Thoughts on the roots of gun control as a political movement

I ran across this in my morning surfing on a left-wing NC blog:

North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole has reportedly joined a movement to allow individuals to carry firearms in our national parks. The movement begun by Republican Senator Mike Crapo from Idaho is pressuring the Department of the Interior to remove the federal ban on guns in our currently gun free national parks. According to reports by extreme North Carolina gun rights organizations Senator Dole has written a letter to the department asking them to lift the ban—in effect opening the door to all park visitors to carry concealed weapons provided they have a permit.

National Park Service ordinance 36 CFR 2.4, and 50 CFR 27.42(Fish and Wildlife Service), prohibits all individuals from possessing a firearm on lands managed by these agencies. These ordinances currently ensure that the national parks system remain a safe environment for visitors and visiting families. At the present time, families who travel nationwide visiting our park system can expect consistent rules and regulations throughout the country. It is likely that families may no longer feel at ease visiting a variety of national parks if they can not anticipate conditions upon arrival---put simply: they will not visit without knowing if it is a gun-free vacation spot.

I did some digging and confirmed that Sen. Dole is one of the Senators attempting to change Park Service rules to allow citizens with valid concealed carry permits to carry on national park property [more info here].

Note the hysterical fear of law abiding citizens with legally carried firearms in the above post. I wonder if 24-year-old Meredith Emerson felt the same way before she was abducted, tortured, raped and murdered while hiking in a Georgia state park?

Do you suppose that John Bryant was glad that he was disarmed by law in the Pisgah National Forest as he watched some two-legged animal beat his wife Irene to death before kidnapping him and taking him to God alone knows what fate?

I wonder if the above liberal blogger knows that every year there are more firearms crimes committed by sworn police officers than by civilians with concealed carry permits?

The fear that some people have of armed citizens is a product of either ignorance or ideology. Those who are ignorant can be shown the facts and will change their opinion. Those who are motivated by anti-gun ideology are immune (and even hostile) to facts because their belief system tells them that firearms are bad.

If you keep digging down to the root of their dislike of firearms you will generally find that what is really motivating them is a hatred not of the firearm itself, which is an inanimate object after all, but rather a deep hatred of the kind of person who chooses to own and carry a firearm for self protection.

The person who chooses to carry a firearm is above all stating that he or she is willing to take responsibility for their own life and safety. This is why gun control is a fixture of the political left because the idea of individuals taking responsibility for themselves is anathema to the left. The left's ideal of the perfect world is a population mired in helpless dependency upon the state (which will be ruled by the enlightened masters of the Left) for every necessity of life from protection from crime to their housing and health care to their next meal.

The self reliant individual threatens the leftist Utopia because he/she needs nothing from the state other than the basic constitutionally mandated services of a national defense and the maintenance of the domestic rule of law. These things the individualist is happy to pay for through reasonable taxation, but any attempt to deprive the individualist of his wealth or liberty in exchange for the provision of government services which the individualist could provide for himself in a more efficient manner will be met with resentment and resistance.

This makes the individualist and the collectivist, or to put it into American political terms the Republican and the Democrat or conservative and liberal, natural enemies. The fundamental difference in the world views of the two types of people make any kind of national unity impossible as long as the two conflicting philosophies are deeply embedded in large segments of the population.

People like the liberal blogger above see me as an intolerable obstacle to their version of the perfect state and would, if her kind ever gained enough power, happily send me to a labor camp for "reeducation" whereas I see her and those like her as a bunch of sordid little Stalin wannabes who remind me of Jefferson's observation that the Tree of Liberty needs occasional watering with the blood of tyrants.