All Filipinos should applaud the actions of US Sen. Ben Cardin (Maryland) for stopping — or, at least, attempting to stop — the sale of 24,000 Sig Sauer M4 assault rifles to the Philippine National Police. This man is a hero and a friend to the Filipino people; he unpopularly went against the interest of the huge US military industrial complex. Although it will be hard to stop the unabated killings of fellow Filipinos, blocking (or at least attempting to stop) the sale of 24,000 Sig Sauer M4 assault rifles will definitely help curtail the genocide.
To sensitize the desensitized minds of a lot of people, an M4 assault rifle is a machine gun, capable of shooting up to 950 bullets per minute. With such firepower, this machine gun can literally cut a man’s body in half if that is the intent. And hypothetically speaking, if one bullet can kill a person, that will be equivalent to 950 Filipinos being killed per minute. Multiply 950 by 24,000, well that’s where we are going every round.
With no shame, and puffed up instead with a false, misdirected sense of pride, some of our leaders are even suggesting that we buy equally devastating machine guns from other countries.
Our so-called leaders and most of us seem to have forgotten to ask: Where are these killing tools going to be used, and what for? These machine guns will only be used to kill Filipinos. It will also be used to harass and terrorize. That is what these machine guns are for.
And to think that nothing is more anti-Filipino than killing Filipinos.
JOSE SANTAMARIA