The following is a guest article by Spencer Wolfe on the Second Amendment and Individualism in America. You can read his blog at www.punchingtheleft.com and on Twitter at @SpencerWolfePtL. Be sure to look out for his new book, The 7 Stumbling Blocks of the Liberal Mind on Amazon.
The Second Amendment, Individualism, and the Left’s Dream of Turning America Into A Nation of Children.
The political Left embraces a sick philosophy—one which Breitbart editor, Benjamin Shapiro, inadvertently touched on in the opening moments of his appearance on Piers Morgan last Thursday night. Almost immediately, Shapiro asserted that Piers, in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, had been “standing on the bodies of dead children” to push his anti-assault weapons agenda. While Shapiro was correct as to what Piers had been—and still is—up to, his statement was also relevant to the overall goal of the media and the Left thanks to the inclusion of the word “children”.
That’s because children are exactly what the Left wants all of us to become.
America’s babysitter, Piers Morgan.
The Left’s philosophy goes something like this:
Human beings are lunatics and should be held to the standard of the lowest common denominator.
Was the slaughter at Sandy Hook committed by a psychopath? Yes.
Are Americans thereby psychopaths? No.
Does that matter to the Left? Absolutely not.
The Left does not believe that humans should be allowed to exist as independent, free-willed creatures. We need to be coddled, controlled, patronized, and once we outlive our perceived usefulness, discarded. In other words, saved from ourselves, because to the Left Winger, every individual is just a hop, skip, and a jump away from blowing his or her lid and wasting a bunch of school kids or tearing apart a movie theater. It’s easier for our Ivory Tower rulers this way. Hypocrite, Diane Feinstein, doesn’t want to have to worry about an individual’s mental health status; Nancy Pelosi can’t be bothered with the fact that seventy-five percent of American gun deaths occur in crime ridden urban areas (often due to gang violence); and Barack Obama certainly isn’t interested in the notion that the vast majority of adults in this country are quite capable of responsibly owning a firearm (sort of like they’re quite capable of responsibly owning a 2,000 lb car). No. For gun-control advocates, it’s way simpler to lump us all together in a nation-sized box, slap a sticker on it that says “For ages 7-10″, and then tell us it’s for our own stupid good.
Yet this is consistent with what the political Left has always been.
Karl Marx hated the individual. More specifically, he hated the individual who possessed adult-level critical thinking skills. That person constituted a threat against the hive-mind. What happens when you get too many of these threats together? You get a society immune to the manipulations of tyrants—one that will punch back twice as hard if provoked. A society that was designed to be—and sort of still is—America.
This is why the Left’s true cause isn’t to ban “assault weapons”, a categorization of convenience for politicians and media types (in mid-1500s England, the sword was also effectively deemed an assault weapon and outlawed), but to eliminate any effective, efficient means an individual could use to defend themselves.
Thus, in Thursday’s debate, Shapiro knocked an intellectually shallow Morgan back against the ropes when he questioned him as to why the media wasn’t concerned with handgun violence in Chicago where the number of deaths by handgun far exceed those caused nationally by assault rifles. Morgan wouldn’t respond. Shapiro later asked again why the Left wasn’t going after handguns, and again, no answer was ever offered.
Of course, Shapiro, as well as Morgan, already knew the answer: that even if an assault weapons ban somehow kept criminals from getting their hands on the higher powered weapons (which it probably wouldn’t), a determined monster would just use a different type of weapon. After all, you can still do plenty of fast damage with a Glock and it’s far easier to conceal. The snowball effect then begins. Whether it’s a Glock or some other model of handgun, the Left would rush to ban that class of firearm the instant it’s used in a media-soaked, suburban shooting incident. It could be six-shooters. It could be sharp objects. It could be Marshmallow Blasters. It could be whatever the government decides is keeping the citizens a little too independent for their own good.
When will America’s marshmallow madness stop?!
America was built on the philosophy of rugged individualism. That’s what’s historically made it so strong—so successful.
The Left hates this.
Unfortunately, it knows that an America comprised of individuals unable to defend themselves is an America where its citizens are unable to enforce the rights granted to it by the Constitution. At that point, we would—at least in the sense of dependency—become a society of seven-year olds. We become a society that looks to the government (mommy and daddy) to provide or grant permission for just about everything. The radical Left would then have what it’s been clamoring for since it first stuck it’s head out of this country’s shadows in the late nineteenth century…
…the death of the American individual, and the birth of the utopian collective.