Murder by Gun Control

by L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Special to TLE

           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.
           The U.S. is far from immune. Look up "Operation Keelhaul".
           Clearly, if those millions had been armed, they couldn't have been murdered by their own governments. And if the governments hadn't known where all the weapons were and who possessed them, the people couldn't have been disarmed. It follows, then, that no amount of gun control -- especially "soft" measures like registering guns or gun owners -- is reasonable or safe. Those who tremble at the idea of personal weapons -- "hoplophobes" is the diagnostic term -- are fond of saying that guns are made for only one purpose. Well, gun control serves only one purpose, too -- the incapacitation and extermination of whole peoples.
           That's why we call it by its right name: "victim disarmament".
           If you think it can't happen here, ask Donald Scott (look him up, too). Ask Vicky and Sammy Weaver. Ask 82 innocent men, women, and children (two dozen beautiful, harmless, helpless little children) from the Seventh Day Adventist church at Mount Carmel near Waco, Texas. Oops, you can't ask them, can you? Because they're all dead -- murdered in cold blood by government terrorists who have yet to be brought to justice.
           Let's ask some questions that everybody on my side's been too polite -- too damned polite -- to ask before.
           What kind of mind would sacrifice millions for the sake of a few thousands, especially when it's been demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that victim disarmament can't save even those thousands?
           What kind of mind wants a return to mean streets and ever-soaring crime rates?
           What kind of mind collaborates with agents of mass murder and genocide?
           Make no mistake: you victim disarmament types are sick, sick people, in the words of T.D. Melrose, who'd rather see a woman raped in an alley and strangled with her own pantyhose than see her with a gun in her hand.
           You're people, down deep in your blackened, shriveled souls, who wait like vultures, secretly delighted whenever atrocities like the Columbine shootings occur -- atrocities whose only significance to you is their usefulness in advancing your political agenda. Dancing in the blood of innocents, just like the lying, thieving, murdering rapist you've sent to the White House twice in a row.
           You're people who, like German voters in the 1930s, have empowered and unleashed on your decent and unsuspecting neighbors the most evil and violent terrorist bureaucracy in American history.
           You're people, in short, who must be stupid, insane, or evil to continue arguing -- in the face of indisputable facts and irrefutable logic -- that others must be forced into a state of helplessness and victimized by individual criminals or the state.
           Stupid, insane, or evil.
           You are morally responsible for what happened at Waco. It was undertaken (bad choice of words, probably) by your favorite agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, at your behest, in your name, in pursuance of the policies you've always advocated. The blood of those babies, of their mommies and daddies, is on your head. You did it. You killed them as surely as if it were your hands at the controls of those tanks.
           Stupid, insane, or evil.
           Harsh words, but what's the point in being polite to advocates of mass murder and genocide? Those are the alernatives: stupid, insane, or evil. Smart people, sane people, good people know, in the words of Robert A. Heinlein, that "An armed society is a polite society."
           If you were interested in saving lives -- even one life -- you'd join me in demanding that the Bill of Rights be stringently enforced, that the 25,000 gun laws on he books (each and every one illegal, each and every one responsible for the injury or death of countless individuals) be repealed, nullified, or otherwise disposed of.
           Immediately.
           For the children.
           You'd agree that, as long as we permit the public school system to continue to exist, it has an obligation to instruct children, starting in kindergarten, in the safe and effective use of firearms.
           Allow me to repeat that: "safe and effective use".
           Emphasis on "effective".
           Now don't go all soft and skooshy on me. I can see the razor wire and bayonets behind your New Age gobbledegook. I can hear the tramp, tramp, tramp as you goose-step to the Horst Wessel Song. I can smell the first faint traces of gas seeping from your chambers of death.
           Let's make it clear for the dimmest bulbs among you: the kids at Columbine High didn't die from too many guns, they died from too few. I'm not suggesting that the teachers should have carried guns -- not as franchised agents of the state. They should have carried guns as ordinary individuals, exercising a sacred right, and in performance of a solemn duty to protect the young lives that were placed -- very foolishly, as it turned out -- in their hands.
           What's more, those young lives needed weapons, too. Instead, they were forbidden the means of self-defense -- even, in effct, the knowledge of self-defense -- and like millions of victims before them, their numbers were added to the ongoing Gun Control Holocaust.
           And you killed them.
           Stupid, insane, or evil.
           You killed them all.
           How many more helpless individuals will have to die for you -- be sacrificed on the altar of your nice, warm, fuzzy idea -- before you see what you've done? Don Kates, Gary Kleck, Sandford Levinson, John Lott, all were card-carrying liberal college professors who somehow forced themselves to look at the facts instead of the lint in their bellybuttons. All (and others) have reached the conclusion that the Second Amendment says exactly what we "gun nuts" always claimed it did, and that society is better off if its members have personal weapons handy. " More Guns, Less Crime" is how Lott puts it.
           "Million Moms March", indeed. When you came to my town of 100,000, all you could attract was four deluded idiots. There were 16 times that number out in the parking lot, picketing your meeting!
           Measly, Miniscule March.
           Stupid, insane, or evil. Those are the choices. Be honest. Call yourselves "Mush Minded Morons" if you decide that stupid is the least intolerable of the options available. If you choose insane, how about "Mentally Mangled Messes"? If you want to go straight to evil, "Mass Murdering Monsters". They're alliterative as hell, and truthful.
           Stupid, insane, or evil. Like it or not, after today, those three words are going to start hanging around your necks like the fabled rotting albatross until, no matter where you go, no matter what you try to say, the first association your presence calls up in people's minds will be "mass murdering genocides".
           Stupid, insane, or evil.
           Or all of the above.
           Your choice.

L. Neil Smith is publisher of The Libertarian Enterprise and author of 24 books including The Probability Broach, The Lando Calrissian Adventures, Forge of the Elders (forthcoming in April, 2000) and The Mitzvah, with JPFO founder and executive director Aaron Zelman. Order these books at: http://www.lneilsmith.org//lnsbooks.html

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