Previous

Contents

Next

What Really is Their Goal?
by Paul Koning
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

The current administration and its partners in Congress are putting an immense amount of effort into new gun restrictions. The question that isn't asked much is "why are they doing that?"

The claim is that this is an anti-crime measure—and specifically, an anti-massacre measure.

But in reality, that story does not stand up to scrutiny.

It's clear enough that the proposed laws won't cut back crime. For one thing, criminals don't obey laws, and for another, the proposed laws don't cover the sorts of weapons criminals use. For another, there is the well known fact that restrictions on normal humans owning firearms increase crime (as shown by John Lott among others).

But there is more. Look back over the past 50 years or so. Think of Federal government efforts that were marketed as anti-crime measures (never mind whether they worked or not). Were ANY of them pursued with the intensity, the level of propaganda, the sweeping support of the lapdog press, that this latest effort is? I don't think so, not even the properly maligned "war on drugs".

So what government goal is so terribly important to those in power that they are investing this much political capital into it? What makes it so critical that they push it harder than just about every other government program of the past half century? We know it can't be the prevention of crime—so what is it instead?

Was that worth reading?
Then why not: