Once again headlines are questioning the role of gun control in American society. At the request of SedonaEye.com columnist J. Rick Normand, let’s go back three and a half years ago:
Sedona AZ – The farce and the fallacy of gun control laws? The reality of the problem is that it’s not an epidemic, it’s a pandemic!
A recent study recited in the Journal of Patient Safety, by John T. James, PhD, says that between 210,000 and 440,000 patients each year who go to the hospital for care suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death. That would make medical errors the third-leading cause of death in America, behind heart disease, which is the first, and cancer, which is second.
The Centers for Disease Control report that ethical drug overdoses were the cause of 38,329 deaths in 2010 which contributes to the above mentioned scourge.
Yet none of these facts are daily front page news. These reports don’t sell newspapers, broadcasts, and talk shows. The media would have to describe these findings as an “epidemic” to do that.
Of 33,636 deaths from firearms counted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2013, some 62% or 21,175 were suicides, 11,208 were murders, 748 were motive undetermined, and 505 were accidents.
In light of all this, the Obama administration is still seemingly hellbent on going after stricter gun control, notwithstanding that research from the Pew Research Center, the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, all reveal that gun violence in the United States is actually on the decline, and is at its lowest since the 1960s. But this is not upsetting headline-worthy news, is it?
To reiterate, gun crime – despite an exponential increase in privately owned firearms over the same period – has steadily declined for about 20 years, except for high profile shootings in gun-free zones which is headline worthy.
Yes, gun crime is a problem that needs attention and prevention, but it is not an epidemic.
Nevertheless, on December 5, 2015, for the first time since 1920, the New York Times published an op-ed on its front page.
The editorial, entitled “End the Gun Epidemic,” takes aim at what is perceived by the New York Times’ editorial board as a lack of federal government enforced gun control across our country.
In the piece, the Times’ editorial board writes: “It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency.”
The editorial board’s piece then dispatches U.S. politicians who offer their thoughts and prayers for victims of gun violence, “…and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing.”
Yet, the Times concedes a point often underscored by gun-control opponents...that tougher gun laws won’t stop “determined killers” from acquiring weapons. And that statement cannot be contested thus rendering the remainder of the Times’ article null and void. What you are about to read will show you why.
Looking to place blame, California Governor Jerry Brown said Arizona and Nevada gun laws provide a “back door” for terrorists. Despite Brown’s remarks, the weapons used in the San Bernardino massacre were purchased from gun dealers in San Diego and Corona within the past three years, a federal official, who can’t comment publicly, told USA Today. Arizona had nothing to do with the mass killings in California.
While nearly 40 states have relaxed gun rules in the last two decades, California has enacted more than 50 major gun bills since 1994. The “pro gun control” Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence based in San Francisco, naturally, gave California’s laws an “A-” in 2014, the highest grade given to any state. Guns & Ammo Magazine, with a “pro-gun rights” stance, ranked the state fourth worst in the country for gun ownership.
Prior to the San Bernardino mass shooting, California had seen seven public shootings since 2006 that claimed four or more lives (not counting those the police believe were gang related) according to USA TODAY’s “Behind the Bloodshed” tracker. Maybe this is why Governor Brown was looking for somewhere else to place blame!
Writer Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post has concluded that Marco Rubio’s claim that gun control wouldn’t have prevented the mass shootings that have occurred in “last few months or years” is, indeed, accurate.
Rubio’s statement stands up to scrutiny…at least for the recent past, as Kessler framed it. “Notably, three of the mass shootings took place in California, which already has strong gun laws including a ban on certain weapons and high-capacity magazines,” Kessler wrote.
And yet, states like New York, on their own, cannot block sales of guns to those who are on the Department of Homeland Security’s “U.S. Terror Watch List” because it is restricted by the Feds. So, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer and Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, in the last couple of weeks, have announced a push to prevent known or suspected terrorists from purchasing guns in New York State. Efforts of Schumer and Cuomo come on the heels of federal failed efforts to close terror gaps. The problem is for the naive Messers Schumer and Cuomo that terrorists and gang-bangers don’t buy guns from the retail trade, they buy or earn them from the worldwide black market cartels of drug and gun runners! However Schumer’s and Cuomo’s efforts will make you feel good, won’t they?
Nevertheless, Schumer and Cuomo are asking the federal government to officially add the U.S. Terror Watch List to the criteria it uses for federal background checks in New York State. This would, purportedly, prevent known or suspected terrorists from legally purchasing guns and would cross-check the terror watch list with a National Instant Criminal Background Check System request. Why then, I ask, has the Obama Administration been so uncooperative? Why has there been no use of the President’s vaunted Executive Order tendency relative to this critical issue?
