De-escalation begins with a change in mentality. And that change in mentality starts with the symbolic yielding of certain types of weapons. The real steps, like the banning of handguns, will never occur unless this one is taken first, and even then not for decades.
What needs to happen before this change in mentality can occur? What must occur first – and this is where liberals are fighting the gun control issue from the wrong end – is a decrease in crime. So long as crime is ubiquitous, so long as Americans cannot entrust their personal safety to the authorities, they will never agree to disarm. There will be no gun control before there is real crime control.
Charles Krauthammer
April 5, 1996
Disarm the Citizenry. But not yet
Originally in The Washington Post on April 5. The above link is in the Seattle Times from April 8, 1996.
[See also the QOTD’s here, here and here.
While Krauthammer is thinking things through better than most anti-gun people he isn’t thinking far enough ahead. If crime is very low then anti-gun people will have no justification for infringing upon the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. You see a hint of that awareness already with anti-gun people attempting to use suicides as justification to infringe upon our rights.—Joe]
Krauthammer missed big with this editorial. The exercise of the right of self defense is not dependent upon the likelihood of a threat, it is inherent to an individual. As are all other inalienable rights. Otherwise, it is not a right, it is a privilege and revocable at will by government. Missing this point makes any other argument about infringing that right moot.
Charles is and was a RINO.
He also has missed the change in the country where the great unwashed have final!y tired of having folks like him scrape their shoes off on them.
Being able to defend myself from criminals is great.
Being able to fight back against a despotic government is PRICELESS.
Even if we had “Minority Report” means of crime control, I would still not trust the government to have a monopoly on weapons and force. Does he really think that we elect the most competent and most ethical people into positions of power?
Crimes and suicides are irrelevant in comparison to the carnage of democide in just the last 100 years. Mass murder of disarmed Armenians, Jews, Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cubans, Africans, and many others dwarf all other violent causes.
So his sentiments in 1996 were wrong then, are wrong now, and will forever be wrong. Gun control advocates can never make a case for disarmament that can account for evil men (e.g. Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Chavez, Maduro) seizing power to control their people brutally. Only my ENEMY wants me disarmed.
He’s making a ridiculous argument. “Insane” is not too strong a word.
“so long as Americans cannot entrust their personal safety to the authorities, they will never agree to disarm.”
To ever trust one’s personal safety to “the authorities” is to abandon the principles upon which this country was founded, to abandon the very concept of individual sovereignty. Crime rates have nothing to do with any of it.
Besides; the leftists have always tried to over-state crime rates, and “gun deaths” as the justification for second amendment violations. With that (idiotic) mentality, the lower the rates, the less justification for gun restrictions. Lowering crime rates then would be the last thing the crazies, the doom-sayers, the power-hungry authoritarians, would want.
Krauthammer, like all those of the authoritarian mindset, is completely missing the point. Probably he has no means of understanding the point, simply because the point is outside the authoritarian mindset. It is not within his ability to perceive or contemplate.
The best he can do, being without the truth to guide him, is to fabricate reasons why people would want to be armed. In this case he’s latching onto the old stereotypes; that fear or paranoia, and so on, are what drive good people to carry guns.
If all evil were cleansed from the face of the Earth forever, and all people were saints, I’d still carry a gun, and more happily than I carry one today. The second amendment would still be as valid, also.
In Krauthammer’s dream world, where “the authorities” control, shape, mold and direct everything in society and culture, crime hasn’t gone away at all. It’s simply been made official policy. Justifying, protecting and fostering coercion at the expense of liberty is the order of the day. Advocating and practicing liberty then becomes the “crime” in the eyes of the authoritarian, and so fight “crime” means fighting against human rights, property and sovereignty.
So as long as this human race continues without a paradigm changing, global awakening of some kind, crime will always be a concern anyway. It comes down mostly to a matter of what, exactly, will be considered “crime”. Will it be “crime” against the authoritarian system or will it be crime against human rights (against individual sovereignty)? Krauthammer (along with most everyone else) is confused as to the difference. They’re not aware that there’s a difference to be understood.
Jesus spoke of this, specifically and clearly, though you would not know it from listening to “Christians”, many of whom have gone over (whether they know it or not) to the kind of Progressive Marxist thinking that Krauthammer is exhibiting.