Common Sense Magazine

The gun control debate is one of those topics that never seem to go away. Whenever you read about any gun related crime such as the case at Virginia Tech you always hear people calling for more gun control and very rarely do you hear that gun control is in fact the killer itself. In very simple terms one side of the gun debate advocates that guns kill people and the other side believes guns protect people from killing people. Emotions often play a role in the debate ranging from people who have been victims of gun violence to people who have protected themselves from being victims. In no other case does one group advocate banning an object or force just because it has the capacity to kill someone. The families of people who die from automobile accidents are just upset as gun victims, but I do not hear a call for a ban of automobiles.

I forgot a major part of the debate - The protection from tyranny. All Americans take great pride in the various checks and balances of our governmental system. What we quickly forget is that our revolution was a check in on itself. It checked the balance of the British Empire in the 18^th century by throwing them out of the Americas in effect ridding ourselves of that tyranny. We see a similar passage to this in the Declaration of Independence – “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government…” Our right to bear arms is sprouted in the revolution, when we used arms to protect ourselves. This had nothing to do with protecting yourself from the common criminal (though it evolved to this over time) but protecting yourself from the plight of oppressive government. Ask yourself what would happen if we would have allowed Great Britain to be the sole owner of guns during the revolution?

Whenever this question is posed to a supporter of gun control they claim that “this would never happen in the 21^st century.” Why is that? History is ripe with examples of what could happen if governments are allowed too much power. Case in point in Nazi Germany millions of Jews, Gypsy’s, homosexuals, the mentally ill and others unable to defend themselves were rounded up to face systematic extermination. In China when they established gun control in 1935 the government was given its tools to destroy any political dissidents and people unwilling to forfeit their private property to the state they wished. Between the years of 1948-1953 under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the communist government exterminated 20 million people unable to defend themselves. The same story goes on and on throughout history. This was all allowed to happen because of the mire fact that government had a monopoly on guns.

Of course this wouldn’t happen in the United States right? This is the land of the free - we have the Constitution to protect us from oppressive government and instead we have belittled it and mocked it making up false interpretations such as, “militia doesn’t mean guns and that militias are no longer needed.” America is definitely the original land of the free but that has not stopped our government from growing beyond its principles. Less than a 100 years ago President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (the same man who practically ordered the “New Deal” policies) ordered the enslavement of everyone with Japanese ancestry to various concentration camps across the country.

I don’t really care about hunting, or even if am able to stop someone who comes into my house and to steal my television. I want to stop government from eroding my liberties and bringing tyranny to the populous - my very friends and family, which is why we must continue to protect the rights of the individual to own a weapon.