Guns, Germs, and Feelz

[Charlie T Waite]

In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, geographer Jared Diamond attempts to explain why Eurasian civilizations have survived and triumphed over those lost to history.  I wonder whether a future sociologist might one day sum up Western civilization's demise as the natural consequence of Guns, Germs, and Feelz, or rather, how hysterical fear-mongering over self-defense and microorganisms and a new world order based on feelings ended up dooming the West.  

At the end of July, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives sent a letter to Rare Breed Trigger notifying the Florida company that the ATF had classified its FRT-15 trigger, a drop-in trigger for an AR-15 rifle that speeds up the rate of fire, as a machine gun under the National Firearms Act and demanding that the company cease all sales.  Rare Breed is fighting the ATF's action, but that hasn't reduced the federal agency's power to turn law-abiding gun-makers and gun-owners into criminals overnight through bureaucratic decree.  

When certain words are not useful to the political left's agenda, the meanings of those words are simply changed to fit the agenda.  In the left's war against personal ownership of firearms, the ATF empowered itself with the barely checked authority to redefine what a "machine gun" is.  By fiat, unelected cubicle kings have deemed a trigger a "machine gun."  A pistol is a machine and a gun, too.  How long before the ATF decides that new wordplay epiphanies empower it to criminalize the Second Amendment more broadly?

Of all the mass delusions that have been perpetrated upon the American people, the government's decades-long mission to terrify the public from owning firearms is the most dangerous.  Because control ultimately depends upon the threat of force, no person can be free when government alone is armed.  This used to be common knowledge in the United States.  It was understood broadly across the political spectrum that private gun ownership is instrumental in preserving liberty.  Progressive Teddy Roosevelt bemoaned the decline of citizen-shooters and actively encouraged schoolboys to practice with their rifles and men of all classes to be good shots.  "The first step" in preserving peace, he argued, "is to teach men to shoot!"

It is even more important for women to know how to shoot.  As a saying in my neck of the woods goes, "God created men, but Sam Colt made them equal."  Nothing puts a 95-pound woman on an equal plane with her 250-pound male attacker faster than a revolver, unless she's kept that holstered at her side so that she can aim her rifle at whoever might threaten her life.

In a truly free society, everyone would be armed and capable of defending himself and his loved ones should the moment arise.  Guns are tools, nothing more.  They have no more innate will than a pair of scissors lying on the table, and just as that pair of scissors is harmless until someone decides to use it to stab another, a gun is a paperweight until it's not.  Teaching people to be afraid of firearms has taught Americans both to be afraid of defending themselves and to depend solely upon bureaucrats from agencies like the ATF to preserve their lives.  Both lessons are deadly. 

If Americans needed further proof that the natural right to self-preservation is toothless without the right to own weapons for one's defense, the Taliban gave another tutorial by promptly scooping up guns from the civilian population the day after seizing power in Kabul while insisting that "people no longer need them for personal protection."  A Taliban official promised that "weapons for personal safety" are unnecessary since "innocent civilians" have nothing to fear.  The Taliban are just putting into practice a common principle held by leftists holding power throughout the world — that law-abiding "innocents" should be prevented from owning weapons to protect themselves from the not-so-innocent who wish them harm.  It's remarkable that at the same time the federal government has redefined lawful Americans who question the legitimacy of the 2020 election or government vaccine mandates as potential "domestic violent extremists" on par with the Taliban, it is Democrats' gun control policies the Taliban imitate.  When the meanings of words are subordinated to the quest for power, though, it gets awfully confusing to remember who the "innocents" and "terrorists" are.

How fast do things go south when ordinary citizens have no effective means of defending themselves from government psychosis?  Just look at New Zealand and Australia, "free" nations with strict gun control that are currently using their militaries to enforce lockdown orders that have essentially placed everyone under house arrest "for his own good."  If people can be stripped of their liberties to live and work as they see fit for a virus that is almost entirely harmless for most people in good health, exactly what potential threat can a well-armed government not use to justify enslavement?  There's no shortage of invisible pathogens in the world for those in power to declare as "public enemy number one" requiring their citizens' absolute obedience, but why stop there?  People die from snakebites, car accidents, and elevated heart rates from unsanctioned free will all the time.  If anything that increases the risk of death sufficiently justifies loss of freedom then totalitarian government is the only threat allowed to exist.  

The pictures of Kiwis and Aussies dealing with such draconian measures are horrifying.  With Dementia Joe and the Commiecrats forcing Americans to take experimental shots and imposing harsher and more punitive sanctions against those who will not submit to the demands of the ATF's friends in the CDC, NIH, and FDA, it's clear that the only thing stopping the D.C. dictators and their state enforcers from following suit, shutting down interstate travel, and loading up half the population into internment camps for medical isolation and re-education is the reality that Americans are still armed to the teeth.  As much as President Braindead and similarly dimwitted knuckle-draggers such as the honey-potted Congressman Swalwell believe that the government's nuclear arsenal will ensure the public's eventual submission to their will, old Sam Colt and his equality-ensuring six-shooter still give them pause.

The U.S. military has around 4.5 million firearms in its arsenal (minus what General "White Rage" and defense secretary "MAGA Purge" just handed the Taliban free of charge).  Police in the United States have another million.  Patriotic free American citizens, however, have 400 million firearms stored away for a rainy day.  And for those in New Zealand, Australia, France, and elsewhere who are bombarded with so much propaganda that they can no longer believe the weather with their own eyes, there's no question from an American's perspective that throughout the West, it's raining.

Ben Shapiro is fond of reminding leftists that "facts don't care about your feelings," but for the political left now dominating Western civilization, their feelings just don't care about any facts.  It doesn't matter how ineffective masks or vaccines might be.  It doesn't matter that opiate overdoses and suicides have skyrocketed from national lockdowns that have done next to nothing to stem the transmissibility of the Wuhan Virus.  Control is the name of the game.  It always is.  It was good enough for authoritarians of the 20th century, and it is all that matters for the authoritarians taking over the 21st.  And if Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, Castro, and Mao didn't teach Westerners why gun control always precedes total control, then the Taliban just gave the slow learners a timely lesson.

The political left has weaponized fear and feelings to take over the world.  As always, only the well-armed rabble are left to hold the line.