In Part One of this post, we noted why military veterans are feared by "liberal" politicians: fear that their positions of comfort and leadership would evaporate if those pols were to over-reach in the further strengthening of an overly-ambitious Federal Government, and the Veterans were to tell them, "No, that's far enough, you can't go any farther towards erasing the individual rights of liberty our forefathers gave us." Some of us have said that, individually, and in small organizations, but we are ignored or shouted down by the momentum of the movement which exists to make all citizens wards of the Government instead of stewards of their own Liberty. That momentum is mighty, and approaches or may have already exceeded 50% of the citizens of this great Nation. The progenitors of the wardship movement, sometimes known as Socialists, after the model of Government which says that the society has more rights collectively than the individual has, have become well-organized at their task, and ending individual Liberty is within their grasp if they act together in a final push.
That final push may be coming, and it will certainly be preceded by as much citizen disarmament as the Socialists can manage, for the obvious reason.
We aren't afraid to state the obvious here.
The reason the Socialists want us disarmed is that they are somewhat afraid that a revolt against Socialism might develop during the final push to implement the destruction of individual liberties, and they are VERY afraid that if those carrying the revolt have credible arms, their revolt might succeed in restoring all the individual liberties our forefathers intended us to have, and that would mean the end of their trying to convert the very-NOT-Socialist USA into a de-facto Socialist nation.
The disarmament of Veterans has already begun.
For some, it began with the end of their enlistments during this current war against terror in South West Asia (Iraq & Afghanistan). When those Veterans mustered out, or in some cases are still enlisted or serving with Commissions, the military began to make an assumption that they had likely been affected by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Don't get me wrong, PTSD is a real affliction, and it's definitely job-related to the military (and other stressful occupations), and in one respect, it's good that the military has finally recognized that. Generations of soldiers, sailors and airmen have served, some have been afflicted with PTSD, and had their afflictions ignored by the military. PTSD is not ignored now, and that much is good.
There's a dark side to the initiative within the DOD to handle PTSD though, and that dark side is expressed by the DOD assuming that all veterans who have been in enemy contact (and a few who haven't been) are afflicted until they have demonstrated that they haven't been afflicted. Is the Department of Defense merely trying to leave no PTSD-afflicted veteran behind, or is another purpose at work here?
I maintain it's the latter. The dark side here is that the assumption of PTSD affliction as a normal or usual outcome of having been in contact with the enemy allows the DOD to attach a label to the combat veteran.
That label is "Crazy". No, they don't come out and say the word, "crazy", but they imply it. PTSD in it's moderate-or-worse form is considered a personality disorder, and those with recognized personality disorders may not possess arms in this Nation. Thus does the wannabe-Socialist government try to disarm it's greatest and most-likely potential foe, by calling them "crazy", and requiring them to prove that they're not. Of course, that's a perversion of our legal system, which REQUIRES the assumption of innocence until complete proof of guilt is obtained, but ever since the Virginia Tech University massacre, perpetrated by a deranged person who obtained arms by lying about his mental disease, and the mistaken acquiescence of the NRA in the "solution" to that "problem", persons in treatment for any sort of personality disorders are supposed to have their Second Amendment rights removed until they are certified as sane and responsible and have gone through (a yet-undeveloped) process to certify that. Coupled with the fact that the Forefathers didn't recognize the then-nascent industry of Psychology, under the auspices of which everyone must be labeled as to their deviancy from a norm, Military veterans with PTSD were swept into that net. The forefathers had "insane asylums" in their day, but they could never have imagined the extent of labeling people "crazy" that we do today. The DOD's assumptive diagnosis of PTSD in separating/separated Veterans (their "screening system" for Veterans amounts to that) sweeps far too many Veterans into the "crazy" net.
Lest you forget, the idea of labeling people "crazy" so as to minimize their opposition to Government is not new, and both of the major Communist dictatorships of the past century, namely the former USSR and the People's Republic of China, make or made strong use of the "crazy" label, except they don't do it to disarm the populace (those people are already disarmed), it is used to deny basic liberty. I refer you to the acclaimed docu-novel "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
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Summary: So far, in Part One, we have identified FEAR as being the motivator for the current attempt to at least weaken and probably remove, the Second Amendment and it's Civil Right of self-defense with firearms, and we looked at the application of FEAR as the primary tool to do so.
In this Part Two, we have identified the target of that "fear-and-smear" campaign. That target is we Veterans, who pose the greatest threat to the implementation of Socialism and the further reduction of individual liberties in this Nation. We have examined just how this fear-and-smear tactic is going to go, and it's likely strategic objective, the disarmament of Veterans by claiming that we are all too crazy to possess firearms.
How do we fight this structured campaign of fear, which appears to be working at it's inception? What steps must we take to solidify the Second Amendment and anchor it properly against the tide of disarmament hysteria which is sweeping the Nation after Newtown? Who could best lead this fight? What tactics will work and what tactics won't work? All these questions will be tied up in Part Three, the final Part of this series.
Scary, but maybe it will cause the active duty .mil to join us against the .gov more readily?
Posted by: Jeb Texas | January 02, 2013 at 16:00