Sunday, November 6, 2011

Further Encouragement for Reactionaries: The Ongoing Tide of Shall Issue CCW

http://www.moccw.org/map.html
Depicts a map of the states in the US by their Carry Concealed Weapon laws.
Things have come a long way since newspapers were breathlessly reporting on the 'Gunshine State', and predicting apocalyptic bloodbaths on the streets of Miami and Tampa if Florida opened CCW to ordinary, non-politically connected people.  Indeed a lot of states even give full faith and credit to several other states' CCW permits.

There are all sorts of reasons people support CCW laws, ranging from the totally prudential (the belief, probably justified by the evidence, that the proliferation of CCW holders in the general population will reduce crime and/or possessing a CCW myself will improve my own safety) to the idealistic (the right to life entails the right to reasonable provision to defending such) to the purely tribal (I strongly detest the people that are against the CCW initiatives and would like to put a stick in their eye).  It turns out that I actually agree and support CCW for all of these reasons.  But there's another very large reason I find encouragement in this trend, and it's not a reason one hears talked about much.

An effective monopoly on the means of defense and violence is the central pillar of governmental prestige.  Since that government is largely our enemy, and having tons of citizens with CCWs reduces that prestige, it is therefore a very good thing.  Call for an ambulance, call a cop, and call for a pizza, which will arrive first in a big city?  Having lots of people trained to look only perhaps after the fact to the almighty State for protection serves the cause of Reaction.  And, ironically, all the training and certification that several of the states put into place in the attempt to mollify opponents and the 'cultural elite' has only succeeded in making CCW holders more effective in all of these aims, the spoken ones and the unspoken ones.  Couple this with the incredibly high gun (and more importantly) ammunition sales figures and things start to smell somewhat like an aroma some of my great great great grandparents would have recognized.

Just to add salt into Leviathan's wounds a few years back, Katherine Harris (yes, that one from the whole 'hanging chad' affair) recognized that the CCW fees in Florida (which were quite reasonable already), exceeded the cost to administrate the system, which had astonishingly become more efficient as it scaled upwards.  So she cut the price of the CCW permit.  That sort of behavior is so alien to government that it is clearly contra-Cathedral.

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