It's time for a few more inconvenient facts -- more insight into the intelligence (or lack thereof), the mental health (ditto), and the character (three strikes, you're out!) of the gun control lobby.

For a long time, the Old Media have stubbornly refused to convey the fact that only .004 percent (give or take a decimal place) of the 750,000,000 privately owned guns in America are ever used to commit a crime. Compared to the chances of a privately owned gun being used to commit a crime, finding a four-leaf clover, getting hit by lightning, being struck by a meteorite, and breaking the bank at the roulette tables in Las Vegas or Atlantic City are each a sure thing.

Gun control advocates -- no, let's make that "advocates of victim disarmament", because that's what it is -- all know this.

I've never said they're ignorant or uninformed. I doubt that I've ever stated a single fact in one of these essays that they weren't perfectly well aware of. Diane Feinstein knows that guns save lives; that's why she carries a .357 Magnum. Ted and Jane know you can "dial 911 and die", which is why they keep guns on their nightstands. That's why I say that the only possible explanation for their behavior is that they're stupid, insane, or evil.

Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and Christopher Dodd understand that "An armed society is a polite society". But they'd much rather employ licensed bodyguards carrying machineguns under their coats and live in an impolite society where their potential female victims can't defend themselves from their increasingly disgusting advances.

Stupid, insane, or evil.

Let me repeat myself for the benefit of the Million Morons March. Everything I say here, the victim disarmament lobby already knows. Each day they labor to turn 70 million of their neighbors -- peaceful and productive men, women, and children interested only in the quiet enjoyment of their unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human rights -- into targets for jackbooted thugs. Clinton states publicly and straightforwardly that he wants to eliminate America's gun culture; the technical term for that -- attention Simon Wiesenthal -- is "cultural genocide".

These hired goons in ski masks, Nazi helmets, and black body armor attack in the middle of the night when they calculate their victims will be deepest in REM sleep, groggiest, and most helpless.

Heavily armed with noxious gas, high capacity pistols, sawed-off shotguns, and automatic weapons that are forbidden to the ordinary individual, they smash their victims' doors in with steel and concrete battering rams, drag their victims by the hair, naked or half dressed, out of their beds, slap them around and rough them up, scream threats and obscenities at them and insult them, throw them on the floor and kick them, and shove cold steel gun muzzles against their temples.

They painfully twist their victims' arms behind their backs -- never mind how old or fragile they may be -- and ratchet handcuffs on their wrists. They delight in wrecking everything their victims own, stomping their victims' pets to death before their eyes and laughing about it, stealing or destroying everything their victims care about, and vanishing into the night when they don't find what they want, or planting false evidence and trumping up charges against individuals who've never done anything wrong. That is, if they don't begin by simply hosing the whole place down with machinegun fire and killing every living thing inside the house.

No, you gun haters out there, this is not just an exercise in paranoia -- you're not going to assuage your guilt that way, not any more. Nothing can save whatever tattered shreds of conscience you have left from squirming on the barbed, rusty hook of your guilt. These violent episodes happen every day in what was once a free country, and you -- you self-righteous advocates of victim disarmament -- are more directly responsible for it than anybody else. It is you doing these evil things; you demanded they be done. They're being done for you.

Morally, it is your finger on the trigger.

Until now, whenever you risked confrontation with the stark, ugly, bloodsoaked truth of what you're doing, rather than the pretty pink pastel Utopia you desperately wanted -- needed -- to believe you were creating, you could turn your head and look the other way.

But no more.

From now on you're going to be shown the truth -- your face will be rubbed in it at every turn -- and the only way you can avoid it is to get off the net, out of political life, out of American social life altogether, and hide out in some tarpaper shack up in the mountains like your patron saint Theodore Kaczynski. Because from now on, the truth -- and your guilt -- will be everywhere for everyone to see.

The really sick, sad thing, disgusting thing is what gun control -- victim disarmament -- is really all about.

As the Shogun (Japanese for Capo de tutti Capi) put it in 1558, "The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other type of arms. The possession of these elements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues and tends to permit uprising."

