If the Russian invasion of Ukraine proves anything, it proves that the one threat to the human community that we have not been able to bring under control is the threat of violence. We know what to do about famine, we know what to do about disease, we know what to do about global warming.

              Now maybe we don’t have the political will to engage in activities that will mitigate or eliminate those threats, but we know what needs to be done.

              Were this only the case when it comes to violence. And I happen to believe that violence between national states, such as what’s happening right now in Ukraine, is just an extension of the violence which occurs every day between two people, or maybe more than two people, who can’t settle an argument or a dispute in a non-violent way.

              And this human propensity to commit violence isn’t just a function of poverty, or underdevelopment or any of the other social ills which allegedly are caused by lack of financial security, or lack of food security, or lack of something else.

              The three men who gunned down Ahmed Arbery in Georgia because he was jogging through their neighborhood weren’t poor, weren’t unemployed, weren’t unable to tell the difference between right and wrong. And I can say the same thing with the same degree of conviction about the more than 100,000 Americans, almost all men, who in 2020 (according to the FBI) picked up a gun and used it to attack someone else.

              Yea, yea, I know all about the Pandemic and how everyone’s afraid of getting sick, so they get easily riled up, get pissed off at someone else and out comes the gun. So, if this is true, how come many of these same individuals can’t be bothered to show up at a neighborhood clinic and get vaccinated against Covid-19? 

              I have been supporting the various national organizations that want to do something about gun violence for the past ten years. By and large these groups began operating after the massacre at Sandy Hook.

              Know what the annual rate of gun homicides was in 2012?  Try 5.88.  Know what it was back in 2012? Try 3.70.  That’s only an increase of 60 percent.

              Oh, I forgot. We had the Pandemic in 2020, right?

              In 2019 the gun-violence rate was 4.39. There was no Pandemic in 2019 but the gun-violence rate was still nearly 20 percent higher than in 2012. A 20-percent increase in 8 years? No big deal.

              I think it’s time that the leadership of organizations like Everytown, Brady and Giffords sit down and confront the fact that what they have been doing to confront gun violence hasn’t worked. And maybe in the course of discussion, they might want to take a chapter from the efforts of a group of physicians led by our friend Ira Helfand, who decided to do something about the greatest violent threat of all – nuclear violence – and was a co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility which received a Nobel Prize in 1985.

              The prize was awarded to PSR because of their efforts to champion the control over above-ground nuclear testing, an effort which then morphed into an international effort to stop the spread of nuclear weapons that earned Dr. Helfand and his colleagues a second Nobel Prize in 2017. This Nobel Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a coalition of 635 organizations active in 107 countries worldwide.

              There is absolutely no reason why a campaign to abolish the ownership of guns used to commit violence needs to be any different from a campaign to abolish the use of nuclear energy for purposes other than peaceful means. If anything, such a campaign led by the one country which grants Constitutional protection to gun ownership would break down all kinds of barriers to the more effective control of guns.

              And if you think such a campaign would violate the 2nd Amendment, then you don’t understand the 2nd Amendment and you probably also believe that gun-control threatens your God-given ‘rights.’

              Want to live in a country that enforces ‘rights’ which come from God? Move to Iran, okay?

              Otherwise, perhaps you will join me later this year when I announce a campaign to ban guns which have no purpose whatsoever except to be used to kill human beings and thus maintain our devotion to violence on a one-to-one scale.

              You can see an early version of my website here: Home | Mysite 1 (bantheseguns.org). Please feel free to respond and yes, we will have an online store where you can buy a coffee mug.

              If you haven’t gotten your booster shot, go out today and get it done.