Violence and Weaponry

You voted by three to one that you didn't think hardcore sex acts should be considered mainstream in Art and Media.

What a lot of prudes you are! :)

Only joking, I love you all really.

On to this week's topic...

Like it or not, much of human culture is founded on the threat of violence as an ultimate resort.

And here, at the turn of the twentieth century, we see that fact confronting us in some rather unusual ways.

I guess the first is in looking at life today in the UK and comparing it to life in other European countries.

The UK is always held up as being a pacific country. Famously, the bobby on the beat has generally been unarmed, unlike his continental counterparts.
And this is a very hard country to legally own a firearm of any kind. We must have some of the harshest legislation concerning firearms in the world.

But that, of course doesn't mean this isn't a violent country. It is. Whether the guns are legal or not, people still get shot. Almost every week. And now the guns are harder to get at, we are becoming more aware of knifecrime. And now they've clamped down on that.
What are they clamp down on next? Glass bottles? Razor blades?

The UK is a violent country where a significant number of people have a way of life that makes them feel they need to be armed, one way or another.

And we seem to have woken up that fact. It's our culture. If guns were as easily available here as they are in the US, we'd have High School massacres too. And drive by shootings on the same scale. We get them anyway, but thankfully, only a handful a year by comparison.

Other European countries can afford to be more lax with their laws on weapons. We can't. Because if UK citizens carried guns, they'd be shooting eachother over who used the pump first at petrol stations. They'd be shooting eachother, rather than glassing eachother in pubs.

We probably WOULD have proportionally more shootings than the US.
In UK society, the threat of violence always lurks under the surface. It is in our culture.

Now I have a confession to make. You think carrying knives in school is a recent thing. It isn't. When I was at school, I carried one. Nothing fancy, and just within the boundaries that it could be passed off as having a legitimate purpose. It was a Swiss army knife attached to my key ring.

But I carried it with me all through High School. And on a couple of occasions, I opened it up, not to sharpen pencils with. To get people to back off. British schools are violent places. Our school had eighteen hundred pupils and was right by a canal. People were always being thrown in that canal.

And can you imagine doing prefect duty in a school that size? You have the power to impose lines. Lines. Whoopee doo!
How do you enforce that? You've got some little cross between Damian and Chucky breaking and entering the block with four entrances that two of you have to keep people out of during lunch hour. You can ask him his name and tutor group, he's going to tell you 'Wayne Kerr'.

It's not going to work.
The only way to impose the rules the School has asked you to impose is by giving him a good kicking.

I flung one of the little bastards so hard against the lockers once his jumper ripped. He said he was going to make a formal complaint. I said 'What you going to say, he ripped my jumper trying to evict me after I climbed through a second storey window?'

No, it's not that much fun, really. You don't get much reward except a different tie to everyone else and the right to use the front entrance along with staff. And I quit eventually.

But should we be surprised we have the police forces we do in the UK?

When school teachers abrogate playground discipline to enjoy an easy hour in the staffroom whilst senior pupils are left to enforce discipline, literally, by force, out in the rest of the premises.

When I had the back field duty, I caught them shagging, shooting up, the lot.

This was mid-nineties. It can't have got any better.



And we graduate in to our adult life in the UK, basically seeing all social situations as things that could become violent, potentially.

I think there is a powerful reason for this. Much the same one is why the US is so violent.
The tolerance the culture at large has to violence.
Because you can pretend that UK culture has a zero tolerance approach to violence, but get real, use your head, how can it do?

Tot up how many days since 1945 that British troops haven't been engaged in conflict somewhere. The UK armed forces are always crying out for recruits. They can't get enough. and they literally recruit in playgrounds. I can remember when their tanks were to be seen outside the second year block selling the joys of the military life.

Because the armed forces need to be stocked. Not stocked with semi-fit volunteers ready to raise a gun in defence of the mother country on the off chance they get invaded, as is the case in all but a small handful of the nations of the western world.

