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Guns  Surprised that I should tackle this subject in an editorial on my cover page now? Those who know me closely will even be shocked! They know me more as a "Make Sex (sic!) not War" guy. As if there was not enough sabre-rattling around these days already... Though having frequented in younger years a famous Salle d'armes (fencing-school) as a talented and devoted trainee (having had to stop one day because of health [heart] problems only resolved much later; a greeting here to those who continued to such exceptional successes: champions Colette Flesch and Jean Link, the latter, incidentally, being born the same day as I in the same city... and our parents had been on intimate terms), I have never ever had the slightest fascination for guns! Unlike those kids I observed the other day in front of the shop window of an arms dealer here in Hamburg or those poor American kids under the constant threat of being called a sissy if they do not build up a fake fascination. I vaguely remember having played as a very small kid a short while somewhat with a couple of those toy pistols using caps, but that was as far as it went with "fire-arms". Below that level snowballs and slingshots and bows and water pistols (less sophisticated than present squirt guns) were used to duly give tribute to childhood meanness and sadism, which puberty is supposed to overcome! Could it be that some Libertarians have never fully grown up? <grinning, ducking, and running> I am not a hunter, not even a fisher, I would not kill a rat or a rabbit. Not even a fly, spider, worm or wasp [not even a WASP! ;-)]. Almost a Jain! Except in an immediate utter situation of self-defense (your life or mine). [How many I have virtually killed in anger, I won't tell! :-)] Thus I am ill-prepared to jump on the bandwagon of all those American Libertarian gun ownership single-or-at-least-main-but-all-day-long-issuers and their international metastases... Born into a family with great rebellious (as rebellious as my cat sitting on my lap right now while I am writing, which sort of slows down the process) and pacifist traditions, both on my father's and my mother's side (I will have plenty of occasions to tell more about this on this website!), I am not so likely to follow suit when the propagan(g)dists are calling, be it the state or its Libertarian opponents. As a red-blooded (but not in the sense the Libertarian gun promoters like to use the term) individualist, individual anarchist (the only true anarchism, as it does not want to replace the state's collectivism by another one, and is as reluctant to impose, even the good, on others as to accept the imposition by others, mainly the state; the individual being by nature also a social creature, collectivism can be OK as a free choice on the social level below the imposed political level), libertarian, exterritorialist, panarchist, I am more deeply opposed to war than anyone could possibly be. War is simply NEVER right. It is in essence collectivist. Without the State there simply would not be any war ever. We would have peace. But please do not misunderstand me. I am not defining peace here in that sugar-coated sense of never quarreling with your mate, neighbour etc. or some individual intruder. Always soft manners here will not bring about the absence of war. Nor will so many peaceniks marching hand in hand change much. Sound prosperity and justice will. But these are not offered by our parliaments or governments, they do prevent them. Now, while I have always accepted the American Libertarian logical and Constitutional arguments in favour of gun ownership, I also saw the American historical and cultural bias and that there were some other aspects to the question. And, like Tom Knapp, I also see some value in some "left-leaning" positions or memes. And that there are some other, maybe better, methods of defense. Along the lines of Gandhi or Thoreau for instance, to name only two of the better known from a long list of people having contributed to an arsenal of defense without explosives. The latter do essentially help to build up the general situation of violence. Or maybe not? But I am mixing two things here: arms used in individual conflicts and arms as tools of war. I personally hesitate to even touch one of those dangerous death-bringing tools and would rather prefer not to have to submit to the training necessary to use it responsibly. If I owned one in the hope of not becoming a victim in the case of an attack (but there is no guarantee ~~ especially if the "attacker" is a policeman, as enough cases have recently shown in the United States and "even" here!), is this (my) establishment of a balance of power not like the very own argument of the U.S. Government and its military-industrial-political complex in the Cold War for building that overkill Nuclear Power arsenal as a deterrent? And it did not deter Them from using nuclear weapons in two recent wars in the Near and Middle East... And regarding the large scale use (in war = by the state), not only against foreign "enemies" and "not just" against soldiers (those who did not know enough yet to desert or did not want to or were incapable of or prevented from deserting...), but also against "collateral-damage" civilians (including cultural collateral damage, cuneiform in a couple of weeks...), AND sometimes (even in my home country, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg! ~~ although in 1921...) against its own citizens, civil disobedience and boycotting and general strike and the like would help much better than guns (just think of Baader-Meinhof in Germany). Unfortunately, the democratic sheeple majority is rarely feeling solidarity enough to allow this approach in an efficient way, unenlightened as they are by the state's school system and divided by the eternal DIVIDE ET IMPERA tactics by those in power. This, in my eyes, is the argument for gun ownership, mainly as an individual protection against an abusive state [is this a pleonasm? ;-)], unable as we are to rely on the solidarity of the sheeple majority, thus barring more civilized ways. Enough of my European brabbling! I cut myself off and let speak the American specialist on the subject, libertarian science fiction author and gun rights activist L. Neil Smith:  He is the libertarian movement's most prolific author, with more than twenty books to his credit, among these, three with a Prometheus Award. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. And, I hope, will move to the White House in 2004! For the benefit of us all. C.B.
