Quote of the Day
If I could wave a wand and make guns disappear, the brutal communist Chinese dictatorship would make new ones. And the Italians (Beretta), Brazilians (Taurus), Russians (AK-47), Austrians (Glock)—all armed nations would be in business making the iron river. Including basement tinkerers.
Wands are fiction but you can imagine a gun-free world—just think back to pre-gun times.
What you get is Genghis Kahn with rampaging hordes, Julius Caesar and Roman Legion crucifixions, Vlad the Impaler, universal serfdom and endless millions horribly murdered. A gun-filled world paradoxically turns out to be more civilized, with safer neighborhoods—even though evil people and government tyrants rampage constantly. Our guns help control them.
Alan Korwin
February 1, 2024
Page Nine: On Utopian Pacifism
See also If there were no guns.
While there are undoubtedly many useful idiots and/or ignoramuses who have a utopian vision of a world without guns, I find a competing hypothesis more likely describes the top leaders of the anti-gun movement. They envision a world where the common person is unarmed physically and in spirit and they are the Genghis Kahn’s, Julius Caesar’s, and Vlad the Impaler’s of the future.
Prepare and respond appropriately.
Vlad impaled invaders to his country.
Still a hero in Romania.
Wow, I just had a vision for a new border wall. With politicians and communists too!
Well, I guess one could ask the Tutsi’s? Ooh, I guess you can’t.
And now it is a settled, proven beyond a shadow of doubt, empirical fact that those seeking equality.
Are just going to use it for their own advantage. And treat you like crap because they can.
My utopian dream is that liberal/communists learn to control themselves.
I wake up; Wow, that was f–k’in weird. Good thing I woke up, I might have crapped the bed.
I was thinking of Marko Kloos and his “The Gun is Civilization” essay as I read this.
Everyone thinks Regency England is so romantic because everyone imagines themselves as a player character in “Sense and Sensibility.” Never as the match girl or Mimi in La Boheme. Even with the sexy death scene.
Yes.
As Asimov pointed out, people imagine themselves in the glory of ancient Greece, chatting with Socrates; they never imagine themselves as slaves in the Athenian silver mines.
And, as someone else once said, some people seem to support tyrannies, not because they want to live in one, but because they want to be in charge of one. And they assume that, were The Revolution to come, they’d be running it. (They forget that revolutions always eat their revolutionaries.)
Guns are not essential to democracy. But in our violent world, guns are equalizers… putting the weak on a level playing field with the strong, the old with the young, the few with the many. As such, they are very democratic indeed.
Not really sure about Vlad but Chinggis and Caesar’s wars were generally against other armies. Not that they refrained from massacres but that was more or less the norm then.
Vlad was born in the middle of a centuries-long war, not just for the survival of his country, but for the survival of Christianity in that part of the world. He decided that to have a chance of winning he had to be even nastier than the Turks.
And Romania is still Christian.