Alex Jones Vs Piers Morgan On Gun Control Live On CNN - YouTube
Piers Morgan: Alex Jones explodes during CNN interview over gun control | Mail Online
Morgan on fiery Alex Jones interview: ‘Startling,’ ‘deluded’ – This Just In - CNN.com Blogs
Posted: 10 Jan 2013 11:00 AM PST
Nearly a month after the tragic massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the ensuing “debate” over gun control and gun violence still looks less like the exchange of ideas and discussion on systemic violence we need to be having, and more like an absurdist tragicomedy; the latest “act” of which is, of course, the recent “interview” between TV tabloid hack Piers Morgan and conspiranoid* fear-mongering talk radio host Alex Jones.
Ostensibly, the two got together in the same room to “debate” each other over gun control. That was how the show was billed, and what appeared on the lower third graphic when the exchange finally aired. And this makes sense: for the last several weeks Morgan has been calling for measures that many — if not most — libertarians and anarchists would no doubt oppose, while Jones is without a doubt one of the the most outspoken (some would say vitriolic) gun rights advocates with access to a microphone and Internet connection.
Those who saw the interview know that nothing like a reasonable conversation actually took place. For those who didn’t watch, this short analysis by fellow C4SS writer Jason Lee Byas captures the spirit of the spectacle nicely: “Within two minutes, (Jones) starts screaming. Within five minutes, he challenges Morgan to a boxing match. Towards the end he begins mocking Morgan’s accent.” In other words, viewers of the program were treated to a dramatic teleplay of epically absurd proportions.
It’s immediately clear that both players were aware of their assigned roles, and they performed them beautifully. Jones was the court jester (or perhaps a more apt description would be rodeo clown?), responsible for keeping us, the audience, riled up and agitated — and more importantly, entertained; Morgan was the quintessential “straight man,” a stoic voice of reason, remaining steadfast after Jones’ whirlwind of irrationality died down. You can find evidence of this in how Morgan described the interview during an appearance on “CNN Newsroom” early Tuesday:
“I can’t think of a better advertisement for gun control than Jones’ interview last night. […] It was startling, it was terrifying in parts, it was completely deluded.”
It almost sounds like Morgan was describing a particularly effective horror movie from the 1930s. “You’ll scream! You’ll shake! You’ll come back for more! Witness the horror masterpiece of the century!” you can very nearly hear him exclaim. In fact, the interview is so scary that it compels viewers to swing right back around to a pro-gun stance; as Laissez-Faire Books editor Jeffrey Tucker wrote in a tongue-in-cheek Facebook post, “If we get gun control, what means will the people have to protect themselves against Alex Jones?”
Joking aside, what no one — not Jones, not Morgan, not liberals or conservatives, nor (to a lesser extent) libertarians and anarchists — is willing to admit is that the problem of gun violence, and violence in general, is a wicked problem, eluding easy answers completely and teasing more complex ones unfairly. It is, like poverty or climate change, an absurd problem.
Liberals want a more powerful regulatory state concerning gun rights. Conservatives and right libertarians oppose this on constitutional grounds, and left-libertarians and anarchists oppose it on the grounds that they don’t want a stronger state, period. Conservatives want a bigger police state with armed guards in every school. Liberals (or, as Roderick Long calls them, the “aristocratic left”) agree with this proposal but disagree on the uniform the guards wear, while libertarians, anarchists and individual progressives (the anti-privilege left) definitively oppose it.
Right-libertarians would like to see a less-regulatory state and more guns in the hands of individuals for self-defense, which liberals oppose. Conservatives play lip-service to it but would probably oppose it if it meant the “wrong” people getting their hands on guns. Of course, left-libertarians and anarchists by and large want to dismantle a state that advocates and promotes violence on a systemic scale; this solution is one that liberals and conservatives alike strongly oppose.
