GUNS ARE NOT ALIVE!

I was shocked today. I have often listened to people who complain how people were killed in our community and we have many who are killed. I heard Alvin Brooks, former Mayor Pro Tempore and long time head of the Ad Hoc Committee Against Crime (In the ghetto) and he said that we need to get guns off of the street because they killed people. As I greatly respect Alvin but do not think that he always shows logic and reason in his statements, I decided that I would try to discover if he was correct. 

I went to my son, who has a concealed carry permit, and asked if I could see his gun. He brought it out and I held it in my hand. It felt cold and lifeless. That feeling brought concern to me, but I pushed on toward my goal of trying to decide if guns killed people. I spoke distinctly and slowly in English and asked the gun whether it had ever killed someone. It did not speak to me. I asked again louder thinking it did not hear me, after all a gun makes a loud noise that can hurt hearing. Still it did not speak. I shook the gun. It did not speak. Finally, my grandson said to me," Grandpa, guns are not alive." I was shocked. It was clear that guns could not kill people because even a child knew that they were not alive. 

Having solved that problem and knowing that guns were not alive. I then sought the source of this fallacious opinion. I discovered that in all dictatorial countries, guns were not allowed. I discovered that China and Iran restrict guns to the police and to the voluntary army. I discovered that seldom are volunteer armies subject to the will of the people and that they most often follow their leaders into doing criminal and illegal acts of terror on human and animal populations. They, of course, do not like for any weapon to be in the hands of the people. I discovered that the police and sheriffs organizations in America are opposed to the populace having guns and that almost universally people fear and hate the police. I discovered that the American armed forces train young, often ignorant, poorly educated minorities and lower socially and economically deprived people to murder others if commanded by their leaders. I discovered that they were taught not to think and to obey without thought. I concluded that people, especially people who are brainwashed into murdering other people without compunction or sorrow, kill people and that their weapons have never killed anyone. 

Having resolved the question of who would teach this fallacious argumentation, I concluded that the enemy was those who held power against the will of the people and that our founding fathers intended that the people should have guns to overthrow those same authorities when they violated the will of the founding fathers. As I was then able to conclude that the police, the army, and the politicians in Washington were the source of this idea, then they must want to set aside the Second Amendment which grants me and every citizen the right to keep and bear arms. 

As my sons know, I took an oath when I became a lawyer to defend against these domestic enemies of the Constitution. I believe and hope that those of you who read my blog will want to have all of these people arrested and tried for treason. I do believe that there is no chance of rehabilitation for treasonous individuals and that they should be summarily executed when they profess their treason. I would prefer that we execute 1,000 at a time on national television during the six o'clock hour so that our children could see what happens to those who hate the Constitution. 

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Decommissioning and Crime

The United States government is able to maintain itself in three wars at the same time because the armed forces are entirely volunteer. The majority of people only become involved in the wars by paying outrageous taxes to support those wars. None of our current wars have been approved by the people are been as a resolution declaring war even though they are against sovereign states. Thus, each of the current wars are illegal under international law and immoral from the standpoint of the commandment against murder. We train young, mostly poor, troubled people to fight in these wars. We make them into deadly warriors. We use euphemisms of targets, enemy combatants, insurgents instead of calling them people. We teach these people how to kill without mercy and without mental reservation. We have seen how these people sometimes forget that they are suppose to be helping the citizens of these other countries to be free of bad political leaders and we substitute crazed warriors for the previous strongmen of the dictator. 

When these same people come home, it has been estimated that 30% suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. Put correctly, this illness is a direct result of the rewiring that the brain goes through in the combat situation where the person perceives any threat and reacts with deadly force. These people go through no process of rewiring their brains. They are still functioning in an heightened states of alertness and paranoia. Threats perceived at home are not treated by the brain any differently than those threats were treated in the combat situation. Thus, the failure to decommission this warrior and return him to civilian life causes many to break and some to commit violent crime. They self medicate and fall deeper into depression from which many never recover. As many as 20% of Vietnam veterans, who participated in a similar war, eventually spent time in jail. 

There should be new ways of dealing with these people. When a person returns from a combat zone and returns to civilian life, they should go through a six week training course to help them care about people again, to help them learn to exercise civil control of their emotions, to help them alleviate the effects of war induced paranoia, and to identify those who need more serious psychological help. Persons who begin to show danger signs like DUI arrests, drug arrests, petty criminality, and domestic violence should be shunted into programs to deal with their underlying pain and suffering. They should get psychological care rather than incarceration. Persons who commit murder as an estimated 1,000 have done who had PTSD should be incarcerated in mental institutions specializing in deprogramming veterans. We should be willing to pay as much to decommission a soldier as we did to train him for war. 

Incarceration as Punishment

In America, the last use of corporal punishment occurred in Delaware in 1952. The Supreme Court considered the act of flogging to be both cruel and unusual and outlawed it. In all of the States of the Union the punishment for crime is now either imprisonment or death. In almost all of those states the vast majority are incarcerated in a space of less than 8' x 4' with another prisoner sharing the space. As a result of incarceration of men, who constitute the vast majority of the prison population, more than 140,000 of the men are subjected to rape out of the estimated 230,000 that are raped in a given year. Because of the gangs and the use of violence and intimidation, almost all the men and women are forced into a degree of slavery and learn to be more violent, more street savvy, and more evil. There is no real effort at rehabilitation and therefore most institutions are neither correctional nor penitential; they are simply prisons. People are put into prison primarily because someone in society is afraid of them and not because they have committed a crime. Fear, which dominates life in our so-called free society, is much more manifest in our decision to incarcerate. The yearly cost of incarceration is between $45,000 and $55,000 per prisoner per year. There are more than 2,000,000 persons in prison in America. thus the cost of imprisonment is roughly $110,000,000,000 per year. That amount exceeds the amount of the deficit in the state budgets by more than 30%. Because we provide so few public defenders and pay them so poorly, many people go to jail that would not go to jail if they could afford lawyers that did not have case loads of 120 cases per year. 

It is hard to claim that our current prisons provide humane living arrangements. Our pets are treated better than our prisoners. It is hard to justify the incarceration of persons who possess drugs, who commit embezzlement, who set up Ponzi schemes, and who are not violent in their actions. The only possible reason for incarcerating these people is because we are afraid of them. Restoring corporal punishment for non-violent crimes would reduce the outlay for prisons by at least one half, would keep the offender from being trained in worse behavior by more dominant and violent criminals, and would allow for almost immediate return of the offender to his job so that he could support his family and self. The current prison method is unscriptural and contrary to the revealed Word of G-d.  The current prison method encourages rape and slavery. The current system makes no since in the case of rapists who are subsequently raped. Why don't their rapists get punished?

From my high mountain, I urge Congress and the various state legislatures to specifically restore corporal punishment as a method of reducing prison overcrowding. I propose that all violent sex offenders be housed together in one person cells and be more closely watched. I propose that life sentences be abolished and each prisoner be judged by his ability to make progress toward rehabilitation as is done in Europe. Lastly, I urge conjugal visits for all prisoners who are in civil unions or marriages at the time of their incarceration.