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PARANOIA STRIKES DEEP
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away
Buffalo Springfield -- For What It's Worth
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink." -- George Orwell
An interesting development in the last year is the almost panic buying of guns and ammunition. The Washington Post detailed this development in a recent article:
"In a year of job losses, foreclosures and bag lunches, Americans have spent record-breaking amounts of money on guns and ammunition. The most obvious sign of their demand: empty ammunition shelves. At points during the past year, bullets have been selling faster than factories could make them. Gun owners have bought about 12 billion rounds of ammunition in the past year, industry officials estimate. That's up from 7 billion to 10 billion in a normal year. In the 12 months since last October, gun shops sold enough bullets to give every American 38 of them.
"I think it's Katrina. I think it's terrorism. I think it's crime. And I also think that it's people worrying about [whether] they'll be attacked by politicians," said Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association. "They're suspicious, and justifiably so." But the most recent FBI crime statistics, from 2008, showed that rates of violent crime were the lowest since 1989."
Wayne LaPierre is correct. American citizens are apprehensive and distrustful of their government. The government has taken over our financial system, our car industry, and now our healthcare system. The next logical step will be to take our guns. Americans that never considered owning a gun are now buying guns. The average middle class American knows they've been screwed by the ruling elite that have hijacked their country. The rage is palpable. Any effort by the Obama administration at gun control would produce an enormous backlash. Doug Casey recently assessed the risks in his essay Street Fighting Man:
"I've often wondered what would have happened in Germany after Kristallnacht if every Jew had been armed. None were, of course, because strict gun control had been imposed shortly after Hitler came to power, and like good little lambs, the population complied with the law. Bills are being discussed about things like a national firearms registry, reinstituting the so-called "assault weapons" ban, requiring secure locks on all weapons, prohibiting the import of ammunition, and levying a substantial tax on ammunition, among other things. No outright prohibition, because they know that would catalyze gun owners. But they keep dialing up the pressure, moving toward a de facto ban.
I'll guess there are at least two to three million Americans who adhere to a couple of succinct mottos: 1. You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers, and 2. It's better to be tried by twelve than carried by six. This is a group that could catch fire at some point."
The Paul Krugmans, Nancy Pelosis, liberal MSNBC (owned by GE) talking heads and the Hollywood elite are troubled about potential violence. They should be worried. The American people are tired of being screwed. Strauss & Howe foresaw the disintegration of popular trust in government and financial institutions in the early stages of this Crisis:
"At some point, America's short-term Crisis psychology will catch up to the long-term post-Unraveling fundamentals. This might result in a Great Devaluation, a severe drop in the market price of most financial and real assets. This devaluation could be a short but horrific panic, a free-falling price in a market with no buyers. Or it could be a series of downward ratchets linked to political events that sequentially knock the supports out from under the residual popular trust in the system. As assets devalue, trust will further disintegrate, which will cause assets to devalue further, and so on. Every slide in asset prices, employment, and production will give every generation cause to grow more alarmed. With savings worth less, the new elders will become more dependent on government, just as government becomes less able to pay benefits to them.
