Dear Editor,
My response to Matt Adkins’s Viewpoint piece in the Jan. 28, issue entitled, “Real Safety for Children: Defense Against Tyranny” was mingled sorrow and pity – sorrow for my country and pity for Mr. Adkins and those like him. He says, “The only reason we fight for our guns is to protect our loved ones, to defend against chaos, and to prevent freedom from being torn from the core of American communities and homes.” Bless his heart.
It is obvious that this argument is rationalizing (Psych 101) a fantasy of being the conquering hero. Games such as Call of Duty nurture such fantasies. Those games are brilliant recruitment tools for the military and brilliant marketing tools. They play on juvenile desires to be the hero/heroine.
Same with games like Need for Speed. Why pay to advertise when the public will come begging for games that tell them they are worthless unless they have an M60 on their hip while leaning against a car that costs a million or five? Those like Mr. Adkins are victims of propaganda. Probability says more guns equal more gun-related deaths.
I support our right to own guns and keep them inside our homes. However, anyone wanting a military-style weapon ought to be drug-tested and every member of the home screened by a licensed professional since the desire itself raises issues of sanity (and maturity). Military-style assault weapons should never be permitted outside of one’s personal property. To say we should have the same weapons as the military is to say we should all have our own personal drones, rocket-launchers, grenades, and tanks on the ready.
Are we to make this equitable by ensuring that low-income people have equal opportunity to such weapons by handing out machine guns in the food stamp line? Checking out drones at the public library? It’s only fair that the poor as well as the rich have access to these weapons, right? How far do you want to take this, Mr. Adkins? If you want to go all out Lord of the Flies, the poor need to be included, right?
The most sorrowful thing of all is the inability to identify and recognize tyranny. I do not trust my own government (which is supposed to be ME and US) because it has been confiscated/infiltrated by Big Money. Who do you think you fear when you fear our government Mr. Adkins? Don’t you know that the NRA IS our government?! Don’t you know that Big Pharma IS our government?! Probably not because Big Money also owns our information (five corporations currently control 90 percent of our media). We are today a plutocracy/kleptocracy because the powerful buy our elections and own “our” government. They want us entertained, not informed. We fear the same foe, Mr. Adkins. You just fail to recognize that enslaving us economically is a far more effective, if subtle, course. Who did you vote for in the last election – Big Money or his twin brother? Economic tyranny is what you should fear. That threat is real and is upon us. Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World” says this of tyranny:
“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers … The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”
Mr. Adkins and his ilk accept the notion posed by the NRA and other propaganda machines that we should want armed civilians on every street corner and at least one taxpayer-funded armed guard at every school –  for crowd surveillance and protection from … whom again? People with guns. One another. The cops. How’s that for getting us to love our servitude?
Do not let the truth be silenced. DO something about tyrants like the NRA instead of sitting around stroking your guns. If you want to protect us all from tyranny, free us from this media oligopoly. Vote against Big Money in the next election. Fight to keep money out of politics! Fight the suppliers and enablers, not the victims of their wares. Be an informed voter and know who owns which politicians. If we can’t trust our own government, in a democracy, then we have no one to blame but ourselves. It is our job to fix it by taking it off the auction block. Meanwhile, let the police do their job and keep your guns at home.
– Celeste Peck

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