The possibility no one will admit exists — or, at least, they won’t in any serious sense — is that there may not be a solution to gun violence. For all the good a conversation on systemic violence, state violence, militarism, etc. might do for a small percentage of the population, the fact that at the end of the day, the current state still exists, will serve to nullify that good. People will still deify military service. Children will still be raised to want to be police officers. And the absurd problem will continue on a systemic level. Therefore, we must, as oppositional forces often do, commit to an absurd answer; we must struggle to teach our own children to reject killing, to reject domination over each other, to reject that systemic violence.
*(portmanteau of conspiracy theorist and paranoid)
Ostensibly, the two got together in the same room to “debate” each other over gun control. That was how the show was billed, and what appeared on the lower third graphic when the exchange finally aired. And this makes sense: for the last several weeks Morgan has been calling for measures that many — if not most — libertarians and anarchists would no doubt oppose, while Jones is without a doubt one of the the most outspoken (some would say vitriolic) gun rights advocates with access to a microphone and Internet connection.
Those who saw the interview know that nothing like a reasonable conversation actually took place. For those who didn’t watch, this short analysis by fellow C4SS writer Jason Lee Byas captures the spirit of the spectacle nicely: “Within two minutes, (Jones) starts screaming. Within five minutes, he challenges Morgan to a boxing match. Towards the end he begins mocking Morgan’s accent.” In other words, viewers of the program were treated to a dramatic teleplay of epically absurd proportions.
It’s immediately clear that both players were aware of their assigned roles, and they performed them beautifully. Jones was the court jester (or perhaps a more apt description would be rodeo clown?), responsible for keeping us, the audience, riled up and agitated — and more importantly, entertained; Morgan was the quintessential “straight man,” a stoic voice of reason, remaining steadfast after Jones’ whirlwind of irrationality died down. You can find evidence of this in how Morgan described the interview during an appearance on “CNN Newsroom” early Tuesday:
“I can’t think of a better advertisement for gun control than Jones’ interview last night. […] It was startling, it was terrifying in parts, it was completely deluded.”
It almost sounds like Morgan was describing a particularly effective horror movie from the 1930s. “You’ll scream! You’ll shake! You’ll come back for more! Witness the horror masterpiece of the century!” you can very nearly hear him exclaim. In fact, the interview is so scary that it compels viewers to swing right back around to a pro-gun stance; as Laissez-Faire Books editor Jeffrey Tucker wrote in a tongue-in-cheek Facebook post, “If we get gun control, what means will the people have to protect themselves against Alex Jones?”
Joking aside, what no one — not Jones, not Morgan, not liberals or conservatives, nor (to a lesser extent) libertarians and anarchists — is willing to admit is that the problem of gun violence, and violence in general, is a wicked problem, eluding easy answers completely and teasing more complex ones unfairly. It is, like poverty or climate change, an absurd problem.
Liberals want a more powerful regulatory state concerning gun rights. Conservatives and right libertarians oppose this on constitutional grounds, and left-libertarians and anarchists oppose it on the grounds that they don’t want a stronger state, period. Conservatives want a bigger police state with armed guards in every school. Liberals (or, as Roderick Long calls them, the “aristocratic left”) agree with this proposal but disagree on the uniform the guards wear, while libertarians, anarchists and individual progressives (the anti-privilege left) definitively oppose it.
Right-libertarians would like to see a less-regulatory state and more guns in the hands of individuals for self-defense, which liberals oppose. Conservatives play lip-service to it but would probably oppose it if it meant the “wrong” people getting their hands on guns. Of course, left-libertarians and anarchists by and large want to dismantle a state that advocates and promotes violence on a systemic scale; this solution is one that liberals and conservatives alike strongly oppose.
The possibility no one will admit exists — or, at least, they won’t in any serious sense — is that there may not be a solution to gun violence. For all the good a conversation on systemic violence, state violence, militarism, etc. might do for a small percentage of the population, the fact that at the end of the day, the current state still exists, will serve to nullify that good. People will still deify military service. Children will still be raised to want to be police officers. And the absurd problem will continue on a systemic level. Therefore, we must, as oppositional forces often do, commit to an absurd answer; we must struggle to teach our own children to reject killing, to reject domination over each other, to reject that systemic violence.
