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Friday, October 23, 2015

Arranging American Gun Confiscation

Let us consider aloud a matter that progressives might prefer to reserve for private cocktail party conversations, namely what sort of "arrangements" would be required to make a national gun confiscation viable in the United States.
First of all, since the practical obstacle to such a program is the existence of patriotic gun owners, such people must be marginalized with propaganda, and targeted for mockery and suspicion. The process begins in childhood. Mass compulsory schooling is first and foremost a tool for promoting government-friendly attitudes of various sorts; increased nationalization of school curricula, goals, and methods makes the classroom an increasingly effective arena for the undermining of constitutionalist feelings in general, and the promotion of anti-gun sentiments in particular -- two aims which go hand in hand, as young people dissuaded from respecting their nation's history and heroes will find little merit, as adults, in attempts to invoke the Second Amendment (a point which the Supreme Court could render obsolete soon enough). After all, the Constitution was written in the pretechnological era by slave owners, racists, sexists, and capitalist exploiters; how could such a document be useful, let alone decisive, in a modern political debate? 
Secondly, as younger generations are increasingly detached from the constitutional and philosophical heritage that spawned America's arms-bearing tradition, the problem demographic may be presumed to be aging, i.e., dying. Therefore, the shrinkage of the principled resistance may be pursued through a combination of attrition and gradual desensitization to "gun control" talk. This fits neatly within the generalprogressive effort to isolate (and intimidate) "conservatives" as a cranky cadre of old rural white men, and progressives as an educated, multicultural, multisexual kaleidoscope of global urban youth.