Gun Control: The Brazilians's shock NO vote

If there was ever an action more guaranteed to inspire the belief that the Main Steam Media follow orders it has to have been the reaction to the Brazilian gun control referendum this week.

For those of you who missed it the Brazilian people went to the polls this week to vote whether gun sales in the country be restricted. The question: should gun sales be restricted? Yes or No, evoked an OVERWHELMING NO.

The pollsters were suggesting their usual close run thing and the shockwave was tangible.

Here was a country with a populace much like our own, run for a change by a government 'of the people' and they share with us an overwhelming wave of crime and violent behaviour.

According to the 'Gun Free' lobby -the citizens yearn to be liberated from the burden of guns.

Yet the Brazilian outcome demonstrates that it is only a minority who require that firearms be suppressed. The majority, reasonably, have little faith in their police establishment and want to protect themselves.

The American second amendment to the US constitution was to guarantee that all citizens could bear arms -the sub-text to the motion was that the citizen's responsibility in bearing arms was to act if necessary to protect the State from being hijacked by anti-democratic elements. Criminals are anti-democratic agents.

The Brazilians must obviously share the ancient sentiments of America's forebears because in their view nothing apparently has changed. Since the end of their own colonial era the place has always been violent. Our own was too, until colonial governments came along and disarmed and hence suppressed the indigenous citizenry, who have now been liberated and it seems that the right of our newly emancipated citizenry to bear arms is strongly disputed, especially by the SAPS..

Thus we are currently experiencing gun control by stealth. Our leadership knows that if they were to put the question of outlawing firearms ownership to our citizenry in the form of a referendum the outcome could well be the same. Imagine asking a black man who had to take up arms to free himself from the oppression of white men to give up his arms and trust the government the way the disarmed citizens of Zimbabwe have to trust Robert Mugabe.

They would say No in sufficient numbers to kill the Bill and so they should, for oppression comes in all colours as most of us know.

So why the deathly silence on the Brazilian results. Why the deathly silence on the apparent fact that the police who are overseeing the new licence allocation don't seem to be achieving their expressed goal of regulating all existing guns in private hands. The bare minimum of news that emanates about the present gun re-licensing activities indicates pending chaos with the usual waffle from the authorities about how 'alles sal reg kom'.

The present gun legislation process threatens to criminalize an entire population of formerly legitimate gun owners without in any way significantly lessening the threats the guns are allegedly helping to keep at bay.. It will certainly force many people to maintain 'illegal' firearms and quite frankly seems anti-democratic. It also doesn't seem to work.

For instance the British Prime Minister Tony Blair stampeded through gun control legislation in the wake of the Dunblaine massacre six or so years ago and now we have a situation where the formerly peaceful country experienced more than 'ten thousand gun related crimes' in 2003 [ Sky news][up from a handful a decade ago] and the formerly unarmed police now apparently operate under 'shoot to kill orders': and have become so gung ho they recently butchered an unarmed tourist with thirteen shots to the head. Maybe Robert Mugabe is right-perhaps there isn't that much difference between he and Blair.

In our backyard we have the SAPS, whom some suggest should be taking over the mini mite Scorpions who are proving too much like their namesakes for comfort, who are 'straining' to get through the mountains of gun licence renewal applications and who, it would also seem, according to conflicting reports, are 'straining' to make headway on the case of the recently doomed mining magnate Bee Kay. Further, according to screeds of callers on a recent SAFM phone in programme the SAPS are regularly failing to do their jobs, and I will personally never forget that it took them ELEVEN DAYS once to attend to the fact that I had been badly shot by bad people..

Perhaps it is because it was never really their job in the past to solve crimes [notwithstanding that in the past there were some police who's job it was to solve serious crimes.] This crime busting is a modern idea of policing- Historically it was the purpose of the constabulary to prevent crime from happening in the first place by making almost every realistic action illegal and thereby ruling by terror, and we grew used to that. Perhaps many of us believe it is easier to live as a terrorised citizen in a crime free zone than a free citizen in a crime plagued zone: waiting for the police who never come; always lose their dockets, trample on the crime scene, and generally contribute to a certain randomness in existence.

There are many who hold to the belief that terror is the way to go. Control a society by passing a plague of laws that are seriously compliance defective. An absurd example would be to pass a law making breathing more often than five times a minute illegal. Most people can't comply and you can selectively apply the law to 'catch' your enemies. As the moviemakers regularly prove, terror can come in many disguises.

The great Hannah Arendt always argued forcefully that the first step to tyranny is the passage of laws that are impossible to enforce except selectively-Is that what we are experiencing here with such legislation as our own 'gun-control-by-Stealth' legislation? Is that why we have this wall of silence about the shock decision of the Brazilian people to retain their own defence in their own hands.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist: I am a chaos theorist. I think that what happens, for instance in this case, is that humans in their natural propensity to arse-creep their fellow humans, in order to get along, have generally bought into the gun free idea because it is much 'nicer' to live in a place where there are no baddies lurking about waiting to gryp, rape and escape than it is to live in a place overwhelmed with random violence. From belief to action.

Ands so every one of these hundreds of humans in the form of editors and proprietors and journo's and broadcasters across the national sweep of Main Stream Media experienced an identical wave of revulsion and denial this week in the wake of the Brazilian NO outcome and unilaterally decided that we would pretend it hadn't happened.

NiK