The Ban on Assault Weapons is a Threat to the Freedom of Religion

Thinking readers well versed in church history understand how a chaplain posits a free democratic society has a Second Amendment right, an obligation, to keep and bear arms and that the reinstitution of the ban on assault weapons is a threat to the freedom of religion.  “Instances of the licentious and outrageous behavior of the military conservators of the peace still multiply upon us” (Townshend Acts).  

In 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency invited psychoanalyst Murray Bowen, M.D. to do a paper on human reaction to environmental problems.  He identified a link between the family and society.  The link had to do, first, with the delinquent teenage youngster, who is a responsibility for both parents and society, and secondly, with changes in the way both the parents and the agents of society deal with the same problem.  We are in a period of increasing chronic societal anxiety. Society responds to this with emotionally determined decisions to allay the anxiety of the moment; this results in symptoms of dysfunction; the efforts to relieve the symptoms result in more emotional Band-Aid legislation, which increased the problem.  We keep repeating the cycle, just as the family goes through similar cycles, regressing to the states we call emotional illness. Modern Americans assert it is more urgent to pass new gun control legislation after a mass shooting of children while simultaneously insisting a woman has the right to kill a child in the womb.  It is irrational to have such incongruent and radically opposing policies within the same society.  A government that fails to hold authorities accountable for Fast and Furious and Benghazi and considers it their responsibility to disarm her citizens is schizophrenic.

ATF "gunwalking" operations were, in part, a response to longstanding criticism of the bureau for focusing on relatively minor gun violations while failing to target high-level gun smuggling figures.  It is one of the many examples of emotional response to societal anxiety and the lack of maturity of both citizens and the political leaders they elect.

42 weapons recovered by Mexican military in Naco, Sonora, Mexico, 20 Nov 2009; these weapons were investigated by U.S. ICE.  Operation Fast and Furious; suspect Uriel Patino bought 19 of the weapons pictured one to two weeks earlier. http://www.justice.gov/oig/reports/2012/s1209.pdf

The Second Amendment

As ratified by the States and authenticated by Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The concept is an extension of European thought during a period of conflict between Protestants and Catholics.  In an effort to oppress the Protestants, their weapons were confiscated, rendering them defenseless.  When less anxious leaders triumphed, a rational policy was based on six foundational assumptions universally necessary to a free people to maintain a healthy balance between the governed and the government:  

• deterring tyrannical government;
• repelling invasion;
• suppressing insurrection;
• facilitating a natural right of self-defense;
• participating in law enforcement;
• enabling the people to organize a militia system.

 

 

HAS AMERICA REGRESSED TO AN EMOTIONAL QUASI-INTRAUTERINE STATE?

 

And, the children struggled together within her.  Gen. 25:22 (ASV) 

 

Incessant discussions across all media forms are centered on the perception, the theory really, that Americans have become an entitlement society.  The prevailing concept of the ultraconservative is that barely more than half the nation’s adult population is gainfully employed and forty seven percent of United States households are recipients of government assistance at one level, or multiple levels.  Is this proof of an entitlement society and, if it is, does it indicate an emotionally regressive state as defined by Murray Bowen?  Is it possible that the population as a whole has reached the point one might think of it as symbiotic?  Has our country devolved into something that resembles the governmental womb of peoples so interconnected, adversarial, and dependent that it would be appropriate to apply the analogy of Jacob and Esau in Rebekah’s womb?  As I process the current events, I work within the parameters of biblical teaching and family systems theory.

According to news reports a young adult, twenty years of age, shoots the mother he cohabits with in the face then proceeds to the nearby elementary school and shoots the principle and psychologist after an altercation.  Next, he enters the kindergarten classroom his mother teaches and kills twenty of her students.  The shooter is misidentified initially based upon the fact that he is in possession of his elder brother’s identification.  The tragedy ends with the perpetrators suicide.  Investigators find it remarkable that his home indicates the young man is meticulously keeping his personal space in order.  The parents are divorced.  The father and elder brother reside in a neighboring state.  The shooter is allegedly developmentally impaired.  

Are the cohabitation, impairment, assumption of a brother’s identity, and choice of targets an indication of symbiosis within the family or something else?  Is it possible he feels entitled to kill his mother’s students in retribution for some perceived error committed by his mother?  Alternatively, given the intrafamily dynamic, has he regressed to a nearly nonexistent level of differentiation of self and taken on a misguided persona of an angry brother and killed out of an anxious undifferentiated family ego mass?

