Murder by Gun Control

"Why is everybody being so damned polite?

          

No sane individual living in the last days of the 20th century would

knowingly welcome Nazis, the KGB, the Khmer Rouge, the ATF, or the

FBI into their homes. We’ve learned too much from what happened to

Jews in Germany, Kulaks in Russia, "landlords" in China, everybody in

Cambodia, and victims of state terrorism at Ruby Ridge and Waco.

          

But let the Jackbooted Thugs’ Ladies’ Auxiliary slap on makeup and

broomstick skirts, let them prattle in squeaky little girl voices and

breathe their vegetarian breath all over us, and for some reason we

think we have to ask them in and offer them chamomile tea.

          

Well, to hell with that. I used to give a lecture at the local

university that began like this: "Until this morning you could plead

ignorance for positions you take or fail to take on the moral and

political issues of the day. When you leave this classroom an hour

from now, having heard the facts I’m about to present, it’ll either

be as a brand new libertarian, or as a fully self-aware fascist

monster."

          

Today I say the same to politicians, bureaucrats, cops, Handgun

Control, Inc., Colorado Governor Bill Owens, and those so miserably

lacking in originality that they had to plagiarize Louis Farrakan (of

all people) and launch a "Million Moms March". Also, anybody else who

thinks it’s morally acceptable to use the hired guns of government to

take everybody else’s guns away.

          

Gun control may have felt like a nice, warm, fuzzy idea to its

advocates back in the 1960s. However today, owing to a great deal of

serious legal and historical scholarship — and a series of

horrifying but highly educational events — anyone who wishes to

violate the fundamental covenant on which this nation is based, by

attempting to outlaw personal weapons, has to get past three

extremely inconvenient but absolutely incontrovertible facts.

          

(1) Every year, in this nation of more than a quarter billion

individuals, a few thousand (three quarters of them suicides) are

killed with firearms, while _millions_ of Americans successfully

use personal weapons to save themselves and others from injury or

death. Guns save many, many times more lives than they take.

          

(2) In every jurisdiction that has made it even microscopically

easier for individuals to carry weapons, violent crime rates have

plummeted by double-digit percentages. Vermont, where no permission

of any kind is required to carry a gun, is named in many respectable

surveys as the safest state to live in.

          

(3) More telling and urgent, every episode of genocidal mass murder

in history has been preceded by a period of intense disarming of the

civil population, usually with "public safety" or "national security"

as an excuse. According to Amnesty International — hardly a gang of

right wing crazies — in the 20th century alone (in events entirely

separate from war), governments have slaughtered more than a hundred

million people, usually their own citizens." ~ [Read More]