“Those who would outlaw weapons,” the late L. Neil Smith wrote, “must first outlaw the knowledge of weapons. And those who would outlaw the knowledge of weapons must outlaw knowledge itself.”
Specifically, knowledge of things like engineering, machining, and chemistry. Guns are, at this point, simple examples of those arts and sciences. While it’s been improved in various ways over time, the “machine gun” has been around since 1884. There’s no way to get rid of it without making everyone on the planet much poorer because even amateur engineers, machinists, and chemists would all have to be killed, no new ones trained, and all texts related to those fields consigned to fire.
Nor are guns the only practical application of Smith’s maxim.
Those who want to outlaw drugs must first outlaw, among other things, chemistry and horticulture.
Those who want to outlaw strong cryptography and cryptocurrency must first outlaw, among other things, math and computer science.
If it was even possible to get rid of guns, drugs, and crypto — it isn’t, but if it was — the politicians who want to do so would have to figure out how to get us to give up everything modern, from the bicycle to the automobile to the microcomputer to the smart phone to most of the food we eat to accomplish their objective.
They’d have to outlaw Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), the set of fields that they’re constantly complaining not enough students are going into.
Are you willing to let them take us down that road into a world where roads would no longer exist? If not, it’s time to give up the fantasy of “gun control.”
— Thomas L. Knapp in ‘Gun Control’ Is a Call for Returning to the Stone Age
5 Responses
“Gun Control Is a Call for Returning to the Stone Age”
That’s the problem with these sorts, they ain’t got no stones.
Just to be clear, there are some folks out there who would be perfectly ok with returning to the Stone Age, and some of them are very vocal.
We all need to live in caves, eat grass and die in our teens to save the environment.
Them’s the ones. Many of the nature-boy types are really clueless. Militant and clueless is a bad combination.
“An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.” ~ Sun Tzu
It’s perhaps too simple, but in a world of sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs, the sheepdogs need the wolves to justify their existence and control of the sheep. In PoTD circles, we think of ourselves as the sheepdogs…but are we really? Big government is the actual sheepdog and seems to conveniently look the other way when the wolves (criminals) come. They take away arms from the sheep but have no real ability to do the same to the wolves since, by their very nature, they don’t obey the sheepdog edicts. Freedom-loving Americans are some fourth category, people trying to both free the sheep and fight the wolves in ways the sheepdog will not.