Wednesday 13 December 2017

Gun Control


The Enemies of Freedom

The shooting in Las Vegas was an incomprehensible tragedy the reason for which was known only to the dead gunman.  Little or nothing more can be said on the subject, but that has not stopped the media from commenting.  They all had much the same thing to say, at least in this country, and almost all of them elsewhere too, certainly the mainstream media, notably the supposedly impartial BBC.  What they had to say was, as we have so often heard from them before, that America should introduce the same kind of gun control that we have suffered here. They present a situation in which the population at large has been disarmed by the State as if it were a norm from which America has deviated when the precise opposite is the case.

The first ten amendments to the US Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, did not arise by chance and were not written as the result of some strange whim on somebody's part.  They, rather, represent the Constitutional Convention's considered opinion as to what are the most basic rights necessary if a nation is to constitute itself as a free country.  That the right to bear arms was among those rights is testament to its importance as a cornerstone of freedom.  In a very real sense the right to bear arms is the necessary guarantee of any other rights anybody might have. It is, in any case, not so much a right granted by the US Constitution, but simply the normal state of affairs, which is to say that it is a right grounded in natural law as an inseparable corollary of such other rights as the right to establish a family, to hold property, to practise the one true Faith without hindrance and, above all, the right and duty to establish and maintain a system of law and government consonant with divine law.  

In the absence of an acknowledged right to bear arms the State has a monopoly of force.  It may do as it pleases to whomsoever it pleases without fear of effective resistance.  Gun control is, therefore, the hallmark of tyranny.  It is what governments do to those whom it neither likes nor trusts, so what can universal gun control mean if not that those in power dislike and mistrust those they govern, and what kind of government treats the entire populace as its at least potential enemies if not a tyranny?  The history of gun control in the British Isles is that Catholics were its first victims after the overthrow of King James II & VII, then Scotsmen after the rising of 1715, after that universal gun control was introduced for a six year period in one of the universally hated Six Acts passed after the Peterloo massacre by an administration that thought it might well have provoked a revolution. It was then reimposed in 1968, some twenty years into 'the post-War settlement', by which time people had become accustomed to dependence upon the State, and servility in dealing with its various branches.  It is not in any sense natural or normal that the State should confiscate weaponry, it was a parliamentary abuse of power half a century ago that would have been unthinkable twenty or thirty years earlier, much like legalised sodomy and abortion.

If gun control means that the relationship between State and citizenry has gone radically wrong and turned toxic why do the media love it so much?  The mainstream media are not a disparate group of intellectually independent, freethinking news outlets; rather, they exhibit a lemming-like herd mentality on all possible occasions.  Yes, in Britain there are tribal differences in the political allegiances of newspapers; but the opinions advanced by them all are similar on both sides, and where they disagree they do agree on the terms of permissible debate.  The people in the media have a certain view of themselves, both collectively and as individuals; they regard themselves as having a right to run the country, and see the State as being theirs for the taking.  For that to be a reasonable prospect, they need a State that is not simply, as it should be, the political expression of the nation or the people organised for action, but a governmental superstructure run by a political caste to which the media types belong, or see themselves as belonging.  The more powerful the State, the better for those who control or hope to control it.  The greater the separation between the political class and the people, them and us, again the better for these media types who either hope to pull the levers, exercising 'power without responsibility', or else plan a move into the front line of Party politics.  Look how many media people there are in Parliament – and see what low-grade politicians so many of them make, especially the ones “off the telly”!  There are exceptions to that amongst those from the more internationally-minded media groups; but BBC people all, by definition, believe in large, publicly-funded organisations and support them instinctively as well as from self-interest.

Statism is the result of a megalomaniacal hatred of popular freedoms.  The right to bear arms is the ultimate guarantor of freedom, hence the statist media types who aspire to capturing the State and holding it as their private plaything with the entire populace helpless as marionettes forced to dance to their tune hate the right to bear arms with a passion.  They want to make its restoration unthinkable just as they have made abolishing socialised medicine, State-controlled education and planning control or the recriminalisation of abortion and sodomy unthinkable.  They are the enemies of freedom.  They are the enemies of us all.  Reject them and reject the politics of us and them, the politics of exclusion, dividing the political rulers from those they govern.  Demand the restoration of our ancient liberties and, above all, demand a renewal of political life that eliminates the baleful influence of the media so that all the options and opportunities can be explored properly, free from the trivia, gossip, propaganda and outright untruths in which they obscure what should be the terms of our national debate.

Films and TV are the problem not
gun control or the lack of it is the problem.
That debate needs to include cutting the media, as well as the State, down to size.  Without saying anything specific about Las Vegas, there can be no doubt that the reason very many spree killers, especially young people, 'go postal' (if that phrase is still current) is that killing sprees, and shooting in general, are a staple of popular entertainment, in the cinema, on TV and in video games.  A similar link might be made between the growth in sexual assaults, again especially amongst the young, and the prevalence of casual coupling on screen.  Shooting people is everywhere.  That is the problem the media do not address because the news and entertainment media are closely intertwined, more closely even than politics and the media are.  I am not, at this stage, advocating censorship, but I am advocating a voluntary self-restraint on the part of broadcasters and games-writers, and I would strongly suggest that that restraint would be promoted if the news media were to create a climate in which broadcasting such material was regarded as irresponsible and antisocial.  I would certainly support a move into politics by journalists favouring a responsible and wholesome media environment.  Advertisers should be pushed to avoid having their products promoted alongside sex and violence; that would send broadcasters a powerful message.  Use the power in your pockets to boycott the products of companies that support socially damaging television.  Now who in the media fancies repeating that message instead of demanding that people be denied the ability to reap the harvest of nature, and to defend themselves and their property?        

By Prayer Crusader St Philip Howard. 

2 comments:

  1. I can see the logic against gun control with respect to freedom and the right to own a gun; just as I can see the logic in favour of the death penalty and its relationship to the just war theory. However, I'm glad that nether are law in the UK, it just something I would not like to see here, perhaps it's because I don't trust people to get it right. Prayer Crusader St Philomena

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    Replies
    1. Perhaps you should be a little more trusting?

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