Recently, Jacob Hornberger wrote 2 essays about reducing domestic mass killings. Below are some condensed paragraphs from his essays. I have edit some of the paragraphs to make the text shorter.
From the first essay above
Given the recent spate of killings in the United States, the response of the gun-control crowd has been predictable. “These shootings show, once again, why we need gun control in America.”
Never mind that Switzerland is awash in the private ownership of guns and there aren’t regular mass killings there. And never mind that California’s strict gun-control laws have not prevented mass killings there. When it comes to gun ownership, logic and analysis are in short supply within the gun-control crowd.
The real issue is one that the gun-control crowd is loath to address: What is it that is causing so much violence in America?
There are two major causes of violence in America.
One is the drug war. Legalize drugs and you immediately terminate all the cartels, drug gangs, turf battles, and drug-war violence.
The other major cause of violence in America is that the federal government is the world’s biggest killing machine. We don’t know how many foreigners the Pentagon and the CIA have killed in the last 60 years, but it has to number in the millions. Martin Luther King was right when he said that the U.S. government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.
The notion has been that so long as the killings were taking place “over there,” they would have little or no impact here. Americans could go about their daily lives and the Pentagon and the CIA could engage in their mass killing sprees in foreign countries.
Those mass killings “over there” have seeped into the subconsciousness’s of Americans.
The biggest effect of America’s overseas killing machine has been on the off-kilter people here at home. Ordinarily, they would just be living their lives a little weirdly but without bothering anyone. But now they are engaged in what amounts to copycat killings.
Thus, to end violence in America, the solution does not involve gun control. The solution is twofold:
- Legalize all drugs immediately.
- Immediately bring all troops home from overseas, cease all military operations in foreign countries, abandon all foreign U.S. military bases, and terminate all foreign aid, including weaponry and money.
From his second essay
A prerequisite to ending the massive violence that afflicts American society is dismantling the federal killing machine. By wreaking death, injury, suffering, and destruction on millions of people in foreign lands for the past several decades, the Pentagon and the CIA have triggered something inside off-kilter people here at home that has caused them to copy the federal killing sprees in foreign lands.
Americans must recognize that the federal government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. Too many Americans are loath to acknowledge the existence of this killing machine, much less call for its dismantling.
An example is an article “Timothy McVeigh’s Dreams Are Coming True” by Michelle Goldberg that appeared in 5/8/2023 New York Times. Goldberg states that the popularity of McVeigh’s extreme rightwing ideology is growing and is usually behind ideologically driven mass killings. Goldberg uses her article to make the standard call for gun control.
What is revealing about Goldberg’s piece is the absence of three words: Ruby Ridge and Waco. How can anyone write about Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma bombing without mentioning Ruby Ridge and Waco?
At sentencing, McVeigh stated it was the federal massacres at Ruby Ridge and Waco that motivated him to commit the Oklahoma City bombing. If the feds had not attacked Randy Weaver and killed his wife Vickie at Ruby Ridge and if they had not gassed and incinerated those people at Waco, McVeigh would never have committed the Oklahoma City bombing.
McVeigh was tried for murder, condemned as a ruthless killer, and sentenced to death. Yet, the behavior of federal agents who killed Vickie Weaver and the Branch Davidians was ignored.
Goldberg says that American rightwing groups hail the tyrannical rightwing regime of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet. She leaves out of her analysis that the U.S. government inspired and supported the military coup that violently ousted the democratically elected president and then ardently supported Pinochet when his goons rounded up 60,000 innocent people, tortured and raped them, and killed or disappeared 3,000 of them.
The mainstream media’s response to the 9/11 attacks was no different. Immediately after those attacks, U.S. officials declared that the terrorists hated America for its “freedom and values.” It was a position that the U.S. mainstream press wholeheartedly embraced.
The rationale was a lie. The terrorists had struck because they hated the federal killing machine, a machine that had contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children from U.S. sanctions on Iraq. Everyone condemned the terrorists, but one would be hard-pressed to find any commentary in the mainstream press criticizing the federal killing machine’s sanctions-related murder of those Iraqi children.
The same holds true for U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright’s infamous statement that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were “worth it.”
After a foreign terrorist shot several CIA personnel in their cars while they were driving into CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, in 1993, he was captured, brought to trial, and convicted. At his sentencing hearing, he said he was retaliating for the death and destruction that the CIA and the Pentagon had been wreaking in the Middle East. He was condemned for being a ruthless killer, but there was no criticism of the federal killing machine that had motivated him to act.
In 1993, terrorists struck the World Trade Center. When one of them was brought to trial, he too cited the death and destruction that the federal killing machine had been wreaking in the Middle East as the motivating factor in the WTC attack. He too was condemned as a ruthless killer but there wasn’t a peep of protest against the federal killing machine.
A problem we face in this country is the fact that all too many people are loath to confront the federal killing machine, much less bring it to an end. That’s because they consider the Pentagon and the CIA to be a patriotic god, one whose massive killings, they believe, keep us “safe.” But if we really want to bring an end to the massive violence that afflicts our society, it is necessary to confront what Martin Luther King called “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” acknowledge its evil nature, dismantle it, and restore our founding governmental system of a limited-government republic.