STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
The Fearful Progressivism of Gun Control
By Daily Bell Staff - December 02, 2015

Obama pushes for gun control after Planned Parenthood shooting … After a gunman opened fire at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood on Friday, killing three people and injuring several others, President Obama urged the nation to increase controls over “the easy accessibility of weapons of war.” – CBS News

Dominant Social Themes: Guns kill people.

Free-Market Analysis: Do guns kill people, or do people kill people? We think it’s the latter. It’s the reason that the British are now suffering from a rash of murderous biting.

Sorry, we just made that up, and, sure, it’s nothing to joke about but it could be true. The Brits – living on an island as enlightened as Antarctica under a trillion tons of ice – have seemingly made every kind of weapon illegal. You can’t even shoot a burglar in your own home without being hauled into court with the threat of life imprisonment.

And what’s the result? The Brits are onto knives now, well … really anything pointy. Last year, The Daily Sheeple posted an article on the next wave of confiscations. The title: “Is This a Joke? British Police Push for Ban on Pointy Knives.”

You can’t laugh about it. It’s not a joke anymore. There is no longer any limit to what can be controlled and regulated. Most people would have laughed hysterically if you told them there would be calls for knife control someday. And not just butterfly knives and switchblades, but apparently, anything that is “pointy”.

The British are thorough as well as often compulsively authoritarian. We learn from the article that, “Researchers consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen. None of the chefs felt such knives were essential, since the point of a short blade was just as useful when a sharp end was needed.”

Point taken. Even professional chefs won’t miss their knives since a short-bladed tool can do the job as well. Presumably it didn’t occur to the surveyed chefs that once the long-bladed knives have been confiscated, short-bladed ones will be the next to go. Presumably, then, if they want to cut something up they can make snipping motions with their thumbs and index fingers.

The article excerpted above from CBS never tells us what President Barack Obama intends to do about gun violence but it does mention Obama’s frustration several times. It’s not good to make Obama frustrated. The last time it happened, it seems he came up with Obamacare. Here’s some more from the article:

“This is not normal,” the president said in a statement Saturday. “We can’t let it become normal.” “If we truly care about this – if we’re going to offer up our thoughts and prayers again, for God knows how many times, with a truly clean conscience – then we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them,” Mr. Obama added. “Enough is enough.”

We’ll wait to see what Obama has in mind but we are not hopeful. He is an enormously energetic and destructive man and the Republicans in Congress don’t seem to be capable of resisting him.

We would recommend, in any case, (he won’t) that Obama take a look at a just-published article on gun control by Eric Englund over at LewRockwell.com. Entitled “Politically Correct Thinking about Guns,” it is a long but entertaining essay about the mad, magic logic that “progressives” adopt when it comes to this contentious issue.

Here’s an excerpt:

Let’s make all privately-owned guns disappear; and then murder, suicide, and crime in general will magically dissipate into the ether. To progressives, like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, more guns mean more violence and, therefore, fewer guns mean less violence. For progressives, this politically-correct assertion is all that is needed to justify their push for gun control.

Fortunately, this simple-minded view of guns is unsupportable as it implies every human being is deranged enough to commit murder by merely having access to a gun. Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser, fortuitously, have produced a study dispelling the anti-gun drivel spewed by progressives; and, no surprise here, guns do not mysteriously impel individuals to commit murder and suicide.

Although the truth does not matter to progressives, it is critical to speak truth to the anti-gun, power-seeking psychopaths in the progressive movement. Many people will listen and our liberty depends upon doing so.

While Englund’s essay is putatively about gun control, it has just as much to say about the warped logic of “progressives” who believe the state power of confiscatory force is a “magic bullet” that will do away with shooting and shooters.

England is probably correct when he writes, “The attractiveness of progressivism is that it relieves people from having to think for themselves while making them believe they are intellectuals.”

Englund also points out that progressivism is “not grounded in philosophy, logic, political science or economic theory. Rather, it springs from emotion or magical thinking.” And he makes the terrific point that progressivism is actually fear-based, which is why it’s so hard to counter. The memes of political correctness have been carefully designed to appeal to fearful people.

He tells us about some of the conclusions reached by Kates and Mauser in their study (published by the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, spring of 2007), especially when it comes to murderers who are not ordinary “law-abiding citizens.” Instead, “almost all murderers are extremely aberrant individuals with life histories of violence, psychopathology, substance abuse, and other dangerous behaviors.”

In other words, these are violent people for one reason or another and they will be violent with or without guns. Confiscating guns will not make them any less violent, which is one reason why gun control in Britain has devolved into pointy-knife control.

The impulse is always to confiscate one last weapon, but the confiscation has nothing to do with the reality of violence and those perpetrating it.

Englund concludes that “Kates and Mauser have armed us with the truth about privately-owned firearms. In the battle of ideas, I’m optimistic the truth will win out. Millions of gun owners know this.”

We wish we could be as optimistic as Englund but, in our view, the political economy currently (and historically) only moves in one direction, forward. The US – the West, really – is suffering from a severe bout of authoritarianism. And the more authoritarianism advances, the more fearful people become. It’s very hard to break that cycle with “logic.”

After Thoughts

For this reason, as always, we suggest that people concentrate on making a difference for themselves and their loved ones. Arm yourself with knowledge regarding your own self-sufficiency before you tackle the rest of the world. We’re not suggesting that you be selfish, merely realistic. Perhaps we can continue to help you in that regard.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
loading
Share via
Copy link
Powered by Social Snap