Gun control

Fred Reed writes,

The orators profess to believe that banning guns will end murder. The actual effects of gun control are very different. This is a matter of observation, and thus has no place in political discussion. Just for the hell of it–it will make no difference–let’s actually look at the question.

The two most heavily armed countries in the world are (still, I think) Israel and Switzerland. In Switzerland, men of military age are (still, I think) required to keep an assault rifle and ammunition in their homes, and Israelis are similarly armed because, having enemies on their borders, they need to be able to mobilize rapidly.

In both countries murders by armed citizens are essentially nonexistent. By contrast, Mexico has strict gun control. Does anyone get shot in Mexico?

Yes, actually. Some 164,000 thousand shot dead between 2007 and 2014 (Figures vary. The foregoing are typical.) Pretty effective, gun control is.

Why do murders occur so exuberantly in a country with gun control? Because making guns illegal doesn’t make guns go away. In Mexico gun control means that criminals can have, and assuredly do have, high-powered military weapons, usually AKs–cuernos de chiva. Thus a dozen narcos can enter a large town and terrorize it. If a hundred men in the town had AR-15s, the dozen narcos would enter the town in pickups and forthwith leave in boxes. Gun control leaves the town disarmed and helpless.

...If guns were made illegal in the US, not a single villain would turn his gun in. The bumper sticker, “When guns are criminal, only criminals will have guns,” is exactly right.Guns, usually small and easily smuggled, are immensely valuable to criminals. Why would they turn them in? Criminals do not obey laws. It’s how you know they are criminals.

Curiously, the fewer guns in the hands of the law-abiding, the more valuable they are to criminals. When citizens may be armed, crawling in a window at night becomes much less attractive. And of course gun control would mean disarming white people, who tend to obey laws. Having witnessed Baltimore, Ferguson, and Charlotte, many whites are not enthusiastic about being left helpless.

One must never say this.

...Obama, of course, blamed guns for the shooting deaths in Chicago. Can he really believe this? It is like the obese blaming spoons.

...But, of course, gun control is only tangentially about gun control. The controllers detest gun owners viscerally as they imagine them, aging white Southern yahoos or Western cowboys with potbellies and third-grade educations who are probably werewolves, Republicans or even conservatives. Deplorables. Note that they never criticize the killers, the Islamoterrorists, the blacks in the cities massacring each other with abandon, or the Hispanic narcos engaged in auto-extermination. The controllers simply dislike white conservatives or, more profoundly, those who are emotionally independent and not of the mentality of the hive. Guns are innocent bystanders.

If a woman tells me that she favors gun control, I can with confidence predict that she favors unchecked immigration, sanctuary cities, affirmative action, banning the Confederate flag, suppressing Christianity, homosexual marriage, abortion, feminism, and the dumbing down–she will call it something else–of schools to avoid wounding the self-esteem of the usual suspects.

Read more here.