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September 20, 2013

Guns, Drugs & Racism ; three dots requiring a Connection

The news that another mass shooting- this time in Chicago- had occurred so quickly on the heels of the rampage by Aaron Alexis in Washington should not surprise us any more than that it happened in Chicago, which is now the unofficial murder capital of the US. That it was gang-related shooting was also not a surprise. The main surprise in this instance is that not one of the thirteen people wounded in Chicago has died yet.

The connection between guns drugs in racism implied by the title of this entry should be obvious: our American insistence that drug prohibition is an essential policy has given rise to huge tax-supported illegal markets at home and abroad. They provide revenue for criminal gangs around the world, especially youth gangs like the ones in Chicago that were almost certainly feuding over turf with cheaply produced guns from China that have made our domestic gun market such a financial success.
The idea that certain drugs have to be illegal is such a failure that it calls into question both the sanity or the intellectual competence of our species' leadership. In any event, it calls for a rational explanation that will, predictably, never be offered by either the DEA or NIDA, two agencies created by Richard Nixon to enforce and defend his inane Controlled Substances Act.

Finally, we come to the issue of racism, another American sacred cow.The idea that the nation that compromising on chattel slavery in its Constitution 11 years after famously agreeing that "all men are created equal" and later fighting a Civil War over that same hypocrisy without suffering any long-term consequences seems, at the very least, far-fetched.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at September 20, 2013 10:17 PM

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