Stopping Illegal Guns: Stopping GUNS or Stopping CRIME?

By John Longenecker

Week after week, I see articles from around the world about incoming illegal guns. Today, I read an article which wonders where they come from.

This is not even germane to the predicament, for it reflects a misunderstanding of the very nature of the problem, and therefore its straightforward solutions.

Many nations oppose weapons for oppressive reasons, not for reasons of justice or for keeping the peace. For many nations, keeping the peace is code for oppression, silencing opposition and delivering widespread, un-opposed murder. For them, guns in the hands of the people would mean justice, and not the kind they would appreciate.

In free nations, it’s getting closer to that, because it confuses the concept of illegal guns with lawful guns and lawful, righteous intention, and therefore confuses their respective purposes.

To frame the issues as if they are identical is a lie.

Specifically, lawful guns keep the peace, because governments cannot. Simply put, any government that keeps the peace will probably be an oppressive one — using force, of course, and, as is the case with New Orleans’ confiscation of lawful weapons in 2005 and the incoming National ID cards around the corner, it would be almost entirely because they cannot tell the good guys from the bad guys. (Supposedly.)

The people do a much better job of it than officials, and officials want the job of it, whether we approve or not. See the storm forming?

Usurping that authority of citizens to act in their own self-defense (in keeping the peace) puts the people on the path of dependency and oppression, a decisive and decisively anti-liberty, anti-American move.

Stopping the flow of incoming illegal weapons by trying to discover whence they come is approaching it from the wrong end. It is a distraction. A ruse.

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The objective is not to discover the source of illegal weapons first, but perhaps later. It’s smarter to think of why they are here at all. For, stopping their incentive would be the faster, more effective solution. Discouraging the need for illegal weapons specifically, meeting them where they are used.

What the illegal uses of weapons are, of course, the question. Where do we take it from there?

Actually, it’s quite easy to answer. Violent crime today is a result of the failure of the War On Poverty, the War On Drugs and the War On Crime and other failed auditions for the job of protecting us. These are examples of how officials fail when they try and take over what belongs to the individual to manage. This is not the mechanical issue officials might like to employ in interdiction, but a values issue each household should employ in defeating a market for the stuff. That was the mistake.

Since the thirties, un-American forces began setting brushfires in the minds of workers and the downtrodden. In the fifties, officials mustered support for outside foes, but in the sixties, that energy took a turn as they could use that energy to set more brushfires in the minds of teenagers, the angry and heartbroken. The objective was to muster the people to respond, but to direct that energy to distorted values to the detriment of the nation. The payday: increasing dependency by convincing the people to delegate more and more authority to officials.

Alright, so much for the history lesson.

Well, some people didn’t buy it. They’re called conservatives and libertarians. And naturally, we’re believed to be wrong, hostile to compassion and equality, and stubborn.

When it comes to owning defense weapons, not hunting weapons, all gun owners ask is the freedom to use lethal force when facing grave danger when first responders will not arrive in time. Of course, this means being free to carry that weapon wherever one goes. [Who can be against this? Whoever is against this, is opposed to our very values system and way of life, because individuals have the legal authority to stop a felony, or didn’t you already know this; certainly, they should be permitted to stop their own murder. Legally, this is so, but is being discouraged politically more and more every day through some of that redirection of values for official demagogic gain.]

This brings me to a short story as an aside: many, many times when I speak about using lethal force in facing grave danger, I hear the response, “You don’t have the say in who lives or dies.” Or worse, “You don’t know their real intentions.”

Well, to put it bluntly, yes I do. One certainly has a say in whether he or she is going to be murdered in the commission of a crime, don’t they, or don’t they?

That previous statement might be germane if it were a judicial proceeding and not a practical one, but in self-defense, the objective is not to kill the aggressor who puts you in immediate grave danger, but to stop them, a different concept. If, in your mind, stopping them immediately takes killing them – and there are many situations where this would be legally so – then one has to be resolved to choose themselves over the criminal.

The idea is that if a victim is so generous as to refuse to shoot sufficiently to stop the criminal using lethal force, it might turn out that it was a horrible mistake if the aggression proves to be not only life-threatening, but fatal. It is equally true on the subject of knowing the mind of the aggressor: in California, as in many states, mind-reading is not a requirement of the law; all that is required is the reasonable belief that one’s life is in grave danger under the given circumstances.

Would you liberals reserve that right for yourselves? Or, would you surrender or wait because you don’t know what’s on the aggressor’s mind?

Crime is a completed act made possible by any combination of surprise, opportunity and lack of sufficient resistance. The question is not really who has the right, but who has the values system and the courage to act in preventing what he reasonably believes to be his own, impending murder.

Americans must re-discover that courage politically. The War On Crime is not going to do it for you and your household.

If you’re going to worry about guns in the streets, the best solution is to adopt the attitude that the individual is the first line of defense, in personal legal authority, in advantageous placement of the moment, and in will or resolve.

I’d prefer to see every good person armed rather than confiscating those arms and never, ever getting the guns out of the hands of the thugs.

And you know something: officials know very well they’ll never get guns out of the hands of criminals.

Interference with this is to act to the detriment of the nation on one of those misdirected values of the sixties. The solution is to return to the values of even longer ago and to meet the aggressive illegal incoming weapons in society with a very legal, already-here weapon in the hands of the person who refuses to be the victim. The idea is not to try and stop weapons from getting into the country, but to arm the country for herself to meet them where they do the most damage to us, one-on-one.

Sever the opportunity (unanswered, armed violent crime), and you dissolve the need.

Perhaps the thugs will come to the same conclusion the Japanese did in World War II: after attacking Pearl Harbor, as they later reported, they chose not to attack our mainland because of… get this… wait for it.. too many guns. I believe the translation was, “There’s a rifle behind every blade of grass.”

I guess it works, huh? It works one-on-one, too, in two-thirds of the nation.

And that’s not bad for the country, it’s good for the country.

John Longenecker’s book, Transfer of Wealth: The Case For Nationwide Concealed Carry is in its Second Edition and it would make a great gift for the non-gun owner. You can purchase his book at Transfer of Wealth. You can also read other articles by John Longenecker here.