Contrast New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s call for gun control with Robert Heinlein’s statement about freedom:
We don’t want to pass the point where society is so saturated with the most dangerous kinds of weaponry that people feel compelled to arm themselves or be left vulnerable, if indeed we haven’t already passed that point.
According to The Associated Press, a small Utah town is making a “gun in every home a priority.” The A.P. reported:
“Spring City Councilman Neil Sorensen first proposed an ordinance requiring a gun in every household in the town of 1,000. The rest of the council scoffed at making it a requirement, but they unanimously agreed to move forward with an ordinance ‘recommending’ the idea. The council also approved funding to offer concealed firearms training Friday to the 20 teachers and administrators at the local elementary school.”
That is not where we want to be as a country.
No, Charles, that is precisely where we want to be as a country. America is a nation of armed free men who answer to no earthly power, it is not a nation of unarmed slave boys who cower before their masters in Washington D.C. lest they apply the whip.
“You cannot enslave a free man, only kill him.”
– Robert Heinlein
Blow doesn’t appear to realize that he is advocating a return to the evil that was inflicted upon his ancestors. What is worse, not only does he not wish to be a free man, he doesn’t want anyone else to be free either.
What was the point of freeing blacks like him when they use their freedom to beg to be returned to their chains? Instead of obediently carrying water like a servile house negro on the NYT plantation, Blow should recall the words of the free man, Frederick Douglas:
“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”
Those with the slave mentality of Charles Blow will quietly submit to the violation and elimination of their Constitutional right to bear arms. Free men will never do so. Nor should ever be so foolish as to do so, as Karl Denninger points out:
All told the count is somewhere north of 170 million citizens that have been executed not by combat in war or as “collateral damage” (accidental injury) but rather simply because once the government obtained an absolute monopoly on force it was able to slaughter people with impunity, and did.
170 million people is an extraordinary number. Since we’re only 330 million out of a world population of something like 7 billion, it is not fair to charge all of them against us when making comparisons. We’re about 5% of the world population, basically, so you could “charge” 8.5 million of those deaths (5%) to us in comparison.
How’s that work out?
Well, we have 11,000 firearms homicides, more or less, annually.
Objectively looking at this issue it would take 772 years for civilians to murder 8.5 million people, most of them one at a time, but the comparison table only runs in the last century.
It is therefore nearly eight times more likely that you will be slaughtered by your government wholesale if you give up your guns than the risk you run of being murdered by a bad guy if you don’t and this assumes that all of the 11,000 gun murders do not happen if we ban all or some firearms.
Guns in the hands of the American people are not the problem. Guns in the hand of the American people are the PREVENTION of the problem. If Charles Blow wants to return to slavery, then let him do so. But he is a damned fool if he thinks free men, black, white, or any other color, are going to follow him there.