America's enemy within

By Donald Kirk

WASHINGTON ― Well, that was quick. After a day of headlines the salvo of long-range projectiles fired by the North Koreans was history, yesterday's news. Reverberations of the shots faded away while experts wondered if those were missiles or just extra long-range artillery.

Actually, whatever they were, Kim Jong-un will have to try a little harder if he thinks he's scaring anyone. No one here really thinks he's about to order an attack on American forces in South Korea, much less on anything else including targets in the U.S. Maybe the reaction here should have been hysterical. Since he didn't get much of a rise out of the American mass media, Congress, the Pentagon or the White House, maybe he'll try again ― firing more and better and still longer-range projectiles, if not missiles.

Americans face a much more immediate real and present danger of just about anyone with a pistol or rifle firing into a crowd. No, the shooter has no chance of escaping, but he can kill or wound people while Americans again debate the constitutional if not the sacred right of just about anyone to own a weapon. In the latest shooting, one student was killed and others injured in an elite high school in Colorado. That was a week after two university students were killed and several wounded across the U.S. in North Carolina.

The fact is, Kim Jong-un is not America's most dangerous enemy, and he is far from the likeliest to go around killing anyone, not counting those tied to posts and shot by firing squads for failing to do his bidding or posing threats to his regime. Americans can rest easy as far as the threat from North Korea is concerned.

As the terrifying sounds of gunfire echo time and again across the U.S., it's obvious that Americans are their own worst enemies. We can muster all the sophisticated weaponry needed to counter a serious challenge from North Korea, but we seem helpless in the face of random attacks by American citizens shooting up other Americans.

Politicos are so afraid of the power of gun lobbyists, led by the dreaded National Rifle Association, that Congress and state legislatures dare not begin to outlaw possession of weapons. Rapid-firing assault rifles such as those used by soldiers around the world may not be absolutely legal but are easily obtained by those who want them.

In the midst of the uproar, some certified idiots believe that teachers should now have pistols in their desks to counter obstreperous students who might be hell bent on killing someone. This idea is utterly ridiculous, however, when you consider how quickly any nut with a gun can blast away before a nearby teacher had a moment to reach for his or her pistol.

Keep up the demand for self-defensive weapons, and pretty soon Americans will routinely be walking around with pistols bulging in their belts, ready to annihilate suspected shooters, whether they've opened fire or not. The prospect of shootouts in drunken brawls, impassioned debates, revenge grudges and fits of driver rage on the highways is all too obvious.

The old self-defense line is common. In a number of U.S. states, “stand-your-ground” laws give Americans the right to fire away when threatened. The point at which a threat merits opening fire is widely debated. The line between aggressive assault and self-defense is blurred, and who's to know whose story or explanation is right.

No one believes in the right to self-defense more than Kim Jong-un. That's the rationale he asserts to clinging to his nuclear arsenal and missiles needed to send warheads to distant targets. Pro-northers in the U.S. defend him, saying, well, he test-fired that sophisticated new weaponry the other day after the U.S. tested a missile designed to counter one of the North's intercontinental ballistic missiles. Sure, as if the U.S. did not have the right to try and shoot down a missile whooshing toward American soil at a speed faster than that of sound. But such talk is abstract, theoretical. The hard truth is that more than 40,000 Americans were killed by gunfire last year. The figure includes individual murders, suicides, accidents, everything, about as many as died in motor vehicle accidents in the same period.

Nobody's seriously expecting Kim Jong-un to order a mass killing other than that of victims of his own gulag system. It's hard to imagine his forces killing thousands with those missiles and warheads that he refuses to give up. Americans face a vastly greater threat from other Americans ― a reminder of the old Pogo cartoon line, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Donald Kirk (www.donaldkirk.com) has been covering war and peace for decades.