The Right to Bear Arms?

The killing of 20 children and 6 adults at the Newtown Sandy Hook school has renewed calls to introduce tighter gun control in America, particularly from people in Europe. But is the banning of private ownership of (certain kinds) of weapons an appropriate reaction?

America has enshrined the private gun ownership in its constitution. Originally, America was meant not to have a (standing) army, only a defence force of armed volunteers — a well regulated militia — who had their own weapons to get on with their lives but be mobilized to defend the country if and when attacked. That way, they could defend the country but not wage aggressive wars. With time, this constitutional provision was ignored and the U.S. developed the biggest (standing) army in the world. With it, the reasons to keep the people armed were forgotten. The question is, what causes more innocent civilians to die — aggressive wars waged by the U.S. military or armed maverick madmen going on killing sprees? If you could abolish one or the other, which would you rather do? Abolishing both is not a practical option, as a country without an armed defence force to defend itself does not remain a sovereign country for very long.

Switzerland still has broadly the same system of defence the U.S. originally had, although the pure “armed militia of volunteers” model has recently started to change so that today, Switzerland has an army of about 4,000 professionals and 130,000 armed volunteers — a standing army of 4,000 and a well-regulated militia of 130,000, if you will. Every man in Switzerland is armed, but Switzerland has no gun violence problem and it wages no aggressive wars. “Guns are deeply rooted within Swiss culture – but the gun crime rate is so low that statistics are not even kept,” says the BBC. Swiss homicide rate is 0.7/100,000 population per year, one of the very very lowest in the world. Perhaps the more interesting question is: why is gun ownership a problem in the U.S. but not in Switzerland?

The European model vs. the American model

Which model — the European one, where defence is by standing army and the state has a monopoly on guns – or the original American one, where defence is by an armed militia of volunteers — has a better track record in terms of gun deaths caused by madmen?

As it turns out, there is no contest. It is not even close.

In the European model — of standing armies and no volunteer armed militia — incidents of madmen-inflicted gun deaths occur far less frequently than in the original American model of volunteer armed militia and no standing army. But when they do, the consequences are far worse. When all the guns are in the hands of a ruling oligarchy and there is no-one armed to oppose it and madmen take over – as the regularly do — the result is millions upon millions of madmen-inflicted gun-related deaths. Hitler and Stalin alone (indeed Hitler OR Stalin alone) account for far — far far — more madmen-inflicted gun deaths than the total number of people killed by mad shooters in the entire history of the United States.

Over the long run, a standing army is by far the bigger threat. And Europe has a far worse long-term record of madmen-inflicted gun deaths than the USA.

It is no coincidence that Europe has, since 1776, had Maximilien de Robespierre, Napoléon Bonaparte, Józef ChƗopicki, Napoléon Bonaparte III, Tsar Nicholas II, Vladimir Lenin (4 million murdered), Benito Mussolini, Miguel Primo de Rivera, Aleksandar Tsankov, Joseph Stalin (43 million murdered), Ahmet Bej Zogu, José Mendes Cabeçadas, Gomes da Costa, António Óscar Carmona, Józef PiƗsudski, Anatanas Smetona, António de Oliveira Salazar, King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, Engelbert Dollfuss, Konstantin Päts, Adolf Hitler (21 million murdered), Kimon Georgiev, Tsar Boris III, Kurt Schuschnigg, Kārlis Ulmanis, Ioannis Metaxas, Generalissimus Francisco Franco, Jozef Tiso, Ion Antonescu, Philippe Pétain, Ante Pavelić, Vidkun Quisling, Ferenc Szálasi, Josip Broz-Tito, Enver Hoxha, Mátyás Rákosi, Nikita Khrushchev, Todor Zhivkov, Antonín Novotný, Walter Ulbricht, Leonid Brezhnev, Nicolae Ceaușescu, George Papadopoulos, Marcelo Caetano, Gustáv Husák, Erich Honecker, Phaedon Gizikis, Wojciech Jaruzelski, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, Slobodan Milošević and Alexander Lukashenko, to name just a few European dictators, many of them responsible for millions of deaths. It is likewise no coincidence that many European countries have been dictatorships for most of the 20th century — Portugal until 1974 (fascist dictatorship), Spain until 1982 (fascist dictatorship), Greece until 1974 (military dictatorship), East Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine until 1989-1991 (communist dictatorship), Belarus until the present day (communist dictatorship). The French fifth republic, which is its constitutional arrangement to its present day, came into being in a 1958 coup by General Charles de Gaulle. Arguably, none of European Union member states have been democracies since having joined the European Union — since the EU’s law-making body, the European Commission, is unelected. That would mean that most of the European Union member states have either never been democracies, or have only been democracies for 10–20 years of their entire history. Over the same historical period, the USA has remained a democracy — it has had no dictators, let alone ones who murdered millions of its own citizens.

