Just a couple of weeks ago two people were murdered in their own home a few hundred meters from my house by a schizophrenic relative. The weapon? A kitchen knife.

It’s a real pity because this would be a great place to live – one of the best in the world – with just a few of our more draconian laws revoked. However both major parties are invested in “gun control” at this point.

http://volokh.com/posts/1177279409.shtml

“Fub:

Tom Holsinger wrote at 4.22.2007 7:04pm:
Safety has nothing to do with it. Dean Trachtenberg’s only objective is to make a political statement.

While I agree with your point, I think something more underlies these silly rituals. What makes these ritual bannings of depictions or imitations of real weapons politically effective (among those for whom they are effective) is a very primitive human thought process: belief in sympathetic magic.

The actual object, the weapon, is imbued with magical power. Its very presence magically causes harm. It causes people to behave in evil ways. The rationale commonly offered is that the mere presence of a weapon makes people more prone to violence.

Sympathetic magic is the belief that what one does with an imitation of the thing with magical power will affect the actual thing. For example, in a magical religious context we see the image of a deity addressed, or given gifts or sacrifices. The magical deity is affected through the treatment of its image, and so performs its magic for the one who gives the image a gift.

In the imitation weapon banning context we have first the belief that the object, the actual weapon, is magic and causes those in its presence to behave in an evil manner. The sympathetic magical belief is that by banning the image or the imitation weapon, the magical power of real weapons to cause people to be violent will be lessened, or the real weapons will stay away from the presence of the faithful.”

This episode makes a lie the often stated argument that disarmament advocates only want “reasonable restrictions” on weapons. Their need to dominate and control never ends. Give them a little control and they want more and more.

This is because their real target is human beings not things.

My other blog mainly concerns itself with self defense and physical security issues. I posted an essay there a few days ago which discuss this very thing.

http://hellinahandbasket.net/?p=1366

The bottom line is that just about any reasonably adept hobbyist can make a sophisticated revolver from scratch, something at least as good as was used during the US Civil War.

Next up, banning the use of a pointed finger within a coat pocket to mime a hidden firearm.

However, note carefully how this action fits within the larger trend of infantilizing and disempowering the individual while shifting responsibility and culpability to inanimate objects (guns, gun replicas, liquids, drugs, etc.) or to groups, corporations, or the government. There is a worldwide ideology that is at war with the idea of personal responsibility and accountability, it wants to rest the entirety of responsibility and accountability in the collective.