I guess we'll see...

...if this comment remains where I submitted it.  Via Arctic Patriot, I found this article, and posted the following to this followup post.  My skepticim that it may not remain, is because of this tidbit on the destination blog:

CeaseFire Oregon, eh?  Set expectations to low, check hip-waders, and see.  Smart money is on either talking-point vitriol (which is a Brady Bunch staple) or marginalization-through-avoidance (which is really their smartest play here).

Anyway, here's what I said.

Greetings. I happened across this thread somewhat by chance, and apparently missed the first call for input.

Please do forgive me if I do not expect much of consequence to come from this, but here goes anyway.

Two articles I published a couple of summers ago articulate the basic way of looking at the topic:

Victim disarmers still sellin' the snake oil

'Living like that'

The most significant points, therein, are these:

- The core issue is not statistical, but moral, and does not lend itself to shades of gray. See here for a well-articulated description of how liberty is either for everybody, or it is for nobody. I am uninterested in statistics; no amount of numerical support is going to suddenly make it okay to enforce the will of a mob upon even a single individual who has not harmed anyone.

- Anyone who is interested or swayed by statistics must acknowledge the most significant statistic of all, which is: the state is responsible for far more murder, violence, theft, corruption, and generalized aggression than its peasants--by orders of magnitude. In the twentieth century alone, governments murdered more of their own citizens than were accounted for in all of the military wars of the same period. This number is at least in the tens of millions, and some counts place it in the hundreds of millions. To wit: You wanna save "just one life"? I'll start taking you seriously when you disarm the government, completely. Until then, ya sound like a buffoon.

- And finally, there is the question of history and precedent. Put simply: what, exactly, is it that any new law is going to accomplish, that the thousands of laws that came before it have failed to accomplish? "Gun control" fails to live up to its claims, every time, and those who continue to beat the drum despite this are operating on more the basis of a religious faith than any rational handle on history.

Some of us would actually like to try something, you know, different, such as removing the state's claim of a monopoly on force. We tried giving 'em everything. All they did was murder some people and prevent others from defending themselves.

In closing, this more recent article gets right at the point of the "divide" between those who want liberty and those who find a way to rationalize mob rule:

From the 'Wish I'd Said That' files

There you go: for your consideration. Again, I don't expect much to come from it; I've encountered the self-proclaimed open-minded for my entire adult life, and the strongest lesson I've learned from that is that people who go to the trouble to make the claim that they are "reasonable", or "open-minded", or "willing to compromise", or any number of other telltale phrases...usually are not at all.

That's okay. I'm not "reasonable" about this either. "Gun control" is a moral claim on the lives of people who have hurt no one, including me. Nobody should be surprised if its victims treat that claim accordingly.

...aaand, I guess we'll see.