Opinion/Editorial
SHOOT TO KILL
The incarceration of America began in the 1970s as the Dirty Harry movie series, starring Clint Eastwood, came online and exposed U.S. citizens to a crime-filled, violent stuffed, and criminally viscous countryside they were unfamiliar with. The series was able to portray a criminally insane male white American, with no life whatsoever (except his ‘work’), using every imaginable unprincipled and illegal tactic to destroy or kill violators of the law that could be certified to be justifiably by using visuals from the objective placement of cameras and a fictional script. The series was completely made up, based upon violence statistics that didn’t exist, and playing to a segment of society trying to recover from a Vietnam war gone wrong, a racially charged nightmare at home, and a public in need of expiated feelings of righteous justice so long denied. Most men loved the show and felt inside that they would like to be the hero killing these made-up bad creatures.
Real America responded by hiring more and more policemen, funding police forces with much more money, and opening a spigot for the relay of military firearms, explosives, uniforms, and vehicles that remain wide open and pouring wildly from department to department to this day. America now locks up 25% of the world’s prison population. It jails a higher percentage of its citizens than any other country on earth and provides conditions for its prisoners that would never be allowed in any other country and not in America if Americans had any idea. Politician after politician has used being ‘tough on crime’ as a springboard into office, while crime rates have continued to plummet, and private prisons have grown up to exacerbate the situation by changing the designation of inmate to ‘client.’
America’s prisons have patterned themselves after lyrics from an extremely popular rock and roll song coming off the definitive “sixties” period of social development. The applicable line reads, “You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave.” Our city, county, state, and federal bureaus of prisons have taken this expression, mixed in a bit of the novel 1984, and armed it with probation, parole, and supervised release violations to ensure that no matter how low crime rates go the systems will continue to be fed a healthy supply of able-bodied men, women and children.
Instead of responding to lower crime and the alienation of such a huge segment of this imprisoned part of the population returning to society, our culture has used the events of September 11th, 2001, and fear fanned like burning embers to build more prisons, to emphasize catching and imprisoning ever more rule-breaking citizens. Advancing computerization and high-technology communication devices have made this process more plentiful, quicker, and much more effective, especially as AI comes onto the scene. Prosecutors now lose less than three percent of their cases. Plea bargains, wherein the criminally accused are offered reduced sentences for not taking their cases to drumhead court conclusions, are the norm, creating the most common crime of our day in the process.
This crime is called perjury, as innocent prisoners are forced to present ‘acceptance of responsibility’ for things they never did to avoid punishment for things they might have done but will never be carefully examined or proven. To ‘touch’ or be ‘touched’ by the American system of justice by mere accusation is to be burned and scarred for life, no matter what the ‘crime’ might have been.
In the meantime, while our venerable old system of justice has been converted into a Moroccan rug merchant bargaining bizarre, our citizens are being taught by right-wing, libertarian, and mass media sources to grow ever more afraid of violent criminals who they will never see, meet or experience by arming themselves with handguns brought about by idiotic carry conceal and ‘stand your ground’ laws. Training sessions are required for the majority of citizens now gaining these permits and new firearms. Our citizens are being trained to shoot first, and if the weapon is drawn and fired then ‘shoot to kill’ is taught as a preferred conclusion. Human silhouette targets are set up and shot at in these training sessions. The silhouette targets are all notably solid black outlined figures printed on white or cream-colored paper.
The very day this article was written an armed individual entered L.A. International Airport and began killing people with his firearms. Our culture will inhale with shock, stand back in dismay, cry out against the inhumanity of such awful violent behavior, and then strap on carry concealed guns, retrain with new silhouette targets, and wait for a chance to kill one of these armed predators. Our culture’s citizens will, once again, be supported by a stupefying self-centered, and public deceiving mass media, failing to realize what they are doing and becoming.
They are getting ever more armed. They are getting better trained with the weapons. Will they never discover that they are the predators, not the men they wait to hunt?
