?This is our first task as a society,? said US president Barack Obama at a January 16th press conference: ?Keeping our children safe.?
The event?s purpose was to leverage last month?s school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut into support for a set of new executive orders and legislative proposals relating to what supporters euphemistically refer to as ?gun control.?
In an evolutionary and biological sense, Obama has a point. The primary of function of human society IS to protect our young so that they can grow up, reproduce and perpetuate that society.
On the other hand Obama, in his role as president, represents the single most powerful and counter-productive human institution relating to that goal: The state. The power grabs he just put on the state?s agenda serve only the interests of that institution ? not just instead of, but at the expense of, the children he?s exploiting as political capital in pursuit of that agenda (and in particular, as the Center for a Stateless Society?s Nathan Goodman points out, the children of the besieged minority communities Obama?s party claims to offer protection to).
Obama?s purported opponents within government aren?t much better. Their line, as voiced by US Representative Dave Reichert (D-WA), boils down to a cowardly ?the laws that we have in this land already need to be enforced.?
Well, no, they don?t.
?The laws that we have in this land already? forcibly compel the daily assembly of millions of children on convenient killing floors (?public schools?).
?The laws that we have in this land already? forbid ? or at least onerously regulate ? possession of the tools of defense to those children, to their parents, and to their teachers.
?The laws that we have in this land already? notify any and all monsters with the ability to read a sign (?Gun-Free School Zone?) that those children are defenseless and at said monsters? mercy.
Other species teach the principles of survival ? including but not limited to the use of such weapons as they naturally possess ? to their young at the earliest practical age. Humans deny their young those weapons and even, in this day and age, actively punish thought or speech relating to self-defense.
Other species protect their children from predators at all costs. Humans set out our children as an all-you-care-to-eat buffet for predators, then turn to the most voracious predator of all ? political government, which regularly seizes double-digit percentages of our sustenance for its own gluttonous purposes, and occasionally throws murderous and even genocidal tantrums ? for ?protection.?
It?s not difficult to see why politicians support ?gun control,? which is more accurately described as ?victim disarmament.? What predator wouldn?t prefer that its prey lack teeth or claws? In Barack Obama?s world, events like the Newtown massacre are a small price to pay for the uncontested ability to do wholesale what Adam Lanza did retail.
What?s hard to understand is why we?ve put up with the predator for so long. In the 20th century alone, governments murdered in excess of 260 million people, and that?s an extremely low-end estimate (its promulgator, Dr. RJ Rummel of the University of Hawaii, excludes the deaths associated with the workaday operations of ?democracies? from his statistics).
Fortunately, Obama?s proposals will go nowhere, as another set of statistics should make clear: At least 70 million Americans own more than 200 million guns (those numbers are also lowball, selected from competing sets I?ve seen). And the technology for unlimited home production of more is now fast becoming irrevocably and universally available. If the politicians think they can ?control guns,? they?ve got another think coming.
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Thomas L. Knapp is Senior News Analyst and Media Coordinator at the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).
