Given the recent spate of killings in different parts of the United States, the response of the gun-control crowd has been predictable. Same old, same old. “These shootings show, once again, why we need gun control in America,” they cry.
Never mind that Switzerland is awash in the private ownership of guns and there aren’t regular mass killings there. And never mind that California’s strict gun-control laws have not prevented mass killings there. When it comes to gun ownership, logic and analysis are in short supply within the gun-control crowd.
Let’s assume that Congress enacted a nation-wide ban on AR-15s. All owners of AR-15s would be required to immediately deliver their AR-15s to the nearest Post Office.
Does this mean that mass killers would now be deprived of an AR-15? Only the most naive and innocent gun-control advocate would believe that. Instead, there would now be a black market in which anyone who wanted an AR-15 could purchase one. Sure, the price would be higher, but that would not be an insurmountable obstacle, any more than increased prices of drugs due to drug prohibition prevent drug users from acquiring illegal drugs in the black market.
All that gun control does is disarm the law-abiding citizen and take away his right of self-defense. Most people who own AR-15s are going to comply with the law. They don’t want to take a chance with a felony conviction. But the killers are going to keep their guns or purchase them on the black market. If the killers aren’t concerned about violating laws against mass murder, they’re not going to care if they’re violating some gun-control law.
The real issue in all this is one that the gun-control crowd is loathe to address: What is it that is causing so much violence in America? If you get to the bottom of that question, then there is a way to pull the weed out by its root rather than simply trying to trim it with some ridiculous and useless gun-control law.
There are two major causes of violence in America.
One is the drug war. Legalize drugs and you immediately terminate all the cartels, drug gangs, turf battles, and drug-war violence. That’s because drug cartels and drug gangs would immediately go out of business. They can only thrive in an atmosphere of illegality. They cannot survive in a legal market competing against pharmacies and other reputable companies that are selling drugs legally.
The other major cause of violence in America is the fact that the federal government—specifically the national-security establishment — is the world’s biggest killing machine. We don’t know exactly how many foreigners the Pentagon and the CIA have killed in the last 60 years, but it has to number in the millions. That’s nothing to scoff at. Millions of people are a lot of people. Martin Luther King was right when he said that the U.S. government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.
The notion has always been that so long as the killings were taking place “over there,” they would have little or no impact here at home, especially if the number of American troops killed “over there” was kept at a low level. Americans could go about their daily lives — working, vacationing, or whatever— and the Pentagon and the CIA could engage in their mass killing sprees in foreign countries. Everyone would be happy.
But that’s just not the way life works. Those continuous mass killings “over there” have ultimately seeped into the subconsciousnesses of Americans here at home. The mass killings “over there” have made regular Americans more tense, nervous, disagreeable, intolerant, discourteous, and quick to anger. Road rage is a good example of this phenomenon.
But the biggest effect of America’s overseas killing machine has been on the off-kilter people here at home. Ordinarily, they would just be living their lives a little weirdly but without bothering anyone. But now they are engaged in what amounts to copycat killings. In engaging in mass killings here at home, they are simply mirroring what the greatest purveyor of violence is doing “over there.”
Thus, to end violence in America, the solution does not involve gun control. The solution is twofold:
- Legalize all drugs immediately.
- Immediately bring all troops home from overseas, cease all military operations in foreign countries, abandon all foreign U.S. military bases, and terminate all foreign aid, including weaponry and money.
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