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 THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 364, April 23, 2006 We have a winner!
But The Railroads Are Running On Time!
Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise You can tell that a civilzation is just about finished when it begins punishing activities on the basis, not of their actual criminality—who got hurt and how badly—but of their political correctness. Or lack thereof. A fairly egregious case in point is that of a teenager convicted of careless driving, who managed to kill two of his friends late last year and, after sufficient tears and abject apologies, got a fine this week and probation. Oh, yeah, and he won't be able to drive a car again. Until he's 18. On the other hand, another teenager had photos made of himself with a lot of guns (he had permission from his parents to do it) and posted them on MySpace, that latest menace (after video arcades in the 80s and soft drinks in the 90s) to Stepfordian peace and order in the suburbs. It seems that, no longer content to oppress children in the dungeons—oops, I mean classrooms—taxpayers are forced to provide them with, the public school system has begun prowling the Internet for signs of wrongthink. It's just another reason that the school system should be abolished, its buildings razed to the ground so that not one stone is left standing upon another, and salt sown on the ruins. For nothing more than the "crime" of exercising his Constitutional right to own and carry weapons, this poor kid is getting the book thrown at him by the mass media (what else would you expect?), his school (in fact, this is a valuable lesson for him and for all of us), the state government (disobeying its own highest law), and the feds, even though the law he's supposed to have broken specifically allows for parental permission to have and use (and presumably be seen with) guns. Partly this is happening because the mass media continue willfully to misunderstand what occurred at Columbine High School and draw all the wrong lessons from it. They will gleefully fuck this boy's life up beyond recognition simply because it lets them extend their inhumane and illegal policy of victim disarmament—these are the same moral retards who would rather see a woman raped in an alley and strangled with her own pantyhose than see her with a gun in her hand—to children. For the benefit of the morons in government and media who missed the point the first hundred times, Columbine happened not because there were too many guns there that day, but because there were too few. But the "findings" of the kangaroos-in-charge in the present case are intended to have far-reaching consequences. The first and most obvious is that some prosecutor clearly expects the act of suppressing a teenager's fundamental rights—never forget how terrified suburban liberals have become of their own children—to advance his career significantly. I'm strongly reminded of a somewhat similar case, a few years ago, when a vicious female prosecutor in another western state railroaded a small handful of young people into prison because they ... well now, I'm not really sure what the "because" is, here. I know one of them, and to this day, even he doesn't know what crime—if any—he committed. Shades of Martha Stewart. At the time, it appeared that he and his friends were convicted of teaching each other to shoot—in short, of breaking a law that doesn't exist. Nonetheless, they were given a catchily scary name by the round-heeled press, and bundled off to the slammer, while the prosecutor rode her victims' broken backs straight into the governor's mansion. Contrary to what the Founders intended, law, to cops, politicians, and other parasites these days, is whatever they make up as they go along. But there's a longer-term object here that the enemies of liberty are pursuing. If we can't put guns in our children's hands, if we can't teach them to use them safely and effectively, then what the media delight in calling the "gun culture"—meaning those who think the Bill of Rights is important—is doomed to extinction. Several years ago, I coined an appropriate phrase for the phenomenon: cultural genocide. Around about the same time, I also said that those who would outlaw weapons must begin by outlawing knowledge of weapons, and those who would outlaw knowledge of weapons must finally outlaw knowledge itself. The public school system—a socialist enterprise that can't seem to teach kids to read, write, or even count, but can shake them down, sample their body fluids, rifle their lockers, rummage through their purses, briefcases, and bookbags, and spy on them cybernetically on MySpace—have made a good start on outlawing knowledge itself, I think. Don't you?
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