I am not a pacifist. That said, I am concerned that warfare, or at least weapons, are again being glorified (TV’s gunny, Ronald Lee Emey.) Weapons are not high tech toys, they are a sad necessity. Once again the old myth that we can win wars with little human loss is being promoted despite the so-called bad guys’ ability to circumvent our expensive technology. TV shows glorify heroes for “taking out” “bad guys.” with super accurate specialized rifles. I was too young to serve in WWII or Korea but remember them. At that time although everyone including the USA used snipers, we only talked about enemy snipers – and ours didn’t use special sniper rifles, they used WWI Springfield 30/03s. No matter how much it had to be ignored in practice and how many other unethical things needed to be done to win a war that had been forced upon the USA, the ethics were that it was unchristian to single out an individual for death. That was naive and impractical, of course, but a noble thought that was violated out of military necessity, not because sniping was some sort of fun game.

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