Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Senators Murphy & Blumenthal: Have You Read the 1844 Gun Control Critique by Nathaniel Hawthorne?


I have met Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal face-to-face, exactly one time each. They are the two U.S. Senators from Connecticut, my home state.

In both cases, they were condescending as they sought to cut off any honest questions about subjects they do not want to talk about.

And when it comes to certain gun violence, such as the Las Vegas massacre, their answers are to draft laws that force people into compliance with their own senatorial self-righteous sermonettes.

What, though, is the source of such evil? The good is anything that humanizes people, and evil is anything that dehumanizes people.

In 1844, Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes a short story entitled Earth's Holocaust. On a wide plain in the Midwest United States, all the world leaders decide to gather and burn everything evil, to a crisp, especially all weapons and war munitions.

An observer to this holocaust is delighted. But then, a man standing next to him points out that Cain needed no weapon to kill his brother. As well, the burning of all evil instruments fails to purify the "foul cavern" of the human heart. Thus, he says, after this great fire consumes all forms of weapons, new ones will be manufactured.

Senators Murphy and Blumenthal: Have you read this short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne? Can you argue that he is mistaken? How do your proposed laws purify the human heart and stop gun violence?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Excellent
Have you a link to the Hawthorne Document?

Unknown said...

The text is here (cut and paste the link):
http://www.online-literature.com/hawthorne/3000/

Hawthorne's tale is the perfect response to the hysteria of treating the symptoms and not the disease, which is precisely what our politicians, celebrities, and pundits propose.