CCTelander
12-01-2011, 05:01 PM
This is an old one, but it's definitely worth a read.
Murder by Gun Control
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@lneilsmith.org
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 rest can be found here:
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2000/libe68-20000331-07.html
Murder by Gun Control
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@lneilsmith.org
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 rest can be found here:
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2000/libe68-20000331-07.html