 The cyclical nature of the symbiotic relationship between the mother and son is so intertwined that they are emotional Siamese twins, or so distant and hostile that they repel each other.  The symbiotic mother-son relationship is intense, not circumscribed or confined to the two but rather a fragment of the larger emotional field, fluid, and shifting, the family emotional system extending beyond the central family unit to nonrelatives and institutions.  In the undifferentiated emotional unit, one family member accurately knows the thoughts, feelings, fantasies, and dreams of another family member.  This “fusion of selfs” could involve every area of ego functioning.  One ego could function for that of another.   Is it understandable only from the family systems perspective — confusion with or the assumption of the brother’s identity?  Is this another level of entitlement mentality?

A biblical perspective might assume humans in the fallen state inherently possess an entitlement, adversarial worldview.  Therefore, any perceived regression and symbiotic functioning is not confined to the United States of America; it is a function of the common human experience from the beginning of time and must be understood as such.  The answers to the above perplexing questions ultimately exist only within the Creator.   A redeemed people cannot hope to comprehend the extent of our interrelatedness and the repercussions of an all-encompassing unseen warfare between spiritual good and evil.

Twins Fight in Womb (video)

 http://abcnews.go.com/Health/video-shows-twins-fighting-womb/story?id=17848740 

 

     

Murray Bowen was less optimistic than he may have been if he had the advantage of current research.  Real, perhaps lasting, change is possible much more quickly than he anticipated in his writings.  Perhaps when our parents and grandparents warned us to be careful choosing our friends we would be wise to listen more carefully.

April 23, 2012

Molecular Effects of Social Stress

Social rank has broad effects on gene regulation, particularly in the immune system, according to a new study in rhesus macaques. The findings help explain how social status gets under your skin.

Rhesus macaques at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center were used in the study. Image courtesy of Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University.

Many species, including humans, have social hierarchies that affect mating and other behaviors that are important for survival. A growing body of evidence suggests that the stress of a low social ranking can also influence mental and physical health in a variety of ways. These include suppressed immune function and elevated risk for cardiovascular problems like hypertension, heart disease and stroke. Yet little is known on a molecular level about how social stress translates into physiological changes.
In the new study, researchers investigated whether social status affects gene regulation. The work, funded by several NIH components, was led by University of Chicago researchers Dr. Jenny Tung (now at Duke University) and Dr. Yoav Gilad. It was described in the April 9, 2012, advance online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers examined social groups of female rhesus macaques. In the wild, female macaques generally inherit their social rank from their mothers and stay in the social group they were born into. The scientists, however, constructed 10 groups with 5 macaques each. In this situation, the order of introduction determines rank, with later admission bringing lower status. The scientists took blood samples and used DNA microarray chips to analyze the blood cell expression levels of over 6,000 genes.
The team identified almost 1,000 genes whose expression levels varied with social rank. Over 500 were more highly expressed in high-ranking macaques; about 450 were more highly expressed in low-ranking animals. The largest functional group, with 112 genes, related to the immune system. The researchers found that, by looking at these expression levels, they could correctly predict social rank for 80% of the macaques they tested.
The social status of 7 macaques changed during the study, giving the scientists an opportunity to confirm that gene expression changes with social rank. They found that gene expression levels could correctly determine the social rank of 6 out of the 7 females.
The scientists also explored whether DNA methylation—an alteration that affects gene expression without changing the genetic sequence­—might mediate these effects. They found that the DNA methylation differences were modest but corresponded with expression. The finding provides at least a partial explanation for how the body might quickly change expression in response to social rank.
“There's a spooky side to this kind of research, in that an individual's social rank is partially determining health status,” Tung says. “But there's also a hopeful side. For the 7 females that changed ranks, their gene status changed with them. They're not stuck in place, and I think that says something more broadly about the capacity for change.”
This study provides insight into the links researchers have long observed between social stress and physiology. More work will be needed to fully understand the mechanisms by which social status affects gene expression and health outcomes.
—by Harrison Wein, Ph.D.
http://www.nih.gov/researchmatters/april2012/04232012social.htm

If this study can be replicated, the biblical admonitions in the O.T. take on a new way of thinking.  The harsh (by current American standards) punishments prescribed by Moses in the Wilderness for antisocial behavior are more reasonable than "civilized" writers and television news anchors and commentators would have us believe.