questions. There’s a feeling in the country that people are under
attack. I think they’re misidentifying the source of the attack, but
they do feel under attack.
The government is the only power structure that’s even partially
accountable to the population, so naturally the business sectors
want to make that the enemy—not the corporate system, which is
totally unaccountable. After decades of intensive business
propaganda, people feel that the government is some kind of enemy
and that they have to defend themselves from it.
It’s not that that doesn’t have its justifications. The government
is authoritarian and commonly hostile to much of the population. But
it’s partially influenceable—and potentially very influenceable—by
the general population.
Many people who advocate keeping guns have fear of the
government in the back of their minds. But that’s a crazy response
to a real problem.
Do the media foster the feeling people have that they’re under
attack?
At the deepest level, the media contribute to the sense that the
government is the enemy, and they suppress the sources of real
power in the society, which lie in the totalitarian institutions—the
corporations, now international in scale—that control the economy
and much of our social life. In fact, the corporations set the
conditions within which the government operates, and control it to a
large extent.
The picture presented in the media is constant, day after day.
People simply have no awareness of the system of power under
which they’re suffering. As a result—as intended—they turn their
attention against the government.
People have all kinds of motivations for opposing gun control, but
there’s definitely a sector of the population that considers itself
threatened by big forces, ranging from the Federal Reserve to the
Council on Foreign Relations to big government to who knows what,
and they’re calling for guns to protect themselves.
Radio listener: On the issue of gun control, I believe that the US is
becoming much more like a Third World country, and nothing is