Motus Mentis

I haven’t linked to Fred Reed in a while, but he continues to do what he does best: writing plain common sense. His latest, from the first of this month, is about gun control. Excerpts:

The two most heavily armed countries in the world are (still, I think) Israel and Switzerland. In Switzerland, men of military age are (still, I think) required to keep an assault rifle and ammunition in their homes, and Israelis are similarly armed because, having enemies on their borders, they need to be able to mobilize rapidly.

In both countries murders by armed citizens are essentially nonexistent. By contrast, Mexico has strict gun control. Does anyone get shot in Mexico?

Yes, actually. Some 164,000 thousand shot dead between 2007 and 2014 (Figures vary. The foregoing are typical.) Pretty effective, gun control is.

Why do murders occur so exuberantly in a country with gun control? Because making guns illegal doesn’t make guns go away…

…If guns were made illegal in the US, not a single villain would turn his gun in. The bumper sticker, “When guns are criminal, only criminals will have guns,’ is exactly right. Guns, usually small and easily smuggled, are immensely valuable to criminals. Why would they turn them in? Criminals do not obey laws. It’s how you know they are criminals.

Curiously, the fewer guns in the hands of the law-abiding, the more valuable they are to criminals. When citizens may be armed, crawling in a window at night becomes much less attractive. And of course gun control would mean disarming white people, who tend to obey laws. Having witnessed Baltimore, Ferguson, and Charlotte, many whites are not enthusiastic about being left helpless.

One must never say this.

That’s the relatively P.C. part of the post. It descends from there into darker heresies:

Gun-controllers, unless they are greater fools than seems humanly possible”“they may well be”“know that criminals are not going to turn their guns in, and there is no way to confiscate them. They also know, unless actually mad, that criminals are overwhelmingly black. Do the controllers propose to send the army through black regions of Chicago, searching houses room by room to find hidden guns? Hardly.

When of a hundred murders in Chicago, almost all are committed by an underclass, do we have a gun problem, or an underclass problem? Do blacks have a white problem, a gun problem, or a themselves problem?

Obama of course blamed guns for the shooting deaths in Chicago. Can he really believe this? It is like the obese blaming spoons.

It is verboten to notice that crime with guns is heavily concentrated in particular groups. I grew up in rural Virginia where all the boys and Becky had guns, chiefly shotguns for hunting deer and rifles for killing varmints. Nobody shot anybody, either deliberately or otherwise. Murder wasn’t in the culture. We couldn’t understand why our guns should be taken away because criminals in the cities wanted to kill each other.

I once spent a week with the US Army in the slums of Port au Prince in Haiti, where guns were illegal. Nobody was shot. Instead brains were laid open and arms severed by machete. It was in the culture.

But of course gun control is only tangentially about gun control. The controllers detest gun owners viscerally as they imagine them, aging white Southern yahoos or Western cowboys with potbellies and third-grade educations who are probably werewolves, Republicans or even conservatives. Deplorables…

…If a woman tells me that she favors gun control, I can with confidence predict that she favors unchecked immigration, sanctuary cities, affirmative action, banning the Confederate flag, suppressing Christianity, homosexual marriage, abortion, feminism, and the dumbing down”“she will call it something else”“of schools to avoid wounding the self-esteem of the usual suspects.

The question of guns demarcates a sharp dividing line between who read the New York Times and those for whom it is the house organ of a class of people they detest.

There’s more. Read the whole thing here.