The Virginia Massacre

Tue 4/17/2007

The argument is basically between pacifists and the sane. Pacifists believe that society can be made better by willfully abandoning violence; sane people know that there will always be violence, and the best way to cope with it is to let individuals — and groups, if necessary — defend themselves in an orderly fashion.

That is, “gun control” — the idiotic remedy advanced by progressives for the Virginia massacre — is a form of pacifism; a form of the belief that if we all do something high-minded together, the world will be a better place.

Individual instances of gun control are not necessarily pacifist; localities traditionally have controlled the use of weapons, going back to ancient Rome and beyond. What is pacifist is the intellectual movement which claims that the more gun control, the better. This is idiotic. It is exactly the kind of childish pacifist sentiment that was a significant component of Hitler’s early success.

In the case of the Virginia massacre, gun control was at least partly responsible; it is hard to believe that on a campus populated by young men, someone wouldn’t’ve have put a bullet in the lunatic’s head early-on — were it not for existing campus gun prohibitions.