In the shadow of the December 14th massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, a childhood friend of mine shared the following:
I believe in gun control. I believe in harsher censorship of video games. I believe in paying attention to what our children are paying attention to. I believe how we feed our bodies plays a great role in how we feed our souls. I believe we’ve lost control. I believe we can regain it if we all start to care. My heart is aching for humanity.
To my childhood friend,
I cannot stay quiet.
I hope you will stand to indulge my extensive comments all the way through. With my deepest respect for YOUR RIGHT to express your opinion, if I cannot impact yours with the following, then I am grateful for the exchange. And I am grateful that as Americans and friends we still can agree to disagree.
To be sure, I do agree with everything you wrote…except the very first sentence. Truth be told, if every other line you wrote came to be, the first one would be obsolete.
Perhaps I’ve learned a bit too much, living (for over 17 years) with a man who spent the first 25 years of his life (1954-1980) in Cuba. He grew up through the entire Cuban Revolution and witnessed first hand how a government’s PROMISE OF PEACE leads to nothing less than the END OF FREEDOM. The campaign of propaganda that “gun control” will reduce everything from domestic murders, to armed robberies and public massacres is the subtle brainwashing that leads one step further away from our ability to protect the very fundament on which our—still not too late, to be great—country was built. FREEDOM.
You’ve heard the cliché. “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”
Now, add to that one, “Where there’s a will there’s a way.”
Do you know what is the preferred method of domestic murder in Cuba?
About half of the members of my Fitness Studio in Miami, FL were born and raised in Cuba, and they all concur:
Pour gasoline on your partner and throw them a lit match.
…may God forbid that such a victim survives.
May God forgive me too for such a thought, but it would be just as easy to do the same thing to a classroom of small defenseless children before they even understood what was happening to them.
When you have some free time, I urge you to read the full texts from which I have pulled the tidbits below.
You may remember my own naïveté back when we were kids. My idea of a perfect world was to be able to live on a “hippy commune.” Actually, it still is! The problem with it is that such a concept only works in theory. To that matter, a pure democracy also only works in theory. (Which is just about where this country is at.) As much as my moral beliefs abhor it, “equal voting rights for all” is also another step away from FREEDOM. Now, that’s a whole separate discussion. However, in short, once the majority vote rests in the hands of those who have “financially less” than the minority, the collapse of capitalism is inevitable.
I cannot help but see glimpses of the foreshadow. ”History IS repeating itself” in America right here and now. Ironically, it was the Spanish philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist, George Santayana who first wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
In 1959, Castro travelled to the United States to explain his revolution. He said, ‘I know what the world thinks of us, we are Communists, and of course I have said very clearly that we are not Communists; very clearly.’
—Year in Review – 1959. UPI. Retrieved 2011-12-24.)
It is a fact, well-known in Cuba, that by the middle of 1959—only six months after the revolution began—more and more people were beginning to realize they had gotten rid of one bloody dictatorship only to fall into another brutal dictatorship. The honeymoon between the Cuban people and the ‘revolution’ proclaimed by Castro was over.
With the triumph of the Revolution, the masses expected a return to civilian rule, and the dismantling of the military apparatus…
In his famous speech delivered on the triumphal arrival in Havana, Castro pledged an end to militarism: Arms? What for? The military barracks will be converted into schools.’
Castro’s acts belied his words. A few weeks later, the Cuban capital was swamped with thousands of young soldiers hastily mobilized into the new military and police forces by the ‘revolutionary’ government.
[Today:]
Nothing escapes their control. Everything and everybody is subject to their orders…
A Black-Market In Guns:
A second underlying assumption of gun control is that guns will no longer be available to anyone, including the violent people who wish to procure them. This assumption is based on the hope that gun control will simply wipe guns totally out of existence, perhaps through some type of government buy-back scheme by which people are encouraged to turn in their weapons to the officials who promise to destroy or store them. Again, the assumption is false, fallacious, and dangerous.
One problem with this assumption is that it fails to take into consideration the free market or, more precisely, the black market that inevitably springs up in response to laws that attempt to restrict the supply of some product or service. Consider, for example, the war on drugs, a war in which the federal government has attempted to eliminate the supply of drugs for at least 30 years. Despite an increasing array of ever-harsher laws, those who desire drugs are still able to obtain them from those who are willing to take the risks to supply them.
Why wouldn’t we expect the same result with a war on guns? Wouldn’t a black market in guns immediately spring up, just as a black market in drugs sprang up when drugs were made illegal? And wouldn’t violent, anti-social people such as murderers and rapists be much more able and willing to acquire guns in such a market than peaceful and law-abiding people?
We would also be remiss if we failed to point out all the disastrous side effects of the federal attempt to stamp out drugs — gang wars, convenience-store killings, police corruption, and robberies, muggings, burglaries, and thefts, not to mention the ever-increasing governmental assaults on the civil liberties of the citizenry.
Why wouldn’t we expect the same results — if not worse — with a war on guns?
But if we just gave the government full powers to stamp out guns, then all guns could be stamped out once and for all, which would mean they couldn’t even be acquired illegally,” gun-control advocates implicitly suggest. That’s problematic, but let’s concede the point. Let’s assume that private ownership of guns is wiped out of existence in the United States and that somehow the government is able to prevent murderers and rapists from acquiring them in a black market.
The Biggest Threat to Liberty:
Would that make the American people safer? No, because a government that wielded the power to wipe out all guns in that society would be an omnipotent, tyrannical government, such as the one that exists in Cuba… To paraphrase an old saying, when guns are outlawed only the government will have guns.
My Dear Long Friend, if you’ve read this far, I applaud your patience and open mindedness, and I thank you for affording your precious time to consider my opinions.
More on the Cuban Revolution at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Revolution
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