Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

In its June issue, Integra printed an outrageous and deceitful attack on the NRA by Ronald Spivey, a confessed psychotic multiple murderer on death row. The editor goes on at length how this unfortunate victim of mental illness and an uncaring world has taken responsibility for his crimes. But in his article, Spivey labors to off load his personal responsibility onto the stress of his external life-style problems, his willful abuse of alcohol and drugs, and the right of citizens to possess firearms. Rather than a "reasoned" discussion of firearm ownership, Spivey's article is a poorly disguised attempt to reinterpret the heinous crimes he committed, and portray himself as the victim rather than the perpetrator.

If any part of the misinformation in Spivey's article were true, then Switzerland would have the highest crime rates in the world. While Spivey falsely attempts to blame access to firearms for his crimes, in Switzerland nearly all citizens possess firearms. Somehow, the heavily armed Swiss manage to resist the murderous impulses that are claimed to accompany firearm ownership, and have almost no firearm involved crime.

Switzerland doesn't maintain a standing army for defense, considering it the duty of all citizens to rise to the defense of the country in an emergency. To this end, all men between 21 and 45 are required to keep at least a fully automatic assault weapon within easy access in their homes. Citizens are encouraged to privately purchase additional firearms for sport and home defense, and to supplement those available from the government. Those with religious or moral objections to possessing firearms are obliged to file for an exemption.

Private citizens who are so inclined can lawfully possess any weapon up to antiaircraft guns. The only restriction on the more potentially destructive weapons is that some critical part of their firing mechanism be stored separately from the main weapon when not in use.

The Swiss government itself sells surplus or obsolete military weapons to its citizens. Rather than licensing guns and owners, the Swiss assume that all citizens possess multiple firearms. And despite one of the highest per capita rates of firearm ownership in the world, Switzerland has almost no firearm related crime. The Swiss do, however, have a deep and abiding belief in effective self defense at both the national and personal levels.

The long history of Swiss freedom and armed neutrality hasn't been accidental good fortune. The Swiss policy of practiced readiness to defend themselves against any aggressor has succeeded in discouraging every would be world conqueror of this century who brutally enslaved its passively neutral neighbors. By being totally prepared to defend their borders from any aggressors, the Swiss have avoided having to pay the cost of proving themselves. And on a personal level, criminals find the aggressive self defense of the Swiss less attractive than the forced passivity of potential victims in America and other countries that restrict and/or discourage their citizen's right of self defense.

Spivey passionately advocates outlawing machine guns and assault weapons, falsely implying that the NRA has been promoting their possession and misuse. Contrary to the media and government's abuse of the term, assault weapons, like machine guns, are capable of fully automatic fire. The truth is that machine guns and assault weapons have been illegal in America since the 1930's under legislation sponsored by the NRA. Clinton's much publicized "assault weapon ban" was actually targeted at semiautomatic firearms that resemble military weapons - firearms which the FBI's own uniform crime reports show are actually used in a statistically insignificant less than 0.3% (that's less than 3/10ths of 1 percent) of firearm related crimes.

Contrary to his assertions that "...they can't do as much damage without a firearm as they can with one", none of the most prolific murderers in history used firearms as their primary method of killing. Even the Nazis found shooting people too slow and expensive, and were forced to develop other methods to commit the bulk of their mass murders. Recent events have repeatedly proven that fertilizer, gasoline, and other common household chemicals are far more lethal than gun powder. On the other hand, firearms, and in particular handguns, are the tools of choice for those obliged to defend themselves and their property from thieves and murderers. Handguns are especially appropriate self defense weapons for older women living alone.

Nor is Spivey's claim that his body count was solely due to his access to a firearm credible. Murderers armed with knives, clubs, fertilizer, chain saws, metal pipes, hammers, scissors, screw drivers, automobiles, common garden implements - and yes, rocks - have repeated proven that it is entirely possible to kill multiple innocent and unsuspecting victims without the use of a firearm. Psychotics have in the past shown exceptional creativity in the use of common objects to cause bodily harm. Since Spivey possesses an Intertel qualified brain, it is entirely reasonable to assume he would have been able to find an alternative means of killing his victims if he hadn't had access to a firearm.

Spivey states that his violence was caused by his psychotic rage. He further claims that his psychotic rage was caused by external life pressures and stress. His psychotic rage was not caused by access to a firearm. Spivey wants to believe that the cause of his multiple murders was his access to lethal capability. The means by which any one of us could kill or maim those around us are constantly at hand. Murders have been committed with every conceivable artifact of human existence. It is not access but intent that causes violence. The outcome would not have been materially different for his victims or society if Spivey had been obliged to act out his psychotic rage with a machete, his car, or gasoline filled whiskey bottles instead of a firearm.

