Things are about to get complicated (see the Skywatch for May), with new energies entering the transit picture. So far, this Spring has been all about Mars.

The red planet has been throwing its weight around like a bully on the school bus. As we have seen, Mars set the tone for the whole season when it set off the Uranus-Pluto square at the Equinox. It is to Mars that astrologers are chalking up the hue and cry over weaponry in the USA.

Bullies

Martial in both form and content, the culture war between gun lovers and gun-control advocates has stimulated a much-needed national discussion. Its chief revelation so far is that the NRA is a group of bullies.

The opponents in this battle: the US citizenry on one side and the gun lobby on the other. Despite the legislative defeat in mid-April, it is clear that popular opinion is on the side of restrictions. Polls show that the majority of the populace favors closing the gun show loophole, and reinstating the ban on assault weapons and on high-capacity magazines.

So how is it that the gun lobby triumphed? Where did they get the money to prevail over the lion’s share of the American population?

Li’l Guns

From the media’s portrayal of the issue, we might assume that the winning hand in this game is held by backwoods survivalists and would-be home-defenders. This demographic has mounted a spirited defense since Sandy Hook, proclaiming it from the Tea Party’s favorite podium: that of the sanctity of lifestyle choice.

Thus we are hearing a lot of good ol’ boys rhapsodizing about their bloody rites in forest and duck pond. My suspicion is that hardly any of these self-proclaimed traditionalists actually hunts for his dinner. My guess is that these are the guys who trundle out to the woods every year, SUVs packed with sandwiches and expensive paramilitary gear, to slaughter harmless creatures for fun.

But the hunting argument is mostly PR image-making anyway. In point of fact, the use of guns for any kind of hunting is tiny to the point of statistically negligible, and getting more so. The hunter demographic — overwhelmingly white, male, Southern and elderly — is dying off; a fact of which the gun makers are painfully aware.  Which is why they’re targeting women now, as well as, astonishingly, children. Big Tobacco used this same advertising strategy in the 1950s and early ’60s, which earned them a black mark of infamy in popular opinion.

On April 30th, with Mars opposed to Saturn in the sky, a 5-year-old boy killed his 2-year-old sister in Kentucky, with his very own weapon, a model named “My First Rifle”. He’d gotten it for his birthday. The company that manufactured it also makes pink ones, for little girls.

Big Guns

But such purchases are not the source of the gun lobby’s power. Ordinary consumers are not the Big Guns in this fight. That role is played by the global arms traders.

This is the shadow reality looming behind the gun debate, to which remarkably scant attention has been paid. Certainly the US media won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. As gun narratives go, this one’s not as sexy as the culture-war angle. It’s just the familiar old corporate-overlords-undermining-the-democratic-process angle.

Weapons makers are the subject of Bob Dylan’s scathing masterpiece from 1963, “Masters of War”. But the public conversation seems to have gone mum about them ever since, despite the fact that their profits dwarf those of industries that attract far more attention (these profits will exceed $100 billion in the next four years, according to Amnesty International estimates.) Even from those social critics who excoriate every other source of ill-gotten gains, we don’t hear Big Armaments mentioned very often. Though it’s hard to imagine gains more ill-gotten than this.

United Nations

That’s why what happened in early April was so significant. As the Sun, Venus, Mars and Uranus were ramming their way through Aries (Mars’s ruling sign), the United Nations overwhelmingly approved the first international treaty regulating the worldwide trafficking in armaments. As the final vote was taken, the chamber erupted in cheers.

Only three countries voted against it: Iran, North Korea and Syria. Uncle Sam, the world’s biggest arms manufacturer and exporter by such a wide margin that no other country even comes close, voted yes. But whether or not the treaty gets ratified depends on what transpires with the domestic gun debate.

Strange Bedfellows

In a sense it is not surprising that the NRA has come out against the UN vote. Disagreeing with the treaty’s prohibition against exporting weapons used for genocide, the gun club finds that it cannot, in good conscience, say no to the right of war criminals to arm themselves.

But in another sense, the NRA’s position is more than surprising: it is downright bizarre. In voting against the treaty, they have thrown their hats in with a handful of countries that, in any other context, would elicit from them a double-barreled fusillade of jingoistic condemnation. North Korea and Iran are, after all, at the very top of Uncle Sam’s Bad Guys List.

Mars seems to be saying: Behold the brothers-under-the-skin.