'Bowling for Dollars' - Guns . . . .

I watched Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine this morning - I felt it my duty to watch it. Having watched and read about the tragic assault that took place at the movie theater in suburban Denver, Colorado - 17 miles from Columbine High School; I was particularly sensitive to the ads that ran on the cable channels reporting on the Aurora siege and its attendant loss of life and physical injury. An ad for an insurance company featured an actor smashing melons, resulting in bystanders being awash in melon juice - a 'bloody' scene nevertheless.
  Arms dealers and arms and ammunition manufacturers provide massive financial opportunities for men, women, and corporations around the world; sales to governments, insurgent groups, and individuals. Wars on terror, governments, drugs, and the poor are big business. Chris Hedges opens his recent Boston Review article, "War Is Betrayal", with words that express important connections to the dangerous traps that we as Americans have set for ourselves:

We condition the poor and the working class to go to war. We promise them honor, status, glory, and adventure. We promise boys they will become men. We hold these promises up against the dead-end jobs of small-town life, the financial dislocations, credit card debt, bad marriages, lack of health insurance, and dread of unemployment. The military is the call of the Sirens, the enticement that has for generations seduced young Americans working in fast food restaurants or behind the counters of Walmarts to fight and die for war profiteers and elites.

 http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/chris_hedges_war_soldiers_army_military_suicides_ptsd.php 


Connect. Think for yourself. Beware of 'free-market' traps. 


I spoke with an unemployed, middle-aged man at a party about the bulge that I noticed under his shirt. I asked, "What is that?" He replied, "It's my pistol." "What do you need to carry that for?", I asked. He said, "To protect my family." Protect his family from what, from whom?, - from poverty, lack of health insurance, credit card debt, mortgage debt, I thought.
  "Protect your family!" NRA's and its puppet Charlton Heston's slogan. Until I had watched Michael Moore's Columbine, I hadn't realized that the notion of protecting one's family was not a sincere response to my question by my interlocutor, but really an advertising slogan. Plutonium processing facilities and disposal sites might be reckoned by some to be part of a family protection scheme, also.
  Guns. Perpetual war. Assaults by "war profiteers and elites" on the poor and the middle-class - with the full advise and consent of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the oval office - should be old news.
  We certainly have a duty to think these matters through. War is, and has been, a booming business for the few. I guess we've been too stupid to feel this. Perhaps we see it; but don't feel it or understand it. How does that wonderful tune, "Some other time" go? "Oh well. We'll catch up some other time." Bird said, "Now's the time".