Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: L'Alzheimer ha beccato anche Mamet

Peccato. Era un grande sceneggiatore, e ora vaneggia di marxisti che 
vogliono decidere al posto del pòppolo. E pensare che, se avesse 
aspettato un decennio per ammalarsi, forse avrebbe potuto essere curato. 
Oh, beh, sic transit gloria mundi. RIP.
 
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/01/28/gun-laws-and-the-fools-of-chelm-by-david-mamet.html
 
 
Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm
 
Jan 29, 2013 12:00 AM EST
 
The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal 
defense, he is the only one qualified to do so.
 
By David Mamet.
 
Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to 
each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in 
practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, 
poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.
 
 
‘In announcing his gun control proposals, President Obama said that he 
was not restricting Second Amendment rights, but allowing other 
constitutional rights to flourish.’
For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its 
supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, 
fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State 
will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to 
each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, 
subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State 
shall take, the State shall give.”
 
 
All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found, to our 
chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning 
public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried 
bureaucrats. These, as all bureaucrats, obtain and hold their jobs by 
complying with directions and suppressing the desire to employ 
initiative, compassion, or indeed, common sense. They are paid to follow 
orders.
 
Rule by bureaucrats and functionaries is an example of the first part of 
the Marxist equation: that the Government shall determine the 
individual’s abilities.
 
As rules by the Government are one-size-fits-all, any governmental 
determination of an individual’s abilities must be based on a 
bureaucratic assessment of the lowest possible denominator. The 
government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have 
fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain 
preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows 
this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.
 
President Obama, in his reelection campaign, referred frequently to the 
“needs” of himself and his opponent, alleging that each has more money 
than he “needs.”
 
But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in 
charge of determining “needs”? And note that the president did not say 
“I have more money than I need,” but “You and I have more than we need.” 
Who elected him to speak for another citizen?
 
It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine 
needs. One person may need (or want) more leisure, another more work; 
one more adventure, another more security, and so on. It is this 
diversity that makes a country, indeed a state, a city, a church, or a 
family, healthy. “One-size-fits-all,” and that size determined by the 
State has a name, and that name is “slavery.”
 
The Founding Fathers, far from being ideologues, were not even 
politicians. They were an assortment of businessmen, writers, teachers, 
planters; men, in short, who knew something of the world, which is to 
say, of Human Nature. Their struggle to draft a set of rules acceptable 
to each other was based on the assumption that we human beings, in the 
mass, are no damned good—that we are biddable, easily confused, and that 
we may easily be motivated by a Politician, which is to say, a huckster, 
mounting a soapbox and inflaming our passions.
 
The Constitution’s drafters did not require a wag to teach them that 
power corrupts: they had experienced it in the person of King George. 
The American secession was announced by reference to his abuses of 
power: “He has obstructed the administration of Justice … he has made 
Judges dependant on his will alone … He has combined with others to 
subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and 
unacknowledged by our Laws … He has erected a multitude of new offices, 
and sent hither swarms of officers to harass out people and to eat out 
their substance … imposed taxes upon us without our consent… [He has] 
fundamentally altered the forms of our government.”
 
 
Who threatens American society most: law-abiding citizens or criminals? 
(Matt Rourke/AP)
 
This is a chillingly familiar set of grievances; and its recrudescence 
was foreseen by the Founders. They realized that King George was not an 
individual case, but the inevitable outcome of unfettered power; that 
any person or group with the power to tax, to form laws, and to enforce 
them by arms will default to dictatorship, absent the constant 
unflagging scrutiny of the governed, and their severe untempered 
insistence upon compliance with law.
 
The Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a necessary 
evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches, and 
between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the 
individual’s greed for power and the electorates’ desires for peace by 
submission to coercion or blandishment.
 
Healthy government, as that based upon our Constitution, is strife. It 
awakens anxiety, passion, fervor, and, indeed, hatred and chicanery, 
both in pursuit of private gain and of public good. Those who promise to 
relieve us of the burden through their personal or ideological 
excellence, those who claim to hold the Magic Beans, are simply 
confidence men. Their emergence is inevitable, and our individual 
opposition to and rejection of them, as they emerge, must be blunt and 
sure; if they are arrogant, willful, duplicitous, or simply wrong, they 
must be replaced, else they will consolidate power, and use the treasury 
to buy votes, and deprive us of our liberties. It was to guard us 
against this inevitable decay of government that the Constitution was 
written. Its purpose was and is not to enthrone a Government superior to 
an imperfect and confused electorate, but to protect us from such a 
government.
 
Many are opposed to private ownership of firearms, and their opposition 
comes under several heads. Their specific objections are answerable 
retail, but a wholesale response is that the Second Amendment guarantees 
the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. On a lower level of 
abstraction, there are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed 
citizen deterring or stopping armed criminals; a number four times that 
of all crimes involving firearms.
 
The Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the hands of a 
citizen is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be 
used in the prevention of crime, but what is there about criminals that 
ensures that their gun use is accident-free? If, indeed, a firearm were 
more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it 
not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them 
accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the 
government, of course, is arming criminals.
 
Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest 
gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the 
criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed, 
and so crime runs riot.
 
Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which 
leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the 
Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less 
crime. What criminal would be foolish enough to rob a gun store? But the 
government alleges that the citizen does not need this or that gun, 
number of guns, or amount of ammunition.
 
But President Obama, it seems, does.
 
He has just passed a bill that extends to him and his family protection, 
around the clock and for life, by the Secret Service. He, evidently, 
feels that he is best qualified to determine his needs, and, of course, 
he is. As I am best qualified to determine mine.
 
For it is, again, only the Marxists who assert that the government, 
which is to say the busy, corrupted, and hypocritical fools most elected 
officials are (have you ever had lunch with one?) should regulate gun 
ownership based on its assessment of needs.
 
Q. Who “needs” an assault rifle?
 
A. No one outside the military and the police. I concur.
 
An assault weapon is that which used to be called a “submachine gun.” 
That is, a handheld long gun that will fire continuously as long as the 
trigger is held down.
 
These have been illegal in private hands (barring those collectors who 
have passed the stringent scrutiny of the Federal Government) since 
1934. Outside these few legal possessors, there are none in private 
hands. They may be found in the hands of criminals. But criminals, let 
us reflect, by definition, are those who will not abide by the laws. 
What purpose will passing more laws serve?
 
My grandmother came from Russian Poland, near the Polish city of Chelm. 
Chelm was celebrated, by the Ashkenazi Jews, as the place where the 
fools dwelt. And my grandmother loved to tell the traditional stories of 
Chelm.
 
Its residents, for example, once decided that there was no point in 
having the sun shine during the day, when it was light out—it would be 
better should it shine at night, when it was dark. Similarly, we modern 
Solons delight in passing gun laws that, in their entirety, amount to 
“making crime illegal.”
 
What possible purpose in declaring schools “gun-free zones”? Who 
bringing a gun, with evil intent, into a school would be deterred by the 
sign?
 
Ah, but perhaps one, legally carrying a gun, might bring it into the school.
 
 
If President Obama determines a need to defend his family, why can’t we 
defend our own? (Jonathan Ernst, Reuters/Landov)
 
Good.
 
We need more armed citizens in the schools.
 
Walk down Madison Avenue in New York. Many posh stores have, on view, or 
behind a two-way mirror, an armed guard. Walk into most any pawnshop, 
jewelry story, currency exchange, gold store in the country, and there 
will be an armed guard nearby. Why? As currency, jewelry, gold are 
precious. Who complains about the presence of these armed guards? And is 
this wealth more precious than our children?
 
Apparently it is: for the Left adduces arguments against armed presence 
in the school but not in the wristwatch stores. Q. How many accidental 
shootings occurred last year in jewelry stores, or on any premises with 
armed security guards?
 
Why not then, for the love of God, have an armed presence in the 
schools? It could be done at the cost of a pistol (several hundred 
dollars), and a few hours of training (that’s all the security guards 
get). Why not offer teachers, administrators, custodians, a small extra 
stipend for completing a firearms-safety course and carrying a concealed 
weapon to school? The arguments to the contrary escape me.
 
 
Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre rattles off a list of places 
protected by armed guards at an NRA press conference.
Why do I specify concealed carry? As if the weapons are concealed, any 
potential malefactor must assume that anyone on the premises he means to 
disrupt may be armed—a deterrent of even attempted violence.
 
Yes, but we should check all applicants for firearms for a criminal record?
 
Anyone applying to purchase a handgun has, since 1968, filled out a form 
certifying he is not a fugitive from justice, a convicted criminal, or 
mentally deficient. These forms, tens and tens of millions of them, 
rest, conceivably, somewhere in the vast repository. How are they 
checked? Are they checked? By what agency, with what monies? The country 
is broke. Do we actually want another agency staffed by bureaucrats for 
whom there is no funding?
 
The police do not exist to protect the individual. They exist to cordon 
off the crime scene and attempt to apprehend the criminal. We 
individuals are guaranteed by the Constitution the right to 
self-defense. This right is not the Government’s to “award” us. They 
have never been granted it.
 
The so-called assault weapons ban is a hoax. It is a political appeal to 
the ignorant. The guns it supposedly banned have been illegal (as above) 
for 78 years. Did the ban make them “more” illegal? The ban addresses 
only the appearance of weapons, not their operation.
 
Will increased cosmetic measures make anyone safer? They, like all 
efforts at disarmament, will put the citizenry more at risk. Disarmament 
rests on the assumption that all people are good, and, basically, want 
the same things.
 
But if all people were basically good, why would we, increasingly, pass 
more and more elaborate laws?
 
The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal 
defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so 
is guaranteed by the Constitution.
 
President Obama seems to understand the Constitution as a “set of 
suggestions.” I cannot endorse his performance in office, but he wins my 
respect for taking those steps he deems necessary to ensure the safety 
of his family. Why would he want to prohibit me from doing the same?
-- 
Namib
.....
- God will take care of you. Whatever you need, God will give it to you.
- I need a shave. Am I next?
(Tom Kromer)

 vogliono decidere al posto del pòppolo. 
 
Poppolo ? :-))
 
In sintesi il poppolo (mi piace) dice:
 
Don't touch my guns.
 
Si sente nudo senza, abituati a bibble and the gun, rischiano un crollo culturale.
 
Ovvero uccidere John Wayne.