June 18, 2012
By Robert W. Hunnicutt
"The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011."
The report tosses everything but the kitchen sink at U.S. society, from bullying in the high schools to drone attacks in Pakistan, describing a grim, authoritarian place where the people are caught between heavily armed criminals and a repressive police state.
But the very first critique applied is against the right to keep and bear arms:
"The United States prioritizes the right to keep and bear arms over the protection of citizens' lives and personal security and exercises lax firearm possession control, causing rampant gun ownership. The US people hold between 35 percent and 50 percent of the world' s civilian-owned guns, with every 100 people having 90 guns (Online edition of the Foreign Policy, Jan 9, 2011). According to a Gallup poll in October 2011, 47 percent of American adults reported that they had a gun."
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Apparently, the Chinese have noticed protests unseen by the rest of us against this situation:
"High incidence of gun-related crimes has long ignited complaints of the US people and they stage multiple protests every year, demanding the government strictly control the private possession of arms. The US government, however, fails to pay due attention to this issue."
Most SGN readers would probably say the U.S. gummint pays way too much attention to this issue, but then we aren't Chinese Communists.
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It's probably not even worth pointing out the hypocrisy of a regime that has murdered and starved its people by the job lot griping about the U.S. human rights record, but the purpose of the exercise is stated clearly at the end of the report:
"The US' own tarnished human rights record has made it in no condition, on a moral, political or legal basis, to act as the world's "human rights justice," to place itself above other countries and release the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices year after year to accuse and blame other countries. We hereby advise the US government once again to look squarely at its own grave human rights problems, to stop the unpopular practices of taking human rights as a political instrument for interference in other countries' internal affairs, smearing other nations' images and seeking its own strategic interests, and to cease using double standards on human rights and pursuing hegemony under the pretext of human rights."
Maybe the current masters of Beijing should refer back to the Little Red Book, in which Chairman Mao Tse-Tung pointed out that "all power grows from the barrel of a gun." For that very reason, we running dogs and imperialist lackeys plan to keep a firm grip on ours.
