From Consortium News: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/12/26/the-price-of-revolutionary-illusions/
Exclusive: A number of Americans – on the Right and Left – embrace fantasies about fighting some glorious revolution in the future, requiring them to maintain arsenals of weapons today, even if the cost of their violent illusions is the brutal murder of children at school, at play or in the home, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
December 26, 2012
The 20 school kids slaughtered in their classrooms in Connecticut – and many other children who die of gun violence every day – are a sacrifice that some Americans feel is “worth it” for their personal dreams of waging some violent revolution sometime in the future, whether from the Right or the Left.
Some of these revolutionary dreamers may have watched movies like “Red Dawn” too many times and are obsessed with absurd plots about North Korea, Cuba or maybe the United Nations invading and conquering the United States. Others look forward to the collapse of the world economy, followed by some armed uprising of the dispossessed.
So, to stay armed in anticipation of such eventualities, elements of the Right and the Left are saying, in effect, that the ongoing butchery of American children and thousands of other innocents each year is just part of the price for “liberty” or “justice” or whatever.
Thus, whenever anyone suggests that perhaps some commonsense gun control might at least begin ratcheting down the numbers of victims, there is an angry reaction from believers in this romanticized idea of armed revolution. You’re accused of wanting to disarm the American people and put them under the boot of totalitarianism.
Especially on the Right, there also has been a cottage industry of concocting a false or misleading history about the Second Amendment, with quotes from Framers cherry-picked or simply fabricated to suggest that the men who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights wanted an armed population to do battle with the U.S. government.
The actual history indicates nearly the opposite, that the Framers were deeply concerned about the violent disorder that surfaced in Shays’ Rebellion when poor veterans and farmers rose up in western Massachusetts. The revolt was subdued by an ad hoc army assembled by wealthy Bostonians in early 1787, just weeks before the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia.
George Washington, who followed Shays’ Rebellion closely, was alarmed by the spreading unrest, thinking it might validate the predictions of the European powers that the new United States would collapse amid internal strife, pitting the rich against the poor and regions against one another.
Continue reading at: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/12/26/the-price-of-revolutionary-illusions/
