Just to be clear, I am completely against gun control in just about any form. And to be crystal, I am for weapons of war to be owned by all citizens. The people need to be able to fight against the government effectively, so I'm talking tanks, machine guns, drones, rpgs, pretty much the works when it comes to conventional weapons. That's what the amendment is there for.
I believe history repeats itself, especially if you didn't learn from it the first time around. Less than 100 years ago, the government used machine guns and even dropped left over ww1 bombs onto striking armed union miners in West Virginia. Although having the numbers, the miners lost against the mine owners and the U.S. military. Note which side they always choose (owners of business). That is not a coincidence, because our founding fathers were all big business. This country is falling apart, some people think it's because of immigrants (prejudice that has happened throughout our nation's history), some think it's the people on welfare sucking our taxes away, some think it's just the eventual spread of globalism and technology. I say it's because the government has been sold to the highest bidder, and they have no concern other than their own profits.
If you want to stop illegal immigration, you don't need to build a damn wall like we're keeping rabbits out of a garden. If you actually want to stop it, you repeal tax cuts to industrial farming and meat processing, which uses tax dollars to depress prices below the cost of production, which put Mexican farmers (and family farms here) out of business overnight, and made them have to find other jobs. Which ironically were supplied by big business here, who literally buses them to their factories. To this day, Smithfield packing had a deal with ice where they won't do a raid in exchange for a number of illegals a month. So guess who they turn in? Immigrants injured on the job, or ones that aren't working fast enough. Next you bankrupt not only the corporation, but the owners (including stockholders) of companies that use illegals to gain a competitive edge. Boom, no one would use them. They are taking advantage of another human by working them illegally for way less pay, and pocketing the difference. Really I think assholes like that should be drawn and quartered.
Welfare is a tricky subject, because some people actually need it. Some do take advantage of it yes, but some cannot live without it. A society is judged by how they take care of their weak and unfortunate. Leaving them to rot and die is one way of dealing with them, thankfully we don't do that here. But some of the people can work. Brian mentioned black ghettos as a particular hotbed for crime and violence, and he isn't wrong. I believe that is caused by overwhelming poverty and despair, and drug additions (which aren't treated). Add in the fact that roughly 150 years ago they were owned as property, used for production without any compensation at all for actual multiple generations, and the fact that until quite recently (and currently) have been greatly discriminated against, that despair is understandable.
Asimov predicted that in the future human labor wouldn't be needed because technology would replace them. We need to actually start considering that possibility. If there is no work to be done, what do humans do? Our monetary system isn't equipped to handle that, and neither is our society. We aren't fully there yet, but most jobs have been distilled down to unskilled labor, and with globalization making all of the working class in the world compete against each other, income inequality will become so severe that all of us will be broke. It might take a generation or two, but capitalism isn't sustainable in the future. Fighting that change is futile, and blaming the first round losers in this is counter productive.
With big money in politics, and with citizens united making huge corporations human, the richest among us can basically run the country. While we fight over pennies, they change obscure laws that make huge changes in how they can do business. And if they mess up, corporate welfare is there to pick up the pieces. This isn't a partisan issue either, the democrats have frigged us just as bad as the big business republicans. This is the actual problem. They don't pay the taxes we do, they profit from other people's labor, and hopefully we can wake up and stop them while we still can. This post is stupidly long, and I apologize for that.
It takes forever to type that out on my phone lol
