NJ.com, a consortium of reliably left-wing newspapers in the Garden State, has published an op-ed calling for the scrapping of the Second Amendment:

Having fewer guns lying around could mean they won’t end up in the hands of a curious child, abusive spouse or suicidal person. Having a gun at home makes it three times more likely that you’ll be murdered by a family member or intimate partner, or successfully attempt suicide.

But let’s not kid ourselves: Gun buyback programs are not going to reduce murders in cities like Newark and Camden. Studies have found that buyback programs don’t have much effect overall on either gun crime or gun-related injury rates.

They don’t directly target the guns that are more likely to be used in violence, and in general, the guns collected haven’t overlapped much with crime guns. These are old weapons that some middle-aged guy found in his basement. What criminal is going to trade in his $700 Bushmaster for $250 from the state?

The biggest problem with this approach, though, is that it tiptoes around the one reform that could really make a difference, but that Americans would never accept: Mandatory gun buybacks. That’s what Australia did, after its own version of Newtown.

Following a mass shooting in Tasmania that left 35 dead, Austrialia banned semiautomatic and automatic rifles and shotguns, and required all the newly banned weapons to be bought back by the government. This cut the number of gun-owning households by as much as half.

The mandatory buybacks were also accompanied by a uniform national system for licensing and registering firearms. Gun owners have to present a “genuine reason” to buy a weapon. A claim of self-defense isn’t enough unless you have an occupational need to carry a gun.

The editorialist then laments that, “We understand this is not going to happen. Neither American courts nor most of the public would support it.”

And yet, they champion it still.

There is a smug naivete in the minds of gun control supporters, combined with a basic pagan fervor.

One one hand, they are the most superstitious of cargo cults, wedded firmly to the animist idea that an inanimate object has a soul that can possess and take over an otherwise sane and rational human being and turn them into a homicidal savage. If you listen to them, or watch them recoil in horror at the mere sight of a firearm, it is clear that they think that the firearm itself—not the intention or skill of the individual possessing it—is the problem.

They state time and again that they “can’t tell a good guy with a gun from a bad guy with a gun,” and assert—with absolute surety—that the gun in the home will one day overpower the rationality of the owner and force them to kill.

It’s an absurdity, is it not? And yet if you look at the heart of every gun control group’s messaging, or these op-eds supporting the abolishing of the Second Amendment, you can see this animist belief that a firearm will somehow overpower your soul as their guiding thesis. It would be amusing, if they weren’t so incredibly deranged and dangerous.

On the flip side of their animism is their collectivism; the thing that can protect us from the “gun boogeyman” is the corrosive power of the state.

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Almost entirely collectivist in nature, citizen control groups do not trust the individual, and instead trust the hive mind of government. They desire to end the Second Amendment because as an unknown soul correctly noted, “Firearms are liberty’s teeth.” An armed citizenry compliments an honest government and provides it with additional security, while it denies a corrupt government the monopoly of force needed to impose tyranny. One must wonder, then, why they take such interest in disarming the law-abiding citizenry when they know that criminals will not disarm.

The honest answer is that they are not looking to reduce crime.

They’re looking to reduce resistance.

As Professor R.J. Rummel noted in an introduction to his work, “…the more freedom, the greater the human security and the less the violence. Conversely, the more power governments have, the more human insecurity and violence. In short: to our realization that power impoverishes we must also add that power kills.”

Those who would strip individual liberties from you do so with the belief that they are stripping those power from you and transferring that power to themselves.

These citizen control cultists aren’t remotely non-violent.

They simply want to ensure that when they turn violent and use the forces of government against the people as has happened so often, so recently, that you have no way of stopping them.

You can either be a citizen, or a subject.

Choose wisely.