Is Gun Control A Symptom Of Western Civilization's Fall?

(AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

When the United States was first established, it was unique in many regards. One was the belief that all free men should be able to arm themselves. Over in Europe, gun control was kind of a thing even before we really had such a term. Kings didn’t want the peasants to have the means to resist them, after all.

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Yet with a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, there wasn’t any reason to keep the people disarmed. Other nations eventually sort of followed our lead. Not to the extent we did, of course, but people had guns.

That was a long time ago, though.

In this day and age, there are plenty of people who think differently. Yet some might say they’re part of the downfall of Western civilization.

In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, geographer Jared Diamond attempts to explain why Eurasian civilizations have survived and triumphed over those lost to history.  I wonder whether a future sociologist might one day sum up Western civilization’s demise as the natural consequence of Guns, Germs, and Feelz, or rather, how hysterical fear-mongering over self-defense and microorganisms and a new world order based on feelings ended up dooming the West.

In a truly free society, everyone would be armed and capable of defending himself and his loved ones should the moment arise.  Guns are tools, nothing more.  They have no more innate will than a pair of scissors lying on the table, and just as that pair of scissors is harmless until someone decides to use it to stab another, a gun is a paperweight until it’s not.  Teaching people to be afraid of firearms has taught Americans both to be afraid of defending themselves and to depend solely upon bureaucrats from agencies like the ATF to preserve their lives.  Both lessons are deadly.

If Americans needed further proof that the natural right to self-preservation is toothless without the right to own weapons for one’s defense, the Taliban gave another tutorial by promptly scooping up guns from the civilian population the day after seizing power in Kabul while insisting that “people no longer need them for personal protection.”  A Taliban official promised that “weapons for personal safety” are unnecessary since “innocent civilians” have nothing to fear.  The Taliban are just putting into practice a common principle held by leftists holding power throughout the world — that law-abiding “innocents” should be prevented from owning weapons to protect themselves from the not so innocent who wish them harm.  It’s remarkable that at the same time the federal government has redefined lawful Americans who question the legitimacy of the 2020 election or government vaccine mandates as potential “domestic violent extremists” on par with the Taliban, it is Democrats’ gun control policies the Taliban imitate.  When the meanings of words are subordinated to the quest for power, though, it gets awfully confusing to remember who the “innocents” and “terrorists” are.

How fast do things go south when ordinary citizens have no effective means of defending themselves from government psychosis?  Just look at New Zealand and Australia, “free” nations with strict gun control that are currently using their militaries to enforce lockdown orders that have essentially placed everyone under house arrest “for his own good.”  If people can be stripped of their liberties to live and work as they see fit for a virus that is almost entirely harmless for most people in good health, exactly what potential threat can a well armed government not use to justify enslavement?  There’s no shortage of invisible pathogens in the world for those in power to declare as “public enemy number one” requiring their citizens’ absolute obedience, but why stop there?  People die from snakebites, car accidents, and elevated heart rates from unsanctioned free will all the time.  If anything that increases the risk of death sufficiently justifies loss of freedom, then totalitarian government is the only threat allowed to exist.

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I’ve made the case for a while–long before COVID–that part of the UK’s assault on freedom of speech/expression has been fueled by the knowledge that the civilian population has been disarmed. They can’t resist.

Now, I’m not getting into the COVID thing in and of itself. I will say that I’m seeing some very alarming stuff in Australia, to be sure, including the shooting of shelter dogs because someone going and feeding them–all while no one else is around–could spread COVID…in a place that hasn’t had a case in three months, apparently.

Anyway, let’s talk about Western Civilization as a whole.

Will gun control lead to our downfall? To be honest, probably not directly. Let’s say guns were banned tomorrow. Much of what’s left will still resemble the Western Civilization we all know and love.

But without the right to keep and bear arms, it’ll be the other thousand cuts that eventually kills it. We won’t be able to resist any of it other changes which will come.

Guns, Germs, and Feelz may well be what brings about the end.

Just one more reason to dig in for a fight over our right to keep and bear arms.

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