By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy

I have known for a long time that US news is agenda-driven. Tonight (December 18) I was made aware of the extent to which agenda-driven US news drives the news of the rest of the world.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, Russia Today Moscow requested a live TV interview via Skype about the Newtown, Connecticut, school shootings that killed 20 young children and several adults. I was interested to know what was Moscow’s interest in the shootings, and I agreed to the interview.

I was surprised to see that RT Moscow’s interest was to spread the official US story of the shootings and to ask me if I thought “assault weapons” would be banned as a consequence.

Many things can be an assault weapon. A baseball bat, a knife, a fist, a foot, a single shot .22 rifle, a double-barrel shotgun, a fireplace poker, a six-shot revolver, a brick, a sword, a bow and arrow, a lance. A person can add many items to this short list.

Gun-control advocates have defined “assault weapon” to be a semi-automatic civilian version of military weapons, such as AR-15, the civilian version of the military M-16, and AK-47. During the Clinton administration the civilian version of these weapons was not permitted to have various harmless features because the features made the rifles have a military appearance, and the weapons were restricted to magazines that held no more than ten rounds.

Today 20 and 30 round magazines are available. For a professional, the capacity of the magazines is immaterial. With experience a person can change clips in a second. A button is pushed, the clip drops out and a new one is inserted. For reasons hard to follow, gun control advocates think that a ten-round clip turns an “assault weapon” into something else.

I told RT Moscow that the United States was the most complete police state in human history. Thanks to modern technology, Washington is able to spy on its subjects far beyond the capabilities of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Even George Orwell’s imagination in his dystopian novel, 1984, has been surpassed by Washington’s current practice. The “war on terror” is the excuse for the American Police State.

A police state, I said, was inconsistent with an armed population, and as all other constitutional amendments have fallen, the sole remaining amendment, the Second Amendment, will not survive much longer.

But why RT Moscow’s focus on “assault weapons”? The accused, Adam Lanza, was immediately declared guilty. According to the Associated Press, the Newtown, Connecticut medical examiner, Dr H. Wayne Carver said that “all the victims of the Connecticut elementary school shooting were killed up close by multiple rifle shots.” http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/183651631.html

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