WhatFinger


Or The "Liberal" anti-gun hysteria

The government failed: Let's depend more on the government!



The amount of absurdity in "Liberal" anti-gun hysteria that was prompted by the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre is beyond imaginable. It's like if the "Liberals" tried to follow Hitler's Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels’s doctrine that a big lie repeated often and authoritatively enough becomes the truth in the eyes of low-informed masses. Now they look and sound as if they were really up to delivering the final kill to Americans' freedom to keep and bear arms. Yet the co-called "conservative" wing of the establishment and media is acting as if its leaders were getting ready to surrender to the "Liberals'" assault, desperately trying to find "reasonable restrictions" on freedom in order to make us all safer and happier.
As you can imagine, this whole brouhaha did not make me sleep any better. So I decided to call a spade a spade and expose "Liberal" falsehoods and fallacies in hope that the truth would deliver a fatal blow to their well-concerted attack against our most fundamental individual freedom: the freedom to self-defense with a deadly weapon.

The 'good government versus bad people' canard

The "Liberals" are perpetuating their mantra that good government will improve upon bad people and will take care of those unwilling or unable to take care of themselves as if they never learned about millions of good people oppressed and killed by their bad governments.

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As a matter of fact, of all the people killed during the last millennium, the majority was killed by governments and only minority was killed by private individuals. And regarding the government taking care, ostensibly, of the people, how can the government that runs trillion-dollar deficits and cannot pass something as basic as its own annual budget could take care of the millions that depend on it? Only in fallacious "Liberal" mind such a miracle can be sustained. Although the "Liberals" have injected their absurd claim (of government's ability to improve upon the people and to take care of them) to American political landscape without a shred of credible evidence, they flatly dismiss all the criticism of that nonsense with one automatic denial "There is no evidence that the government’s care and improvement of the people must fail." (Tell me more about hypocrisy. Or is it a new religion?) As a result, practically no one is asking for a before-hand proof that the government will actually deliver what the naive and deceitful "Liberals" claims that it will, although this certainly is the most fundamental question that begs to be asked before any further delegation of power to the government. A good illustration of this line of wishful thinking is a quote from a gun-control advocate and a husband of a victim of past massacre that appeared in an article [1] in the "Washington Post":
"In a place of worship, in a movie theater, in a business office, in Columbine, in a McDonald’s, the one I lived through," Sposato said. "What is it going to take? How many more wounded? How many more dead? How many more children? This is an absolute failure of government to protect its people, and we need to get serious about doing something."
Well, the government failed in this respect, and miserably so, indeed. But the history suggests that failures of this kind are not an isolated anomaly that just needs to be fixed, somehow. They are in the government's nature. It has been a common wisdom that out of three parties: the murderer, the victim, and the police, it is the police that arrives at the crime scene last, which illustrates impossibility of governmental effective protection of an individual in a free society. And the courts ruled in the past that police and other law enforcement agencies have no legal obligation to protect any particular person from a prospective assailant, so they cannot be even sued if they fail to do so. Under these circumstances, what we need here is a proof of or convincing evidence for the hypothesis that delegating to the government more power at the expense of people's liberties will actually lead to improvement, before we consent to any such empowerment.

'The more government power the better' fallacy

Despite the well-known facts that clearly contradict their good-government-versus-bad-people fallacy, the "Liberals" came up with a fallacy that is even more absurd than anything I heard from them before. They stipulate that if the government failed to protect the people from the armed psychopath then the people must "do something" and delegate to the government even bigger portion of their God-given right to self defense with a deadly weapon. (With idiot's "thinking" of this kind, it should surprise no one that they overwhelmingly voted for Obama. At this point, I can only pray: "And deliver us from stupid voters." ) The "Liberals," in their fallacious minds, collectively reinforced by the "Liberal" propaganda that the so-called "mainstream" media are flooding this nation with, seem incapable to comprehend that it is in the nature of the government to fail, and to oppress and exploit the people rather than protecting them. After all, the founding Fathers did not draft so carefully the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights for nothing.

