Originally published at VolkStudio Blog. You can comment here or there.
Does anyone really need old family snapshots? Pictures of your child as a baby, or of your grandparents on their honeymoon have no monetary worth and nearly no practical value. What can you do with them, besides looking every few years. Would you be OK with government taking away by an arbitrary decree?
We don’t need apples. Pears are close enough and can be used in the same recipes. Would you be OK with apple growing being prohibited?
Nobody needs to read Jonothan Swift. Should the books be destroyed for their supposed advocacy of cannibalism?
When we are robbed of snapshots, apples or books, we are robbed of more than sentimental value — we are robbed of free choice! Applied to guns, the claim that we don’t need them — though faulty in itself — is first and foremost ethically offensive to the core! To have a master decide if you may have a pear but not an apple, or a smoothbore shotgun instead of a rifle, or any other personal aspect of your life is the very definition of slavery. It’s the major component in learned helplessness. When our government officials behave as domestic abusers, it’s time to start wondering why.
The gun banners are right on one thing: weapons are a special case, just not the way they think. I may have a gun that I do not need. It could be less than a wallhanger, just something taking up space in the attic. But that lack of purpose goes away the second somebody wants to rob me of it — defending against brigandage becomes that gun’s primary purpose.