979

WHY MANY GOVERNMENTS

LIKE GUN CONTROL:

DO WE WANT TO JOIN THIS COMPANY?

By Carroll Cox

Gun control laws (the stricter the better) have always been a tool of choice for despotic governments. History is littered with examples of peoples controlled or exterminated by depriving them of the means to protect themselves.During the 20th Century at least 60 million people have been wiped out after first being disarmed by their governments.

Let's look at just a few of the worst cases. The most well known example was Germany, where Hitler confiscated the firearms of his citizens in 1938. The world is familiar with what happened over the next seven years. As many as 13 million Jews and other "undesirables," unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Less well known are the millions of other people who died defenseless under gun control tyranny. Consider the Soviet Union, which established gun control in 1929 and during the next quarter of a century exterminated at least 20 million political dissidents. Turkey implemented gun control in 1911 and in just two years, from 1915 to 1917, wiped out 1.5 million Armenians. China's infamous killing spree followed a few years after aggressive gun control laws of 1935 created a helpless citizenry lulled into a mindset that "The People" had progressed beyond the need for private firearms ownership. Historians estimate that somewhere around 20 million Chinese political dissidents learned a final lesson: that in many places, power comes not from words of wisdom, but out of the barrel of a government gun.

How many know that extermination of 100,000 Mayan Indians followed Guatemala's 1964 banning of guns in the hands of private citizens? Or that the Ugandan Government murdered 300,000 Christians after "cleansing" the country of private arms in 1970? The Cambodian government established gun control in 1956 and twenty years later rounded up and exterminated about a million of its most "educated" and politically sophisticated activists, who of course had willingly complied with disarming themselves in their quest for nonviolent change.

A few laws here and a few laws there and before you know it a populace even such as American citizens, heirs to constitutional freedoms unequaled in mankind's history, are conditioned to a naive faith that only government can be trusted with weapons and only government can provide protection and justice. One small restriction after another accumulating over a period of time, coupled with clever manipulation of public opinion has created a wimpy popular culture that revels in individual defenselessness and dependency and even goes ballistic over toy guns in the hands of children.

In their sneering revulsion at the idea of firearms in the hands of the unwashed masses, the only anti-gun pronouncement not yet used by firearm-hating activists is front yard signs proudly declaring their homes gun-free zones.

In the last decades while violent crimes were soaring, thousands of new laws were implemented that accomplished little other than harassment and restriction of honest citizens and (formerly) legal livelihoods and activities. (Clinton drove 175,000 gun dealers out of business.) Criminals laugh at laws and at the sheeplike subservience of their potential victims who allow themselves to be disarmed. (Bad guys would be even happier if legions of mealy-mouthed anti-gunners would only put up those signs!)

And now we have a president who, prior to election vowed repeatedly to protect the right embodied in the Second Amendment... the right, not privilege... of all law-abiding citizens to be unhampered in their ownership of firearms and means of protection. Read: "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED..."

But President Bush in office has changed positions and turned left. He wants to hire 113 new federal prosecutors specifically for (so-called) gun crimes, in addition to 200 more BATF agents (inventors of the SWAT raid craze) and 600 more state and local prosecutors to work full time harassing and niggling at gun owners. The President and anti-gun lobby would have you believe that the sole function of the new muscle is to control violent crime, but in truth, with more than 20,000 laws on the books, most legal efforts are dissipated on mundane matters such as socking a gun owner with a $10,000 fine for selling or owning a shotgun with a barrel 17.99 inches long instead of the "legal" 18 inches. Keep in mind that the Ruby Ridge and Waco slaughters both erupted from such absurd trivialities.

Gun laws, like most laws in modern America, are all about control. Keep honest and productive citizens busy trying to comply with meaningless and outrageous laws and they won't have time or energy to fend off the shackles slowly imprisoning them.

I'm reasonably confident that the U.S. Government doesn't have any mass exterminations in mind. It's just that, like all governments devoted to control, ours is increasingly less inclined to trust regular citizens with day to day responsibilities, including the ownership and use of firearms. Still I'd feel better if the wording of our gun laws weren't so eerily similar to those devised by Hitler and Stalin.

It's pretty frightening to have the leaders of a supposedly free country give more respect to the words of dictators than to the constitutional rights guaranteed to their own citizens in the Second Amendment.

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