WHEN MEN TOTE GUNS
 

As a rule when gun toting men become angry or despairing, women tremble and try to hide the children.   And there are a lot of gun packing men in the US, Mexico, and other places like the Congo, Afghanistan, Syria, etc.  There are even some in Canada.  And if these men get angry enough at a situation (whatever it is) and especially if they run out of medication (alcohol, street drugs, subscription drugs or simply lose patience with infidels or rival biker gangs or annoying women and children) they reach for the emotional security they have faith in.  The gun.  The US Supreme Court has ruled that men (and women) can now carry concealed weapons as well as unconcealed ones, and furthermore, university students can lug them around with their school books. 

 Have they gone completely and absolutely collectively mad down there?  Yes. And I believe that it is our job as Canadians not to go mad with them.

This is going to be difficult. We are so close. But I think we can do it with Quebec leading the way.  And if we can just get Stephen Harper out of the way.  While it is some time before we can vote this man out, I think even before the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut happened, Harper was feeling just a tiny bit squeamish about announcing publically that he had just destroyed the long gun registry records in Canada.  They were all destroyed. Except in the province of Quebec.  The Supreme Court of Quebec ordered that the records of the Quebec registry be preserved. According to the National Post (Nov. 2, 2012) Harper has no plans for holding a press conference to announce the destruction of the records of all the other provinces.  A little strange since he campaigned on the destruction of the long gun registry. So why isn’t he crowing about accomplishing this?  Well, Harper is shrewd.

Harper is aware that women as a group aren’t as keen on guns as men are and that women helped sink the Republicans in the recent US elections.  And Harper got a severe dressing down from the Quebec Supreme Court judge for attempting to destroy Quebec records. The harm has already been done to the rest of the provinces, the records are destroyed.  But we can demand the beginning of new gun registries, more stringent than the one destroyed by Harper.  

While I admit that the hunting culture in northern Canada is not the same as the cut loose of the cowboys in the US, it is still troublesome to have unregistered guns anywhere in Canada.  Long guns are weapons. They can be sold, or stolen. People are killed by these guns as well as hand guns, or sorely wounded.  Children are killed by them. Registering a gun is not the magic bullet, so the speak, but it might make the owner of the gun count his bullets more carefully and be more mindful of his duty as a good citizen to clean, lock, and store this death weapon extremely carefully.

I think President Obama’s tears over the murdered children in Connecticut were crocodile tears.  I don’t think it too outrageous to say that Obama is a murderer and assassin himself.  The drones he is sending into Afghanistan and other parts of the world also kill children, little people like the ones he wept over in the White House after the school shootings.  I believe these other little people being killed by US policies increasingly tied to Obama’s drone kill list are meaningless to him.  

In my opinion, what is most meaningful to Barak Obama is the good will of the gun lobbies, the American Rife Association, the trillion dollar arms sales, the military weapons, the profit of shoddy reconstruction corporations, and the human waste of war.  All these wars, bankrolled by corrupted international banking systems are coming home to America. Obama’s crocodile tears are for show.  And even if they were sincere it wouldn’t matter.  From The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam: 

“The Moving Finger Writes; and having Writ moves on, nor all thy Piety nor Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”

But let’s not go mad along with Obama and the American right wing cow boys and gun culture.  We must also try to stay sane under the extreme provocation of Harper’s give away of our country’s resources, in his war on women and the poor, his contempt for the environment, in his lust for extreme prison sentences for small infractions while the drug gangs launder money in our banks under his nose, for his war on crime while mandating lax gun laws in this country.  I admit it is enough to drive people mad. However I am reminded of a scene in the movie “The Dresser”. 

The movie is about the man who dresses a Shakespearean actor for his change scenes during World War Two.  Under the pressure of the constant bombing and ensuing chaos in London the actor begins to lose it. During a performance change of scene the actor tells the dresser he thinks he is going mad.  The dresser will have none of it.  “You can’t,” he says, or words to that effect.  “You can’t go mad.  This is a crisis.  It is your patriotic duty not to go mad.”

I love that scene.  It speaks to me during these weird times we are living through. Can we all stay cool and purposeful?  It is our patriotic duty.  The laws and leaders that are tearing up our world were put there by ordinary people who mistook greed and cruelty for strength.  We were mistaken.   But like the poet said, while our tears cannot wash away what has already happened, we can certainly wipe the tears away and get on with it.

Let’s demand of our politicians that we want a new gun registry, one so strong that any every gun in Canada can be accounted for at any given time, and traced to an address, driver’s license, vehicle tags, employment, and medical history.  People who have guns in their possession should be required to report every six months to a fire arms registry.   Northern people who hunt for food would have to be accommodated by sending government agents to them, or opening offices in their territories, rather than having food hunters bear the burden of travel.  All of the applications and paper work should take place in separate government offices so there is no confusion. Using target practice as a need for owning a gun is not good enough.  Let’s cut the gun toting cowboys off at the border.   Impossible?  Not if we mean it.