Gun Control Is About Control, Not Safety
With President Obama’s tear-filled speech last week, gun control is on everyone’s mind. So, let’s define some terms and set things up properly here. First, a reminder: Governments, in their continual drive to clamp down tighter and tighter on private gun ownership, are not against guns and violence. We are lead to believe gun control is about safety, security, and reducing violence. But, gun control measures are rarely intended to benefit the subjects; I mean citizens.
Violence is Government’s Best Friend
The real object is control. The more governments monopolize all aspects of society – land use, gun ownership, schools/education, security, law, healthcare, roads, business regulation etc. – the easier it is for them to govern (i.e. rule). Don’t be fooled, the State is very much pro guns and violence; after all, force is the preferred method of doing business. In fact, government’s only tool for getting something done or solving a problem is to use violence or the threat of violence. Does that sound outrageous?
Well, think about it. Any interaction between an individual and their government will always come with the use or threat of force. That is the nature of an involuntary relationship. Take any situation with government to its logical conclusion, and violence is always their method to get you to comply, pay, conform, and obey. Though these things are never said aloud, the agreement is really like this…”If you don’t pay that extortion money (traffic tickets, fees, fines, permits, etc.) or comply with our commands we will come after you with armed men, shoot you if necessary, put you in a cage, and ruin your life.” If they don’t like the way something or someone is living or acting they shoot it, bomb it, occupy it, control it, or put it in a cage.
You Own Yourself
We could also look at this from a property perspective. A gun is just an object. If you own a gun, it is your property. It is no different than your car, gas grill, kitchen knives, bucket of KFC, prescription drugs, cordless drill, bathtub, or your bare hands; in other words, all the other things you own that can kill people. A gun is a tool and a piece of property. And it doesn’t matter how dangerous a specific object is, as an absolute rule, we should oppose any supposed authority telling us what we can and can’t own or do with ourselves. You own yourself, your property, and the ability to use them both, and any infringement into this natural right begins a long slide into tyranny and slavery.
Control and Manipulation Never Work
We can also consider how gun control measures don’t statistically equate to less crime. Government makes it harder and harder to own a gun in certain places, imagining that will make for safer cities, while nothing is done to address the underlying conditions in these places that lead to violence in the first place; conditions that were often caused by previous government policies. The point is, government manipulations simply do not work. When you try to artificially make something so, just because you want it to be so, your attempt tends to backfire. Beneath the external (emotion driven) hoopla lies the factual truth. Minimum wages actually hurt the poor; they lead to more unemployment, contribute to price inflation, and generally distort the economy. Government “education” does not produce more educated people, no matter how much money you throw at it. As we recently learned, encouraging everyone to buy houses because it is the “American Dream” and throwing around easy credit ended up distorting the market and led to a disastrous cycle of boom and bust. Mandating that everyone have “health” insurance does not lead to actual health, but just to more insurance, more price distortions for medical services, less availability, and higher costs all around.
Correlation Is Not Causation
Statistical proof can be seen in the difference between places with strict gun laws, and places with very few restrictions. You see data all over the board, with no clear evidence that more gun laws = less crime. Sometimes you see less crime, sometimes more. One of the most interesting examples is Switzerland, where citizens are actually encouraged to own guns, and their murder rate is extremely low.
All of this makes me think of our recent article, Fat and Cholesterol Do Not Cause Heart Disease. The same sort of logical mistakes are made in both cases. Doctors might see cholesterol at the scene of the crime, so to speak; just as we see guns at the scene of an actual crime. In both cases, the cholesterol and guns are blamed as the cause of the problem. We are told we must bring down the numbers on these things to have a healthier future. But it just doesn’t add up. Just as we see with the wildly fluctuating relationships between guns, laws, availability, and violence all over the world, we see the same with heart disease. Often (actually 75% of the time) a heart attack victim has low cholesterol, but sometimes high. Sometimes when they manage to lower their cholesterol, they happen to not have another heart attack, and sometimes they still do. In other words, we see scattered association, but not causation, just as we do with gun ownership and violence. In both cases there are other factors at play that lead to the problem. In the case of heart disease, check out that article. In the case of violence, the causes are many, including government created ghettos, the drug war, forced schooling in terrible schools, a corrupt legal system, incentives to become dependent on government, overuse of psychiatric drugs, and the list goes on and on.
Cutting In On Their Business
So, government is very much pro-gun. They simply want to monopolize guns, just as they seek to monopolize everything else. Gun control really does just come down to control. Politicians and bureaucrats don’t care if you’re safer or not. In fact, they are threatened by people taking care of themselves. They fear it for two reasons. First, as many will point out, and as history has shown us over and over, governments are afraid of an armed population, because it is a check on their own power, their control, their tyranny over their subjects. Second, it actually cuts in on their monopolized business. The definition of government is an entity with a monopoly on the use of force in a given geographic area. They have made it illegal, or at least very difficult, for any other group to provide services like law, security, safety, justice, roads, mail, education, etc. We are also propagandized to think we vitally need them to provide these things, that no one else could do it, and without them, everything would descend into chaos. So, an armed population, voluntary security cooperatives, or even private security companies are not looked at very favorably by governments. These sorts of people and organizations protecting themselves has the ability to show government for what it is, an unnecessary evil, a mafia-like organization, who extracts forced payments for their monopoly “services”.
Just Another Form Of Control
The brainwashed statist might respond to all this rhetoric about “taking guns away” by saying “No one is trying to take away your guns you gun nuts. We just want sensible regulation to keep guns away from criminals.” Sure, they’d be right. Right now, at this moment, no one is trying to completely take away guns. But just know, that is the eventual goal. It is the ultimate government dream to have an unarmed population. Government can never implement all of its plans at once though. It would be too obvious. So, they employ the long game, slowly whittling away at the margins, eventually changing public opinion, always working towards their ends, while no one sees it happening. You could call it a slippery slope, or the Overton Window (slowly making acceptable today, what was unacceptable yesterday).
For example, the idea of having everyone register their guns in a national database might sound harmless enough, but if considered in the full context of history, how government operates, and how that database could be used in the future; it begins to look a lot more suspect. We should again stick with objective principles. No organization should be keeping a database of any of our private property. It doesn’t matter how rosy their intentions sound today.
Gun laws should be seen as just another form of control. It is on par with banning a book, manipulating the news, committing false flags, or any other terrible thing governments do all the time to solidify their power. Don’t be fooled by the propaganda. Don’t buy into the hysteria. We must stand for principles, and not be swayed by every new media campaign that hits the airwaves. Let’s lay it out plainly one more time. Government would like to see fewer privately owned guns. But, they don’t want to get rid of guns. They just want to centralize the ownership and control of guns in their own hands. This is the same organization that screws everything else up; wrecks the economy over and over; has turned news into propaganda; has turned peace into war; who spies on everything we do; bombs the rest of the planet with robot planes; and invades other countries as routinely as traffic stops. Governments are NOT benevolent organizations we should be wholly trusting to do anything, much less, to lord over us with all the weapons. So, fight the urge to give in to the feel-good idea of gun control. You would only be supporting your own domesticated, coddled, and controlled existence under an ever more totalitarian state.
Further Reading:
- School Sucks Project: Shows tagged gun control
- Gun Control Articles on Mises.org
- Adam Kokesh gun control videos
- Carey Wedler videos tagged gun control
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv7ZXLU51Hs
