If You’re Pro-Gun Control, You’re Not Anti-Violence. You’re VERY Pro-Violence

If you are in favor of restricting what kind of guns Americans can own, or even favor making the process of purchasing a gun more rigorous, you’re not against violence. I said it, and I’ll say it again. You are not against violence—you are only against violence by civilians, yet permit the state to use it.

Stefan Molyneux explains this the best: “If you are for gun control, then you are not against guns, because the guns will be needed to disarm people. So it’s not that you are anti-gun. You’ll need the police’s guns to take away other people’s guns. So you’re very Pro-Gun, you just believe that only the Government (which is, of course, so reliable, honest, moral and virtuous…) should be allowed to have guns. There is no such thing as gun control. There is only centralizing gun ownership in the hands of a small, political elite and their minions.”

As I argued in my last article “Statism—Ideas So Good They’re Mandatory”, making the government do something for you does not make an action moral. The state is a monopoly on violence because they commit daily atrocities that any ordinary civilian would be arrested for. While gun grabbers often advocate to end “senseless gun violence”, it is impossible to end this if the state is used to enforce their proposed gun control legislation.

Recent events such as the Dallas attack on policemen and the Orlando massacre have led to an uproar among the left and other statists for tighter restrictions on purchasing a gun, as well as laws on which guns people can own. However, as terrible as these acts of unwarranted violence are, these events will only continue as long as an agency is permitted to use force to impose their will on others.

Gun control simply permits the state to harass law-abiding gun owners for not following intrusive laws. It is highly unlikely that everybody in society would follow tighter gun laws, so it is inevitable that a degree of nonsensical violence would be used by the state. Although there is still of a faction of authoritarians that want to only tighten restrictions of gun purchases rather than banning certain types of (or all) firearms altogether, these proposed policies still permit state violence and deny due process. Gun dealers that don’t conform to background screening and other measures would be punished for the behavior, once again allowing the state to use violence against them.

Even groups such as #BlackLivesMatter have acknowledged that centralized and monopolistic violence is problematic with recent police brutality episodes, yet they fail to reach the conclusion that limiting gun ownership to the state will only strengthen this issue. If the police are truly racist killers as many leftists make them out to be, it simply wouldn’t make sense for to advocate disarming their victims.

If you truly wanted to end gun violence, you would start by protecting yourself and others with self defense. Using legislation to fulfill the gun control you would like to see will only continue violence, but with the state committing it instead of the citizenry. Relying on the state for your goals to be accomplished is a cowardly act. Matters must be taken into your own hands in a peaceful manner.

As the founder of psychoanalytic psychology Sigmund Freud once said: “A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.”