Re-Post
Normally, I do not re-post what I've written somewhere else. However, in this context, I feel that to simply link to it will break the flow. Therefore, with my apologies, I'm re-posting this (#204 from MADE for killing):
There is a fundamental problem with the premise that legislation solves anything.
Legislation solves nothing. Really.
You can't solve rudeness by making a law that people must be polite.
You can't prevent sex by outlawing sex. People are going to do it. All you will change is when and where and under what conditions.
You can't prevent drinking by outlawing alcohol. You
CAN, and they
DID, but it didn't work. People are going to drink. All that changes is the source and the venue and the companionship.
You can't prevent murder by outlawing murder. Murder is going to happen anyway. For what it's worth, murder has nearly always been unlawful. What changes over time is the
definition of murder and the tools used for it, depending on who's in charge and the culture they've created.
People have been killing each other for all of creation. Even during the most recent "civilized" periods of man, killing one another is so common and ordinary that it's become a cliche. You almost can't write a book or produce a movie without killing as part of the plot.
Sam Colt, those who went before him, and those who have come later, did something unique in human history:
he made the weak equal to the strong.
The tradition throughout history is that the strong control and dictate to the weak. With the advent of the personal firearm, the first true equality of force in history was achieved.
The bullies have never been able to accept this. The bullies want control back. The bullies can't extort and steal and control and intimidate if their victims have the ability to fight back with equal force.
Socialism.
Socialism is a utopian-sounding ideology that visits brutality on a population to guarantee equal outcomes regardless of ability (which is seldom equal). It requires force to steal from the able and distribute the wealth they create to those who can't or won't. Socialism, while sounding "ideal" and "fair" for everyone, cannot succeed without forcible confiscation. The most able are punished and the least able rewarded. It is, without doubt, one of the sickest political/economic systems ever cooked up.
It is one of the more popular forms of tyranny.
It is the politics of bullies.
Bullies don't want the masses to have the means to protect their persons or property. Guns make it possible for people to protect what is theirs. Therefore, guns have to go.
Bullies are not necessarily stupid. It isn't a real stretch for them to grasp that you can't TELL people why you're disarming them. Therefore you need a subterfuge of some kind.
Crime.
Everybody can agree that crime is bad. If you can convince them that somehow GUNS are CRIME, then you can get the guns.
All you have to do then is keep redefining what "crime" is, until
the very ownership of a gun, at all, is a crime.
Now you have disarmed the population. You have reduced them to committing their crimes with knives, swords, bricks, fire, rope, broken glass, bow & arrow, and other low-tech implements. You have NOT eliminated crime.
You HAVE, however, created a disparity of force, so that when YOUR goons and thugs show up to enforce YOUR laws and decrees, the population will not have any effective means of fighting your tyranny.
If there is one thing that has become clear over the last several decades, it is that
gun control is murder.
One population after another has been disarmed and systematically exterminated.
Crime has never been solved by gun control. All you get when you remove guns is crime that is committed with different tools, and a whole set of demographics now unable to defend themselves against bullies and predators. This is not progress.
More gun legislation is not only NOT the answer, it is a
COMPLETELY WRONG answer.
The "illegal trafficking" to which you refer only occurs because some thug decided to restrict access to the only effective means of self defense. The NEED for self defense doesn't go away, and the DESIRE to commit crimes doesn't go away, and *presto* you have a black market.
Guns are here to stay. There is no rationally supportable way to eliminate them.
Let's turn our attention instead to criminals. We've always had those. We've always had laws against what they do. We've always had penalties for those crimes.
What's new is this: the concept that the criminal is not really at fault, and shouldn't really be punished, because that would be cruel. So we let them back out on the street, and pretend that we have to restrict access to self defense tools because bad people (whom we've let out onto the streets) might get them.
And, since we can't be sure who's bad, we have to treat everyone as though he is or could be a criminal, until he can prove otherwise, before we allow him to exercise a guaranteed right to own arms.
There's your real insanity: let bad people back out into the general population, don't keep track of them, and instead make everyone else prove he's NOT a criminal.
The answer is just about too simple to be expressed: a) anyone you allow to walk the streets can be trusted to own a gun, b) anyone you can't trust to own a gun doesn't walk the streets.
Guns are not crime. Guns are not bad.
Guns are the only effective way honest people can protect themselves from otherwise stronger predators.
Criminals are bad. Your choices are these: a) fix the criminal so you can trust him, b) kill the criminal so he's no longer a problem, c) house and feed and care for the criminal until he dies.
It only becomes completely crazy when you try (d) and just let
someone you know is bad loose into society.
Guns aren't the problem.
Bullies and tyrants are the problem.
Solve the right problem.
