Dan Greenfield identifies the philosophy of the would be gun controllers and explains on which side historically statists demanding a governmental monopoly of force are really on.
The gun issue is about solving individual evil through central planning in a shelter big enough for everyone. A Gun Free Zone where everyone is a target and tries to live under the illusion that they aren’t. A society where everyone is drawing peace signs on colored notepaper while waiting under their desks for the bomb to fall.
That brand of control isn’t authority, it’s authority in panic mode believing that if it imposes total zero tolerance control then there will be no more shootings. And every time the dumb paradigm is blown to bits with another shotgun, then the rush is on to reinforce it with more total zero control tolerance.
Zero tolerance for the Second Amendment makes sense. If you ban all guns, except for those in the hands of the 708,000 police officers, some of the 1.5 million members of the armed forces, the security guards at armored cars and banks, the bodyguards of celebrities who call for gun control, and any of the other people who need a gun to do their job, then you’re sure to stop all shootings.
So long as none of those millions of people, or their tens of millions of kids, spouses, parents, grandchildren, girlfriends, boyfriends, roommates and anyone else who has access to them and their living spaces, carries out one of those shootings.
But this isn’t really about stopping shootings; it’s about the belief that the problem isn’t evil, but agency, that if we make sure that everyone who has guns is following government orders, then control will be asserted and the problem will stop.
It’s the central planning solution to evil. …
Gun control does not control guns, it gives the illusion of controlling people, and when it fails those in authority are able to say that they did everything that they could short of giving people the ability to defend themselves.
We live under the rule of organizers, community and otherwise, committed to bringing their perfect state into being through the absolute control over people, and the violent acts of lone madmen are a reminder that such control is fleeting and that attempting to control a problem often makes it worse by removing the natural human crowdsourced responses that would otherwise come into play.
People do kill people and the only way to stop that is by killing them first. To a utopian this is a moral paradox that invalidates everything that came before it, but to everyone else, it’s just life in a world where evil is a reality, not just a word. …
[T]he Democratic Party is no longer the party of Thomas Jefferson. It’s the party of King George III. And it doesn’t like the idea of armed peasants, not because an occasional peasants goes on a shooting spree, but because like a certain dead mad king who liked to talk to trees, it believes that government power comes before individual liberty. Like that dead king, it believes that it means this for the benefit of the peasants who will be better off being told what to do.
The question is the old elemental one about government control and individual agency. And tragedies like the one that just happened take us back to the equally old question of whether individual liberty is a better defense against human evil than the entrenched organizations of government.
Read the whole thing.
The key dynamic of statism requires some kind of government action in response to any problem making the news. It doesn’t really matter that gun control legislation will actually only disarm law-abiding, rational people who have no disposition at all to commit violent crimes. What matters is that government must be seen to be operating to solve the problem. Whether the problem is really solved or not is immaterial. Statist responses are symbolic expressions of power, designed to assure the masses that their rulers are in control. There is no necessity for causality to reach beyond the symbolism to the facts. As long as the pageant of identification of a PROBLEM is followed by a supposed SOLUTION and RESPONSE, government has proven its indispensibility, affirmed its authority, and justified its existence. The issues of ineffectuality and untoward consequences can easily be obfuscated away.
Lexington, Massachusetts, April 19, 1775, militia members resist government confiscation of assault weapons.
SDD
The second amendment to the Constitution was derived precisely from a fear of statism.
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