“Stupid locals”

“You are a stupid [expletive deleted] moron,” read an e-mail I received two months ago. “You need to spend . . . less time talking about putting concealed handguns in the hands of the people of the Commonwealth,” read the vicious diatribe. “Bud in one [hand], gun in the other. Good idea . . . moron.”

This piece of vile hate mail came in response to a column I wrote in support of the right to bear arms in the CNMI. It no doubt came from a long-time mainland American resident of the CNMI. And I suspect it is quite representative of a certain segment of the mainland American population, which holds our local people in complete contempt.

A certain segment of the mainland American population obviously regards the people of the CNMI as hopelessly ignorant and incompetent. These snooty mainland Americans believe that the CNMI’s indigenous population is largely incapable of local self-government.

Merely consider the quoted statement above. The implications are quite clear. The typically drunken, Budweiser-addicted local people are totally incapable of using firearms responsibly. As idiots, they have no right to carry concealed weapons as responsible, red-blooded Americans regularly do in the more civilized and refined United States of America.

The unmistakable message here is this: Mainland Americans are entitled to the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution; CNMI residents, by sharp contrast, are not nearly mature enough for it. With more guns, we would only cause crime and wreak havoc. We would kill ourselves. Like our mainland American friend says, “Bud in one hand, gun in the other.” How much more racist can one get?

The same argument is also being made about the proposed shooting resorts. Liberal mainland Americans are vehemently opposed to it. They don’t trust the indigenous employees of the Department of Public Safety to enforce the law. In other words, they don’t trust drunken, ignorant savages with greater access to firearms.

What is worse, some mainland Americans don’t even trust our people with the administration of justice itself–e.g., with our local jury system in the criminal or civil courts. A mainland American attorney at the AG’s office, for example, recently had to apologize for openly calling the reliability of local jurors into question. Locals are stupid and highly biased; naturally, they cannot be trusted to render a reliable jury verdict on a fellow local (such as attorney Arriola, for example).

The same anti-local sentiment is also being played out on a larger scale, as when the US Interior Department, the US Democratic party, the US labor unions and other special interest groups work dilligently to portray our local government in the worst possible light. Their agenda is basically to demonstrate our local incompetence and prove that we are hopelessly incapable of local self-government. As David North wrote in a conspiratorial 1998 memo to his Interior colleagues, “We ‘probably find,’ yet again, strong indications of the lack of will/ability on the part of the CNMI government to bring real reform.”