Moving on, Eugene Volokh, a professor of Constitutional law at UCLA and writer for “The Volokh Conspiracy,” a legal blog hosted by the Washington Post, points out that [gun] violence has dropped nationwide even though most states have loosened gun control laws and California is widely known to have the strictest laws in the nation. But those strict gun control laws haven’t reduced the rate of gun related deaths in California at all. The percentage of homicide victims killed by firearms has remained steady in California since 1990, according to the California Attorney General’s Homicide Report.
Realistically, the battle to prevent mass tragedies with legislation may be futile, Volokh said.
“Let’s look at somebody who is a would-be mass shooter. This person has essentially decided to have the defining event of his life, and possibly the concluding event of his life, be mass murder,” Volokh said. “This is somebody who is very motivated to commit the crime, and again, we know he is motivated because he’s willing to give up his life to do that.”
So, let’s examine the real reasons the Feds can’t seem to halt the mass shootings that now dominate media headlines. The root of the problem has little to do with retail gun shops, background checks, published terrorist lists, kids with legal guns, and gun show loopholes. Those are assertions for consumption by the gullible public!
Below, I will describe to you how the incomprehensibly massive and complex transnational black market in illegal weapons works: It’s not an epidemic (geographically limited to a single area or country), it’s a pandemic (spreading world-wide)! But first, we must begin with the two following proven premises: First, there’s no way to separate the merger of the international drug cartels from international gun-running. They work hand-in-hand. And, secondly, the vast majority of small arms on the black market were produced and traded legally before being diverted into an illicit network.
METHODOLOGY for CIRCUMVENTING OFFICIAL REGULATION aka The Black Market:
Sourcing Arms Inventories, Manufacturers, Wholesaling Networks
The Shadow Economy of the Trans-National, Allied, Inter-Operable Crime Syndicate Organizations is comprised of illegal drug cartels and dealers, covert contraband smuggling operators, covert gun-running cartels, covert international money laundering banks, and gun-barter brokers for non-cash trades for other commodities, such as mined gemstones, who use bogus private nominee agreements and proxy statements in their trade documentation. There are professional pirates and human traffickers as well (immigration coyotes, human slave traders, child sex slave traders, prostitution rings and sea born pirates) who now work together with drug cartels and gun-runners across borders with the help of aircraft transport and shipping companies who bribe corrupt government officials in third world countries for seemingly legitimate operating licenses (AOCs) and import-export documentation. Within all contraband, there are usually included military grade weapons. It’s a great recession-proof high cash-flow business.
Drug cartels have merged drug sales and distribution into covert gun running operations with common street gangs in almost every mid-sized and large city of America and the western world.
Islamic jihadist organizations have entered into joint ventures with crime/cartel syndicates to distribute overseas stolen, captured, illegally traded and purchased, as well as, hijacked and pirated weapons, derived from pirates and contraband smugglers who engage heavily in trafficking of captured and stolen military-grade weapons from current and past conflict zones. More wars generate more black market weapons!
3D Printer manufacture of guns and ammunition and the advent of gun design software have made it even more challenging for gun control supporters to corral the rise of homemade arsenals, as a recent YouTube video uploaded to the “Taofledermaus” channel in the last few days demonstrates. And people have already started to download patterns (software) for their future firearms. According to a 2015 January report, more than 150,000 patterns were downloaded immediately following a pro-gun control speech by President Obama. No, these bullets are not even close to commercial or military grade yet, but the speed at which technology progresses will assure that quality untracked 3D manufacture of high grade guns and ammunition isn’t far off.
Distributing Arms Inventories, Retail
The illicit drug trade (and its black market weapons partners) is the largest, most profitable and best cash-flowing business on Earth, and accounts for more than 8%-9% of world trade today. Illegal product(s) cartels simply cannot function without cross-border banking services from the largest of international banks including money laundering, equipment financing, currency conversion, as well as, jury-rigged export-import documentation and investment banking facilities. There is a consensus among U.S. Congressional Investigators, former bankers and international banking experts that U.S. and European banks launder between $500 billion and $1 trillion of dirty money each year, half of which is laundered by U.S. banks alone. Bank of America, Western Union, JP Morgan/Chase, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo (through its Wachovia Bank acquisition) are among the institutions allegedly involved in the drug trade. Meanwhile, Britain’s giant HSBC has admitted its laundering role, and evaded criminal prosecution by paying a fine of almost $2 billion. In fact, all these banks evade criminal prosecution by paying large fines without admitting guilt which is a permissible legal tactic in the United States. The drug cartels, gun-runners, smugglers, contraband traffickers, etc. cannot exist without banking partners…the same banks who serve in your local Chamber of Commerce.
