There is something disturbing about our friends in the gun rights movement. They talk about how dangerous the modern world is and why we need to arm ourselves in self defense. Of course, arming oneself in depth, tear gas/pepper spray, knives, guns, shillelaghs, and training, is prudent and you should get as much as your pocketbook can handle. This is the only way to deal with an increasingly dangerous world. That said, they appeal not to our prudence but our fears.

Meanwhile the advocates of gun control also speak to people's fear. To them the world is growing dangerous and we have to get rid of all the guns so the crazy folk and criminals who commit murders can't get them. This is the only way to make the world safe. Disarmament is the only prudent step.

I don’t know how any of this is going to come out. I’m not seeing rainbows and unicorns in our future. Whether the gun-banners “win” or get beaten back on a new ugly-gun ban or a private-sale ban, I expect chaos. But this time around, there seems to be a lot more understanding that the battle is about freedom. For all of us. And that it’s not just the possessions and privileges of one group or another that are at stake.

From a logical perspective, the real argument that the gun control advocates are making is that, there’s nothing wrong with guns. In fact, the gun control advocates want them to be employed against the citizenry by the state on a rather grandiose level. The only problems with guns, from their perspective, is that people who are not officially sanctioned by the state have them.

So you believe guns will go away after you’ve forbidden them? They will go away exactly as much as liquor did during the 1920s, as much as illegal drugs have. Welcome to Prohibition. And the drug war. And all the futile violence they spawned, times ten.

The excuse that people will start shooting each other is also plain and silly. So it is our politicians saying that our society is full of incapable adolescents who can never be trusted? Then, please explain how we can trust them or the police, who themselves grew up and came from the same culture?

No it is about power and a total power over the people. There is a lot of desire to bad mouth the Tsar, particularly by the Communists, who claim he was a tyrant, and yet under him we were armed and under the progressives disarmed. Do not be fooled by a belief that progressives, leftists hate guns. Oh, no, they do not. What they hate is guns in the hands of those who are not marching in lock step of their ideology. They hate guns in the hands of those who think for themselves and do not obey without question. They hate guns in those whom they have slated for a barrel to the back of the ear.

When you rob people of their self-respect and sense of control over their own lives, use them as means to your own ends, and treat them like garbage, don’t be surprised if you don’t like the destructive methods they choose to assert their sense of self. By all means let’s feel sympathy for the innocent victims when the worm turns — but let’s also never forget who set things in motion.

Want social peace? Disarm the cops and soldiers. Take away the power of bloodsucking CEOs — created by the same state that would regulate guns — over our very right to exist on the earth.

No justice, no peace. That’s not a threat or an apologetic. It’s a fact.

How convenient for our political overseers: there has been another mass-shooting – this time at a Connecticut grade-school – in which many adults and young children were murdered. Members of the mainstream media, politicians, and other government officials are being turned loose to share their lack of critical thinking with a public conditioned to await their direction. With the kind of frenzy exhibited by a monkey that has been bitten by a scorpion, establishment sock-puppets quickly respond with proposals to further enhance state power while, at the same time, shrinking individual liberty. Taking the advice of the neo-Machiavellian Rahm Emanuel – that "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste" – the victims in Connecticut will join those in the Oregon shopping mall, Columbine and Aurora, Colorado, and elsewhere, to be exploited on behalf of disarming Americans.

To impose gun control on their government, the American people need in addition to arm themselves in a way that is more fundamental than merely possessing physical weapons. They need to arm themselves intellectually and morally as well, by reading and studying the works of the great modern defenders of freedom, above all, Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. This will enable them to counter and overcome the vicious ideas that underlie the misuse of government power and its continuing growth. An armament of physical weapons combined with knowledge and moral conviction will ensure that the American people will never find themselves in the position of helpless, terrified people being led as sheep to the slaughter. They will never allow themselves to be either the victims or the perpetrators of a holocaust, for they will have regained control over their government and its use of its weapons. They will have achieved the kind of gun control that secures their lives and property and threatens the lives and property of no one else.

The government and its use of its weapons are falling increasingly out of the control of the American people and their elected representatives. A government whose activities are beyond the capability of an intelligent, conscientious representative or senator to understand, is a government that is out control. Those in charge of it do not, and cannot, know what they are doing, despite the fact that they are doing it with guns. Most of them do not even read and carefully study, let alone fully understand, most of the bills they are called to vote upon. Routinely, they enact laws whose consequences they do not know, and whose essential terms they cannot even define. To put it mildly, this is an extremely dangerous state of affairs.

Whenever there’s a violent tragedy, someone immediately starts using it as an excuse to restrict civil liberties. Many on the left understand this when it comes to the Patriot Act, but not when it comes to gun control. (Conservatives have selective blindness in the opposite direction.)

In deontological terms, the right to self-defense is the foundation and presupposition of all other rights; and forbidding private citizens to own guns while allowing police and soldiers to carry them is a violation of moral equality – a reserving of weapons to the powerful while denying them to the powerless.