now.howstuffworks.com offers readers Thought Experiment: What Would a World Without Guns Be Like? If you or I were to write that piece we’d simply look back in history, scanning the scene before AD 1000 when the Chinese invented firearms. Or a few hundreds year hence, before Sam Colt made men equal.
We’d quickly conclude that life sucked for the average human. The strong preyed upon the weak without remorse. As they still do, only more so back then, when armies and/or armed thugs could murder or enslave less-well-armed or disarmed populations with impunity. As they still do, only more so back then.
But that’s not how HSW writer
The paper said around 11,000 more people were alive every year since guns had stopped working. What they hadn’t quantified yet was how many people died because of weapons like the boys outside (impact weapons) were wielding. Mrs. Robertson thought it must certainly be less. There were fewer homicides, fewer robberies and fewer assaults every year now . . .
Some thought without guns, the world would collapse back into feudalism. Other predictions like an unsustainable rise in the population hadn’t come true either, with only 11,000 more people each year. In fact, the biggest problem was what were they going to do with the millions of useless chunks of gun metal they were left with.
I haven’t checked any online legal databases, but I reckon Mr. Sager and reality have been divorced for some time. His thought experiment, steeped in progressive politics, is an exercise in wishful thinking. Nothing more and nothing less.
Our Constitutional republic is based on civilian firearms ownership. Remove firearms from the equation and power would once again concentrate from whence it came, from whom our forefathers wrested it: the government.
As the son of a Holocaust survivor whose disarmed family was slaughtered by agents of the state for the “crime” of being Jewish, I can think of nothing worse.
How Stuff Works should stick to vacuum cleaners.