I’m scrolling through my news feed on Facebook and two friends, Lew Rockwell and Scott Horton, have shared an article, “Obama calls for measures against gun violence“. No need to quote from the article, the headline speaks for itself.
I commented recently on the misguided thinking that more gun control laws are either necessary or appropriate to reduce gun violence in the U.S., and pointed to another more serious culprit: “the culture of violence—and the example the government itself sets in its lawlessness and criminal violence”.
Wheeling my mouse down the page a bit on Facebook, another friend, Stephen Zunes, has shared the following image:
‘Nuff said. And then there are the wars and bombings, etc. I’ll let Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have the last word:
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
