Shall Not Be Questioned has a post that links to an article trying to unite the various gun control advocacy groups. The article is an interesting read because I believe the author is completely unaware of the irony of what he penned. Instead of coming up with something new or unique to say about gun control the article parrots the now common anti-government fear mongering that seems to compose a majority of anti-gun statements:
But the truly stunning growth came from anti-government “Patriot”/militia movement that views the government as their primary enemy. These groups formed in the mid-1990′s based on the perception of violent government repression of dissident groups at Ruby Ridge, ID in 1992 and near Waco, TX in 1993. The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 is attributable to this movement which peaked a year after the incident and then rapidly declined. But the movement was once again energized in 2008 with the economic recession and the appearance of Barack Obama as a presidential candidate. The numbers of these groups rose from 149 in 2008 to 1,274 last year. Of these, 334 were militias. A state by state listing of these groups is provided here. A graph produced by SPLC showing the meteoric growth of such groups is displayed below.
What did the Oklahoma City bombing have to do with gun control? Who knows? Furthermore the article only managed to bring up the three commonly cited examples of violent anti-government actions. Everything else is pure fear mongering.
Let’s consider the other side of the coin. What about pro-government extremists? Democide, that is non-war murders by government, has killed six times more people than wars this century alone. Whether we discuss the gulags of the Soviet Union, the death camps of Nazi Germany, or China’s Great Leap Forward the number of deaths caused by governments is high. Gun control advocates will often stop me here and claim that such atrocities would never happen in the United States. I’m pretty sure asking Native Americans or residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and August 9th, 1945 whether or not the United States would commit democide would lead to a resounding yes.
Advocates of gun control want to strip non-state individuals of firearms. Their method of doing this is to implement laws against gun ownership and have state agents, armed with guns, kidnap or murder any non-state individual in possession of a gun. Who is the more violent extremist? Me, an anarchist who carries a gun but has never killed anybody, or somebody who wants armed agents of the state to initiation violence against people like me? I would say the latter show a much higher propensity for violence. They want to give more power to organizations that have, together, killed an estimated 262,000,000 people (and that’s not including the wars those organizations have waged). How does that make sense? How can somebody claim to oppose violence while advocating state-initiated violence? Just because a guy with a costume and a badge initiates violence doesn’t make it something other than violence.
Statists seems to have a hard time scrounging up examples of anti-government violence. They mention Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the Oklahoma City bombings time and time again but in each case the number of people who died was relativel small. One other other hand I can point out many examples of pro-government violence that killed millions of people. It seems disarming the people would put them at an even greater disadvantage when faced with state aggression. Why do gun control advocates want to disarm generally peaceful individuals instead of disarming states? Why are they pro-government extremists? If gun control advocates truly opposed violence they would be demanding the governments around the world disarm.
“What did the Oklahoma City bombing have to do with gun control? Who knows? ”
Back then, blame was assigned to Talk Radio (Rush Limbaugh) and the NRA even before McVeigh was apprehended. It was the era of the AWB and those damn AKs being “The preferred weapons of terrorists and drug dealers.”
AKs were the preferred weapons of terrorism, huh? I wonder why nobody told me that AKs have a built-in self-destruct feature that allows them to act as bombs.
You didn’t know? I thought that was common knowledge. There’s this switch on the back that switches it into “bomb mode”. It magically turns the magazine into a block of C4 and primes the whole thing for detonation. It’s really a marvel of modern technology circa the late 1940s.