No Surrender on Guns
Something very
good – though very dangerous to the congealing police state
(but not to liberty-minded people) has occurred: Millions of Americans
have decided they will not abide by any demand they register their
firearms – much less surrender them. And are saying so –
openly. More than a few local sheriffs have also publicly stated
they will not enforce any such demands. For the first time in living
memory, the debate is not fundamentally about which guns
– or how many guns. It is about whether the government
has any business even knowing whether you’ve got guns at all
– much less dictating the type you’re allowed
to have.
It’s
a Rubicon moment – because this idea involves a great deal
more than merely firearms. It is an assertion – though not
fully conscious, yet – that trampling the rights of any individual
because of the actions of another individual is an ethical
outrage. Not just the right to keep a gun.
All
rights.
The Beat-era
author/philosopher William S. Burroughs once quipped: “After
a shooting, they always want to take the guns away from the people
who didn’t do it.†He said that decades ago and at long
last, people are coming to resent being vilified – and punished
– not for anything they did. But because some
other person did something.
Or even worse,
because some other person might do something.
Group guilt
isn’t selling as well as it once did. And the stock people
take in individual responsibility seems to be increasing.
Perhaps because
the orbit of liberty has constricted so dramatically – especially
during the past 10 years. Instead of gradually increasing the temperature
so that the frog doesn’t notice he’s being boiled alive
until it’s too late for him to hop out of the pot, they’ve
cranked up the heat suddenly – and the frogs are
now aware of what’s happening to them.
And beginning
to hop…
It is no hard
think to understand that the average person – merely trying
to live his life – is growing weary of being hassled at every
turn, treated as a presumptively guilty criminal by authorities
that seem unable to recognize, much less respect, any limits
to their power. Just as the catcall, “you must be racistâ€
is losing its ability to cow legitimate criticism of such things
as open-ended entitlement programs that incentivize multi-generational
poverty, so also the tiresome bleats about “safetyâ€
and “security†have grown really tiresome.
And the frayed edges are beginning to show.
I suspect because
– unlike in years past – ordinary people are now routinely
subjected to hassles and degradations. Whereas in years past –
especially in the years before nahnlevven – the typical
person could for the most part go about his business without being
continually subjected to hassles and degradations. That plus increasingly
disproportionate punishments for trivial statutory offenses and
non crimes has led to more and more Ordinary Joes and Janes thinking
about what’s happening all around them. Perhaps for the first
time in their lives.
And once they
begin to think, they begin to see.
Consider the
etymology of register:
Noun:
An official list or record, for example of births, marriages
and deaths…
Verb:
Enter a record in an official list as being in a particular
category…
Italics added.
February
21, 2013
Eric Peters
[send him mail] is an
automotive columnist and author of Automotive
Atrocities and Road Hogs (2011). Visit his
website.
Copyright
© 2013 Eric Peters