*(portmanteau of conspiracy theorist and paranoid)
Fear, Violence and the Absurd
Negroes With Guns: Robert F. Williams on Self-Defense - YouTube
Negroes with Guns (African American Life): Robert Franklin Williams, Timothy B. Tyson, Gloria House: 9780814327142: Amazon.com: Books
Independent Lens . NEGROES WITH GUNS: Rob Williams and Black Power . Rob Williams | PBS
A (Brief) People’s History of Gun Control
Posted: 17 Jan 2013 02:30 PM PST
From its very beginning, gun control — the attempt to regulate the possession of means of self-defense by the ordinary populace — has been closely associated with class rule and the class state.
In early modern England, regulation of firearm ownership was closely intertwined with the struggle by the landed classes and capitalist agriculture to restrict the laboring classes’ access to independent subsistence from the land. This included enclosure of common woodland, fen and waste — in which landless and land-poor peasants had previously hunted small game — for sheep pasturage or arable land. It also included exclusion of the common people from forests via the Game Laws and restriction of hunting to the gentry.
Under the slaveocracy of the American south, firearm ownership was prohibited by Black Codes that regulated free blacks. And after Emancipation, whenever the old landed gentry managed to successfully assert its power against the Reconstruction regime, former slaves were disarmed by house-to-house patrols, either under the Black Codes or by such irregular bodies as the Klan.
The same was true of the Civil Rights struggle a century later, after World War II. In areas where armed self-defense efforts by civil rights activists were widespread, they significantly improved the balance of power against the Klan and other racist vigilante movements. Numerous armed self-defense groups — e.g. the Deacons for Defense and Justice, whose members used rifles and shotguns to repel attacks by white vigilantes in Louisiana in the 1960s — helped equalize the correlation of forces between civil rights activists and racists in many small towns throughout the south.
Especially notable was Robert Williams, who in 1957 organized an armed defense of the Monroe, NC NAACP chapter president’s home against a Klan raid and sent the vigilantes fleeing for their lives. Williams’s book Negroes With Guns later inspired Huey Newton, a founder of the Black Panthers Party.
Speaking of the Black Panthers, no discussion of the origins of modern American gun control would be complete without recognizing their role in inspiring the modern right-wing gun control agenda.
Foreshadowing current groups like Copwatch and Cop Block, the Panthers in 1966 organized armed patrols of Oakland streets with rifles and shotguns, stopping to witness police interactions with local residents and provide information and offers of legal assistance when necessary.
In 1967 Republican state assemblyman Don Mulford of Oakland, a vocal enemy of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Black Panthers, responded with a bill to prohibit publicly carrying firearms in California. The BPP’s Bobby Seale protested the bill by leading a Panther detachment, armed with .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns and .45-caliber pistols, up the steps of the statehouse (“All right, brothers, we’re going inside”), through its doors, and into the public viewing area. There Seale read a statement denouncing Mulford’s bill as an attempt “at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror and repression of black people,” and warning that “the time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.”
Mulford’s gun control bill was signed into law three months later by Governor Ronald Reagan.
Irregular workers’ militias and armed defense formations played a significant role in labor history, both in the US and abroad. During the Copper Wars at the turn of the 20th century, the governors of several Rocky Mountain states instituted martial law — including door-to-door confiscation of firearms from workers’ homes and striker encampments. In some cases, as with the West Virginia Coal Wars and the Homestead strike, workers fought pitched battles against Pinkertons, state militia and sheriffs’ deputies.
In Spain it was largely owing to workers’ militias, organized under the auspices of the CNT trade union federation and the parties of the Left, that Franco’s July 1936 coup attempt failed. In the areas of southern and eastern Spain where Franco’s forces failed to carry the day, workers’ militias often played a decisive role. In some areas armed workers drove Franco’s troops back into their barracks after pitched battles and burned them alive inside.
