Why I Stopped "Discussing" Guns

 

Patrick Henry in the House of Burgesses

This business of the government's collecting millions and millions of phone calls and e-mails per day is the reason I shut up reasoning about guns.

I do not reason.  I try to point out the implications of where we are and where we are going; I try to make us all realize that the choice to live in a weaponized society is ours and ours alone, just as the choice to live in a future totalitarianism where the government fully uses the Patriot Act and its crimes to destroy our liberties.

I do not discuss nor do I reason.
I do not think we can discuss or reason. Our society does not give reasons in the form of debate, rather, it assassinates the characters of the opponents.

I shut up because I suddenly saw the NRA, given its vision of a weaponized society, was quite correct.

And I had known for a long time that the Intel and Police function were being melded together with Weapons and War to create a future dictatorship of Constant War and the Policing and Intelligence Gathering that War necessitates.
Add to that the fact that habeas corpus has been suspended often during the course of wars, and we have the 1984 we thought we had left behind forever.

We are on the horns of a trilemma: we are between a Patriot Act which will enslave us, the weapons which will ensure constant war, and present and future government who will have at their fingertips powers to control our intimate lives far beyond anything imagined by the Founding Fathers.

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