Clearing away all the double talk, Spivey tries to make the case that because he failed in every way as a human being, we as functional individuals shouldn't have rights and liberty. More specifically, Spivey tries to make the point that because a diagnosed psychotic who should never have been allowed to interact with unsuspecting normal individuals couldn't handle real life, functional individuals should no longer be "allowed" our basic rights of self defense and individual freedom. My rights and freedoms did not cause Spivey's mental illness, his life-style problems, or his failures as a human being. Eliminating my rights and freedoms would not in any way "cure" Spivey's mental illness or protect him from the effects of his faulty life-style choices. Eliminating my rights and freedoms would, however, have a substantial negative effect on me.

Spivey is right in that there shouldn't have been any way for him to gain access to a firearm. Nor should he have been allowed access to an automobile, toxic chemicals, sharp objects, blunt instruments, or anything else that he could use to harm others. In short, he should have been removed from society until he no longer posed a threat to those around him. Spivey repeatedly demonstrated his inability to function in society. Judges and doctors repeatedly returned Spivey to an unsuspecting general public while actively conspiring to deny his future victims knowledge of his true nature.

Spivey publicly proclaims he is a member of the NRA. If Spivey is indeed a member of the NRA, he has to be fully aware he is attempting to deceive the public, because the well documented facts that disprove all of his claims have been repeatedly printed in Government and NRA publications - even if the main stream media chooses to ignore the truth. One of the facts Spivey fails to mention is that over 1 million Americans each year successfully defend themselves, their loved ones, and their property through the lawful use of their privately owned firearms. Most of the time, it is not even necessary to discharge the firearm. Studies prove that in the real world the rest of us are obliged to live in, firearms save far more lives than they "cost". Finding this aspect inconvenient to his position, Spivey ignores these well documented facts.

Spivey advocates people sue the NRA in order to destroy the organization and eliminate its lawful efforts to protect the rights of Americans as guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. With his advocacy of harm to the NRA and its members, Spivey makes it personal. I'm a member of the NRA, and therefore one of Spivey's intended victims. I haven't actually fired a gun for over a decade (and then it was a replica of a Civil War era musket), but I contribute to the NRA in support of their uncompromising defense of liberty. Since my resource base has constricted I've stopped contributing to the ACLU and send most of what little I can spare to the NRA. History indicates that if we lose our right and ability to physically resist the encroachments of an out of control government, paper warriors like the ACLU will quickly become irrelevant anyway.

I have been an NRA member off and on for decades, and have found the NRA a consistent advocate of constitutional democracy, rational and effective justice, the rights of victims, and a supporter of basic law enforcement (the cop on the beat). Contrary to the gross distortions by Spivey and the popular media, the organization that I know well has never failed to maintain the moral and ethical high ground. Take a close look at what the NRA actually says and does, and you will find it is one of the very few untarnished white knights in American politics. Unfortunately, the press prefers to publicize fabrications and distortions about the NRA spread by self serving proven mental defectives like Spivey, instead of accurately reporting the eminently respectable reality of a prestigious organization of over 3 million Americans.

George Bush's highly publicized resignation from the NRA is hardly a valid measure of the NRA. George Bush has a history of betraying just causes at critical times. He first supported women's rights, and then changed sides and worked hard to eliminate the rights of women to control their own bodies. He promised no new taxes, and then betrayed us all by raising taxes. He started a war against Sadam Hussein, and then at the 100th hour managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. (Because of Bush, we will have to fight Iraq again within the next 10 years, and next time Sadam's followers will be far more motivated and numerous, and our casualties will be far heavier. Ask the Kurds, Shiites, and Iraqi moderates if George Bush is an honorable man. Oh, I'm sorry, you can't - they're all dead because Bush helped keep Sadam in power, and then refused to intervene while Sadam viciously butchered men, women and children with impunity.) And now we are supposed to be surprised that Bush has abandoned the defense of liberty. If anything, Bush's politically motivated departure serves as further confirmation of the validity of the cause he is currently attempting to betray.

But back to Spivey. Even now, Spivey refuses to recognize that he was solely and personally responsible for his actions. No inanimate objects, no substances, no other people, nothing but his own internal mental processes caused him to attempt to murder 5 total strangers. In Oregon, divorces out number marriages, and an estimated 80% of businesses fail in their first year. Alcohol and drugs are generally available to anyone who seeks them out. These factors are a recurrent experience for a significant percentage of the population and do not cause normal individuals to "snap" and murder total strangers. The single critical variable in the lethal equation is Spivey and his mental defects.