It is precisely an armed people which has stopped a mad dictator taking over the U.S. and its army and committing the kinds of atrocities European dictators have committed. A Hitler coming to power in America would either be assassinated, or face an armed rebellion, by his own people. There are no such safeguards in Europe.

While America has had dozens of people murder dozens of their fellow citizens over the past 200 years, Europe has had dozens of people murder millions of their fellow citizens (but Europe, too, has had its share of Breiviks, IRAs, ETAs, Brigade Rosses, etc. despite gun control laws).

The only way to control gun violence is with a body empowered to protect people agains such armed violence. But such a body must itself be armed. And that always brings up the question — quis custodiet ipsos custodes? What if the protectors themselves misbehave and go on a shooting rampage? We must then have armed protectors from armed protectors. The pyramid of protectors must either have a narrow top — like in Europe — or a wide one — as in America. The question of who is to be trusted to be the ultimate protector against murder by armed psychopaths — the armed people or the head of state in charge of a standing army — is analogous to who should be trusted to decide who should govern the country — the people or the head of state.

You only have the rights you can enforce and defend. The law without am effective, impartial, honest, non-corrupt, judiciary, is a dead letter. So is democracy without an armed population.

Fighting the Climate Change

I was reading this article in the Guardian where the authors wrote

Greenpeace said Heaton-Harris was one of a number of Tory politicians they secretly filmed in an attempt to assess whether the government was rowing back on its commitments to combat climate change.

Just think for a moment what the above quote is saying so its true meaning sinks in. “The government was rowing back on its commitments to combat climate change.”

What would you think of the authors if they had instead written “King Canute is rowing back on his commitment to combat the tide causing water levels to go up and down.”? Or “the Government is rowing back on its commitment to make the Earth cool by 2 degrees C.” Or “the Government is rowing back on its commitment to cause the global rainfall to decrease by 5 inches a year.”

You’d think they were obviously nuts. Surely we would all think they were obviously nuts. Wouldn’t we?

Yet this is, in essence, exactly what people like Greenpeace and other “Anthropogenic Global Warming” Chicken Littles claim to be proposing.

They note that if we simply carry on living normally, climate will change. Which of course it will — climate always has changed and it always will. But these people do not like the way they say the climate is changing. So they are saying — we must do something about it. The Government must do something about it. The Government must force all the rest of us to make drastic changes to our way of life, to take urgent action. And to what end? They claim: to cause the world temperatures to drop by a few degrees (compared to what they would be if we just carried on living normally).

So if thinking the Government has the duty to cause the Earth to cool by 2 degrees C is obviously nuts, why does not everybody think global warming alarmists (who claim to want precisely that) are also obviously nuts?

