Conclusions
So what kind of conclusions is an informed person likely to come to about the continuous and intensive pushes for gun control in the United States?
From what I've been seeing, I'm inclined to think that:
- Most of the push comes from the top-down; either by officials and/or progressive-oriented hope-and-change groups.
- These people have the resources, access, and intellectual ability to understand the information presented in this article, and are probably already well aware of it.
- Most of any populist support for gun control is the result of the above groups promoting their agenda to people who don't have the time or the inclination to examine the issues in a thorough, non-emotional manner.
Our current public officials seem to be very uneasy about the general population being well-armed. It's a bit mystifying to me that our leaders would be openly willing to sacrifice our ability to defend ourselves from common criminals to implement solutions that are unproven at best, and more likely counterproductive—especially since gun violence has been dropping dramatically over the past 20 years. I can only interpret this in two ways:
- They believe that the general population is too incompetent to possess firearms. One would think that a government program to educate people on gun safety, maybe at just a fraction of the cost of training them to use condoms, would correct this.
- They think (understandably) that allowing people unfettered access to firearms will make them unmanageable, should conditions deteriorate and civil unrest become rampant. If our republic is, as some believe, on track to devolve into a totalitarian form of government, these people would very much like to be a part of the controlling elite.
Police with guns drawn go door-to-door, pulling citizens out of their homes while searching for the remaining marathon bombing suspect in what amounted to a martial law exercise for the Boston Police Department.
This latter point is especially disconcerting when you consider that few democracies have ever lasted longer than 200 years. Consider the Cycle of Nations through which great civilizations progress, described by Henning Webb Prentis, Jr., president of the Armstrong Cork Company in a 1943 speech:
| From bondage → to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith → to great courage; From courage → to liberty; From liberty → to abundance; From abundance → to selfishness; From selfishness → to apathy; From apathy → to dependence; From dependency → back into bondage. |
I think that with just a little thought, you and I could come up with the years that correspond to the first 6 or 7 of these stages in U.S. history.
If #2, above, really is the thinking behind the constant push for gun control, it will require that citizens be unable to resist a power shift from the people to a controlling oligarchy. Gun Control does this.