Buddhist attitude toward guns? (video)

Seth MacFarlane, Family Guy ("Gun Safety" cartoon); Khawa Karpo (Tibet); Pfc. Sandoval, Ashley Wells, Sheldon S., Dhr. Seven, Crystal Q., Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly COMMENTARY

Tibetan Buddhist monks beat guns into ploughshares to the playing of trumpets to welcome peace.

Oh, the CIA? They paid me and helped us.

It's easy to guess the Buddhist attitude toward guns because of Buddhism's attitude toward killing. Abstain from all killing -- of animals (mammals, fish, birds), humans (all), nonhumans (monsters, demons, ghouls, ghosts), and insects (even the annoying biting kind). Its whole orientation is one of nonharming (ahimsa).

Instead of grasping at what we like, pushing away what we dislike, and being bored or perplexed by things we're neutral toward, the Buddha shows the way to SEE our own greatest benefit, the benefit of others, and the mutual benefit of both (the community).

Big Brother is watching, so watch it (1984).

Pro-gun advocates will say that we should all be for guns for some of these very same reasons -- to preserve our freedoms, safety, property and slaves, and to enforce laws that favor some "superior" groups and massively harm and take advantage of other "inferior" groups. Choose a side.

Whichever side you choose, don't shoot. Guns don't kill people, guns don't kill people; it's mostly the bullets. And behind the ammo is the mind of aversion, fear, hatred, resistance that leads to heavy bad karma, sin, missing the mark of how to live.

I don't want to be shot...or aborted please.

When all guns are gathered up, only police, paramilitary, and militant forces will have guns to enforce the dictates of a police state. So how can we allow the powers that be to confiscate all guns? There are two sides to this argument.

City-dwelling cosmopolitan-types like us will take one side, and rural salt-of-the-earth types the other. It would be better if we talked and understood one another. Whichever side is right or wrong, BOTH sides have valid points and concerns. If we quiet down and listen, we will hear their side.

Guns in and of themselves are NOT the problem, because if they were Canada would have all the gun violence problems we in the U.S. do. Their gun ownership rates are at or above U.S. rates. Yet, Canada has only a miniscule fraction of U.S. rates of gun crime.

Did Canadians learn to respect guns at a young age? Do they not have Hollywood (via Westerns and shoot 'em blockbusters) spurring them on to horrific acts of public carnage? Do they not play first-person-shooter games like "Fortnite" all day until they're in a hypnagogic stupor of suggestible gun-loving, gun-needing phobia that when exhausted and pushed will result in someone getting shot?

The peaceful make peace not war.

Are they not deadened to the feelings of others by an opiate crisis that not only numbs physical pain but also empathy and sympathy for others just like OTC preparations? When all guns are finally rounded up in an Orwellian dream, will Americans not have access to other weapons and means of killing others on a mass scale? Of course, we will.

No one wants to be shot, but being shot is likely to be preferable to the way people are going to harm one another then unless we do something radical (from Latin radix, "root") now. Guns are not radical, gun buy backs are not radical, gun control is not radical. Let's be radical.

"The revolution will not be televised," like our infiltrated and undermined Occupy Movement. It will be internal. In the meantime, two camps of fools with argue with each other with bad arguments that each side takes as convincing.

Whatever groups of fools decide, each individual must decide because it is our own karma we must concern ourselves with for the sake of our phala/vipaka (fruits and karmic results).

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