"The Central Planning Solution to Evil"

Sultan Knish writes from a perspective that, as a Libertarian, I don't always agree with.....but his writing skills and point of view on the gun control lobby are second to none. His entire piece is not only worth reading, it's worth framing on your wall. Please go read the entire piece. Selected excerpts below:

The gun issue is about solving individual evil through central planning in a shelter big enough for everyone. A Gun Free Zone where everyone is a target and tries to live under the illusion that they aren't. A society where everyone is drawing peace signs on colored notepaper while waiting under their desks for the bomb to fall.

That brand of control isn't authority, it's authority in panic mode believing that if it imposes total zero tolerance control then there will be no more shootings. And every time the dumb paradigm is blown to bits with another shotgun, then the rush is on to reinforce it with more total zero control tolerance.

Zero tolerance for the Second Amendment makes sense. If you ban all guns, except for those in the hands of the 708,000 police officers, some of the 1.5 million members of the armed forces, the  security guards at armored cars and banks, the bodyguards of celebrities who call for gun control,  and any of the other people who need a gun to do their job, then you're sure to stop all shootings.

But this isn't really about stopping shootings; it's about the belief that the problem isn't evil, but agency, that if we make sure that everyone who has guns is following government orders, then control will be asserted and the problem will stop.

It's the central planning solution to evil.

Gun control does not control guns, it gives the illusion of controlling people, and when it fails those in authority are able to say that they did everything that they could short of giving people the ability to defend themselves.

The question is the old elemental one about government control and individual agency. And tragedies like the one that just happened take us back to the equally old question of whether individual liberty is a better defense against human evil than the entrenched organizations of government.

Do we want a society run by kings and princes who commit atrocities according to a plan for a better society, or by peasants with machine guns? The kings can promise us a world without evil, but the peasant with a machine gun promises us that we can protect ourselves from evil when it comes calling.

It isn't really guns that the gun controllers are afraid of; it's a country where individual agency is still superior to organized control, where the trains don't run on time and orders don't mean anything. It's afraid of individual power.