Gun control won’t disarm the Syrian rebels. Or the Syrian Army. It can’t disarm the Russians, or the Kurds, or any of the combatants in the Middle East. If only gun control (and explosives-control laws!) could disarm the European jihadis, currently under some of the strictest gun- and crime-control laws in the civilized world. That way, the murderous factions over there could stop murdering everyone. But it just doesn’t work, doggone it.
This is the great flaw with law. It doesn’t work. It gives you legal options after the action, and it deters good people, sometimes, but it doesn’t do much other good. Gun control deters no one intent on evil acts. Only some of us understand this unfortunately. If laws against armed bank robbery worked, we’d have no armed bank robbers, right?
Laws’ failures are legendary, monumental, self evident, and yet missed. If laws against committing jihadi atrocities worked, there would be no San Bernardino, no Brussels, no Paris, none of the names that are going to happen in the not-too-distant future. If only gun control worked.
The constantly vilified supposedly evil gun lobby (the NRA) fervently wishes those laws worked. Every one of their five million members wishes gun-control laws—the 20,000 we hear are already on the books—worked as advertised. There isn’t any criminal act you can commit with a firearm that isn’t already illegal. If only those laws did something to stop crime! We’d be safer, and the left wouldn’t be out there, all alone you might have noticed, pressing for still more laws to do what those laws aren’t doing.
The worst part—new gun laws being proposed don’t even confront crime. They don’t have to, because the crimes are already outlawed. But I repeat myself. The new laws make crimes out of things that aren’t crime—by banning legal activity Americans do every day. Look at gun-transfer laws, pitched as more background checks* for example, the current rallying cry of more-gun-law proponents.
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It’s already illegal for criminals to transfer guns, buy guns, have guns, giveaway guns, get guns, anything. More background checks will increasingly burden the innocent, but it won’t disarm or stop criminals who are already armed. Enhanced enforcement and arrests will have that desired effect, but these aren’t proposed.** Armed criminals are armed now despite all the laws banning it already. You do understand that, don’t you? Such questions are mysteriously not posed to gun-control advocates by the media. Instead, reporters virtually cheerlead and campaign for new laws that will incrementally disarm or subarm the public.
With the addition of another gun-control law, which we know won’t disarm armed combatants, criminals will just continue to trade guns among themselves, gather guns from their dead, steal guns, get guns from Cold War warehouses in South America, buy them with straw purchases, and have them supplied by governments that are completely outside the whole gun-control scheme.
Gun controllers don’t even contemplate affecting governments. Government agents, agencies, uniformed police, every active or retired cop anywhere, secret police, alphabet-soup groups, diplomats and their entourages, private security forces for the major corporations, even the minor ones—they don’t count when contemplating gun control. Proposed bills always carve out exceptions for such groups. This is one hidden underbelly of the gun-control dialog. An entire universe of people are exempt from it—upper-class citizens when it comes to 10% of the Bill of Rights.
Only the little guy, the pawns and peons otherwise known as citizens, NRA members, the good guys, they’re tumbled around in the trappings of so-called “gun control.” Criminals remain pleasantly and fully armed despite every gun-control law ever enacted. Major international warring factions, drug runners in news reports retain “the right to arms”— merely by force of arms. And kill each other in sufficient numbers to remain armed, in which case gun control is a more pragmatic thing.
So play on with the left-wing petty delusions over this type of ugly black gun or that arbitrary number of rounds in your magazine—which is about control, not guns. Imagine this invisible line around a school campus where every manner of official, properly armed guard, federal officer, school security person, city law enforcement officer and other elitist can be armed. But you—the likely subject of an attack or rape—can only bear arms if you do so completely discreetly so no one knows you are. That’s gun control. Exercising such control that no one knows you are exercising control over your gun. “Diplomatic carry.”
Oh, if only gun-control laws really worked. In reality, they are a way to make politicians look falsely good, keep police occupied and keep the public in line.
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*They’re pitched as background checks but they’re actually gun-registration plans and more if you read them, which the media doesn’t before reporting. So what’s wrong with gun registration? It lacks a crime-fighting component, for one thing, but at least it’s expensive. http://www.gunlaws.com/Page9Folder100up/PageNine-122.htm.
**The FBI’s existing “background check” databank receives the names of more than one million innocent people monthly, but its crime-prevention stats are absurd: In 2010, 14.4 million checks, out of 76,000 denials (with no due process by the way), only 62 cases referred for prosecution. Success rate: 0.000000902 (for the 13 guilty pleas they settled for). We would do better to give away the $250 million the system cost. Why don’t they at least arrest the tens of thousands of criminals they find? Stunning: the system wasn’t designed for that (White House says) -- http://www.gunlaws.com/BradyArrestsLacking.htm
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