn about NRA Hypocrisy and also the REAL HISTORY of How and Why the Second Amendment was Added to the Constitution
Feb. 20, 2018 3:30 pm
By Thom Hartmann