The 'in the government we trust' fallacy

We the People should fear the government rather than blindly entrusting it our lives and well-beings. Our personal safety and wealth is our own responsibility, and in the past we accomplished a lot in fulfilling it. For our national survival, we empowered the government to carry on its basic duties, that is, the national defense, the criminal law enforcement (not to be confused with personal protection), and enforcement of contracts. But everything that goes beyond these basics, particularly if it infringes on our Constitutional rights, caries a high potential of abuse, waste, and incompetence. Just look at what happened after the government pre-empted the right to self-defense against invasion (mass illegal "immigration" of Mexican nationalists is an example of) from the states and the People, in clear violation of Article I Section 10 [3] and Article IV Section 4 of the Constitution and of Tenth Amendment. The government's failure to enforce our national border, due to incompetence or unwillingness, or both, has all appearances of national betrayal. Yet each and every time when a state, like Arizona, or a local enforcement agency, like Sheriff Arpaio and his deputies, are trying to defend the people from the invasion, the feds spend their (seriously limited, according to their explanations) resources on suing the states and the law enforcement for their alleged abuses of invaders' rights and not on stopping the border violators and sending back those who have already managed to sneak in. For all those of you who think that the government will jealously protect and defend you against the criminals and psychopaths as soon as you give up your right to possess and use at your will instruments that are capable of instant killing of a raging attacker, the immigration un-enforcement scandal is a good example of what one can reasonably expect here. There is absolutely no credible evidence that the government will protect you any better than it protects the country from illegal "immigration". (And it does not, as the Sandy Hooker Elementary massacre shows.)

The '"gun-free" zones' fallacy

A typical "Liberal" fallacy is that if ones bans all firearms in a certain area (like, for instance, on school campus) then there will be no "gun violence" there. It is a fallacy because a ban does not imply a lack, particularly if it is enforced by incompetent, slow, or otherwise bureaucratic body. So, the "gun-free" zones fallacy produces a fiction that is a disaster waiting to happen. And it does happen fairly often, as the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre has painfully reminded us about. The so-called "gun-free" zones introduced by the "Liberal" educational establishment just a few decades ago, became notorious for shooting massacres, while places with the highest concentration of firearms, like gun shows and rifle ranges exhibited no such pathology. And understandably so. A derailed lunatic, like Ryan Lanza, or any other prospective mass murderer, would have been killed instantaneously before completion of his barbaric act in the area saturated with armed good guys, but can indulge himself with spraying bullets around on terrified unarmed victims until the SWAT team arrives, which usually gives him enough time to kill as many people as he wants. The bottom line here is that there is no credible evidence that disarming the good Americans will make us all safer, even if the "gun-free" zones were somehow enforced. On the contrary, a comparative analysis suggests that these zones have a potential of making us sitting ducks in a cross-hair of a bad guy because their very existence shifts the balance of firepower from the law-abiding (who obediently got disarmed) to the bad guys (who refused to obey the gun bans). Just imagine the magnitude of a possible massacre if the U.S. were declared a one huge "gun-free" zone. As if the idea of the "gun-free" zones weren't absurd enough, the "Liberals" now claim, and fallaciously so, that the failure of the government to enforce them gives it a mandate to further restrict our Constitutional liberties. That's right, the government created a "gun-free" zone, then failed to protect the people in that zone from an armed psychopath, and now the people are going to be punished for the government's failure with pretty draconian restrictions of their Second Amendment rights. Only in a maniacal mind infected with "Liberal" gun-grabbing ideas may such absurd argument appear as a valid inference.

The 'government benevolence' fiction

The "Liberals" tend to perceive the government (at least a Democratic one) as the ultimate provider of good things to the people, so that the people should just delegate to the government their rights, like the right to the fruits of their work, or the right to defend one's life, in order to make government’s taking care of them easier. Judging from "Liberal's" confidence that the government is really willing and capable of doing all these good things, they must perceive the government as some kind of god. And so their ideology, deeply rooted in similarly naive doctrines born in Russia and Central-Eastern Europe some two centuries ago, is becoming a new "Liberal" religion. But despite repeated claims of the "Liberal" ideologues, there is no credible evidence that the government, even if controlled by the Democratic Party, is a natural benefactor of the people. On the contrary, the history abounds in examples of governmental wrongdoing. In addition, many individual liberties that the American people enjoy have a tendency to impede government's ability to perform its basic duties. So, the government tends to assert adversarial position to the concept of limited governmental powers and virtually limitless individual liberties, as expressed by the Tenth Amendment. To make this adversarial tendency even more obvious, the very name of the federal agency that has been given power to interfere with our right to keep and bear arms, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, is not very comforting to the self-defense enthusiasts. I know what was the history behind this suggestive name (collection of taxes), but it does help to create a negative perception of firearms in mind of an average subject of "Liberal" anti-gun indoctrination. Also, the ATF has a long history of power abuse and drastic infringements on the constitutionally protected uninfringeable right. Just imagine suspicion from the co- called "mainstream" media if a federal agency were empowered to regulate our First Amendment rights and was named a Bureau of Gambling, Prostitution, and Freedom of Speech. Both names correctly suggest government's adversarial role in matters related to individual liberties listed in the Bill of Rights, or its outright contempt of these liberties.

