Sam P. wrote:
>... There is no causal link between gun ownership and crime. In
Switzerland, I believe, every male is required to have a gun yet
Switzerland has a low crime rate.<
But each has a gun as part of the national armed forces and so gun use is
highly regulated. Further, these guns are held by people who strongly
believe in the Swiss community. In the US, guns are held in a
largely-unregulated way often by "fierce individualists" (or groups of
them) who often have little regard for community outside their numbers.
So might we say, in US society (i.e., holding the nature of society
constant), the more guns there are floating about the more gun-using crime
there will be? Or might we say that as the degree of societal atomization
of society increases, the amount of gun-using crime rises? (In the second
question, I didn't say that the amount of guns floating about was held
constant, since increased atomization might lead to an increased demand for
guns. That suggests another question: does the prevalence of gun-holding in
the US encourage societal atomization? (The only kind of community
encouraged by gun-holding is the NRA.) So might there be a vicious circle
of atomization and gun-holding going on?)
Whatever the answer, it seems to me that having a solid community where
individuals feel a part of a society with others they are less likely to
want to hold guns. Liberal efforts at gun control seem to miss this point.
The problem is that capitalism abhors community, especially egalitarian and
democratic ones. The permanence of everyday forms of living which allows
people to develop ways of living with each other is continually disrupted
by the dynamism of an economy dominated by aggressive profit-seeking.
Further, a lot of communities have been destroyed by government efforts (in
alliance with corporate greed) to solve social problems using "urban
renewal" (what people in Chicago learned to call "Negro removal"),
freeway-building, and the like.
The kind of communities favored by capitalism are (a) top-down bureaucratic
communities ("corporate culture"), very much under control, and (b)
atomized communities joined by such weak links as the passive voting in a
secret ballot, based on information received by corporate media. Even
community organizations of people upset about violence and the like seem to
be subordinated to the official police and encouraged to go in the
direction of walling themselves off from the world, which encourages
another kind of atomization.
> BTW, isn't Charlton Heston the head of the NRA now?<
yes he is. I hear he can still walk on water, too.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html
Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia!
