Second of two parts
Re “Police Chief and Dr. Samad Disagree About Gun Violence”
[img]1669|left|Dr. Samad||no_popup[/img]Dateline Pasadena – The subject at Tuesday night’s meeting of the Pasadena chapter of the ACLU, before an unintentionally senior citizen-dominated audience, was gun violence.
Where do we go from here? ACLU leaders asked Pasadena Police Chief Phil Sanchez, Dave Sapp of the ACLU and Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, college professor, writer and South L.A. community activist.
Dr. Samad leveled a dynamite accusation – that a root cause can be aimed directly at the federal government. They were the enabler, he believes. And law enforcement was a victim.
Excitement Dies Away
What happens after every mass murder, said Dr. Samad, speaking with deliberation, follows a frustratingly reliable pattern:
“We get upset for about six to eight months. Then we go back to sleep.”
He relates a compelling narrative that seldom sees light in the media. Listeners must almost strain to hear him, enhancing the marriage of drama and bombshells. Two nights ago, his audience at the Neighborhood Universalist Unitarian Church was supportive of his views.
“We allow the NRA lobby to massage, and even to some degree threaten, legislators who want to look at this gun situation in a more accurate manner,” Dr. Samad said.
“The proliferation of guns on our streets,” he charged, “really is a manifestation of the overproduction of weaponry in our refusal to reduce our defense spending.
“America always needs a bogey man. We always have somebody out there that is a threat to us. But after the Cold War ended, we could have diverted a whole lot of that money back into infrastructure and social programs.
“But that didn’t happen,” Dr. Samad said. “That money continued to go into manufacturing military armament. The United States and its defense contractors brokered that weaponry all around the world.
“When they had no place else to sell it, they made their way into the inner cities, and in suburbia where a young child could Not tell you where the library was, but he could tell you where to buy a gun.”
Meanwhile the government, says Dr. Samad, executes a clean getaway. Not a drop of responsibility or fault falls dampens them.
“We give excuse to that,” he says. “We give in to these radical conversations about the 2nd Amendment when gun ownership has nothing to do with proliferation with how military weaponry found its way into civilized society.
Cops Had No Choice
“The police had to arm-up because they couldn’t outgun the people in the streets. The police began to buy military armament to protect themselves against the youths, or whatever you want to call it, the gang culture, the drug culture, or just the gun-fascination culture – all law-abiding citizens who just want to buy guns, the bigger, the better.
“They don’t want you to restrict them from buying their rocket launcher. If you restrict them from buying their rocket launcher, somehow you have infringed on their 2nd Amendment rights. That is nonsense.
“Let’s look at it this way. We have a roomful of senior citizens.
“In America, we have over-the-counter medication and we have prescription medication. We have laws that regulate prescription medications because they are too dangerous to self-administer.
“Using simplistic analogy,” said Dr. Samad, “if we applied that methodology to weapons acquisition, why is it you can buy an automatic weapon over-the-counter at Wal-Mart when, clearly, you do not have the expertise or the need to procure one?
“Someone should need a prescription to buy that.
“I am just talking about simple public policy.
“But we have become such an anti-regulation society we don’t want to regulate anything.”
Meaningful progress in controlling the gun population will not be possible, Dr. Samad said, “until we say we are going to regulate some of this weaponry.”
