Americans Don't Learn

My daughter Kathy says, other races don't learn either. I have begun to think of Americans as a separate race of people. Otherwise, we would have known without thinking not to go way across the world, as the
most powerful nation on the face of the earth, to attack a weak country- thereby proclaiming ourselves
to be unimaginably dangerous to all of humankind.
Both Gulf Wars were horribly ill-advised, yet we barely mention the first one at all any longer.
According to Kathy, then, humans have not evolved or grown naturally into their intellectual gift. They are the newest species to have evolved so far, and if we measure their time on earth in millenia, they are infants.
Some of them, especially in America, seemed steeped in the id of the human psyche. Some have schema
blunted from  having received almost no stimuli save that inciting the infantile rage described in textbooks.
Our circumstances change.
Settings change.
Social and emotional environments vary.
Yet the desire to be armed to the teeth never seems to shrink or dwarf here.
Our gun desire is oddly directly proportional to the capacity.
Guns rule all. The more weaponry available, the more we want.
We have no shortage of weaponry.
And we have no shortage of armed services to use to exercise our aggressions.  We have Army, with loads
of weapons and weapon systems. We have Navy with different sets of any number of weapons and weapon
systems. We have an Air Force with state of the art top secret systems in planes and helicopters equipped
for war. We have a marine force which trains the most efficient fighting men in the world to use a plethora
of the most efficient weapons in the world.
So is there a waiting list to join any or all these units where men, women, and nearly children can be legally,
helpfully, mightily armed? No. No there isn't. Americans want to shoot Americans. Americans want to shoot
American civilians. So odd.
Americans do not have small or narrow availabilities for obtaining weapons.
Still, we never get enough of our obsession with them.
One congressman wondered aloud if someone in the theater in Aurora, Colorado had had a gun besides the armed perpetrator. Everyone should possibly have had bullets ricocheting off everything then?
What part of the man threw a smoke deterrent into the crowd, having protected himself with bullet-proof
throat protector, groin protector, flak jacket, head and face protection, and leg armor does that congressman not understand? Would he have had everyone shoot at a gunman prepared to kill with small risk to himself?
If you had not  come to the movies to kill in Aurora, you were automatically in a defensive position when the man who already had his gun out began to shoot.
When everyone is shooting, only the original gunman has freedom to get to cover and take aim.
I always found it hard to believe David Koresh could take down an Attorney General in his aims. He
always intended to invent the world, be king of the world, and incinerate the world if anything threatened his   kingdom. I don't think it ever for one minute crossed Janet Reno's mind that she was not to attempt to disarm an illegal militia. But in America we don't actually need the ATF because 'illegal militia'  is a term which has become an oxymoron.
Our President is right. We don't need citizens having thousands of rounds of ammunition. NO citizen needs
thousands of rounds of ammunition. The most difficult question to answer, though, is where to start.
I recall that John F. Kennedy Jr. had pages in his magazine, George encouraging black men to teach their
boys to shoot for their own self-protection. I knew he was right. Why would he lie?
When the Honorable Coleman A. Young was mayor of Detroit, he was admonished by many city governments in Michigan to enact more restrictive gun laws. His reply: 'Are you kidding? Don't you know
Detroit is surrounded by the militia?'
And when I asked my beloved uncle why he had rifles and handguns, and slept with some of them close by,
he said- 'Baby, as long as that man has a gun, ama have a gun.'
It sent a chill through me. I had no comeback.
And so here is the question: Who is going to disarm who? And does it have to begin with ammunition?