Not until entrenched ethos of violence ends will domestic gun violence end

Thomas Dworzak MAGNUM
UN disarmament curriculum image

Serial killing: 

U.S. abroad, 

U.S. at home

By Carolyn Bennett (re-reporting and commentary)

U.S. involved in violence against Syria

The latest: a university, civilian death

At least 80 people died Tuesday and scores of people suffered wounds when two explosions hit Aleppo University in Syria’s second largest city, Press TV reported.

Reports said it was unclear where the second of the two explosions hit but “one of the explosions hit an area between the university dormitories and the Faculty of Architecture.” Among the dead, Press TV reported, were women and children.

Syrians protest
foreign interference

The crisis in Syria ─ as U.S. involvement has done throughout the region of the Middle East and eastern Africa ─ is devastating to civilians, far more than to armed forces. ” The U.S.-allied Free Syrian Army “is taking advantage of the situation, [using] aggression and violence to get what it wants.”

In a Press TV interview, Michel Chossudovsky of Montreal’s Center for Research on Globalization said, “This particular event of bombing a university suggests that the so-called opposition, the so-called Free Syrian Army, is in the state of despair; [and] to claim, as Western media are doing at this moment, that government forces would have bombed a government building, a state university, is totally absurd.”

Lawlessness masked as deference to law

An initiative raised by four countries (Ireland, Denmark, Slovenia and Austria) to refer the case of Syria to the International Criminal Court,  Chossudovsky says, will go nowhere as this initiative, in effect, is being raised by North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries (except Ireland) and “NATO is behind the rebel forces in Syria.

“In other words, who should be taken to the ICC?

The foreign powers that are the sponsors of these terrorist attacks and the assumption of this initiative is precisely the opposite. It is to ultimately smear and demonize the Syrian government.

Self-inflicted

Violence over there, over here

U.S. self-inflicted violence

Year end into 2013

December 14, 2012: Twenty children, six adults fatally shot, killer commits suicide at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Shooter also kills his mother.

December 17: Texas gun store owner calls to arm teachers, offers them concealed-carry discount.

January 4, 2013: Shootings target 3 New York police officers

January 7/8: Texas North Shore Senior High School student is arrested for posting this message on a Twitter account: “Who wants to help me blow up the school tomorrow?”

January 10: At least two people reportedly shot in gunfire that erupted at a Bakersfield, California, high school.

A week earlier four people died, including the shooter, and sustained injuries in the exchange of fire in Pennsylvania.

January 11: A school district in the Midwestern state of Ohio votes unanimously to allow school janitors to purchase and bring guns to their respective schools.

January 12: San Diego, California, police in a confrontation (rising from a domestic dispute) shoot and critically wound a man in a confrontation at the Reading Cinemas Carmel Mountain.

January 12: A Tennessee man threatens “to spark civil war" and "fire the first shot" if there is an executive order to ban assault rifles and to impose stricter gun control.

Thomas Dworzak MAGNUM
UN disarmament curriculum image

January 15 (yesterday): Shooter with a semiautomatic pistol shoots two people at Hazard Community and Technical College in eastern Kentucky.

Same day a gunman enters a business college in downtown St. Louis, Missouri, and shoots a school administrator, then turns the handgun on himself.

I

n pathetically muddled remarks yesterday, the U.S. president said, “The belief that we have to have stronger background checks, that we can do a much better job in terms of keeping these magazine clips with high capacity out of the hands of folks who shouldn't have them, an assault weapons ban that is meaningful... those are things I continue to believe make sense.”

But what of the unending train of violence and unchecked serial killing that is ordered daily and justified by Washington?

Does any sane person seriously believe that U.S. massacres of civilians and assassinations of leaders and heads of state in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Somalia, Syria, Mali, Palestine, all across the Middle East and Africa are some kind of humanitarian venture, random acts of kindness and are separate and distinct from U. S. domestic violence? Do you? I don’t.

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either this president nor the long line of predecessors nor the American people at large want to confront underlying issues or the entrenched U.S. predilection for violence in all affairs domestic and foreign. If anything, it is this willful ignorance, this careless indifference, this hypocrisy, this tunnel vision that is indicative of psychological and moral impairment. This we must disarm.

Sources and notes

Press TV news search, http://www.presstv.ir/ and other news sources

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Member States Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States of America

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a military alliance established by the North Atlantic Treaty (also called the Washington Treaty) of April 4, 1949, which, after World War II, sought to create a counterweight to Soviet armies stationed in central and Eastern Europe.

Its original members were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Joining the original signatories were Greece and Turkey (1952); West Germany (1955; from 1990 as Germany); Spain (1982); the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004); and Albania and Croatia (2009). France withdrew from the integrated military command of NATO in 1966 but remained a member of the organization; and in 2009, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that the country would resume its position in NATO’s military command. 

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