alohachris
Member
I wanted to share this with the hopes that it will serve to clarify and distill the contest we are constantly up against in defending the US Constitution, and particularly, the Second Amendment.
I realize that the article isn't news to many of you who have worked to protect firearm rights over the years, but it opened my eyes to the 'why' of people who seek to ban guns. Pointing out this reasoning to people may serve to open their eyes to what they're really asking for when they want guns banned.
I realize that the article isn't news to many of you who have worked to protect firearm rights over the years, but it opened my eyes to the 'why' of people who seek to ban guns. Pointing out this reasoning to people may serve to open their eyes to what they're really asking for when they want guns banned.
There's something very poisonous to human society and human relations, and that is the fear of freedom, the wish to be slaves, the wish to be told what to do. Just as we all like to think and we live under written documents and proclamations that encourage us to think that is our birthright and our most precious need to be free, to be liberated, to be untrammeled. So we also know that, unfortunately, innate in people is the servile, the desire to be told what to do, the adoration for strong and brutal and cruel leaders, that this other, baser element of the human makeup has to be accounted for and gives us a great deal of trouble, all around the world as we speak.
What I mean about the fear of freedom is this: Nobody, of course, wants to live under a hellish regime of death & starvation, with gulags and such. But they quite like being told what to do. They don't want to be told that the world doesn't owe them anything and that they're on their own -- and they repeatedly vote for parties and leaders who promise to provide everything as long as they'll give up their freedom. Just a little bit of freedom, right now, and in exchange, the leaders will give you more security and more welfare. It always begins this way, with incrementalism. It's a serious temptation and sometimes it takes it's course to an extreme end, such as North Korea. This kind of thinking is implicitly totalitarian.
It's the recognition that "there are no guarantees", that is the beginning of wisdom as well as, I think, the beginning of liberty.
Christopher Hitchens
from a lecture given on August 16, 2007