George Rebane

The Union reports on the efforts of Amanda and Nick Wilcox of Penn Valley.  This couple is working for the passage of AB962, the assembly bill seeking to add further constraints to the sale of handgun ammunition.  In a recent RR post I wrote –

Our Founders understood that governments operate on the edge of evil.  Therefore they wrote into our Constitution the provisions by which our new government would always remain responsive to its citizens, not by the goodwill of honorable and incorruptible politicians, but by the direct means of armed revolt when our leaders finally step over that edge.  The existence of this desperate but necessary redress has not escaped the elites who are forever dedicated to constraining our behavior to fit into their template of a politically correct Homo Perfectus.

Last year a similar bill AB2062 was defeated, and AB962 is this year’s indefatigable follow-on.

What makes the newspaper’s report a bit sad is the ignorance of this good-hearted couple in their belief that AB962 is only a limited, single-purposed prescription to stop gun use for criminal activities, and by people who are already proscribed from using firearms. They, along with their equally simple compatriots, think that passing another liberty limiting law, on top of those already not being enforced, will this time improve things.  I choose to believe the pair is not practicing perfidy – as are the leftwing politicians in Congress – in their seemingly innocent and grief motivated support of incremental gun control.

Nevertheless, there is a class of history-deprived people who sincerely believe that if the state owned all guns suitable for armed resistance against it, then we would enter a golden age free of violence.  History has shown the opposite – for it is at that point the state becomes the greatest robber and killer of its own citizens, far surpassing any conceivable criminal activity that preceded confiscation (see Death By Government here and here).  Our President already has a plan for launching a paramilitary 'Civilian National Security Force' to favorably rival the power of our military.

Gun controllers are quick to point out that other western countries, where guns have essentially been confiscated, don’t seem to be suffering from such egregious behavior by their respective governments.  What they fail to account for is the historical role of the United States as the de facto defender of human rights and the exemplar of limited government.  We have a history, albeit irregular, of intervening when a foreign government starts persecuting its people so as to counter our interests in dealing with that country.  If American citizens finally surrender their guns, the world will change forever.