Professional straw buyers for non-qualifying buyers who work different state retail stores (who report most brokered sales to police as stolen weapons so that when they’re tied to a future crime there will be no associated liability for the straw man). These people operate a huge cottage industry.
Drug Cartels have merged drug sales and distribution into covert gun running operations with common street gangs. Every under aged “gangsta” knows how to buy or earn, through drug sales or a contract killing, a firearm and ammunition without ever entering a retail gun store.
Every millennial in the U.S. and western world who is unemployed, disillusioned, lonely, highly indebted, and sees no future, who has a hand-held communications device and understands ever app that runs on it as well as all social media communications, is already being targeted by the drug/gun-running cartels through exceedingly sophisticated social media online marketing. You older progressives just don’t get it…your political leaders, laws, and law enforcement are doomed to be in control of nothing that these cartels don’t want controlled…but they do want you to help them with gun control laws which drive more customers to them!
Sales made by legally licensed but corrupt at-home commercial gun dealers, without retail store facilities, are proliferating.
Gangs are now so sophisticated that they have central weapons vaults for temporary loan of “gang community guns” to young gangstas who haven’t earned ownership of a weapon. They also hire college MBAs for their financial management needs.
Secret online gun-running and Internet weapons-trafficking syndicates are proliferating. All they need is a private Tor Browser Bundle and a skilled hacker.
Stolen guns derived from ordinary street crime, burglaries, home invasions, mini-storage locker thefts, etc., are bought by the crime syndicates. Continuously stealing guns is an organized cash-flow business for the unemployed these days since there’s always an available illicit buyer/reseller.
Foreign unregulated gun and ammunition manufacturers, of which there are over a thousand manufacturing in more than a 100 countries, use illegal crime/cartel syndicate’s distribution systems in the U.S. just as if they were straight-up import/export businesses.
Unreported gun and ammunition sales between private parties happen every day. There’s no way for police to know about these transactions.
Provided to the illegal guns black market are U.S. Government unaccountable mass firearms distribution, such as Obama’s botched Fast & Furious operation and an unaccounted for 15,000 National Park Service assault weapons, not to mention provision of weapons to friendly jihadists and middle east government militaries that surrender in battle and leave U.S. provided weapons behind for capture and sale.
Many governments, including the U.S. Government, and that of the U.K, France, Germany, Belgium and Israel, not to mention China and Russia and several Balkan countries, enter into the gray-market trade, in which arms sold legally can end up on the black market.
“This involves weapons that originate from a legal government transfer,” a Conflict Awareness Project official said, “but when they arm proxy forces to carry out their national security agendas, they may use illicit channels or black market arms brokers to carry out the deal.” Virtually all international illegal arms brokers work the world’s conflict zones.
COMMONLY DISCUSSED CAUSES OF MASS GUN VIOLENCE:
Desensitized Gamers playing/viewing endless online war games, DVDs, television shows and movies glamorizing war; these guys are targeted for recruiting into the military.
Emergence of Religious, Political and Polarized Lifestyle Cult Groups:
ISIS and al-Qaeda are sophisticated brainwashers and seducers. Internet advertisement is horrendously popular for terrorist recruiters. Charismatic Imams use fiery anti-American sermons at mosques to attract young men. These potential recruits are “in-betweeners”: in between jobs, in between relationships, in between their family homes and their own marriages, in between schools or, in general, in between young adulthood and adulthood. The key psycho-dynamic patterns in homegrown terrorists are:
- Ambivalence toward or disappointment in early parental figures, often resulting in father hunger or longing
- Ambivalence about vocation, marriage, and intimacy
- Being an “in-betweener” with prolonged adolescent identity searching
- Ambivalence toward authority, fear of authority and hate of authority, yet longing for effective authority.
The recruitment of homegrown terrorists involves the charismatic exploitation of “in-betweener” life situations by radical Imams as cult figures. Terror cults and their recruiters use well-recognized mind control, thought-reform techniques, and social group atmospheres to accomplish their ends vis-a-vis the Internet.
Death of the Nuclear Family and Golden Rule in favor of promotion of self-esteem (“it’s all about me” attitude), Political Correctness, Failure of State Welfarism, Multiculturalism and Religious Diversity, as well as, emergence of unfathomable cost of a business or entrepreneurial education.
Emergence of electronic non-face-to-face communications which reduces moral compunction!
Utter rewriting of history to promote current political and social belief-systems.
Replacement of a loving and merciful God with a politically correct God.
Complete collapse of morality, in general, since the “Love Generation” of the 60s.
Complete failure of a manufacturing based economy resulting in sustained high unemployment.
Loss of faith in the objectivity and truthfulness of the news media.
Promotion of military conquest and settlement of international disputes by economic coercion and subterfuge.
Complete divergence from original Constitutional Law reflecting our Founding Fathers principles.
