What if there had to be a public referendum before the United States could start a war? Would you favor that? You know that almost happened in the 1930s, but FDR stopped it. It was called the Ludlow Amendment. I've never seen a history text book mention it.
How about if you could vote for public funding of elections, no bribery, free air time for candidates, open debates and ballots, no gerrymandering, hand-counted paper ballots, international monitors, no electoral college, no delegates, no superdelegates, and a three-month election season with a bit of actual governing before the next one starts -- would you vote for any of those things?
Greatest democracy on earth!
What if you could vote to take military spending back to 2001 levels, tax corporations and billionaires at 1960 levels, restore the minimum wage to its 1968 level, and guarantee everyone top-quality free education preschool through college, healthcare, job training as needed, vacation, family leave, retirement, transportation, childcare, clean energy, public parks, sustainable agriculture, and significant aid to the rest of the world?
OK, how about this one: would you vote for a ban on the sale of machine guns to individuals? How about a ban on the sale or gift of weapons of war to local police? Clearly many people recognize that murderers, like the man in Orlando, do far more damage when armed with weapons of war. Australia banned guns after a mass murder and has not had any since. Norway reacted to a mass murder with sanity and integrity and has not had any since. In the United States, nobody even expects policy to follow science. What works isn't even brought up as relevant. Does mass incarceration decrease or increase crime? Does a global war on terrorism decrease or increase terrorism? Does banning some guns or all guns reduce or increase gun deaths? The answers to these questions are fairly well established, and the opposite of what a U.S. news viewer might imagine, but the questions aren't even asked with any expectation that the answers will be acted on.
WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS?
Right. The National Rifle Association (NRA) spends $3 million on lobbyists and $600,000 on what other countries call bribes and we call campaign contributions.
The relationship between the Orlando killer and ISIS is a tricky one. He had no known contact with ISIS. He supposedly professed allegiance to ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Hamas, which are in fact at war with each other. Media outlets love to hype stories of foreign enemies, even when someone is not actually foreign. But we shouldn't be too hasty to ignore the fact that this deranged and hateful man claimed his motivation was revenge for U.S. bombing campaigns. He also reportedly told African Americans he was not attacking them and believed they had suffered enough. Both of these bits of information suggest to me that, regardless of what weight is placed on what motivations for this mass murder, including hatred or self-hatred of homosexuality, anger at humiliation, thirst for infamy, and of course the ready availability of weapons, this was a killer who wanted to see himself as acting on the side of historical justice.
In that regard it is worth noting that every actual foreign terrorist behind anti-U.S. terrorism in recent decades -- I don't know of a single exception -- has claimed to be motivated by a desire to end U.S. bombing. That's the last thing ISIS wants, of course. U.S. bombing is what allows ISIS to inspire more killers. Even poor souls set up and armed and encouraged toward terrorism by the FBI and then arrested for it have offered the same motivation. The FBI had tried unsuccessfully, by the way, to lure the Orlando killer into a terrorist act, and concluded from his refusal that he was no danger.
There are many steps that could be taken to make the United States safer. First, address the greatest dangers: diet, disease, lack of exercise, unsafe workplaces, unsafe roads, etc. But even in terms of mass killings by firearms, there are many possible steps. The first two, however, are obvious: get rid of the guns -- or at least the guns that kill thousands of times as quickly as did the best guns when the Second Amendment was drafted -- and stop bombing people.
ARE WE MISSING THE LARGER PROBLEM?
It's not just "stop bombing people," though. The biggest step toward peace would be to stop selling and giving weapons to other countries. ISIS videos show ISIS with U.S. guns riding in U.S. Humvees. The majority of wars in the world are fought with U.S. weapons. The majority of weapons in what we call the Middle East were made in the United States. Many wars have U.S. weapons on both sides. In Syria, troops armed and trained by the Pentagon are fighting troops armed and trained by the CIA. The U.S. is the top supplier of weapons to other governments, to poor countries, to Middle Eastern countries, to dictatorships. And weapons rarely stay in one place for the life of the weapon. ISIS has many weapons that started out in Iraq or Libya. There are poor parts of the globe where you can buy an AK47 for $10 but can't get a glass of clean water. A top U.S. Air Force official this spring said that the United States would never use a tool for accurately dropping food on starving people in Syria because it costs $60,000. Meanwhile, spending tens of billions on killing people is taken as an unquestioned norm.
Why should the logic of gun control stop at the water's edge? If it's damaging to flood the United States with guns, if killers in the United States do far more damage when heavily armed, why imagine those facts don't hold true abroad? The corruption is the same, only much larger. Remember that $3 million and $600,000 from the NRA? The military contractors spend $127 million on lobbyists and $27 million on bribes -- including $4,500 to your local Congressman Bob Goodlatte. And military contractors hold power over Congress members principally through the threat of job removal. Stop making this weapon and we'll pull jobs out of your district.
The people of Roanoke spend about $66 million on the Department of so-called "Defense." You have to nearly double that to cover all federal military spending through all departments. Let's call it $100 million a year. These numbers can be looked up for any city on CostOfWar.com. In return you get the shame of mass killing, the generation of enemies, environmental destruction, the erosion of civil liberties, and the spread through our culture of violence, hatred, and bigotry. You also get some $79 million in local military contracts. That sounds like a positive thing perhaps, but it is an economic drain. The same dollars spent on education or infrastructure or even on tax cuts for ordinary people would create more jobs and better paying jobs. But what if it were true that military spending was good for the economy? Would that excuse it? How would that sound to you if you lived outside the United States? If you lived in one of the countries being bombed?
In the Politico newspaper some weeks back a top Pentagon official openly said that hostility toward Russia is driven by a desire for profits from weaponry. It's hard to imagine a more shameful end for our species if that ends up being how we go out.
Wars happen in poor countries, and not on battlefields. They happen where poor people live, and mostly from the air. But poor countries don't make weapons. The permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany make most of the weapons, led chiefly by the United States. Many years ago, Franklin Roosevelt's mother's family got rich selling opium in China. A bit earlier trading alcohol to the Native people of North America was quite popular. What the rich now funnel to the poor are weapons of war. Small arms sales have tripled since 2001.
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