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.
