{"id":11303,"date":"2016-03-29T10:45:07","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T09:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=11303"},"modified":"2016-03-29T12:45:24","modified_gmt":"2016-03-29T11:45:24","slug":"america-where-the-one-eyed-man-is-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=11303","title":{"rendered":"America: where the one-eyed man is king?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You know the story by now?<\/p>\n<p>The so-labelled &#8216;San Bernadino guman&#8217; (Syed Rizwan Farook) went on a killing spree and, very tragically, killed 14 people in San Bernadino, California.<\/p>\n<p>There has been a great deal of vigorous discussion in the US, following this terrible event.<\/p>\n<p>But, puzzlingly, what has been exercising branches of the US Government and US Judiciary has been a discussion around the security and privacy of\u00a0Syed Rizwan Farook&#8217;s mobile phone.<\/p>\n<p>There has been no discussion about the ability to buy weapons of mass destruction (and 14 fatalities is, to any sound and sane mind, a horrific event of mass destruction) so freely in the US.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s almost as if the Americans think that Farook&#8217;s mobile phone could somehow have stopped these deaths.<\/p>\n<p>But it couldn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>The US Government is somehow fixated on the post-aftermath information, instead of fixing the pre-aftermath problem.<\/p>\n<p>Because, surely, legally buying, legally encrypting, and legally using a mobile phone didn&#8217;t cause these 14 people to lose their lives?<\/p>\n<p>No, of course not.<\/p>\n<p>But legally buying high-calibre weapons did.<\/p>\n<p>When the Founding Fathers sat down and wrote the US Constitution, and when their antecedents wrote the Second\u00a0Amendment (which, by the way, was in 1791), the right to bear arms referred to rifles like this:<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_11304\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-11304\" style=\"width: 348px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11304\" src=\"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Rifle-of-1791.jpg\" alt=\"Rifle of 1791\" width=\"348\" height=\"220\" srcset=\"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Rifle-of-1791.jpg 348w, https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Rifle-of-1791-300x190.jpg 300w, https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Rifle-of-1791-237x150.jpg 237w, https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Rifle-of-1791-150x95.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 348px) 100vw, 348px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-11304\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rifle of 1791<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I can&#8217;t help feeling that there would be far fewer shootings in the US, if the politicians, and vested interests, had kept the intent of the Second Amendment intact, instead of updating it.<\/p>\n<p>I also believe that the Americans would spend their time in a richer, more productive manner, if they looked long and hard not at the security of a mobile phone, but instead looked at the deep-seated insecurity of the American public, in that they still feel the need to arm themselves as if the US was somehow rooted in the 1700s\/1800s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You know the story by now? The so-labelled &#8216;San Bernadino guman&#8217; (Syed Rizwan Farook) went on a killing spree and, very tragically, killed 14 people<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}