From its beginnings the state has been an executive committee of the economic ruling class and an instrument of armed force by the owners of the means of production, enabling them to extract surplus labor from the rest of us. I can’t imagine why anyone would expect the state’s gun control policies to display any less of a class character than other areas of policy. Regardless of the “liberal” or “progressive” rhetoric used to defend gun control, you can safely bet it will come down harder on the cottagers than on the gentry, harder on the workers than on the Pinkertons, and harder on the Black Panthers than on murdering cops.
A (Brief) People’s History of Gun Control
.
.
.
In early modern England, regulation of firearm ownership was closely intertwined with the struggle by the landed classes and capitalist agriculture to restrict the laboring classes’ access to independent subsistence from the land. This included enclosure of common woodland, fen and waste — in which landless and land-poor peasants had previously hunted small game — for sheep pasturage or arable land. It also included exclusion of the common people from forests via the Game Laws and restriction of hunting to the gentry.
Under the slaveocracy of the American south, firearm ownership was prohibited by Black Codes that regulated free blacks. And after Emancipation, whenever the old landed gentry managed to successfully assert its power against the Reconstruction regime, former slaves were disarmed by house-to-house patrols, either under the Black Codes or by such irregular bodies as the Klan.
The same was true of the Civil Rights struggle a century later, after World War II. In areas where armed self-defense efforts by civil rights activists were widespread, they significantly improved the balance of power against the Klan and other racist vigilante movements. Numerous armed self-defense groups — e.g. the Deacons for Defense and Justice, whose members used rifles and shotguns to repel attacks by white vigilantes in Louisiana in the 1960s — helped equalize the correlation of forces between civil rights activists and racists in many small towns throughout the south.
Especially notable was Robert Williams, who in 1957 organized an armed defense of the Monroe, NC NAACP chapter president’s home against a Klan raid and sent the vigilantes fleeing for their lives. Williams’s book Negroes With Guns later inspired Huey Newton, a founder of the Black Panthers Party.
Speaking of the Black Panthers, no discussion of the origins of modern American gun control would be complete without recognizing their role in inspiring the modern right-wing gun control agenda.
Foreshadowing current groups like Copwatch and Cop Block, the Panthers in 1966 organized armed patrols of Oakland streets with rifles and shotguns, stopping to witness police interactions with local residents and provide information and offers of legal assistance when necessary.
In 1967 Republican state assemblyman Don Mulford of Oakland, a vocal enemy of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Black Panthers, responded with a bill to prohibit publicly carrying firearms in California. The BPP’s Bobby Seale protested the bill by leading a Panther detachment, armed with .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns and .45-caliber pistols, up the steps of the statehouse (“All right, brothers, we’re going inside”), through its doors, and into the public viewing area. There Seale read a statement denouncing Mulford’s bill as an attempt “at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror and repression of black people,” and warning that “the time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.”
Mulford’s gun control bill was signed into law three months later by Governor Ronald Reagan.
Irregular workers’ militias and armed defense formations played a significant role in labor history, both in the US and abroad. During the Copper Wars at the turn of the 20th century, the governors of several Rocky Mountain states instituted martial law — including door-to-door confiscation of firearms from workers’ homes and striker encampments. In some cases, as with the West Virginia Coal Wars and the Homestead strike, workers fought pitched battles against Pinkertons, state militia and sheriffs’ deputies.
In Spain it was largely owing to workers’ militias, organized under the auspices of the CNT trade union federation and the parties of the Left, that Franco’s July 1936 coup attempt failed. In the areas of southern and eastern Spain where Franco’s forces failed to carry the day, workers’ militias often played a decisive role. In some areas armed workers drove Franco’s troops back into their barracks after pitched battles and burned them alive inside.
From its beginnings the state has been an executive committee of the economic ruling class and an instrument of armed force by the owners of the means of production, enabling them to extract surplus labor from the rest of us. I can’t imagine why anyone would expect the state’s gun control policies to display any less of a class character than other areas of policy. Regardless of the “liberal” or “progressive” rhetoric used to defend gun control, you can safely bet it will come down harder on the cottagers than on the gentry, harder on the workers than on the Pinkertons, and harder on the Black Panthers than on murdering cops.
A (Brief) People’s History of Gun Control
.
.
.
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