Obama’s Second Term

Over the course of the last century, every country, one by one, has been sliding inexorably into socialism. The left, once in power, create more public sector jobs and increase the welfare state, thus increasing the size of their clientele of captive voters. Much like Roman patricians before them, they pay for the bread and circuses of their clienta by exploiting their slaves, and thus buying the votes needed to keep them in high office. In Ancient Rome, slave ownership was in private hands and relatively few were enslaved; today, it has been nationalized and we are all slaves — all those of us making an honest living, at any rate.

Every country eventually reaches the tipping point: the point where the number of various parasites exceeds the number of those in honest work. At that point, the left becomes permanently enthroned and eats the state from within. The rich are soaked until they run out of money, then the upper middle classes, then the middle classes, and so on, until there is no one left to milk and the whole nation becomes impoverished. It becoming impossible to have a decent existence for anyone, those in power grant perks to themselves and their friends in the name of “helping the vulnerable” in order that they, at least, can continue a decent existence. The country descends into being a corrupt banana republic, various mafias take over, sometimes in competition, more often in collaboration with those formally in “government”. This is a state from which no such state has historically yet recovered. Changes of government, revolutions and coup d’etats are tried, but none results in any improvement. Socialism inevitably leads to being a banana republic, and the banana republic is a deathly stable state from which there is no escape.

Ironically, yesterday’s U.S. Presidential election shows that America, too, has now reached the tipping point. Obama won because he won Ohio, and he won Ohio because he supports the “bailout” of the auto industry — or, to call it more bluntly, because he bought the votes of the corporate welfare recipients in the automotive industry. No honest politician can compete with such wholesale bribery.

America, a relatively young state created in 1776 on libertarian ideals, at least America as we know it, as “the land of the free”, is no more. It, too, has chosen to join the not-so-exclusive clubs of countries on the road to permanent socialism, bankruptcy, poverty, squallor and corruption.

So was America special and free because its people are special, or merely because it was young? Most states start off being freer than what they eventually become. The “left” (or the “corrupt”, as they were known before the term “socialism” was invented) take some time to consolidate their grip on power. And America, up to now, had not yet had the time for its left to do so, as had its European counterparts.

Repeat after me … Barroso Broz Barroso Broz Barroso Barroso Broz Bros Barroso Barroso

Hail hemperor of the non-himperial hempire!

The Global Financial Crisis Misnomer

The saying goes that the Lord Privy Seal is neither a lord, nor a privy, nor a seal. In the same way, the Global Financial Crisis is neither global, nor financial, nor a crisis. It should more properly be called the new Normal of the Western Socialist Experiment. For the root of the problems we are experiencing are not in finance but in socialism, they are not global, but those of the West, and they are not a crisis, but the norm — for countries who adopt socialism.

Quote of the Day

“The authority of the legislator demands that laws are put in force, not that they are challenged by the people in referenda.”

Danilo Türk, President and head of state of Slovenia

Just Schools

‘The just school is characterised as a political institution that is non-selective and compulsory. [This means it is] comprehensive in admission and compulsory in membership … The just school provides a physical space where children are removed from the influence of their parents … Parents can be more relaxed about the time they spend with their child when they know that the state requires the majority of the child’s time to be spent in a political institution … I argue that the special principle of justice and the just school trumps certain kinds of parents’ rights of school choice … A conception of justice that includes children must include a conception of the just school.’

So the Campaign for Real Education quotes the writings of a certain Dr Philip Cook of Leicester University.

Translated into simple English I think this means: the society we approve of must include institutions which children are forced to attend, against their wishes, and against the wishes of their parents if need be, where children are forced to spend the majority of their time, where they are removed from their parents’ upbringing, where they are forced to mingle with those of lower ability and where they are brainwashed.

It sounds a lot like jail, not school, to me. Except that unlike children, we’re not allowed to brainwash prisoners, of course. They have human rights. And we don’t need to brainwash them. Thieves and thugs are, more than likely, of their nature, socialists already.

Of course, we all knew this is what the champagne socialist political class has been up to. What is amazing and new is that someone is saying it so openly and brazenly.