An Indisputable, Moderate, Common Sense Argument For Gun Control
Everyone who is not crazy can have their goddamn guns. Taking away our guns is not what President Obama and Democrats are calling for, unless someone is mentally insane or is listed on government watch lists. If someone is a registered threat to this nation and its people, she or he cannot have a gun. And before anyone buys their guns, we will check to make sure they are not documented unstable people.
And no one can have military-grade machine guns and heavy weaponry. You don’t need those for hunting, and recreation with heavy weaponry is not allowed for our own good. Safety is a huge reason for why governments were created in the first place thousands of years ago. And you definitely should not be threatening your rural neighbors with a grenade launcher or an arsenal.
That’s the whole argument for why the advocated degree of moderate gun control is necessary. Communities should not be arms races, and neighborhoods should not live in constant fear or intimidation. Arms races are an antithesis of freedom and liberty.
Even if you are armed to the teeth to someday valiantly defend America from a potentially dystopian totalitarian state, I believe the military has far outpaced civilian comparison. A ragtag of libertarian patriots could not defeat the modern US military. The libertarian inspiration is the successful Revolutionary War, but our colonial guerrillas did not fight stealth jets, SEAL teams, or remote control drones. Other national armies with billions in funding can’t dream of competing against our military. It’s that strong.
However, there is no tyranny. Read the dystopian fiction that guides libertarians’ abstract fears. Quite different from those dystopian novels, our government controls little of our daily lives: the post office that sent your mail to you today, the water regulators who made sure the water you blissfully used for your coffee wasn’t toxic, the spending programs used to pay workers to build and maintain the highway you drove on to work, the environmental standards imposed so that the air you breathe isn’t smoggy, etc., we could go on literally all day for the good and largely background things our government does for us.
If our government actually was tyrannical, federal agents would already have fought back and massacred the Bundy group. We can all agree that that would be a tyrannical governmental crime, but the government is doing exactly the opposite in standing down and allowing this to settle out peacefully without loss of life or even threats of violence. Even though the Bundy family & friends are committing crimes designated as terrorism, the government is not treating them like terrorists who legally can and executably should be eliminated.
The government is instead behaving as the mature, sensible party by not giving them the fight they are attempting to provoke. By honoring these domestic terrorists’ lives, and the eventual due process coming to them, the government is embodying why their philosophy is unreasonably militant. Their call to arms is unnecessary and unpopular, and it underscores why the limited degree of gun control in which President Obama and Democrats are advocating is neither unreasonable nor unnecessary.
Image via Austin Chronicle
