Video- ‘US needs moral values revolution’

An analyst says that the US can become a safer place for Americans if the significance of moral values was placed before the economic and political gains of unnecessary conflict and wars.

A recent Brady Center Report released January this year, suggests that over 62,000 firearms have been “lost” since 2008.

Reports indicate that the US has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, while nearly 4.5 million of the eight million new guns yearly manufactured across the world, are purchased in the US.

Press TV has conducted an interview with attorney Muhammad Ibn Bashir to get his views on
Press TV: Why do Americans have so many guns?

Ibn Bashir: They have so many guns because the nature of America is that it was built on a constitutional government and part of that constitutional government is that they included it in the[US Constitution’s] Second Amendment. People in this culture will fight for “the right to keep and bear arms”, even if in their constitution they’ve misrepresented what it means as keeping bear arms.

That is, there is nothing in the constitution that says that you have a right to carry a gun, but they have interpreted it now to include that and since they’ve interpreted that since the beginning of the culture, that gun has a way of progressing the culture through. That is, eliminating Native Americans, moving past Jim Crow [laws], etc. They use the gun as their protector, no one is willing to give it up, even to the point where they misinterpreted or re-interpreted the constitution to include that you have the right to carry arms.

Again, go back to where it began and you will be able to trace the fruit of the tree. They began because this weapon is what empowered them to be able to take control of the country. They took control of the country, because they had Native Americans fighting with arrows and they had guns. That gun has now become a symbol of that protection. They understood that if you took that gun and made a bigger gun, you could become even more powerful. The nuclear weapon is now the most powerful weapon out there.

Press TV: Who benefits from the abundance of guns in the US?

Ibn Bashir: The gun lobby obviously benefits from it. The law enforcement benefits from it. They want you to believe that the average citizen benefits from this but they don’t. What they do is they benefit from a false sense of security by saying that they have a gun in their home as a level of protection. There are millions of other ways to protect yourself in a culture like America.

Press TV: Why don’t we have stricter gun laws?

Ibn Bashir: Because to have stricter gun control laws means that you would have to attack the second amendment, and in order for you to get by that, you would have to get by that lobby and mindset in America that says the gun is part of the constitution. The constitution’s second amendment basically says to form or to have a militia, then the people would have the right to keep and bear arms, but the right to keep and bear arms is preceded by the issue of having a militia, meaning that you are only allowed to have a gun if you are part of a militia. We have misinterpreted that to say anyone can have a gun, and again America is so afraid of everything, especially European Americans, that they believe they have to have a weapon.

Press TV: With all of the dissatisfaction in America, with high unemployment, the loss of jobs, foreclosures, homelessness, and poverty is anyone concerned that with all the guns available, there will be an armed uprising in America similar to what we’ve seen in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and even England?

Ibn Bashir: There are couple of concerns, watch this as part of the development of the Terrorism Act and things along that line. Watch and see how America begins to address things like militias. The militias that are beginning to develop are beginning in stock-pile weapons, because part of the whole militia ideal is that they believe that the militia government is their enemy, so therefore, they have to arm themselves as a way of being prepared to battle against potentially, the government. So they have already had that mindset.

People are having guns on the streets. Young black males are killing each other randomly, for no reason or for frivolous reasons, over drug turfs that don’t belong to them anyways. That’s not something that they regularly fear. That’s something that they (the US government) think they can control through the criminal justice system and so they’re allowed that particular type of a weapon. Having that kind of a weapon is not something that they fear especially at a level of a revolution. But they are concerned about the government is concerned about the stock-piling of weapons by groups like the militia, because they really believe in revolutions.

Press TV: What needs to be done to make Americans safe?

Ibn Bashir: I’m a Muslim, so I would say we need to submit to the will of Allah, but that’s not from me. Malcolm X said that 40 years ago that if they would just change the way they see it, Martin Luther King said we need a complete revolution of values. I think we need to know what it is we value.

Here we value our safety, because we are afraid and there is no reason to be afraid if you’re not committing crimes against other people. There is no reason to be afraid if you are not exploiting other people. There is no reason to be afraid if you are extending true brotherhood to your brother. There is no reason for me to fear my brother. If that’s the case and I’m willing to do that in America, that would mean a complete change and a complete revolution of how we value our brother and how we value our brotherhood. If we ever get to that particular point, you’ll see a much safer society. We’re not going to get to that point because we can’t profit off brotherhood. We can profit off of weapons. We can’t profit people treating each other well. We can profit off of conflict.

We can’t profit off of Crips and Bloods getting together and shaking hands. We can profit off of waging wars between Palestinians and zionist israelis and Libyans fighting other Libyans. America is a capitalist country; they see profit before they see people.