More modern samizdat art from the new media. This poster succinctly portrays the gun grabbers’ strategy of disarmament by a thousand cuts, or incremental confiscation. The strategy worked in England and Wales (and, one could argue, medieval Japan), but it’s not working in the United States. The current approach is to make guns costly and difficult or impossible to use without severe legal impediments. This is supposed to lead to reduced levels of gun ownership. When gun ownership drops to the point where it becomes politically ineffective, then wide scale confiscation becomes possible . . .
Until that point, incremental confiscation is the name of the game. This is done by expanding the classes of people prohibited from owning guns, incrementally increasing the kinds of guns that are prohibited (too big or too small, too effective, or not effective enough, or scary looking), and aggressively confiscating firearms from people when they or their guns become a member of one of the prohibited classes.
But in the United States, the gun culture has vigorously fought back by making guns more utilitarian through concealed carry laws, as well as enactment of castle doctrine and stand your ground laws. Gun confiscation can only be sold when defense of self and others is de-legitimized. But gun ownership is up, not down, and the total number of guns in the United States is now approaching 400 million, about double what it was 30 years ago.
At the same time, the murder rate has been cut in half, putting the lie to the central claim used to market gun prohibition: more guns = more crime. It turns out that guns either have little effect on crime, or as John Lott endeavored to show, more guns = less crime.
So the civilian disarmers are left trying to market blatant lies, such as “there is an epidemic of gun violence” or “semi-automatic assault rifles are the weapon of choice of criminals.” Both are demonstrably false.
The new media, as exemplified by the poster at the top, means the decidedly anti-gun mainstream media no longer have an oligopoly on the dissemination of information. That’s why they are losing.
©2015 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.
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