Letter 2 America for April 16, 2013

Dear America,

This is something of an exercise in arithmetic, and I'll be frank.  It is directed at people like Senator Ted Cruz.  There are approximately 310 million people in the United States of America, and the average household has about 2.5 people in it, translating to abut 125 million households.  Approximately 34% of households have guns in them totaling about 300 million guns in private hands.  In other words, there is a gun in about one household out of three, and there is almost one gun for every American.  At the same time, including reserves there are about 2.25 million personnel in the American military...125 million households with 300 million guns and about 2.25 million people at best who could be recruited to confiscate them.  Put simply, each of the members of the military would have to disarm about 55 households for the government to confiscate the guns of the American people, and they'd have to do it before word got out to the households that hadn't yet had their weapons confiscated; as the old saying goes, not bloody likely.  But in spite of the astronomical odds against the American government executing a coup d'etat by confiscating the guns of our citizens, Cruz is afraid that it could happen, and on that flimsy rationale, he opposes universal gun registration, apparently on the theory that if the government doesn't know where the guns are, it would make the already impossible...impossibl-er.  (I assume he buys lotto tickets too.)  He doesn't want the military to know where to look for the fifty-five houses that each of its members will have to go to in a military take over of our nation, as if each of them could go to forty or so homes to disarm two to three people in each one, each with a gun on average.  It's just arithmetic, but it demonstrates the lunacy of the position of the right on the issue of gun control, and universal registration in particular.  No one is trying to take the guns from the American people, at least partly because it couldn't be done.  The impetus today is just to know where they are, and those who oppose registration, which is a minimal response to the massacre at Newtown, Connecticut, are afraid that registration will make a military takeover of the United States possible...absurd, but Ted Cruz got elected on such theories.  Notably, he also believes that it should be easier to institutionalize people who might be a threat to public safety, which would be much greater threat to liberty than registration since it is already possible to involuntarily commit someone who is a threat to himself or others in most states.  In fact, in nations like Nazi Germany, locking up the purportedly insane was a pretext on which political activists were eliminated.  So, here's the question.  What do you call a person who cleaves to a set of ideas that is inherently irrational even though it proliferates a dangerous instrumentality?  Hint: you call the cookie truck when you find one.

Well, that's an exaggeration.  You don't call the authorities to have a person locked up because he believes that any gun control is part of a conspiracy to create a despotic empire in this country.  After all, they all have the right to their points of view, and they all have the right to spew their sentiments to anyone who will listen under the first amendment.  But really, do you vote for them when they run for office?  And if you do, what does that say about your own rationality, and by extension, what does that say about Texas, which elected Ted Cruz?  And that brings me to the real question.  The next time some jack ass says that Texas should secede, why should we object.  Let them have their own country, led by Rick Perry...or the next Hugo Chavez for all the difference it makes.  And I would say that the rest of the world feels about as I do if the UN is any indicator.  Last week, the UN General Assembly voted 154 to 3 for an Arms Trade Treaty (A.T.T.) intended to regulate international trade in conventional arms so as to stifle the tendency toward armed conflict in some parts of the world.  And the treaty does make it incumbent on the nations that ratify it to legislate certain controls on gun traffic so as to prohibit the more ruthless elements of any society from ignoring the treaty's sanctions and controls, which relate exclusively to international trade and explicitly provide for every nation to regulate conventional arms within its borders as that nation sees fit.  By the way, the three countries that voted against the treaty were Iran, North Korea and Syria.  And who is among the one third of U.S. Senators, including two democrats, who are willing to be associated with those opponents of the treaty?  Well, Ted Cruz, for one.  He thinks that people to whom he and others refer as "internationalists" are interfering with our second amendment rights by seeking to ban trade in conventional arms with countries in which the only people who can afford to buy guns are working for an oligarchy and an oppressive government.  The treaty is intended to stop crimes against humanity, and only crimes against humanity, but Cruz apparently doesn't see that as a noble enough goal to justify even these external controls on gun sales and transport.  I am aghast...appalled...discomfited.  Which is why I say, let Texas secede.  If they want to be the wild west again, let 'em, "pard."

Your friend,

Mike