Posted on 09/14/2014 5:01:15 PM PDT by marktwain
Ultimately, a civilized society must disarm its citizenry if it is to have a modicum of domestic tranquillity of the kind enjoyed in sister democracies like Canada and Britain. Given the frontier history and individualist ideology of the United States, however, this will not come easily. It certainly cannot be done radically. It will probably take one, maybe two generations. It might be 50 years before the United States gets to where Britain is today.The column came to mind because even the Bloomberg funded Moms Demand Aciton has decided to step away from the idiotic "Assault Weapon Ban" for much the same reasons that Charles Krauthammer mentioned:
Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic -- purely symbolic -- move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation. Its purpose is to spark debate, highlight the issue, make the case that the arms race between criminals and citizens is as dangerous as it is pointless.
De-escalation begins with a change in mentality. And that change in mentality starts with the symbolic yielding of certain types of weapons. The real steps, like the banning of handguns, will never occur unless this one is taken first, and even then not for decades.
While many gun control groups still officially support the assault weapons ban — "we haven't abandoned the issue," as Watts said — they're no longer actively fighting for it.Krauthammer has changed his thought a little bit since then. This is from his column "The roots of mass murder" published in December of 2012:
I have no problem in principle with gun control. Congress enacted (and I supported) an assault weapons ban in 1994. The problem was: It didn’t work. (So concluded a University of Pennsylvania study commissioned by the Justice Department.) The reason is simple. Unless you are prepared to confiscate all existing firearms, disarm the citizenry and repeal the Second Amendment, it’s almost impossible to craft a law that will be effective.But Charles has never really explained why he thinks that gun bans are necessary for domestic tranquility. They have never reduced the homicide rate anywhere else. The homicide rate in England increased with increasing gun control, including homicide with guns. Nowhere have gun bans been shown to decrease homicide rates. The closest place is Australia, where a massive, intrusive, gun control scheme was pushed onto the public in a rush after a mass shooting in 1996. The legislation had been planned in advance, just waiting for the right trigger.
“An armed society is a polite society.”
The issue is certainly not helped by wild media sensationalism. The Assault Weapons ban he cites is a case in point. Statistically these are among the least abused and safest guns out there, whose portion of the total crime scenario has decreased with popularity, not increased. Surely this must suggest something other than a "plague" to any objective thinker.
And yet even in his original point it was clear that social engineering, i.e. "domestic tranquility", was the driving motivation, yet the examples he gave do not serve to support that goal. Is it a net gain for a society if gun-related crime is down yet other violent crime skyrockets? There is no sign that he has considered this. Curing a patient's depression with a drug that causes heart attacks is not a net gain. I wish I could be confident that he has weighed this but I'm not.
Bump
After Sandy Hook, Obama introduced an initiative to reduce gun violence. He laid out a litany of tragedies: the children of Newtown, the moviegoers of Aurora, Colo. But he did not mention gun violence among black men.
If his goal was to stop gun-related deaths, why would Obama completely ignore the demographic that represents a full 50% of them?
Perhaps if Krauthammer was able to defend himself he might more easily see the wisdom in letting his fellow citizens defend themselves
Gun bans, based on the belief that men and governments are intrinsically good.
I think it was Clint Eastwood who said something like, turning your gun in to authorities is like castrating yourself because you think your neighbors have too many kids.
Yes, there should be no means for the citizens to oppose a tyrannical government. There have never been tyrannical governments so why are these yahoos clinging to their guns anyway?
Removal of the Second Amendment would in no way contradict this truth. Those of us who recognize the truth WILL NOT BE DISARMED.
Progressives operate under the delusion that rule by majority would create a utopia. Our Founders recognized how false this notion is and went to great lengths to prevent it.
Quite to the contrary, I believe that Krauthammer is still comfortable with his conclusion. Let's face it, Krauthammer is a smart guy but only rarely a conservative.
Fortunately I will never live to see the day when America is disarmed.
That's because it is the category in which they reside.
A good US history professor many years ago described western philosophies with a small matrix of “realism” and “idealism” on one side, and “optimism” and “pessimism” on the other.
For example, after 1500 years of war in Europe, the Europeans are exhausted of idealism and optimism; so their philosophies are realistic and pessimistic. “Things will go on like they are today, gradually getting worse.”
The majority of Americans, however, have the realism and optimism of the frontier. “With hard work we can make our lives and those of our posterity better.”
However, mostly limited to New England, there is a strong current of just the opposite point of view: idealistic pessimism. The craving of the “New Jerusalem” where the “elect” will live and rule over others.
But here is also a great irony. Their idealism has the fundamental belief that “people are inherently good”. But from this is extrapolated that “government is inherently good as well, so the more government, the better.”
The flip side of this is “Frontier libertarianism”, that embraces the idea that “people are inherently bad, and so is any government”; at least enough so that the only agreements that exist are temporary handshake agreements between people who trust each other, up to a point.
But the founding fathers had a different idea. Believing in the social contract, but knowing that there are both good men and bad men and both, and that it can be hard to tell them apart. So they concluded *not* that people are inherently “good” or “bad”, but that they are inherently *weak*.
They knew that the ink on the constitution, and the law, would be barely dry before people would consider ways of avoiding and evading it. Which is why there are such a large number of checks and balances, of competing human interests, in our constitution.
And in this is the answer to our society, and Charles Krauthammer.
“Ultimately, a civilized society must disarm its citizenry if it is to have a modicum of domestic tranquillity of the kind enjoyed in sister democracies like Canada and Britain.”
Seen through eyes that think that people are inherently good, this would make sense, that a good government made up of good people, can take away guns that can make good people do bad things.
And it even “half” makes sense if all people are inherently bad. This is a chaos theory, that guns create chaos because bad people will inevitably misuse them.
But it makes NO sense if people are inherently weak. If they live under the social contract, enforced by all, in defense of the weak good people, and against the weak bad people, guns are an absolute necessity.
The founding fathers had the right idea.
Charles Krauthammer is a member of the Beltway chattering class who once worked for Walter Mondale. He’s the token “conservative” trotted out in D.C. when there’s a need to appear “fair and balanced” but not offend the media by having a real conservative present.
Who is the US history professor- you are parsing, and from what University?
That depends on how one defines the term. In Krauthammers case it means the absence of any possible resistance to the State.
His name was James Robert Kearney III. He taught History at Arizona State for 30 years. He passed away in 2006.
No idea why you would want to know that.
Just wondering. Thanks, yefragetuwrabrumuy.
>>It will probably take one, maybe two generations. It might be 50 years before the United States gets to where Britain is today.<<
Current climate in the U.S. today...yea, I’d say it’ll be at least 50 years.
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