The Dharma, sutras, and commentarial interpretations of interest to American Buddhists of all traditions with news that not only informs but transforms. Emphasis on meditation, enlightenment, karma, social evolution, and nonharming.
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Did you just call me trash? - No, I said white. - And? - And I mentioned your lovely trailer.
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America’s firearm culture
Some whites sold us guns, and some shot us.
Unique experiences in our heritage have decisively influenced American culture.
As Europeans encountering Native Americans and wiping them out to make room for our settler colonial project, our enslavement of Natives and Blacks, the civil war, and our ascent as the world’s first hyper-superpower. (Move over, England and Rome).
We played with guns as kids, and now we play with them for real aimed at Palestinians.
We are a Christian nation of gun lovers ready to shoot the Darkies. With Jews.
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We can't wait to buy more guns!
However, even this militarized history is not enough to explain why Americans suffer from the worst gun violence in the industrialized world.
Other settler colonial projects have as many guns per capita (such as our neighbor to the north) with only a fraction of the gun crime.
As of 2014, for every 100 Americans there are a staggering 90 privately owned guns. It's worse now.
The mass proliferation of firearms exercises a tyrannical hold over the American imagination.
It is both a cause and an effect of the many social problems afflicting the nation.
With the country in political and ideological gridlock (and add to the mix the vested interests and lobbies with too much business to lose like the NRA or National Rifle Association), how can there be any resolution to the mass proliferation of firearms and US gun crimes?
Look, I'm just like Jewish Jesus but in a flag bikini!
While wars of self-defense and geopolitical deceit are a reality of samsara, it is basically impossible for Buddhism to defend the arms trade in any form.
Guns loom large in our national imagination.
Dealing in weapons, people, poisons, animal flesh, or alcohol are the five kinds of trade the Buddha specifically warned against, labeling them "wrong livelihood," yet this is how so much ill-gotten gain is accrued by people who could care less about accruing terrible unskillful karma.
Look, everybody, look! I'm an "American" like in the movies! Bam bam, bam bam!
My mom got me this jacket, my stepdad this Uzi.
The proliferation of weapons is antithetical to religions that promote peace. When examined from a critical historical perspective, the frontier mentality and the right's Second Amendment’s narrative of maintaining a civilian militia bearing arms turns out to be an oversimplified framing of American history.
I can't believe they give us guns and tell us to kill Natives. We're teens raised on propaganda.
We join for camaraderie and to become desensitized to the dirty desert rats' suffering.
Our settler colonial project is almost complete. Now destroy West Bank, purge Jerusalem!
To be, uh, masculine in Israel and get girls, must be killer with gun exterminating vermin.
Kids, kill for the Fatherland, a Jewish state we can steal. The Bible says they're Amalek.
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Yet it is upheld as the nation's founding myth. The capabilities and symbolism of guns, from plastic pistols (Glocks) to semi-automatic AR-style rifles to modified fully automatic military guns, continue to exert such an irresistible allure that the more deaths that occur from shootings, the higher gun sales rise. More
The mass proliferation of firearms exercises a tyrannical hold over the American imagination.
Yet it is upheld as the nation's founding myth. The capabilities and symbolism of guns, from plastic pistols (Glocks) to semi-automatic AR-style rifles to modified fully automatic military guns, continue to exert such an irresistible allure that the more deaths that occur from shootings, the higher gun sales rise. More
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