The Root Cause of Gun Control
Less than one week after an empty shell of a man shot dozens of innocent people in Christchurch, New Zealand, that country’s prime minister has announced a ban on “military-style semi-automatic and assault rifles in tough new gun laws.”
“Tough new gun laws” is the sort of phraseology the progressive media uses to suggest a brave leader’s no-nonsense approach to justice, thereby masking the true nature of Prime Minister Ardern’s knee-jerk reaction. For what this law and its precipitous, drunken rush to passage really indicate is not courage or toughness, but rather lawless hysteria, the response mode of people so morally unhinged by immoderate fear that they would stampede their own mothers to escape a troubling shadow.
One might object to my reading and say that what New Zealand’s government is really revealing is a complete disregard and disdain for two essential pillars of modern liberty, namely property rights and the right of self-preservation. In fact, I think these two interpretations are not only compatible, but actually two facets of the same response. For this is the essence of the progressive mind: a tyrannical disregard for the lives and liberty of other human beings, motivated by the lawless hysteria of the perpetually frightened. What is a progressive, in the end, but a person so afraid of life and its inherent risks, challenges, and imperfections, that he would stop at nothing — literally nothing, as history proves — to escape his terror of living among other human beings?
Scratch a progressive totalitarian soul, find a person who feels pathologically weak and helpless. Hence the infinite capacity for oppressive cruelty. (In this regard, the leading progressive thinker is different from the New Zealand mass shooter only in the scope of his vision and the comprehensiveness of his intentions.) The progressive’s first instinct, his unthinking reaction, when he feels humanity creeping up at him — and he always perceives humanity as a creeping ooze — is to push down hard and climb on top.
A progressive is a coward of existential proportions. He dreams in a never-ending nightmare world, trapped amid an undulating mass of imperfection and unpredictability, with his only hope of survival being to clamber desperately atop the mass and subdue it before it swallows him. In his waking life, he calls this mass “the People,” and claims his goal is to care for the mass, and his motivation love. This mask of humanitarianism, too — the pretense of pity barely covering the sweaty face of frightened hatred — is part of his breathless effort to subdue and destroy the oozing mass of his nightmare before it annihilates him.
To a lover of liberty — that is, one who is not afraid to live as an individual among others — the frightening prospect is a world in which men are unable to govern, defend, and protect themselves. For progressives, that very world, i.e., a world of free men, is the source of their greatest dread.