Weapons Kill People

  Weapons Kill People

By Shlomo  Maital

Anaheim Police Armored Car

 Weapons kill people.  The more weapons, the more people will be killed. Many of them will be innocent.  Conclusion:  Somehow, stop making so many weapons. Pretty simple. But, in a world with $1.8 trillion in defense spending, it seems impossible.  Too many countries make too much money for too many companies.

  Here is what Bloomberg Business Week reports, on the massive amount of weapons sent home by America from Iraq and Afghanistan – what do you do with all that great useful weaponry?  Give it to the cops, of course!  Genius.  Ferguson, Missouri erupts in rioting, as an unarmed black teenager is killed by police —

   ” The heavily militarized police force in a St. Louis suburb is hardly an anomaly. Local police departments across the country deploy not just military-style equipment but actual castoffs from the U.S. military.  Federal grant programs fund the police acquisition of military weapons and vehicles, and a U.S. law has sent more than $4 billion of surplus Pentagon gear to law enforcement over the past 17 years. Now protests following the fatal police shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.—and the heavily armed response by local police—seem likely to spark a national debate on the militarization of law enforcement. Do local cops from from Maine to New Mexico need military rifles and armored personnel carriers to do their jobs? “

    Once, believe it or not,   British police, called “bobbies”, were unarmed, using only a truncheon.  And they kept the peace.  Now, they are heavily armed, many of them, and there is more violence in British streets, not less. 

     Weapons are like addictive drugs.  If they are out there, they will be used, and they will kill people.  And when one side gets more of them, the other side has to have more of them, too, and then the first side needs more, and the other side, and soon…..