Stop Mass Killings Limit First Amendment Not Second

The Bill of Rights is a beautiful thing. The First Amendment protects freedom of expression and freedom of religion, while the Second Amendment mandates that the people ARE the military – in other words, the only kind of military allowed to exist in the USA is the “well-regulated militia” consisting of THE PEOPLE, self-organized, and their privately-held weapons.

No other interpretation of the Second Amendment makes any sense whatsoever. If you don’t like it, amend the Constitution – don’t torture logic!

Today, the First Amendment is on life support. Since the coup d’état on September 11th, 2001, the USA has gone to war against the religion and people of Islam. So much for freedom of religion. And many thousands of people, including Sami al-Aryan and Tarek Mehanna, have been imprisoned for their political opinions as well as their religion. So much for freedom of expression.

But the First Amendment isn’t entirely dead. Enough of it survives in the hearts of minds of the people that many serious dissidents, including yours truly, are still on the loose.

The Second Amendment, however, is as dead as Monthy Python’s proverbial parrot. (Except maybe in Switzerland, where the “Swiss Army” consists of the entire adult population of Switzerland, every one of whom is required to own a machine-gun and keep it in a locked box in case someone is stupid enough to invade that country and challenge its “well-regulated militia.”)

Nobody, not even Hitler and Napoleon, is ever dumb enough to invade Switzerland.

The whole point of the Second Amendment was to prevent any armed bureaucratic organization, whether “police” or “military,” from ever raising its ugly head. The Founders (at least the smart ones) knew that unless the people ARE the military and police, they will be oppressed and exploited by the bureaucracies that control the guns.

In other words, power does indeed grow out of the barrel of a gun. The only way for the people to have the power, is for the people to have the guns. It really is that simple.

Unfortunately, the USA, unlike Switzerland, is in an advanced state of civilizational decline. Loonies, Operation Gladio style false-flag killers, and various combinations thereof regularly commit mayhem with the relatively light weapons they are able to obtain.

And since the real meaning of the Second Amendment is so profoundly at odds with today’s reality, after every massacre, an anti-gun mob starts howling for even more restrictions on privately-held guns – without ever calling for the Operation Gladio professional killers, and all of the other armed bureaucracies including police and military agencies, to be similarly disarmed, as the Second Amendment mandates.

Meanwhile, the so-called “gun nuts” of the NRA respond by touting the talking points of the firearms industry.

Any way you slice it, the gun nuts are right about one thing: Banning and regulating weaponry is not going to stop crazy, evil people from committing massacres. Anybody who wants to can easily massacre at least a couple of dozen people, maybe more, without using any “weapons” at all.

Regulating and restricting privately-held firearms – which the Second Amendment would seem to prohibit – cannot possibly stop massacres. But regulating and restricting free speech – i.e. violating the First Amendment – probably could.

Here’s how: Simply pass a law prohibiting any professional media outlet from covering any massacre.

When crazy people commit these massacres, it is because they have seen similar massacres in the media, and gotten excited about them (like everybody else, only more so). They see that committing a massacre is by far the easiest ticket to fame. Any idiot can make their name a household word simply by murdering a whole bunch of innocent people.

And when Operation Gladio professionals commit these massacres, their purpose is to use the media coverage to manipulate popular opinion in service to an authoritarian political agenda.

Any way you slice it, the real culprit in these massacres is THE MEDIA.

Who says that twenty-six deaths in a school is nationwide news, while twenty-six deaths on the highways are ignored? THE MEDIA. Why? Because by hyping the exciting, melodramatic nature of school massacres, and whipping up fear and hysteria, they can MAKE MONEY.

The media are getting rich by lapping up the blood of the murdered children of Newtown, Columbine, and all the other places where lucrative wall-to-wall coverage has, in effect, celebrated the exploits of a mass killer.

It gets worse. Believe it or not, the media are often directly involved in the Gladio-style operations that massacre civilians. For example: The corporate-monopoly media, owned by 9/11 conspirators, was profoundly complicit in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. If you don’t believe it, check out the pre-scripted performances of Harley Guy, Jerome Hauer, Ehud Barak, and Jane Standley of the BBC; or watch the evidence of foreknowledge broadcast shortly before 9/11 in these episodes of The Lone Gunman and The Simpsons.

The film V for Vendetta got this exactly right.

Today, the corporate monopoly media are the real terrorists. They are the ones who are terrorizing us. They brainwash us into fearing “Islamic terrorism,” even though you’re far more likely to be struck by lighting than to be killed by any kind of terrorist; and even though Muslims commit less terrorism than radical Jews, leftists, and hispanics.

Maybe it’s time for President Obama to use his insanely unconstitutional power to order drone strikes against suspected terrorists, and “take out” every key player in every major US corporate media outlet. I mean, if you’re going to shred the Constitution, you might as well go all the way.

Yes, some might call that a violation of the First Amendment. But compared to the violations that have made the Second Amendment a dead letter, executive assassination of every significant player in every significant corporate media organization would be a relatively minor transgression.

And if you think that’s going too far, we could always just prohibit big media from covering massacres (including “terrorist attacks”). Word could still leak out through the non-professional internet media, so we’d all still know what was going on. In fact, we’d probably have a more accurate idea of what really happened at Newtown, or 9/11 for that matter, if everything went straight from those involved to the non-professional media, without the filtering of the professional liars and propagandists.

Severely restricting big media would actually enhance freedom of expression overall. One could even argue that if we really want to respect the spirit of the First Amendment, we should completely shut down the Orwellian corporate media propaganda machine.

And if that’s going too far, maybe we could at least start by convincing the media to act responsibly, and turn the volume way, way down on its coverage of massacres.

Obviously, if we did that, the attacks would stop.

But does anybody, in our corporate-media-brainwashed society of the spectacle, really want them to stop?

Kevin Barrett

Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist is one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror.

He is the host of TRUTH JIHAD RADIO; a hard driving weekly radio show funded by listener donations at Patreon.com and FALSE FLAG WEEKLY NEWS (FFWN); an audio-video show produced by Tony Hall, Allan Reese, and Kevin himself. FFWN is funded through FundRazr.

He also has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS, and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications.

Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin; where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.

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