“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms … disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed one.”
—Cesare Beccaria, recorded by Thomas Jefferson in his Legal Commonplace Book1
The topic of gun rights/control is one I assumed pretty much everyone in the anti-tyranny/pro-freedom movement would be in agreement on. A lively comment exchange at a recent el gato malo post proved otherwise, however.
Dr. Meryl Nass also wrote this thoughtful analysis of the topic2:
School shootings. I am sorry, but this needs to be said.
1. Normal people have no interest in killing children, especially ones they do not know, especially in large numbers. 2. In my view, only people subject to mind control (please investigate Sirhan Sirhan or read about US intelligence agency attempts to create mind controlled assassins beginning in the 1950s) or people taking certain…
10 days ago · 264 likes · 107 comments · Meryl Nass
And The Naked Emperor started a provocative discussion thread about it here.
These exchanges sparked me to start a discussion thread (my first!) posing the question:
What are your views on gun rights/control, and why?
Here are mine:
1) The MSM lies like hell.
Every story they present serves a narrative. Every fact that threatens those narratives is suppressed. Every journalist of integrity knows this as a certainty.
Ethics in journalism is extinct in the mainstream media. It is an absolute impossibility to publish a story that violates the iron-clad laws to serve their corporate sponsors and government masters. They are unadulterated propagandists. That is why old-school reporters who care about ethics, facts, and balance like Sharyl Attkinson, Rebecca Strong, and Sally Beck leave.
You can learn precisely how the propaganda machine operates to craft narratives and suppress inconvenient facts in Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism.
Two+ years of COVID propagandizing have made this obvious to the hypnosis-resistant. The media flood the public consciousness with fear smut by constantly reporting death and case counts based on fraudulent data from cooked PCR tests; deaths “with” not “of” COVID; and fatalities caused by lethal protocols (not COVID). Simultaneously, they hide the millions of injuries and tens of thousands of deaths proven by the Bradford Hill criteria to have been caused by the experimental injections.
This is how they control a narrative. It is absolutely no different when it comes to gun rights.
Just like with COVID, the media only reports gun crimes. It never shows the staggering numbers of instances in which victims have defended their lives from criminals, saved others’ lives by stopping mass shooters in their tracks, and defended citizens from tyranny throughout history. They also scarcely report the massive numbers of knife crimes and homicides committed by other means such as vehicles.
2) The media pushes gun control—another wedge issue created to divide us—through emotionally manipulative, triggering reporting engineered to manufacture consent for gun restrictions.
When people are bombarded with tragedy, their higher reasoning faculties shut down. Anyone who tries to calmly discuss the topic of gun rights in this atmosphere is likely to be perceived as callous. It is during this emotionally charged window that the politicians and propagandists push hardest for gun control laws. This is Problem Reaction Solution in action.
Case in point—Tyrant Trudeau has already leapt into action, right on cue, saying, “It will no longer be possible to buy, sell, transfer, or import handguns anywhere in Canada.”
NOW – PM Trudeau: “It will no longer be possible to buy, sell, transfer, or import handguns anywhere in Canada.”pic.twitter.com/rVd5gWgEtq
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) May 30, 2022
The possibility that some of these lightning-rod events are LIHOP or MIHOP false-flag alphabet operations is irrelevant when it comes to the argument for gun rights, and veering off into what is considered conspiratorial territory by normies will cause people on the other side of the debate to tune out and shut down. That doesn’t mean these are invalid lines of inquiry, just that it will derail the conversation and give them an excuse to dismiss you as a “conspiracy theorist.”
Even those who have bought the narrative, however, can probably agree the media is primarily responsible for creating the psychological conditions in which tragedies such as mass murders occur and seeding the lust for notoriety among the mentally deranged.
3) Organizations like the NRA profit from the threats to take away gun rights, so they can’t be trusted, either, and are guilty of their own form of fear smut.
Yankee Marshall provides a fairly balanced perspective on proposed gun legislation and which bills constitute genuine threats. That doesn’t mean I agree with everything he says. He’s wrong about his faith in the injection, for example, but he is against mandates, which is consistent with his views on the Second Amendment.
4) Every totalitarian, genocidal regime in modern history has first disarmed its citizens. It is a prerequisite to accomplishing tyranny.
5) Gun laws do not stop criminals from acquiring them. Gun laws do not stop mass murders from occurring. They only stop law-abiding citizens from being able to defend themselves. This is precisely what tyrannical governments desire.
6) The constitutional framers understood these precepts so deeply, they enshrined them in the Second Amendment as a means of preserving the First.
7) Over the past two years, the countries that ratcheted up the tyranny most rapidly were those that had predominantly disarmed its citizens.
8) Gun restrictions serve despotic regimes, not the people. If you care about defending yourself, your loved ones, your freedom, and your autonomy, preserving gun rights is a matter of life or death.
I didn’t always hold these views. Like most people, I was once carried along by the propaganda and mistakenly thought more guns = more bloodshed. It wasn’t until I woke up to the framing that I realized this was yet another lie, researched it, and discovered the data tells a very different story from what the media presents.
To further elucidate my position, I will share excerpts from an exchange I had with a reader at the original el gato thread. I don’t want to call unwanted attention to her so have only listed her initials here, but this is a person whom I’ve enjoyed positive encounters with on other occasions and who’s on my mailing list (props to her for not unsubbing over this).
She has seen through the lies about COVID, but she believes the media and government are telling the truth in this case. She took my arguments as personal attacks against her rather than her position. I understand that when one of your deeply held beliefs is being challenged, it feels like an attack on you personally; apparently, I failed to make that distinction clear. If she is still willing to re-evaluate her position, perhaps she and others like her will read this discussion thread with an open mind and heart.
One of my hopes is that, in this little sanctuary of the Internet, we can enjoy civil exchanges about points of disagreement without it devolving into defensiveness and ad hominem attacks. This discussion thread is intended to offer a space for exploring this issue in a thoughtful and respectful manner.
