January 25, 2013
As the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre (could a man’s name sound gayer?) explained, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” But what if there’s, like, another bad guy with a gun, say, standing in a grassy knoll? Do you need two additional good guys with guns standing behind him to keep him in check? Ethical issues involving deadly force can get complicated quickly.
When our Founding Fathers crafted the Second Amendment, they did not have AR-15s in mind. But neither were they thinking of iPads while drafting the First Amendment.
But seriously, why does anyone really need an AR-15, you know? Why should any citizen be permitted to have one of those? How many of those do you really need to kill a duck?
Does that question even deserve an answer until you first explain why anyone in the government needs an AR-15? Or 5,000 nuclear warheads? Or chemical weapons? Or why the coolest and deadliest weapons are exclusively hoarded by those who also claim the sole authority to tax? Why have they been allowed to stockpile an arsenal so massive and terrifying that many Americans seem to have concluded that any armed resistance against the government is futile?
With all the lip service that gets paid to “equality,” guns are about the best equalizers we currently have, whether you”re dealing with the micro level (a hundred-pound woman with a single concealed-carry pistol to fend off a rapist) or the macro level (over three hundred million guns, legal and illegal, floating amid private hands to counterbalance a super-powerful government’s obscene cache of high-tech weapons).
With all the shrieking we hear about “saving the children,” you don”t hear much about saving them from a government that has already indentured them in the future to pay off its current debts.
And finally, with the nonstop carping and clucking and scolding we hear about “bullying,” the fact is that the US government, enabled by its unparalleled weaponry, is currently the biggest bully on Earth.
The twentieth century was very instructive regarding what happens when governments disarm their citizens. From the Soviet Union to Red China to Turkey to Uganda to Guatemala to Cambodia and seemingly all points beyond, disarming the citizens served mostly to set them up for slaughter. It’s the same trick every time: Give me your gun, said the government official. OK, now give me your wallet. When it comes to trusting the government to monopolize violence, paranoia may be a better survival mechanism than gullibility.
Would it be a better world with no guns? Theoretically, sure, just as it would be a better world with no nukes, no heat-seeking missiles, no foreign wars, no CIA, no IRS, and no income tax to fund the whole murderous machine. But you rarely hear even the most fervent of gun-control advocates who call for a complete…or a gradual…or even a slight…disarmament of the US government. So before our insolent and audacious “public servants” start getting all uppity with their repeated calls for private citizens to lay down their weapons, we feel they should set a good civic example and lay down theirs first.
Until that happens, no deal.
Deal?