Why Did it Have to be ... Guns?by L. Neil Smith
Over the past 30 years, I've been paid to write almost two million words, every one of which, sooner or later, came back to the issue of guns and gun-ownership. Naturally, I've thought about the issue a lot, and it has always determined the way I vote. People accuse me of being a single-issue writer, a single-issue thinker, and a single-issue voter, but it isn't true. What I've chosen, in a world where there's never enough time and energy, is to focus on the one political issue which most clearly and unmistakably demonstrates what any politician -- or political philosophy -- is made of, right down to the creamy liquid center. Make no mistake: all politicians -- even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership -- hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it's an X-ray machine. It's a Vulcan mind-meld. It's the ultimate test to which any politician -- or political philosophy -- can be put. If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash -- for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you. If he isn't genuinely enthusiastic about his average constituent stuffing that weapon into a purse or pocket or tucking it under a coat and walking home without asking anybody's permission, he's a four-flusher, no matter what he claims. What his attitude -- toward your ownership and use of weapons -- conveys is his real attitude about you. And if he doesn't trust you, then why in the name of John Moses Browning should you trust him? If he doesn't want you to have the means of defending your life, do you want him in a position to control it? If he makes excuses about obeying a law he's sworn to uphold and defend -- the highest law of the land, the Bill of Rights -- do you want to entrust him with anything? If he ignores you, sneers at you, complains about you, or defames you, if he calls you names only he thinks are evil -- like "Constitutionalist" -- when you insist that he account for himself, hasn't he betrayed his oath, isn't he unfit to hold office, and doesn't he really belong in jail? Sure, these are all leading questions. They're the questions that led me to the issue of guns and gun ownership as the clearest and most unmistakable demonstration of what any given politician -- or political philosophy -- is really made of. He may lecture you about the dangerous weirdos out there who shouldn't have a gun -- but what does that have to do with you? Why in the name of John Moses Browning should you be made to suffer for the misdeeds of others? Didn't you lay aside the infantile notion of group punishment when you left public school -- or the military? Isn't it an essentially European notion, anyway -- Prussian, maybe -- and certainly not what America was supposed to be all about? And if there are dangerous weirdos out there, does it make sense to deprive you of the means of protecting yourself from them? Forget about those other people, those dangerous weirdos, this is about you, and it has been, all along. Try it yourself: if a politician won't trust you, why should you trust him? If he's a man -- and you're not -- what does his lack of trust tell you about his real attitude toward women? If "he" happens to be a woman, what makes her so perverse that she's eager to render her fellow women helpless on the mean and seedy streets her policies helped create? Should you believe her when she says she wants to help you by imposing some infantile group health care program on you at the point of the kind of gun she doesn't want you to have? On the other hand -- or the other party -- should you believe anything politicians say who claim they stand for freedom, but drag their feet and make excuses about repealing limits on your right to own and carry weapons? What does this tell you about their real motives for ignoring voters and ramming through one infantile group trade agreement after another with other countries? Makes voting simpler, doesn't it? You don't have to study every issue -- health care, international trade -- all you have to do is use this X-ray machine, this Vulcan mind-meld, to get beyond their empty words and find out how politicians really feel. About you. And that, of course, is why they hate it. And that's why I'm accused of being a single-issue writer, thinker, and voter. But it isn't true, is it? |
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