Americans have a history of scrambling from one
Moral Panic and resulting Moral Crusade to another. Those zealots (and most often they are religious zealots) who scream Moral Panic at the top of their lungs, that the sky is falling, and America with it, always invoke the idea America will become a better, more lawful and more just society if only their Phobia will be implemented into law. Two of the enduring Moral Crusades Americans have been bombarded by with over the last four to nine decades are Gun Control and the War on Drugs.
Guns are not the problem. Gun Control will not solve “the problem”. The problem is violence and crime, and that problem is driven by the facts of:
(1) Americans apparently insatiable appetite for street drugs,
(2) The money to be made from those drugs.
(3) Our unwillingness to accept those facts and to legalize those drugs.
How long does a “noble” experiment need to continue before it's declared a failure? For Alcohol Prohibition, that means The Eighteenth Amendment and The Volstead Act, it was about 13 years.
The Alcohol Prohibitionists during their
Holy Moral Crusade, which started in 1840, assured us that Temperance would make America a better and more just society. It would Save Lives, It would Save Families, and most importantly to them, it would Save Souls. It was just the reverse. Americans went blind or died from bad liquor. Corruption of Law Enforcement was widespread. Government budgets suffered from the lack of revenue from alcohol taxation. Murders became National Celebrities. Prohibition’s ultimate result was the creation an entirely new class of criminals, the Bootleggers, who used extreme violence to achieve their ends. Violence shot up as the bootleggers used machines guns to kill each other, as well as innocents.
This led directly to the first nationwide gun control, the
National Firearms Act of 1934, which initially banned machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. Previously, automatic weapons like the Thompson Submachine Gun, or the Browning Automatic Rifle, aka the B.A.R. could be bought unrestricted, even through mail order via the Sears catalog. There were no mass killings with these weapons before Prohibition. It was the power and wealth available through bootlegging that drove the violence.
With the passage of the 21st Amendment in 1933, the repeal of Prohibition occurred. The bootleggers, aka Organized Crime, lost nearly all of their black market alcohol profits because of competition with low-priced alcohol sales at legal liquor stores. So Organized Crime eventually turned to drugs. On December 17th, 1914, the
Harrison Narcotics Act passed the US Congress. So the Prohibition of Opiates and Cocaine has been ongoing for 94 years. NINETY-FOUR YEARS. Marijuana prohibition was enacted in 1937. Today, marijuana can be purchased anywhere in the United States, even in schools.
The findings are on the drug prohibition experiment are conclusive -- it's an absolute, utter and complete failure. Want proof? We have half a million people incarcerated in US jails and prisons for drug offenses to show for this “Ignoble Experiment”. FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE. In jail. For Drug related offenses. And have all these people incarcerated caused American’s demand for drugs to decrease? No, they most certainly have not. The day we legalize drugs is the day we can begin to clean up the (un)Holy mess that drug prohibition has created.
One of the most prominent supporters of Prohibition helped hasten its end. A letter written by wealthy industrialist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to Nicholas Murray Butler, was published on the front page of the New York Times in 1932. Butler was President of Columbia University, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and had received the Nobel Peace Prize. The letter stated:
‘When the Eighteenth Amendment was passed I earnestly hoped- with a host of advocates of temperance-that it would be generally supported by public opinion and thus the day be hastened when the value to society of men with minds and bodies free from the undermining effects of alcohol would be generally realized. That this has not been the result, but rather that drinking has generally increased; that the speakeasy has replaced the saloon, not only unit for unit, but probably two-fold if not three-fold; that a vast array of lawbreakers has been recruited and financed on a colossal scale; that many of our best citizens, piqued at what they regarded as an infringement of their private rights, have openly and unabashedly disregarded the Eighteenth Amendment; that as an inevitable result respect for all law has been greatly lessened; that crime has increased to an unprecedented degree-I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe.”
Sound familiar? Change the context to drugs and see what you get.
You want to end violence associated with guns? Then stop offering the simplistic, feel-good solution of Gun Control, and start demanding the much more difficult solution of Drug Legalization.
Demand that drugs be legalized, regulated and taxed, just like alcohol. No matter of the outcry of the Moral Zealots on the both the right AND the left, that the sky will fall.
Demand that no state, county, city, town or village be allowed to be "dry".
Demand anyone incarcerated on non-violent drugs charges be immediately released, and receive a pardon from their Governor, or from the President.
Demand that laws not be based on "doing it for the children", since what they do is to erode the rights of adults, while doing little, or nothing to save children. State clearly and loudly, that adult Americans, as adults, have more rights than children.
Demand that Sin Based Laws in America cease, and accept the fact that it is not the job of American jurisprudence to Save American Souls. This will be the hardest part of all, since Americans do love encoding an Old Testament notion of Sin into American Law.
Finally, accept and loudly acknowledge the fact that America is based on the ideas and ideals of Rights and Freedoms of the Individual, and the of price Individual Freedom is the fact that some people are going to suffer, either because Drugs are Legal, or Guns are Legal.
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