Violence in Our Society

“A TURNING POINT”

by Gunnery Sergeant John McClain, USMC, Retired, ©2013

(Apr. 13, 2013) — With the events which purportedly took place at a school in Sandy Hook, we received an instant, knee jerk reaction; it’s time to ban guns, especially automatics, and assault weapons, no one needs thirty bullets to hunt, all the standard malarkey.

Such things never take place in a vacuum, but always have a cause.  We know the single most important aspect of liberty and security “among the people” is the nature of our culture.  In fact, we deliberately form and control the way our culture develops – the direction it heads because we know it is the source for all principle we intend to inculcate in our children.

This nation has gone through some vast changes since its inception, primarily because altering a world’s perception of the status of People and Their Governments, with seven millennia of history is the most enormous change in cultural standards ever deliberately fomented.

We did not set out to change the world, wanting only a decent respect for the legal rights of English Subjects.  The colonies were ruled by appointed governors, and on the other side of an ocean, our complaints were lightly taken, ignored for lack of urgency; we could easily be ignored, and were for more than half a century.  Only our actual acts in rebellion, starting as people chose liberty over security, and the colonists became “guerrillas” bit by bit, gave cause to pay attention, and bring about the movement of troops to “quarter” in our homes.

Our primary intent was preventing such from ever happening here, and in our selfish notion, noted it should never happen anywhere, clearly a violation of what was seen as “self evident truth”, and made our rebellion more than it simply appeared.  It opened our eyes to hundreds of tiny incursions in our lives.

The People of these Colonies were staunch, self-reliant, and knew their own capabilities, having had to survive life.  The moment governors called for troops, we no longer were rebelling against the illegal actions of our government, but were put to the test of rebelling against an actual occupation, with the full intent of British Troops occupying the homes of Colonists.

We did not defeat the King or pull down the British Empire; we only won our Independence by costing the Empire more than we were considered “worth”, to keep.  The States choosing confederation shows there was no plan in place to form a New Nation, no plan for a new form of government, it took experience as a “confederation of states”, to realize “confederacy” would not serve as government.

The establishment of a coherent government, designed deliberately, with careful consideration,  with representation of “The People”, and the full ratification of this plan was a new concept in government, the logical one, following our actions.  Even with such care, obviously such an endeavor must have erred, and be modified and corrected.  In doing so, we have allowed antithetical ideas be couched as political when they are in complete opposition to the principles of our establishment, and thus allowed us principles debauched, our form lost.

People killing each other is the most common fact recorded as history.  The only real substantive change in “History” is the occasion where people have managed to go a significant length of time without wanton killing.

The key to our having had a choice of fighting a government determined to subdue us was entirely our being armed and an independent-minded people.  Nothing else is significant in this argument.  It is a simple fact government has been the primary perpetrator of mass killings since the beginning of history.

We are at a turning point in our own history.  Half our Nation is accustomed to living off the other half; we have an open, active president pressing to extend this.  We can choose to keep our guns and be both present and relevant at the table, or we can allow them taken, and be given a token seat, from which we can watch our own demise.  We are exactly at the point when our arms are of the most significant they have been since the war of 1812.  Make no mistake; that was the culmination of years of abuse by England, proof they would never take us back by force, nothing more, nothing less.  What is at stake today is whether it is “The People,” or “The government” which is to be “The Nation.”