The gun debate rages on. While NY recently passed the most comprehensive gun legislation in the country and also one of the toughest, other states are moving in the opposite direction. In Missouri, the current state legislature is proposing bills to require gun safety training for 1st-graders, to allow teachers to carry guns in their classrooms, and to make it illegal to enforce certain federal firearms laws.
Gun owners not only cite the 2nd Amendment as the basis for claiming a right to own whatever type of gun they choose, including military-style assault weapons; some also claim it is their God-given right to do so. However gun makers and gun sellers have a much more pragmatic reason for opposing any gun control. Their push to market guns is all based on the bottom line: profits are declining. Their strategy to increase profits resembles the past strategy of the cigarette industry when its profits had declined: market to younger and younger customers and get them hooked at an early age.
SOME MUST-READ ARTICLES:
* "Selling a New Generation on Guns" by Mike McIntire (The NY Times)
* "The Surprising Unknown History of the NRA" by Steven Rosenfeld (Alter Net)
* "War zone in America? Mother loses 4th child to gun violence" by Alex Kane (AlterNet)
We live in a capitalist society, place where numbers are placed before a human life. Gun-makers and gun-sellers need to realize the moral side of gun and weapons. Today, so many weapons have been created and are owned by so many people across the U.S. Unfortunately, some of this weapons end up in the hands of the wrong people. In so many situations, this weapons are used to solve problems of two parties that disagree. In the engage book we learned about how power to reason is greater than any weapon. Alice Walker has written, "I believe that war is a weapon of persons without personal power, that is to say, the power to reason, the power to persuade, from a position of morality and integrity; and that to go to war with an enemy who is weaker than you is to admit you possess no resources within yourself to bring to bear on your fate." (31)
ReplyDeleteWe live in a capitalist society, place where numbers are placed before a human life. Gun-makers and gun-sellers need to realize the moral side of gun and weapons. Today, so many weapons have been created and are owned by so many people across the U.S. Unfortunately, some of this weapons end up in the hands of the wrong people. In so many situations, this weapons are used to solve problems of two parties that disagree. In the engage book we learned about how power to reason is greater than any weapon. Alice Walker has written, "I believe that war is a weapon of persons without personal power, that is to say, the power to reason, the power to persuade, from a position of morality and integrity; and that to go to war with an enemy who is weaker than you is to admit you possess no resources within yourself to bring to bear on your fate." (31)
ReplyDelete