Good article.
http://www.press-citizen.com/article...tually-pro-gun
Here is is, so you don't have to link.
Not all gun control advocates oppose private ownership of firearms. But plenty of them insist that only police and military personnel should be allowed to carry guns, and that guns are bad by definition.
Many people declare that in an ideal world, no private person would own a gun, even if they admit that such a radical solution would be difficult to implement. Many insist that abolishing private ownership of guns should at least be the long-term objective.
I’ve heard it posited that my owning a firearm constitutes a public danger even if I have no nefarious intent. The reasoning goes that even if I never use a gun to commit crime, my gun might fall into the hands of a criminal, who might shoot or threaten someone with it — and thus the public’s right to safety trumps my right to own a gun.
I’ve even heard the argument that gun owners, simply by owning guns, make some people afraid, and people have a right not to be afraid.
In a recent column in The Des Moines Register, the odious Donald Kaul demanded that the government “declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal.” He added, “If some people refused to give up their guns, that ‘prying the guns from their cold, dead hands’ thing works for me.”
Those who take such positions are not anti-gun. They’re pro-gun. They just want the keeping and bearing of arms restricted to a specially empowered élite: an élite that will act on their behalf to disarm me!
Who will take my gun? Those who demand that I be disarmed won’t risk their own skins to do it, of course: they’ll send goons. Call them police officers, call them soldiers, call them “lawful authority,” call them whatever: if they threaten or initiate armed force against peaceable people at your bidding, they are your hired thugs.
How will they disarm me? Why, by shooting me, if I don’t give up my gun voluntarily! They’ll have to have guns — and a lot of them — in order to take guns away from all the people the government doesn’t think should have them.
I insist that I have a right — an unalienable right, a God-given right if you prefer — to protect myself and my family, with deadly force if necessary. If the government takes away my wherewithal to do so, it deprives me of that natural right — and makes me a slave.
Those who say I have no right to keep and bear arms are advocating a soft form of slavery — which, we must admit, many people approve of. Face it: Liberty isn’t easy. Liberty implies some self-reliance, some responsibilities, which many people find daunting.
Liberty, and citizenship, require that we trust our neighbors to do right. If they do wrong, they’ll have to be stopped, but if they’re not breaking legs, picking pockets or committing fraud, we must assume they’re not going to do those things. Should I, or you, or anyone, be punished or restrained or disarmed — or shot dead — for something that we might do, that we could do, that we might conceivably be thinking about doing?
If the government attempts confiscation of firearms, there will be bloodshed: a lot of it. Those who advocate confiscation will of course stand well out of the line of fire — cheering the government on, in these life-saving operations, and blissfully refusing to see the irony. Or perhaps, like Kaul and others, they’ll justify it on the grounds that people like me simply need killing.
To some, “gun control” means they get to control me — with guns.