My dear friends on the other side

My dear friends on the other side of the ocean!

I feel with you and moan with you about the 20 dead children in Sandy Hook Elementary school. This is a terrible tragedy!

I have to admit I’m a bit numbed by the constant reports about killed children. I’m running out of tears.

Three days ago a car packed with explosives blew up near a school in a residential part of Qatana, Syria. 16 people were killed, including seven children and three women, nearly two dozen people were wounded.

34 Palestinian children died in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead.

I’m a bit numbed and mentally exhausted but I’m still able to connect the dots.

There are a lot of guns and explosives around, these tools of destruction don’t come from nowhere! Who produces and distributes the guns and who funds the violent psychopaths who use them?

I live in the country where one of the most popular pistols is made. http://www.glock.com/

I’m not proud about it, I hate the idea that I share the same nationality with Gaston Glock. I’m not proud that in a tiny segment of the market Glock outperformed Smith & Wesson.

My dear friends on the other side of the ocean, don’t worry about being outperformed, apart from the tiny company Glock, well established US corporations dominate arms manufacturing and arms trade. The USA is undoubtedly the biggest muscle and the unchallenged master of weapons manufacturing and it leads the competition by a wide margin.

In 2011, the USA exported weapons worth 66.3 billion US$, which is 78 percent of the global arms market.

Manufacturing military equipment is the most profitable business and the weapons industry is the politically best connected lobbying group. In the USA this special interest group is called “the Military Industrial Complex.”

A significant part of the weapons companies output is meant for the domestic market. The USA has the biggest military budget (711 billion US$, which is 41 percent of global military expenditures) and the Pentagon is with a workforce of 3.2 million the biggest global employer. The USA maintains between 600 and 800 military basis abroad.

The USA has 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers and 71 nuclear powered submarines (more than all other navies together). The USAF and the Navy operate 5,000 aircraft, 2,200 cruise missiles, 700 drones, 500 LGM-30G Minuteman missiles with nuclear warheads plus 288 Trident-2 D5 missiles (on submarines) with nuclear warheads.

How could it be different? Weapons, especially guns and shooting, are a part of US American identity and US citizens have the constitutional right to keep and bear arms (Second Amendment). In 2008 and 2010, the Supreme Court clarified that this right is unconnected to the service in a militia and indeed constitutes an individual's right to possess a firearm.

My dear friends across the ocean, the cherished individual freedoms that are part of US identity come at a price.

The freedom from accountability for environmental damages comes at a price.

The freedom to acquire as much wealth as possible comes at a price.

The freedom from environmental, financial, social regulations and restrictions comes at a price.

The freedom to possess weapons comes at a price.

The USA has the highest gun ownership rate in the world (an average of 88 firearms per 100 people), US Americans possess between 240 and 260 million guns, that are roughly 40 percent of all globally civilian-owned guns.

As I wrote before, manufacturing military equipment is the most profitable business and the weapons industry is the politically best connected lobbying group. The freedom to make any kind of products which can be sold profitably comes at a price.

The freedom to produce and distribute arms comes at a price, but the price is not paid evenly!

The guns, which are constantly made in big numbers are put to use in the strategic moves of the worlds big players, who are trying to destabilize countries and who are fanning the flames of war by pouring out their cornucopia of weapons onto even the meanest and heinous thugs, thereby causing indescribable pain and suffering all around the world (Syria, Congo, Somalia, Afghanistan, to name just a few of the most recent imperial projects).

The occasional shooting sprees by deranged individuals in the USA are only faint reflections (one could also call it “straying beams”) of the shooting sprees that gunmen all over the world commit with US produced and US delivered weapons and there are for sure at least 20 children dying every day in the worlds conflict zones outside the USA.

Newtown (Sandy Hook Elementary) is not Aleppo, Blacksburg (Virginia Tech) is not Homs -- far from! This is not even collateral damage, this is a negligible side effect of an enormous profitable business from which all US citizens (more or less) benefit. Weapons manufacturing is the one industrial branch where the USA is second to none and can outperform any competition. Without weapons manufacturing the USA would have gone bust long time ago.

I moan about the 20 dead children in Sandy Hook Elementary school as I moan about all the other slain children of the world. This is a terrible worldwide tragedy!

Peace.