Historians and sociologists have been saying for some time (among themselves -- nobody wants this kind of thing to get out) that there's a point somewhere at which, if one more percentage point is taken in taxes, there'll be a revolution. That number's generally believed to be 50%, but there are complicating factors.

Hardly anybody is aware of what he pays. Withholding was invented during the administration of Roosevelt II (by Milton Friedman, of all people!) precisely to prevent that kind of awareness. In addition, there are so many different kinds of taxes -- real property, personal property, sales, excise, etc. -- that nobody can keep track. We passed that 50% mark long ago and hardly anybody noticed.

Gun control -- victim disarmament -- is meant by its proponents for when we do notice. Look at the victim disarmers in the Senate, the House of Representatives, your state legislature, your county commission, your city council. They're exactly the same politicians who want higher taxes and other regulations that turn your life into their property. Taxes and regulations that privately owned guns might get in the way of. It's funny the way my semiautomatics were never a threat to anybody until the total tax rate rose above 50%.

You gun haters sneered at the Gulf War because it was "only about oil" but your sacred cause -- the Gun Control Holocaust you've unleashed on your unsuspecting neighbors -- at the highest levels and at the bottom line, turns out to be only about money.

Tax money.

Stolen money.

Somewhere on the net I've heard there's a "Death Clock", counting the number of individuals who die by gunfire every microsecond or eon or whatever. I've never looked for it or seen it because I know that, rather than being built of springs and gears like any self-respecting clock, it's built of lies. The same tired Old Media lies we've been hearing for half a century.

I know that three quarters of the deaths you're counting are suicides, something it's morally wrong to interfere with and that can't be stopped in any case. People will use gas or poison or jump off tall buildings if life becomes intolerable; that's their right. Until gas and poison and tall buildings are outlawed, I believe I'll continue refusing to take your Death Clock (or anything else you say or do) very seriously.

Another point: some of those deaths, a number you cynically withhold -- are "righteous" shootings, people killed by other people who were legitimately defending themselves. The implication, of course, is that it's more politically correct to submit to evil, to give up and die for the sake of your demented and obscene victim disarmament ideology than to resist. And why not? After all, that's the same policy you advocate for rape, isn't it?

Elsewhere, there's a "Life Clock", counting the number of times that individuals successfully defend themselves with guns. I've never seen or looked for that clock, either. I know that somewhere between two and a half million and four and a half million people every year -- 40 times the highest number on the Death Clock -- are alive and well, instead of dead or injured, because they had that "easy access to guns" which you victim disarmers decry so dramatically.

I think there ought to be a third clock. John Lott offers some impressive numbers of the people whose lives might have been saved if they'd had easy access to guns, the victims of victim disarmament who died because of you people who advocate, introduce, pass, and enforce laws that violate the unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right of every man, woman, and responsible child to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.

That's right, that's what I said. "The unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right of every man, woman, and responsible child to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission." And hundreds of thousands of people -- maybe even millions -- will read it, many of them learning what their rights are, and where they come from, for the first time. Doesn't that make you mad? Doesn't it make your stomach churn? Won't it cost you a night's sleep? Won't it shorten your life expectancy by at least five minutes?

A good life consists of small victories.

You victim disarmers have a lot to atone for -- the injury and death of countless thousands -- maybe even millions -- of innocent individuals. From now on, Sarah, Chuck, from now on, Diane, before you get to talk about what you want (everybody's sick of hearing about what you want, anyway), we're going to talk about what you owe.

I can think of a good way to start -- and if there's any merit in them, it's your last chance to show that your ideas about personal weapons work better than mine. Wherever you live, put a big white cardboard sign in your biggest front window, as high and wide as local ordinances allow. On this sign, in great big black letters no less than six inches high, write:

WE HAVE NO GUNS HERE

Do it. Do it right now. Because until you do, once my challenge gets to be widely advertised, it's hard to see how anybody'll take you seriously any more.

Isn't it?

Permission to redistribute this article is herewith granted by the author -- provided that it is reproduced unedited, in its entirety, and appropriate credit given.  If you enjoyed this one, you will also appreciate El Neil's candor in Murder by Gun Control.

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