Gun Control, Crisis and the State

by Angelo Mike 

Exclusive to STR

April 30, 2007

Last week’s shootings at Virginia Tech have been the catalyst for reinvigorating the gun control debate. This is both predictable and regrettable, as this is no loss for the state and its subdivisions, but an asset. It’s only a loss for the family and friends of the students murdered and the decent members of society who recognize their loss.  

The government and its operatives haven’t wasted time in capitalizing on this opportunity to increase its power and standing as a protector. George Bush has taken this opportunity as “the nation’s consoler in times of tragedy” to visit Virginia Tech and give a message of solace to the school. That this was a thankful diversion for him from the thousands killed and wounded in Iraq in the last week because of his own intervention on their behalf is largely unquestioned.  

But the question still remains for many people and the major media: Should gun laws be stricter? The second question that is implied but isn’t asked is: Should only criminals have guns?  

These questions are merely two sides of the same coin. While the question for the government is one of how it should project its authority from the top down, there are still questions and their sequels to be asked by all of society. They get into the philosophical as well as pragmatic, but among them are: Should guns be politicized? Can they be legitimate property? Can they be used defensively? If they can’t, why does the state insist as much while being heavily armed?  

On political talk shows and in print, the question nominally being asked is what the government should or should not do in its assigned role as protector.  

Yet I have a question for discussion. Why, when we can all see that this tragedy serves to increase the state’s power to compel and coerce, and to keep guns out of the people who are least likely to use them for anything but recreation or defense by outlawing them, do most people not recognize that the state is acting as a predator? That, as happened on Virginia Tech’s campus where firearms were already banned, when it bans weapons, doesn’t it only disarm the people who would hope that the state would protect them when left to its own devices?  

Any clear-thinking person must conclude that something is systemically wrong about the state. It is clear that its well-being is maintained at the expense of society, like a parasitic cancer invading its host. Both need their hosts to be productive and healthy enough to have something to feed off of, but these hosts must have some weakness to exploit.  

It failed its purported mission at Virginia Tech, yet this failure is a pretense for spreading failure countrywide with an escalation of the same policy. Seung-Hui Cho, the VT killer, was already prohibited from purchasing a gun by federal mandate because of his status as legally “adjudicated as a mental defective.” Rather than recognizing the arbitrary and tyrannical nature of these mental health judgments, most people are only questioning whether or not such laws should pervade the entire country and be carried out more intensely.  

Any limit to such a power is arbitrary, since not even the total state could prevent all such killings anywhere. Rather, it is most likely to engage in such murder itself, and seizes on the possibility of any non-state murder as a pretense for its own aggrandizement. We increasingly face the possibility of being judged by a court to be mentally defective (surely anarchists fall under this capacity), and face sanctions, imprisonment, or death if we disobey. No room for a lack of unity on this issue can be allowed.  

Who will fall under the cloak of mentally defective? How can this power, if at all, be limited? It’s already enforced today. Expanding it means giving the government a much more efficient lever to crank up its grasp upon society. Given all the experience we have of handing one more instrument for compulsion on society to the state, don’t we know that it will tend to overrate this power?  

It’s an illusory power to be sure. It gives a one shot benefit to its perpetrator, like a narcotic high which passes through a drug user’s body. The benefit is soon lost, and it must be carried out more intensely on a grander scale to briefly experience it again. Like an addiction to narcotics, it must be overcome or it will overcome its abuser.  

The power to prohibit mentally ill people from owning guns will be insufficient, of course. Why limit this tool to gun ownership? A final solution, of sorts, to how to deal with all criminals, and not just gun owning ones. The solution should be quite clear: That of outlawing the mentally ill. Countless millions of Americans have some kind of mental disorder, so this can’t be accomplished all at once. And many, if not most of them live as normally as anyone else. This process can only be ratcheted up step by step.  

Yet this reasoning is still the total inverse of what most of society and the state believes. Instead of treating its advances during times of crises with scorn and derision, most people accept the fact that the state benefits greatly from losses to society. This can only go to show that it is our mortal enemy and a gang of thugs. They are bent on controlling our lives and our thoughts, and filling our thoughts with support for itself.  

By politicizing murder, violating the separation of life itself and state, the tragedy at Virginia Tech may not have ended with the painful consequences for everyone who knew the victims, but will be expanded to the rest of American society through a vicious doctrine of people control for some time to come.