Acceptance of a new moral construct, i.e. avoidance of responsibility for one’s acts while attempting to find a social cause for every immoral transgression or micro-aggression:
“…[E]very free individual must protect themselves against the evil will of the man, the mob and the state.”
Tiffany Madison
GUNS ARE NOT THE ISSUE. WE ARE.”
Aaron B. Powell, Guns
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1. The Conflict Awareness Project (CAP) is an international non-profit organization dedicated to investigating, documenting, and bringing to justice major arms traffickers, war profiteering networks, and transnational criminal operations that fuel war and conflict around the world. See http://conflictawareness.org
2. “The Tangled Web of Illicit Arms Trafficking by Rachel Stohl.” See http://conflictawareness.org/
3. “The Making of a Homegrown Terrorist” by Peter A. Olsson, MD http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/trauma-and-violence/making-homegrown-terrorist?GUID=21A28F6B-4D09-45C1-8017-E51A24CF1790&rememberme=1&ts=10122015
4. “3D Printed Bullets-Latest Gun Control Nightmare” http://www.inquisitr.com/676556/3d-printed-bullets-latest-gun-control-nightmare/
5. Table 10. Number of deaths from 113 selected causes, Enterocolitis due to Clostridium difficile, drug-induced causes, alcohol-induced causes, and injury by firearms, by age: United States, 2013…Centers for Disease Control
6. Death by Prescription, by Deborah King, The Huffingon POST 09/23/2013
7. Doctors Are the Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S. by Joseph Mercola, D.O.
8. [Search domain www.wsws.org] wsws.org/en/articles/2011/05/mexi-m20.html
9. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/avinash-tharoor/banks-cartel-money-laundering_b_4619464.html
10. Banks Financing Mexico Drug Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-06-29/banks-financing-mexico-s-drug-cartels-admitted-in-wells-fargo-s-u-s-deal
11. US Bank Money Laundering – Enormous By Any Measure by James Petras, Professor of Sociology, Binghamton University
I second that motion to force people to use their own names!
You first?
I think Sedona Eye should start posting aALL comments not just those that bash All things Sedona government.. Stop acting like your unbiased (cause you not)and start posting all comments once again.. Be them pro or con..
Stop pissing in the sand and stick to the topic. No wonder city hall can’t function without Chamber. The old people fart brains at city meetings and the young people at Chamber and their friends at city hall laugh all the way to the party and the bank. Put your check books away and turn the kids out of the basement and force them to go earn a living. We’re tired of it.
Read stats.
All Readers at The Eye:
Please click on the comment above from this writer entitled ” Sedona Eye » J. Rick Normand: Farce and Fallacy of Gun Control Laws Three Years Later in 2019 says:” and you will be taken to a current follow-up to the main article which is highly impactful to say the least. Thank each of you!~J. Rick Normand
Where are folks like Dick Ellis & Pud Colquit & Joe Venier & other council members & mayors have to say about this? You’ve got the history here not these children of the corn. We need reasonable & rational development and freedom fighter voices to speak up instead of keeping quiet. John Cornelius and his ilk are spinning in their Sedona graves. Being older I don’t give a fudge damn if I’m called names. I know my substance and worth and beliefs. If some mouthpiece of a small minded group calls me names then screw them. Nobody should intimidate or care about others calling you names. What you should care about is being railroaded by your silence. Your silence is killing us not guns.
okay whatever you argue is fine, that’s your right
keep in mind when you argue these points
good people are dying for no reason
we don’t need bump stocks
we don’t need howitzers
we don’t need military grade weapons
we don’t need an arsenal in every home but we do need the right to own guns in our homes
we don’t need tanks or swat vehicles or drawn guns to answer most police calls, we do need patience and diplomacy
we don’t need homeless on our streets, they need to be in hospitals or assisted living facilities or under supervision if diagnosed with mental health issues – we have loitering laws, enforce them
when you take military grade weapons away from our town and city and state police, then we can talk about taking away from our citizens
when you take guns away from the drug gangs and thugs like Antifa and Nationalists, we can talk about taking away from our citizens
when you fail to educate that America is the best global example of multi culturalism and democracy and freedom of religion, the citizens will need to protect themselves from those children who take living here for granted
Guns Don’t Kill People – Gun-owners Kill People.
good morning Sedona enjoying coffeepot help me here @shobert b/c when Obama & holder & democrat majority congress gifted guns & $$ to Mexican gangs, those gangbangers weren’t culpable b/c US owned them & the border patrol agents murdered by them were virtual deaths????? talk about fast & furious BS
I just like the helpful information you provide in your articles
@elainephoenix God bless you for your words of Wisdom.
Very well presented. Every quote was awesome and thanks for sharing the content. Keep sharing and keep motivating others.