“President Obama says the biggest frustration of his
tenure is the lack of new gun control laws.”
USA Today, July 24th, 2015
Unlike most of
the President Obama’s declarations – “If you like your doctor, you can keep
your doctor”, for example – this one, above, was true. You
could believe him for once. Obama always hated guns and if it had been in his power
he would have confiscated every firearm in the country down to the last BB gun,
except for those carried by the Secret Service detail that continues to protect him and his
family.
Obama is a man
of the left and the left hates guns more than almost anything else they
remotely associate with the despised right, more than gas guzzlers, home school
families, coal companies, confederate flags or pro-life protestors. Just the
mention of the NRA will trigger spasms of fury and outpourings of disgust from
a leftist. The NRA for them is evil incarnate. No other organization is likely
more detested.
What is it
about guns that make people on the left hate them so much and harbor so much
contempt for those people – not so much the criminals who use them, but the
ordinary, law-abiding people who insist on owning them?
Begin with the
basics: a gun is an amazing instrument
of power. A ninety pound woman physically confronted by a two hundred pound man
with a BMI of 25 has little power to resist his assault or aggression. A gun in her hand completely changes the
power equation. Sans gun by virtue of
his superior size and relative strength, the man can seriously injure or even
kill the woman. It happens. With the gun
she can easily kill him if he attempts to harm her. This does not happen often
enough. The right person in this scenario takes the ride to the morgue. His
advantage-conveying, extra 110 pounds and bigger bones and muscles are
nullified by the discharge from her 25 ounce Ruger.
Guns enforce power-relations which is why
police and soldiers carry them. Guns also can change power-relations which is why so many people want them both for
reasons legitimate and some not so much. The left wants to take away guns (primarily those of the “bitter clingers”) so as to render them powerless.
The left would
love to confiscate all the guns in this country claiming that it would end gun
violence. This is idiotic on the face of it. Criminalize the possession of something in high
demand and relatively easy to produce and you will see a dramatic spike in its price
because of the seller’s criminal risk. High prices attract high-risk entrepreneurs (aggressive young men usually) into the marketplace who form
powerful, sophisticated crime syndicates that are (a) very competitive and
hence extremely violent and (b) cater successfully to vast markets for their
illegal product. The massive infusion of drugs into the U.S. with the
accompanying violence dramatically illustrates how the unintended consequences
of firearm confiscation, if attempted, would unfold. Government confiscation of guns would drastically
increase (criminalized) gun ownership and vastly increase gun violence, not to
mention the exhaustion of law enforcement resources and the complete political
alienation of large numbers of American citizens.
The loathing
of the left for guns in part comes from their jealousy of power. Guns are
highly-charged symbols as well as practical instruments of power, and power,
they believe, belongs exclusively to them. This is not just about what guns can
do. It is about what they symbolize – individualism,
independence and self-sufficiency – for the collectivist, regulation-loving, control-obsessed
left, anathemas.
The thinking
on the left goes something like this: because we are compassionate, smart, right-thinking
and destined by the progressive march of history to eradicate – pick your evil
– racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, global warming, we and we alone deserve
power. If not us, who? And, whatever we must do to get it and keep it
is fine because above all else we are well-intentioned and virtuous and if we
are not in charge, then it’s, well, “the other”, the corrupt and morally
benighted people who oppose us – racist,
bigoted, greedy, stupid, indifferent to the plight of the poor and unfortunate. Leftists neither practice nor believe in loyal
opposition: for the opposition they have only contempt.
Gun ownership
confers power and thus just the suggestion that people might legitimately arm
themselves constitutes an encroachment on the left’s perceived prerogative and
arouses their jealousy and outrage.
People, they groan, do not neeeeeed
guns! They know what people need and don’t need and are clearly annoyed that
the unenlightened rubes who live outside of the civilized regions of Manhattan,
San Francisco, Washington, DC and Madison, Wisconsin cannot grasp this obvious
truth.
Self-defense,
they sneeringly dismiss as a legitimate reason to own a gun – that is what the
State is for. Try not to choke on the
hypocrisy. They are protected 24x7 by
armed secret service personnel (Obama and his family) or live in safe, posh
suburbs with expensive, sophisticated security systems and reliable, predicable
police protection. But for those “folks” for whom they have so much compassion
and about whom they know so little, those folks who have to worry about the
muggers, rapists, wife-batterers, drug peddlers and strung out junkies who
populate their neighborhoods? Well, they are supposed to cherish how virtuous they
will feel without those awful guns they don’t need and hope a cop might show up
before someone in the family gets raped or murdered. We all know that there are
large sections of some of the cities in the U.S. (governed by anti-gun Democrat
politicians) where the police reluctantly go. The State is quite selective in
the protection it provides for its citizens. The “State” for the “ruled-over”
is a useless abstraction and the pervasive cynicism and skepticism now aimed at
those who operate it are completely justified.
These “public servants” enjoy all of the perks of their offices that the
rest of us only envy. (“Last Friday,
[Hillary] Clinton flew to Bergdorf Goodman in New York, where the stylist
at the salon gives $600 haircuts. The department store was locked down for
her.” http://thehill.com/opinion/ab-stoddard/249734-ab-stoddard-clinton-must-be-joking)
Our political class betters make onerous rules for their inferiors to live under, but
not for themselves. At election time these vultures descend from their comfortable,
lofty perches to perform tedious rituals of pretending to care when what they
really want is just more power and the advantages and privileges that come with
it.
The animosity
of the left for guns is also about the special kind of snobbery they indulge
that relates to the work they do and the way they live. They tend to work in
the realm of ideas and at activities intended to influence the thinking and
actions of others. They teach in schools
and universities, run media outlets and newspapers, manage and administer
organizations, market and sell products, process paper in government offices.
Some of them are “grievance specialists” at universities and other
organizations, professional busybodies and scolds who operate under the rubric
of “diversity”, a code word that permits them to hector and bully whomever they
please. These types don’t change the oil in their own cars, fix things they own
when they break down, make or grow anything they use or consume. They pay “other people” to do things like
this, and they mostly look down on them.
These “other people” tend to like guns. They live and think
conservatively and work at jobs such as policemen, firemen, mechanics, truck
drivers, construction workers and run small businesses. They hunt, fish, bowl, fix
their own cars, go to church, take care of their grandparents, join the
military and do many other things that offend the sensibilities of the left. For the
Prius-driving, inequality-obsessed Sociology professor who campaigned for Obama,
the gun-toting policeman he loathes and execrates in his 101 classes could not respond
quickly enough to his summons when he thinks a burglar might be near.
The left will
never relinquish their hostility toward gun owners and never abandon their
efforts at gun control. “Gun control” is
a euphemism, an essential piece of the larger picture that defines the essence
of the left and what they aspire to, complete control of others. Because they
believe themselves to be uniquely entitled to order and manage the lives of everybody,
they observe no restraints of honesty or fair play. Be assured, they will
relentlessly intrude themselves into every corner of our lives so as to make the rest of us
into what they think we should be, pale, inferior imitations of themselves. Guns are a huge obstacle to this goal. Viva
the cold dead fingers!
No comments:
Post a Comment