The Cultural Bias Behind Gun Control

From Frontpage Magazine:

But media-stoked irrational hysteria about gun violence isn’t the only reason we are hearing calls for more gun control. Politics is a factor as well. According to the New York Times, while 60% of Republicans have a gun in the house, only 25% of Democrats do. “Whether someone owns a gun,” Nate Silver writes, “is a more powerful predictor of a person’s political party than her gender, whether she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, whether she lives in the South or a number of other demographic characteristics.” That’s why Obama used the Newtown killings to bully the Republicans into caving on his demands for higher taxes. Like class warfare, gun control is a reliable issue for Democrats to exploit for political gain no matter how ineffective the resulting policies. Just as the soak-the-rich policies dominating the Democrats’ solutions to the “fiscal cliff” will do nothing to reduce the deficit and control spending, so too more gun control will not stop tragedies like the Newtown massacre.

Gun control laws, then, represent yet another instance of the progressive ideology that distrusts the average person to control his own life, and so demands ever greater regulatory intrusion into private life that necessarily expands the scope and power of the government. Restrictions on guns assume that most people, especially those conservative “bitter clingers to guns and religion,” as Obama called them, are too untrustworthy or incapable or stupid to own and carry a weapon. Such laws are written by elite snobs who think they know how to run your life better than you do, just as progressive economic policy is predicated on the belief that the federal government has a right to confiscate your money because it knows how to spend it more efficiently or justly.

In the end, the progressive point is not to solve problems that history shows big government is usually incapable of doing without extracting prohibitive costs. The point is to expand the leviathan state at the expense of individual freedom and autonomy, based on a contempt for ordinary people whom progressives at heart believe are not as worthy of freedom as they are. The emotional excesses that surround a tragedy like the Newtown massacre are merely the camouflage for advancing this assault on freedom.

Gun, control, in other words is merely a symbolic issue. Liberals want to put people whom they define as “the other” in their place, and symbolicly vindicate their own claimed lifestyle superiority. It fundamentally, deep down, has nothing to do with decreasing gun violence.