Gun Control is STILL About Who...Whom

http://www.rkba.org/comment/cowards.html

It never has been about crime control, or reducing gun accidents or suicides or the like.  Instead, I'll let Snyder give it to you straight:



Gun control is a moral crusade against a benighted, barbaric citizenry. This is demonstrated not only by the ineffectualness of gun control in preventing crime, and by the fact that it focuses on restricting the behavior of the law-abiding rather than apprehending and punishing the guilty, but also by the execration that gun control proponents heap on gun owners and their evil instrumentality, the NRA. Gun owners are routinely portrayed as uneducated, paranoid rednecks fascinated by and prone to violence, i.e., exactly the type of person who opposes the liberal agenda and whose moral and social "re-education" is the object of liberal social policies. Typical of such bigotry is New York Gov. Mario Cuomo's famous characterization of gun-owners as "hunters who drink beer, don't vote, and lie to their wives about where they were all weekend." Similar vituperation is rained upon the NRA, characterized by Sen. Edward Kennedy as the "pusher's best friend," lampooned in political cartoons as standing for the right of children to carry firearms to school and, in general, portrayed as standing for an individual's God-given right to blow people away at will.

The stereotype is, of course, false. As criminologist and constitutional lawyer Don B. Kates, Jr. and former HCI contributor Dr. Patricia Harris have pointed out, "[s]tudies consistently show that, on the average, gun owners are better educated and have more prestigious jobs than non-owners.... Later studies show that gun owners are less likely than non-owners to approve of police brutality, violence against dissenters, etc."

Conservatives must understand that the antipathy many liberals have for gun owners arises in good measure from their statist utopianism. This habit of mind has nowhere been better explored than in The Republic. There, Plato argues that the perfectly just society is one in which an unarmed people exhibit virtue by minding their own business in the performance of their assigned functions, while the government of philosopher-kings, above the law and protected by armed guardians unquestioning in their loyalty to the state, engineers, implements, and fine-tunes the creation of that society, aided and abetted by myths that both hide and justify their totalitarian manipulation.



Have we seen anything to indicate that this is not an accurate summary of the opposition's motivations?  Hardly.  I recommend relentless hostility towards any who support gun control, with a healthy application of who..whom.  Frankly most issues in our society aren't about what they are nominally purported to be.  They're about what group can turn their opponents into society's niggers.  The whole tempest over teaching evolution, creationism, design, et al is exactly the same---are we really expected to believe that the motive on either side is merely a concern for accuracy in education?  In a system that can't even teach functional literacy a good fraction of the time?  No, the reason, as before is who...whom.  Strip the sanctimonious sophistry swiftly and let's just have a sublime slugfest of self and group interest.