| by Paul Craig
Roberts
( December 20,
2012, Washington DC, Sri Lanka Guardian) I have known for a long time that US
news is agenda-driven. Tonight (December 18) I was made aware of the extent to
which agenda-driven US news drives the news of the rest of the world.
For reasons
unbeknownst to me, Russia Today Moscow requested a live TV interview via Skype
about the Newtown, Connecticut, school shootings that killed 20 young children
and several adults. I was interested to know what was Moscow’s interest in the
shootings, and I agreed to the interview.
I was surprised
to see that RT Moscow’s interest was to spread the official US story of the
shootings and to ask me if I thought “assault weapons” would be banned as a
consequence.
Many things can
be an assault weapon. A baseball bat, a knife, a fist, a foot, a single shot
.22 rifle, a double-barrel shotgun, a fireplace poker, a six-shot revolver, a
brick, a sword, a bow and arrow, a lance. A person can add many items to this
short list.
Gun-control
advocates have defined “assault weapon” to be a semi-automatic civilian version
of military weapons, such as AR-15, the civilian version of the military M-16,
and AK-47. During the Clinton administration the civilian version of these
weapons was not permitted to have various harmless features because the
features made the rifles have a military appearance, and the weapons were
restricted to magazines that held no more than ten rounds.
Today 20 and 30
round magazines are available. For a professional, the capacity of the
magazines is immaterial. With experience a person can change clips in a second.
A button is pushed, the clip drops out and a new one is inserted. For reasons
hard to follow, gun control advocates think that a ten-round clip turns an
“assault weapon” into something else.
I told RT Moscow
that the United States was the most complete police state in human history.
Thanks to modern technology, Washington is able to spy on its subjects far
beyond the capabilities of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Even George Orwell’s
imagination in his dystopian novel, 1984, has been surpassed by Washington’s
current practice. The “war on terror” is the excuse for the American Police
State.
A police state,
I said, was inconsistent with an armed population, and as all other
constitutional amendments have fallen, the sole remaining amendment, the Second
Amendment, will not survive much longer.
But why RT
Moscow’s focus on “assault weapons”? The accused, Adam Lanza, was immediately
declared guilty. According to the Associated Press, the Newtown, Connecticut
medical examiner, Dr H. Wayne Carver said that “all the victims of the
Connecticut elementary school shooting were killed up close by multiple rifle
shots.” http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/183651631.html
Yet Fox News
http://www.fox5vegas.com/story/20346133/reports-of-multiple-dead-including-1-child-from-ct-elementary-school-shooting
reports that “A CNN reporter said police recovered three weapons at the scene:
a Glock and a Sig-Sauer, which are handguns, as well as a .223 Bushmaster
rifle. The rifle was in the back seat of the car the gunman drove to the
school, the handguns were inside the school.”
The same Fox
News report says: “Security measures implemented this year at Sandy Hook [the
school] kept doors locked during class hours, and people have to be buzzed in
before entering. There is a camera to view whoever enters the building.” If
this report is correct, how did an armed Lanza gain entry to the school?
I tried to point
out to RT Moscow that these news reports indicate that the accused dead gunman,
whom no one can interrogate, if he is indeed the culprit, killed the children
with handguns, not with an “assault rifle” left in the car, but that the
medical examiner said the children were killed with rifle shots.
The discrepancy
is obvious. Either the news reports are incorrect, the medical examiner is
wrong, or someone other than Adam Lanza shot the children.
This was too
much for RT Moscow’s news anchor. She cut me off with her statement that the
children were dead by whatever gun. Yet, the focus of the program was on
“assault rifles.” This focus was reinforced when I was asked to stay online for
a post-interview question.
The question
from RT Moscow was whether I thought assault weapons would be banned. I
answered that I thought all guns would be banned. I had already told the TV
anchor that I thought that all guns would be taken away from US subjects, but
that I doubted the efficacy of the ban. I told the news anchor that during the
early part of the 20th century, the US, in all its wisdom, had a ban on
alcohol, but alcohol was everywhere available. The alcohol ban was the origin
of the crime syndicates’ fortunes. Today we have the drug ban, going back
decades. The result is that drugs are everywhere, and drug syndicates are
making billions. It will not be much different with a gun ban. England has a
gun ban, but criminals have guns, and today the formerly unarmed British police
are heavily armed. When I lived in England, guns were not banned and the police
carried nightsticks, not firearms.
The focus on
“assault weapons” is puzzling for another reason. According to news reports
Lanza had a personality or mental disorder, or perhaps he was just different.
Regardless, he
was on medication. So does the blame lie with guns or with medication?
As the agenda is
to ban guns, the blame is placed on guns.
In the previous
mass shooting at the Colorado movie theater, eyewitness accounts differed from
the official account, and according to news accounts the suspect was involved
with the government in some sort of mind control experiments and was found
after the shooting sitting in a car in the movie theater parking lot.
Similarly, the
Connecticut school shooting has puzzling aspects. In the real time report to
the police, a teacher says that she saw “two shadows running past the gym.”
http://sgtreport.com/2012/12/so-many-questions-too-few-answers-was-the-sandy-hook-massacre-an-organzied-false-flag-operation/
The police radio recording also reports two men in a van at the school stopped
and detained, and various news sources report that the police arrested a man in
the nearby woods. The man says, “I didn’t do it,” but how would a man out in
the woods know what had just happened? There are no TVs to watch in the woods;
yet, the man denied doing the shooting. Very strange.
What often
happens is that there are a number of initial false reports, such as in the
Connecticut case the report that Lanza’s mother was a teacher at the school and
was killed at the school, that Lanza had also killed his father, and that
Lanza’s brother might have been involved. Any discrepancies in the official
story then get thrown out with the false reports. As the media simply goes
along with the official story and does not investigate, it is impossible to
know what really happened. People just accept the official story.
It seems odd,
however, that RT Moscow would uncritically follow the US media in reporting the
official story after experiencing, for example, the US media’s intentional
misreporting of the Georgian-Russian war, which was started by the former
Soviet republic of Georgia but blamed on Russia. Does RT Moscow really believe
the US media that the US missile bases surrounding Russia are directed at Iran?
Americans have
been well armed for several centuries, but “gun violence” is new. Why?
Are there more
disturbed people? More medicated people? Have Americans lost self-control,
their moral conscience? Are Americans being molded by violent movies and video
games and by eleven years of their government’s slaughter of other peoples?
Have Americans lost empathy for others?
Tom McNamara, a
lecturer at the French National Military Academy, asks: “Do Arabs Cry For Their
Children Too?” http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/18/do-arabs-cry-for-their-children-too/print
The Connecticut
school shooting is a tragedy in more ways than one. Children lost their lives,
families lost their children, and the tragedy is being used to disarm Americans
faced with a police state growing in power and menace.
Paul Craig
Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and
associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business
Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many
university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide
following.
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