The Real Reason For Gun Control

I am sick and tired of the all-out assault on our liberty, using poor shot up kindergarteners as ammunition (pun intended).

I'm sick of you nanny-state whiny liberals with your "more government, more programs, more controls, less freedom" answers. And I'm sick of your underhanded and conniving president and his administration, bent on neutering this great country, using convenient tragedies to seize more government control and power.

Face it: the reason you, personally, want to "control" guns is because guns scare you. And the people who own guns scare you. The guy tailgating you in the giant pickup with the truck nuts hanging from the hitch, he scares the hell out of you in your Prius. All those red-state people scare you. You'd ban them too, if you had a president with any balls, because they're unafraid and tough and mean and self-sufficient and ... and ... and they're different than you.

Quoting Thomas Sowell: "Guns are not the problem. People are the problem — including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts."

Quoting Mark Trapscott, Executive Editor of the Washington Examiner

» Violent crimes, including those involving guns, have declined by half in the past two decades. This decline has occurred even as gun ownership rates have [grown] in virtually every state.

» There is no discernible trend in the frequency of mass shootings like those that most shocked us in recent years. In fact, the year with the highest number of such shootings was 1929.

» Schools are getting safer, with the number of violent crimes plummeting from 53 per 1,000 students in 1992 to 14 in 2010.

» The prevalence of guns in America increased to 88.8 for every 100 people in 2007, from 84 in 2001. With an estimated 300 million privately owned firearms, America has nearly one for every man, woman and child.

» Remember the much-heralded "assault rifle ban" during the 1990s? It had no discernible effect on gun crime. Its restoration would likely accomplish nothing, except to enable professional politicians to pretend they are "doing something."

These are extremely relevant facts - and extremely inconvenient for the modern liberal statist. If you continue to push for tighter controls for law-abiding citizens, you need to come clean to yourself and to your countrymen about your true motives.

Here's a start:

You are scared of guns. Your fear and ignorance makes you a bigot who wants to control people who are not scared of guns. You are no different than the bigots who want to ban gay marriage.

Sources:
Thomas Sowell: Invincible Ignorance
Reason Magazine: 5 Facts About Guns, Schools, And Violence

Do Guns Scare You? Children Scare Me

So let me get this straight. "I don't like guns. I don't own a gun. I think you should not own a gun either. Guns can be used to do horrible things."

"I don't like children. I don't have children. I don't think you should have children either. Children can grow up to become crazy people who do horrible things in Oklahoma City, through the Post Office, or sometimes with guns."

Is there a difference? Of course there is. But there is also an awful similarity. The former assumes guns are the essential problem in a small fraction of events, and seeks to eliminate them and any positive use for them to prevent those events. The latter trade-off does the same with human spawn, but would never be acceptable, even though we could have eliminated some pretty evil people in the process.

The previous reductio ad absurdum was brought to you by someone who has a real distaste for pat thinking and closed minds.

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Everyone should read Thomas Sowell's excellent analysis of the current "gun debate", Invincible Ignorance, which deconstructs the irrationality of gun control, complete with statistics.

But, there's more to it than that. One needs to ask why a certain segment of our society insists that this is the logical course of action when it clearly isn't. Why do some people instinctively turn to this? What drives them?

The answer is not new. It's the same reason we have bigots and ill-informed debates about fluoride and vaccinations.

Ignorance and the fear it begets.