Guns are the real terror
Guns, not NSA spying, the real scandal
By Kelvin Wade
From page A11 | June 13, 2013 | 2 Comments
It’s been six months since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, where 20 first-graders and six adults were killed. You wouldn’t know it because all the talk in the news is about former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s explosive revelations about the NSA’s domestic telephone spying program and its Internet counterpart, PRISM.
But the telephone-spying program is something we’ve known about for seven years. None of it is shocking, because after 9/11 it seems we’ll do anything to fight terrorism:
We gave the president unprecedented war-making power by an obscene vote of 420-1 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate.
The U.S. began a war in Afghanistan that still goes on, the longest war in American history.
We passed and reauthorized the Patriot Act, expanding law-enforcement powers and encroaching on civil liberties.
We invaded Iraq under false pretenses and lost nearly 4,500 Americans with another 32,000 wounded. Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths are upward of 116,000.
We opened detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We rounded up terror suspects, including Americans, and held them indefinitely without charges or trials. All told, 54 countries participated in the CIA secret prison program, where we would hold suspects and torture them, violating the Geneva Conventions.
The U.S. operates kill lists and can order the killing of alleged terrorists, including American citizens, with the use of predator and reaper drones.
In Jeremy Scahill’s book and upcoming documentary, “Dirty Wars,” he details how the CIA gave Somali warlords hundreds of thousands of your tax dollars to kill suspected al-Qaida terrorists in Somali in a proxy war, how the Pentagon is running kill teams of U.S. Navy SEALs and U.S. Army Delta Force units with no congressional oversight and other sordid deeds.
The wars, with all of their associated costs, will cost us trillions of dollars. We’ve spent another $800 million in homeland security costs.
So when you look at the NSA’s spying program in perspective of just how much we’ve changed in America since 9/11, no wonder most Americans approve of it. The public has totally bought the idea of a perpetual war on terror.
We did all of this in the aftermath of a horrific event that killed 3,000 people.
We kill 10 times that many Americans every year with firearms. Since Sandy Hook, more Americans have been killed with guns in this country than were killed during the entire nine-year Iraq War. How have we responded? We haven’t passed universal background checks. We haven’t closed the gun show loophole. We haven’t addressed mental health.
In our community, we had two shootings last weekend on Parker Road and Walters Road. The two knuckleheads who shot Matt Garcia are having their appeals heard this week. You and your family have more to fear from idiots with guns on the streets of Fairfield than any foreign or domestic terrorist.
While we kill and spy our way to safety from terror, we’re not doing anything about the real threat on our streets. Peace.
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