The 'all people are equal' fiction

The "Liberals" claim, without credible evidence, that all people are equal. This fundamental "Liberal" fiction prompts one to ignore this simple fact of life that there are good guys and bad guys, and that claiming that these two kinds are equal is absurd. But any suggestion that the bad guys do not deserve the same privileges than the good guys enjoy, which includes the right to arm and to organize, meets with frantic, if not hysteric, "Liberal" opposition. So, if the bad guys are to be disarmed, then, according to "Liberal" orthodoxy, all people must be disarmed. Or - in other words - if criminals and psychopaths use guns to kill innocent people then everybody can do equal evil (since we are all equal), so that all the people have to be disarmed. This is nothing less than a case of social leveling that the Soviet Union and Mao tse-Tong's Communist China were so notorious for. The damaging effects of propagating this nonsense are further amplified by the fact that usually only the law-abiding good guys obey the restrictions of gun-control laws while the criminals do not hesitate arming themselves with illegal weaponry. The unequal attitudes towards the law actually make things worse as it shifts balance of power in favor of bad guys. This observation is consistent with the effects of outlawing personal firearms in Great Britain in Australia, which draconian gun-control measures brought a significant increase of violent crime. The all people are equal "Liberal" fiction has another socially detrimental aspect. To their credit, many "Liberals" are good-meaning, non-violent people. Quite naturally, they assume that all people are like them, and that all people will stop resorting to violence if only their prospective victim disarm themselves (just to show the assailant that they mean no harm). This kind of fallacious thinking was (is?) the main rationale behind "Liberal" push to unilateral disarmament. Unfortunately, there is no credible evidence that all or most people of the world, or of the U.S., would like to just sit down with everybody else and sing Kumbaya once given a chance, so the "Liberal" story how disarming America improves humanity remains a canard.

Conclusions

Delegating to the government our God-given right to self-defense with a deadly weapon, particularly under the circumstances of government's inability to actually protect the people in a free society like ours from determined killers, defies facts and logic. In the best-case scenario, it is like awarding a mechanic with a consistent history of botched repairs of one's car a monopoly on fixing everything in one's household. In the worst-case scenario, it is like appointing a fox a guardian of a hen house. The psychopath Ryan Lanza was a dangerous maniac showing symptoms of mental disease. It is good that he was killed in the course of the massacre of the innocent that he committed in a "gun-free" zone. But the "Liberal" maniacs, who refuse to or cannot see the absurdity of their calls for gun control in this dangerous world when a call to arms seems very much in order, are dangerous, too. They are, perhaps, even more dangerous to individual security in our country than Mr. Lanza was. They, too, suffer from a mental condition that drives them to escalate their gun-control mania to the point of hysterical assault on our Constitutional liberties despite a lack of credible evidence that its net result will do any good for the safety of the American people. Insanity, according to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. So, the "Liberals" and all other maniacs are not going to give up on their dangerous ideas, like "gun-free" zones, that have inflicted so much lasting damage to this nation. Attempts to educate them about irrationality of their insanity are futile and are doomed to fail. Perhaps, mental institutions should play a bigger role in search for a solution of this complicated problem.

REFERENCES

Below is a reference to an article in Washington Post under a title that is suggesting something else than the article contains. I was expecting here some facts about what were the repercussions of strict gun control laws passed in Great Britain and Australia (the violent crime went up), but the article, instead, was a "cautionary tale" for gun-grabbers to learn from their past defeats. (1) History of gun control is cautionary tale for those seeking regulations after Conn. shooting By Scott Higham, Sari Horwitz, David S. Fallis and Joel Achenbach, Saturday, December 22, 1:44 PM


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Mr. Dwyer has been a continuing contributor to the Federal Observer. Mark Andrew Dwyer’s commentaries (updated frequently) can be found here. Send your comments to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).


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