REMINDER: This Thursday, November 2, at 7 p.m. Eastern. Austrian economics star Joe Salerno will be our fifth presenter in our online Austrian conference: “How Austrian Economics Impacted My Life.” Register here to receive your Zoom link. I hope to see you there!
****
In the aftermath of another mass shooting — this one in Maine — gun-control advocates are, once again, saying that too many guns are the reason for the killings. If only the federal government would prohibit Americans from owning assault rifles, the argument goes, the mass killings would cease or be significantly reduced.
Of course, this is all pure nonsense. If widespread ownership of assault rifles is the cause of mass killings, then why isn’t Switzerland, where people are free to own AR-15s and other assault rifles, also besieged by mass killings?
The problem is that all too many American statists simply cannot bring themselves to recognize the real cause of mass killings in America — the U.S. government, especially the national-security branch of the government, i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.
Many years ago, Martin Luther King pointed out a truth that statists have never denied but have never wanted to confront: The U.S. government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. We don’t know exactly how many people the U.S. government has killed, injured, or maimed in the last, say, 75 years, but it has to number in the several millions. That is nothing to scoff at. When it comes to killing, maiming, and injuring people, there is no doubt that the U.S. government has made America Number 1 in the world.
Some of the violence occurs as a result of domestic programs, such as the war on drugs or America’s socialist system of immigration controls. But the largest percentage of the violence occurs in the foreign arena, owing to the interventionist antics of the Pentagon and the CIA. We are talking about such things as invasions, occupations, coups, wars of aggression, undeclared wars, support of regimes that kill large numbers of people, inciting wars between other nations, and state-sponsored assassinations.
After the federal government was converted to a national-security state after World War II, the notion was that it would wield the omnipotent power to kill as many people as it wanted with foreign interventionism. Neither the courts nor Congress would interfere with the massive death and injury toll that foreign interventionism would produce. Everyone simply assumed that this massive killing machine was necessary to keep Americans safe from a Red takeover.
A B-1B Lancer takes off from a base in Southwest Asia to support Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom. The B-1B has the capability to carry guided and unguided weapons and deliver massive quantities of precision and non-precision weapons against specific targets. (U.S. Air Force photo)
But here was the deal: Since the great percentage of the U.S. violence would take place in foreign countries, Americans were told that they did not need to be concerned with it. They could go about their daily lives — raising their families, going to work, and going on vacation. Of course, a large amount of their income would be taken from them to fund all this overseas violence, but people were taught that this was simply the price for living in a “free” society.
So, that was the deal — omnipotent government wielding the omnipotent power to kill, injure, and maim “over there,” while Americans here at home lived semi-normal lives. Sometimes the massive violence was out in the open, such as with the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Other times the violence was supposed to be kept secret, so that Americans need not be bothered with crises of conscience. That was why U.S. officials got so furious with Julian Assange for revealing the U.S. national-security establishment’s war crimes, which were supposed to be kept secret, to the American people.
One big flaw in all this, however, was the off-kilter people in American society. In normal times, the off-kilter people would simply be a bit off-kilter, but they wouldn’t hurt anyone. However, with the federal government becoming the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, this has had an adverse effect on the off-kilter people, including those who served in the military’s killing machine. It has caused them to engage in copycat killing here at home, where they copy the massive killing that the Pentagon and the CIA engage in overseas.
Thus the notion that the U.S. government could become the greatest purveyor of violence in other parts of the world without it adversely affecting life here at home has proven to be a pipe dream. The fact is that the victims of the mass killings here at home have paid the price for the U.S. government’s being the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.
Unfortunately, however, all too many Americans simply do not want to recognize this phenomenon. For them, the national-security state is their be-all and end-all. It is essentially their god. They cannot imagine life without it. They are convinced that the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA are necessary to their safety and well-being. That’s why they inevitably turn to the silly notion of gun control as the solution to mass killings in America.
If we are to restore a healthy society to our land, we need to confront and deal with Martin Luther King’s truth about the U.S. government. It is, in fact, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. That’s because the federal government was converted to a national-security state wielding the omnipotent power to kill, maim, and injure people, either directly or indirectly, especially in foreign lands.
There is but one solution to all this deadly and destructive mayhem, both foreign and domestic: Completely dismantle the national-security state form of governmental structure and restore our nation’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic to our land.
