VICTIM DISARMAMENT KILLS AGAIN by L. Neil Smith
Ernest Hancock
Website:
www.ernesthancock.com
Date: 04-17-2007
Subject:
Gun Rights
VICTIM DISARMAMENT KILLS AGAIN
By L. Neil Smith
Attribute to _ The Libertarian
Enterprise_
I have something very difficult and unpleasant to say.
I promise you're not going to like it. Believe me, I don't like
having to say it. But it _is_ the truth, it has to be said, so I'm
going
to get it over with right up front: the deaths and woundings at
Virginia
Tech this week were in fact -- each and every one of them --
self-inflicted.
And the shootings themselves were a direct and
unmistakable
result, not of too many guns in society, as some will say, but
of too
_few_.
Don't look at me that way. It's the only conclusion any
rational
individual can come to. Some guy (don't bother asking why; I don't
give a rusty fuck and neither should you) comes onto a university
campus
-- where the means of personal self-defense have been strictly forbidden by
the administration and the state legislature -- armed only with a puny nine
millimeter automatic pistol (the boxcutter of handguns), and murders 32
people (at this writing), wounding a dozen more.
The campus police
perform their usual Keystone Kops act, and
nobody fights back, because, in
addition to having been disarmed by the university and the state
legislature, the victims-to-be have been
bound and gagged by a lifetime of
saturated exposure to a Culture of Harmlessness. They've been conditioned by
their parents, government, and the media to rely, instead, on "authorities"
that in every other context, they know perfectly well are evil, stupid, or
just plain crazy.
Everybody knows what will follow now.
This
is exactly what Tom Mauser, Sarah Brady, Carolyn McCarthy, and Charles
Schumer have been waiting for, just like cartoon vultures perched on the arm
of a _saguaro_: another eruption of senseless slayings that mean nothing
more to them than an opportunity to make political hay for left wing
socialism, while stripping you and me and everybody else of the astonishing
socially beneficial technology that has achieved something that -- since the
insanely crime-ridden '60s -- billions of dollars and all of the cops in the
world have been unable to accomplish, causing the rate of violent crime to
plummet in double digits.
In indisputable point of fact, Tom Mauser,
Sarah Brady, Carolyn
McCarthy, Charles Schumer, and everybody else like them
-- with the one notable and noble exception of Texas Congressman Ron Paul,
each and every declared candidate for the 2008 presidential race so far is
a longtime advocate of victim disarmament -- are as responsible for what
happened at Virginia Tech as if they'd pulled the trigger
themselves.
Thanks to them, in an historical era where the violent
crime rate
is otherwise free-falling rapidly, civilization has become a much
more dangerous and deadly place -- should you venture into the free-fire
zones that they and their ilk have created for the benefit of criminal
maniacs.
The situation is so obvious, and the policies that generated
it are so stupid, that even the most staid and prosaic mind is tempted to
wonder if it isn't exactly what the victim disarmament movement wants
and has even perhaps arranged. Maybe Virginia Tech was intended to be
our Dunblane, Scotland, where a mass-shooting by a disgruntled former
Boy Scout leader (I am _not_ making this up) on March 13, 1996, gave the
British equivalents of Tom Mauser, Sarah Brady, Carolyn McCarthy, and
Charles Schumer an excuse, basically, to outlaw every gun in the
land.
The same thing worked in Port Arthur, Tasmania, where only six
weeks later, on April 28, 1996, another murderous nut killed enough
people so that Australians could be disarmed. Since then, England has
achieved for itself the highest violent crime rate in all of western
civilization, with the exception of -- you guessed it -- Australia,
proving to anyone except useful idiots who let themselves get steered
around by the likes of Tom Mauser, Sarah Brady, Carolyn McCarthy, and
Charles Schumer, how much criminals appreciate having their victims
rendered bound and helpless for them by the do-gooders and their
government.
Does this absolve the recent victims of blame for their
own
victimization?
Not for an instant.
Under the Second
Amendment to the United States Constitution --
the last time I looked, the
Bill of Rights was still the highest law
of the land, George W. Bush and his
pack of vicious howler monkeys to the contrary notwithstanding -- there
isn't a single item of weapons legislation in this country, not one, that
isn't illegal in and of itself.
Moreover, the Second Amendment was
only written to protect a basic human right the Founders believed already
existed as a part of Natural Law. It should be clear by now that the
Founders were right, and, much more to the point, that the wages of
obedience to any lesser laws are death.
Which is why, in the end,
it's the victims' fault.
Unfortunately the point is either not clear to
politicians and the
media, or they have something huge to gain by ignoring
it. There are
certainly enough "coincidences" and "conveniences" involved to
justify a thorough and independent investigation into any possible
connections between incidents like this one and the principal advocates of
victim disarmament.
As for the European press, who reportedly blame
what happened on the late Charlton Heston, they can stick it where the the
sun don't shine. When we're through here, we're coming for them -- England
first.
But enough about them, what about me?
And
you.
Aren't you fed up with your rights being up for grabs any time
some evil sonofabitch decides to hose a bunch of people down with hot
lead?
Don't you agree with me that America -- and western
civilization
in general -- can no longer afford the deadly illusion of "gun
control"?