But ready to go decimating the cities of the Middle East, or rifling through the homes of Irish Catholics as and when required.

The UK has one of the toughest fighting forces in the world, poorly funded as it is, and in days when no one much wants to go and die for King and Country, it helps to have a sizable portion of the male population grow up thinking 'Yeah, a life of violence and killing, that sounds fun.'

So we glorify it all. We pretend not to, but we do. We love our war films, we love all that.

And hey, I admit that, because I admit I've grown up in it and love a film with a high bodycount myself. I love paintballing. This is a culture where testosterone can be tolerated. And in most of us, that's OK. But in the UK, those whose testosterone puts them into the psychopathic character have a role, and need to be encouraged in their growth, because the culture ultimately depends on them.

Because the UK is one of the few countries in the World which actually has an ARMED forces.
As in, an army that as a final resort, can be used to enforce the will of it, and the other members of that special little club.

Or perhaps, let's just call it the club of two. Big brother and little brother. Big U and little U.

Still, you say.
The UK is still much less violent than the US.

No. I think we have two problems they DON'T have in the US. Two problems that come from the way the problem is handled in the UK.

First, you've created a violent culture, so people are going to behave violently. And you forget, as a last resort, nature armed everybody with fists.

OK, getting punched isn't fatal.

But people probably behave towards eachother in a far more threatening way and with far less politeness in the UK than in most places. They behave nicely on the continent because they're not violent cultures. And they behave politely in the US because getting shot IS fatal. Here, we're used to acting within a violent undercurrent. We face eachother off, we invite people 'Outside, in the carpark NOW!'

Because our culture encourages us to see violence as a justifiable way of solving problems, but doesn't actually arm us enough to make it just that little bit too real.

But there's also the other more sinister aspect.

The US Second Amendment guarantees the citizen the right to bear arms. And we in the UK see that as being an appalling twisting of the logic of freedom.

We're fools.
Because that amendment was only inserted in the US consitution when someone looked back at the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and realised that actually, that was something the US needed.

It's in the English Bill of Rights.
In a typical disciminatory way, of course. It guarantess all PROTESTANTS the right to bear arms as an ultimte defence against the government to establish tyranny.

In other words, if they're armed, the citizen should be too. Otherwise, iof they get above themselves and start trying to take away our liberties, we can't get rid of them.

And this is what we forget. WE CAN'T.

We, the people of the UK, even we were in a majority, could not overthrow our government.

But why would we want to, you say. This is a democracy.

Is it now? Is it now?

I'm not saying we WANT to, not yet, maybe. But COULD we? And that's what we need to ask.

If they declared a state of emergency tomorrow, could we stop them?

This is the problem.

While they have weapons, we're stupid not to. This is the sad fact. It's a violent culture the UK and if we were all armed, we'd be mowing eachother down in the streets. That's how much rage and frustration lurks beneath the surface in this culture on the verge of the collapse.

But they, our masters, forment this social collapse as they make us more and more powerless as they build up the muscles of the forces of the state.

The real solution to the violence that is endemic across all cultures in the world, even in European ones, but most notably in those where the use of armed troops to enforce foreign policy decisions is accepted as normal, is not to disarm the civilian more and arm the state further at his expense.



The violence remains as an undercurrent, the culture that creates those violent sentiments still exists, just armed with empty Budweiser bottles, not guns.

And the power of the state to enforce whatever it chooses remains the greater.
And the wars fought not in our name blaze across the globe.

It ends when THEY are disarmed.

It ends when the UN passes a resolution calling for Universal Global Disarmament.

It ends when the nations of the world agree to abolish ALL armies aside from a UN peace keeping force whose sole function is to ensure things stay that way.

Violence breeds violence.

Armed governments and disarmed populations lead to tyranny.

Armed governments and armed populations are a little better, but still don't create societies of the type we truly want.

We need disarmed governments and disarmed people.

Or so I believe.

But it's up to you.

The poll is in the sidebar.

Have your say!