Repost- So Called “Logic” of Gun Bans by Oleg Volk

My wife once consulted emerging democracies about limiting the role of their governments.  Limiting government power avoids political exploitation and subsequent civil war.  Some governments listened to her.  Some did not, and her predictions came true.

Well good for her, but how is that important now?  With that political theory in mind, I’ve noticed that several US states are driving out minority voting blocks.  It has long been a politician’s goal to choose your voters rather than have voters choose their representatives.  Rather than use voting laws to discriminate, you can use cultural regulations to achieve that same goal.  This is ethnic cleansing by another name.   It is cultural cleansing where you use political power to punish a political minority through bigoted laws.  Like slow genocide, it is all perfectly legal.  It is despicable and the opposite of the liberal tolerance that many liberals claim to value.  I do not expect our Supreme Court to have the political sophistication to stop this power grab.

I’d like to thank Oleg Volk for making this connection clear with his post “So Called “Logic” of Gun Bans”.  I’ve copied Oleg’s complete post with permission, but you should add his site to your regular wanders on the web.

By Oleg Volk

To make the “logic” of gun bans a little more obvious, I’d like to use the analogy of cars as more familiar to everyone. Imagine a situation in which some tiny number of vehicles are used for criminal purposes, such as transporting drugs, kidnapping and drive-by shootings.  By the logic currently applied to guns, the hypothetical car-banners can try several approaches:

• Ban everyone from using the same kind of cars as used by the majority of criminals. If the most popular “crime car” is a Ford Escort, ban those. Or all compact sedans. As everyone, including criminals, switches to other types, ban the most popular of those.
• Ban the most high-performance vehicles (or those with largest number of seats, greatest cargo capacity or some other useful feature) on the theory that they are most suitable for criminal use and evading police. Next year, ban the next to the most high performing types and so on.
• Prohibit ownership to specific people, defining the “specific” people broadly enough to include everyone besides specifically exempted politicians and their, so called “public”, servants.

Neither of these approaches is reasonable but anti-gun people push for them anyway. They are OK with victimizing the blameless. That tells us that their real goal isn’t disarming the criminals but disarming everyone they view as potential political opposition.

Some segments of gun control are aimed at producing a local electoral majority, the prime example being the Colorado bills that would cause enough pro-gun people to move out of the state to ensure a long-term Democrat majority. Others are aimed at disarming the “most probably enemy” population groups, and both political parties are guilty of that to some extent, though Democratic party does it far more.

~_~_

Thank you, Oleg.

I have some further thoughts on this.  Let me know if you’d like to discuss them.

Rob