Even after 18 years to think about it, Spivey refuses to recognize that the lethal defects are in his basic makeup, and his inability or unwillingness to control his behavior. Instead he lashes out in self serving outrage at the lawful right of normal citizens to possess firearms.

He doesn't question that he was repeatedly returned to the general population while he continued to pose a threat to those around him. At no point does he even consider that the public has a right to be protected from violent and dangerous defectives like him. No where does Spivey consider that he personally knew from when he was as young as 11 that he was prone to psychotic rages, and posed a clear and present danger to those around him. And yet he proceeded to willfully place himself in situations that would trigger his psychotic rages.

From his own description of his lifetime of frustrating society's ineffective efforts to alter or control his behavior, it would seem obvious that Spivey would have snapped eventually regardless of his access to a firearm. Because of misplaced sympathy for Spivey, the system protected him from the victims of his earlier crimes, and denied his later victims any knowledge of the violent psychotic loose among them. By his own account, the system had multiple opportunities to protect the innocent, but instead chose to repeatedly release Spivey back into the general public until he finally committed atrocities that couldn't be ignored.

A case could be made that the real failure was in a system that allowed such a manifestly defective specimen as Spivey to survive long enough to deprive society of 2 far more valuable individuals. Perhaps the real on going crime is that society continues to value and support at great expense Spivey's continued life, while his victims who contributed far more to society while living than Spivey ever will, continue to be dead.

Far from accepting personal responsibility for his reprehensible acts, Spivey implies that going berserk is somehow a normal and reasonable reaction to divorce and business failure. In Spivey's perverted logic, it was society's failure to restrain the physical effects of his rage when he could not, that caused the tragedy. In Spivey's self serving version of reality, if only society had limited his world to rocks, he wouldn't have been able to commit his murders. Spivey has no concept of the true reality of his actions. He is still trying to portray himself as the victim.

Spivey proposes instead that the whole world should have been turned into a safe institution for him to harmlessly bounce off the padded walls. In Spivey's mind, because he can't be trusted with sharp objects, we must all be limited to dull plastic scissors. I resent the implication that I and the rest of the functional world, are really only here as therapy objects for the defective and broken minority. I reject the concept that I must live inside his institution because he is incapable of living in the real world.

Spivey's claims of a tortured life filled with moral anguish offered up in a bid for sympathy must also be framed in the proper context. I'd bet either one of his murdered victims would gladly trade places with him. If you doubt that a life of feeling guilty on "death row" is substantially preferable to the grave, why hasn't Spivey willingly joined his victims in the cold earth during the long years since he so violently ended their lives? To spend 18 years on death row, Spivey has to have appealed his death sentence - continuing his lifelong pattern of resisting society's efforts to either fix him or cut its losses and rid itself of him.

I would further wager that at least the 25% of the world population currently facing eminent death from starvation, disease, and/or war, struggling just to stay alive one more day, would gladly trade places with Spivey. In our perverse "justice system", Spivey's standard of living and life expectancy on "death row" is substantially superior to the brutal reality experienced by at least a billion non-murderers in the third world. Put another way, the ongoing cost of maintaining Spivey alive in an expensive high security prison would probably support several hundred third world children who are now doomed to a painful lingering death.

And now, having been allowed to outlive his first victims by 18+ years, Spivey has decided to murder freedom itself! Unable to convince his jailers to set him free yet again, he seeks to enclose the rest of us within the walls of his prison, and thereby take from us the liberty we have taken from him.

Spivey has already committed sufficient atrocities to justify his execution. There is no doubt as to his guilt. There isn't any possibility of "rehabilitation". Why is this man still alive to wrongfully attack the NRA after being sentenced to die 18 years ago? Are the multiple people he murdered 18+ years ago any less dead today? Is there no limit to the damage this man will be allowed to cause before his accumulating victims can rightfully demand NO MORE!

But no, justice will not triumph this day, and Spivey will carve yet more notches in the iron bars that fail to contain his malevolence. From the parasitic security of his publicly supported cell, this admitted failure of a human being is reaching out in an overt attempt to harm me and the other wholly innocent members of the NRA. He has subverted society's failure to follow through on his death sentence into license to rack up even more victims. Having avoided any real measure of justice for his previous multiple murders, Spivey is now aiming for a body count in the millions by attacking the very foundations of our liberty.