In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, a Yale lecturer in political science is calling for President Obama to call a joint session of Congress for gun control along the lines of what President Johnson did for civil rights back in 1965.
But, Jim Sleeper says in a Huffington Post article, the will to change isn’t going to come from politicians; it has to come from the American people. ” Progress would require more than laws and federal marshals and troops. It would depend on nothing less than a long, wrenching reconfiguration of many Americans’ national myths and viscera,” he said.
Sleeper advises that it’s a revolution along the lines of how this country was founded, which created the right to bear arms, that is going to change the gun laws in the United States. “We have forgotten where power really comes from and how it really flows or is drained. Since the middle of the last century, vast empires and national-security regimes, armed to the teeth, have been brought down by unarmed peoples in British India, apartheid South Africa, the Soviet-ruled nations of Eastern Europe,” he said.
He adds that the right to carry increasingly powerful weapons has not stopped mass murders. “All our guns and military might and ever-expanding “rights” to carry assault weapons and concealed weapons … haven’t protected us from the Oklahoma City bombing, the Long Island Rail Road massacre, the dozens of school and college and shopping-mall massacres. They have induced them. They have warped and demoralized our children. They are multi-billion dollar, self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.”