Shouldn't we ditch the infantile pretenses of victim
disarmament
and the "expertism" it rests on, and initiate a new age of
personal
responsibiliy?
To that end, I make the following proposals;
there will be more to
follow:
Although there is no ethical way to
enforce it, and I myself would
bitterly oppose any such legislation, any
parents who won't make sure their kids know how to use a gun safely and
effectively are guilty of child abuse, and we should point the finger and
shout it from the housetops.
For as long as we permit the public
schools to continue existing,
they should be made to train pupils in the
safe and effective use of
firearms.
Concealed carry licensing is
merely a means of intimidating people
who don't deal well with bureacracy
out of exercising their rights.
These laws, as illegal as any other gun
legislation, must be repealed,
nullified, or otherwise disposed of, and
universal Vermont Carry,
which requires no government permission to exercise
a fundamental
right, instituted coast-to-coast in their place. What's more,
both
Canada and Mexico (to begin with) must be persuaded to recognize and
respect, by treaty, the right of Americans to go armed wherever they
wish.
Similarly, every bit of this "security" nonsense at the
airports must be brought to a sudden, screeching halt. Nobody is secure when
his rights are violated, and we know from Columbine and Platte Canyon
High how well relying on the authorities -- like Air Marshalls --
works.
The unconstitutional Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms
must be broken up immediately -- all registries of privately-held firearms
must be destroyed -- and any money saved by that measure must be used,
first and foremost, to indemnify the 100,000-odd gun dealers they've
deliberately driven out of business over the past three or four
decades.
The Department of Homeland Security must likewise be
abolished, or converted into a Department of Bill of Rights Enforcement that
will monitor the actions of politicos who habitually advocate violating its
precepts.
I wouldn't mind seeing the cowardly National Rifle
Association
broken up the same way, and its assets distributed where they
can be put to good use. But again, I'd never dream of advocating it as a
libertarian and Bill of Rights advocate, and I would oppose any such
legislation.
As difficult as that might be.
As for you, Tom
Mauser, Sarah Brady, Carolyn McCarthy, Charles Schumer, and all the rest of
you, don't even think about it. We've got your number now. We know that
you're the kind of cold, calculating ideological parasites who would rather
see a woman raped in an alley and strangled with her own pantyhose than see
her with a gun in her hand.
******
But forget all that.
Just for a moment, allow yourself to imagine, if you're familiar
with my twenty-six novels, what would have happened the other day at
Virginia Tech (or aboard the 9/11 highjacked airliners) in any of the
fictional worlds that I've created for my readers over the past 25
years.
In the North American Confederacy of Win Bear and Lucy
Kropotkin [see _The Probability Broach_, available in print through the
"Webley Page" at http://www.lneilsmith.org, or as a graphic novel (both
online and dead-tree forms) at http://www.BigHeadPress.com], where children
usually get their first gun at their sixth birthday party, the instant
that idiot drew his tiny weapon and began to point it at somebody, he'd
have been filled full of holes from fifty different directions. It all would
have ended as nothing more than a "massacre" of one, at the scene and moment
of the crime, at the hands of his intended victims.
In the little
frontier town of Curringer on the terraformed and
homesteaded asteroid
Pallas [see _Pallas_, available in print through
the "Webley Page" at
http://www.lneilsmith.org], it would have turned out much the same way,
except that, had the criminal managed to survive, he'd have been tried in
the barroom court of Judge Aloysius Brody and sentenced to fight a duel with
his victims' choice of weapons.
In his colony on 523 Eris (another
asteroid) or back at home on an
historically alternative version of the
Earth, Mr. Thoggosh [see
_Forge of the Elders_, available in print through
the "Webley Page" at http://www.lneilsmith.org], a gigantic molluscoid Elder
and ardent
capitalist, having attended to the capture of the miscreant,
would
have hired a P'nAn "adjudicator" to restore the moral balance -- if
necessary with the assistance of his razor-sharp double-edged badge of
office.
In the Federated States of Texas [see the graphic novel
_Roswell,
Texas_ at http://www.BigHeadPress.com], which require every
citizen in good standing to carry an effective weapon all times, those who
don't want to may apply for a legal exemption which their local government
_must_ issue -- following a thorough psychological examination, of
course, along with a physical, fingerprinting, and placing their names
and addresses into the public record book for anyone to see, including
the occasional obnoxious reporter who will then print them in their
newspapers. Nobody is an _unwilling_ victim in the Federated States of Texas.
And coming soon to a monitor screen near you, be sure not to
miss
_TimePeeper_ [keep an eye on http://www.BigHeadPress.com for news],
the first of a series of stories of the Great Moratorium -- where new
legislation of any kind has been outlawed for the next 100 years, where
personal weapons are as common and unobtrusive as watches and wallets, and
violent crime is as uncommon as frog fur and chickens'
teeth.
******
I apologize. Sort of.
This started out
to be a diatribe, not an advertisement, but as
you can tell, I've been
thinking -- and writing -- about this very
situation for a long, long time,
and I've put most of that thinking
into the books I write. What's more, I've
been right in every one of
my predictions. As Heinlein put it, "An armed
society is a polite
society".
And where there are too few guns,
instead of "too many", carnage
ensues.
Invariably.
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