Feb. 4 issue
Profiting from guns
By John LonghurstPage:
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A Canadian gets to the U.S. border and is asked by the border guard if he is carrying any guns.
Longhurst
“Of course not!” the Canadian replies, surprised and slightly offended.
The American border guard hands the Canadian his gun and says: “Well, you better take mine — you’ll need it down here.”
That old joke is partly funny and partly sad — and partly explains the way Canadians view the U.S. when it comes to the subject of guns.
Although Canadians and Americans are similar on many things, one area where we differ greatly is guns. Canadians simply don’t feel the same way about them that many Americans do.
For starters, we have fewer guns per capita than our neighbors to the south: 23.8 per 100 in this country versus 89 per 100 in the U.S. (Great Britain, as a point of comparison, has only six per 100, leading one commentator to quip that if the purpose of the Second Amendment was to protect America from British invasion, you’ve pretty much got that one covered.)
Although we do have a lot of guns, most of them are rifles used for hunting. Handguns are prohibited or highly restricted.
Which isn’t to say that we don’t experience violence in Canada — ever seen a hockey game? In 2011, there were 598 homicides in Canada, a murder rate of 1.73 per 100,000 people, compared to 12,664 murders, or 4.7 per 100,000, in the U.S. that same year.
The main difference is that the majority of the murders in Canada were stabbings, while 8,583 homicides in the U.S. were due to guns.
But this is not another smug column by a Canadian about violence in America. In fact, the number of guns in Canada is rising, and the murder rate rose 7 percent in 2011. (That same year the murder rate in the U.S. was at its lowest point in almost 50 years.)
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Comments
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Canadian Foodgrains Bank, say you?
You're profiting from root cause of swords and guns being invented: to protect and serve the Owner Class' abstract property rights to the surface of the earth to agriculturally grow grain.
• "Agriculture creates government." ~Richard Manning (2005) Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, p. 73
• "...we chose the latter [agriculture] and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny." ~Jared Diamond (May 1987) Agriculture: The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race. Discover Magazine. pp. 64-66.
Violence is inherent to growing grains, as illustrated in the Genesis mythology of Cain and Abel. Abel was the hunter, slaughtered by the invasion of his agricultural brother Cain, the world's first farmer and city-builder.
As Mennonite theologian Ched Myers writes:
The “Fall” in Gen 1-11, then, is not so much a cosmic moment of moral failure as a progressive “history” of decline into [agricultural] civilization—exactly contrary to the myth of Progress.[1]
Agriculture inexorably gave rise to concentrated populations and increasingly centralized and hierarchical societies in built urban environments. These in turn developed into oppressive city-states, an aggressively colonizing civilization that exerted a powerful centripetal force upon the hinterlands. Thus agriculture is portrayed in Genesis not as a gift of the gods—as in other Ancient Near Eastern myths—but as a curse, the result of human rejection of the old symbiotic lifeways of the “Garden” (Gen 3:17-19).[2]
Jesus criticized agriculture in Luke 12:18 and Luke 12:24, yet you profit it.
You may want to quit casting stones south and reflect on your own contribution to agricultural civilization's violence.
[1] Ched Myers (2005) The Fall. Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. Continuum.
[2] Ched Myers (2005) Anarcho-primitivism and the Bible. Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. Continuum.
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The Swiss Institut de Hautes Studes Small Arms Survey of 2007 puts US ownership at 88.8 and Canadian as 30.8.
By the way, the word “homicide” means the killing of one person by another person, whether intentional or unintentional, accidental or deliberate. People who have committed homicide include Laura Bush, Brandy, Adlai Stevenson, and Orville Wright. Murder is criminal homicide. People need to get these terms straight.
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