Why Don't We Want To Give Up Our Semiautomatic Rifles And Standard Capacity Magazines?

Because there are people like this guy, Donald Kaul, a columnist at the Des Moinse Register, out there, and some of those people are in powerful positions in the government.

Here, then, is my “madder-than-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore” program for ending gun violence in America:

• Repeal the Second Amendment, the part about guns anyway. It’s badly written, confusing and more trouble than it’s worth. It offers an absolute right to gun ownership, but it puts it in the context of the need for a “well-regulated militia.” We don’t make our militia bring their own guns to battles. And surely the Founders couldn’t have envisioned weapons like those used in the Newtown shooting when they guaranteed gun rights. Owning a gun should be a privilege, not a right.

• Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. Hey! We did it to the Communist Party, and the NRA has led to the deaths of more of us than American Commies ever did. (I would also raze the organization’s headquarters, clear the rubble and salt the earth, but that’s optional.) Make ownership of unlicensed assault rifles a felony. If some people refused to give up their guns, that “prying the guns from their cold, dead hands” thing works for me.

• Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control.

Really, when a mainstream liberal statist is advocating mass murder and a torture of people who disagree with the policies he'd impose on them -- "that 'prying the guns from their cold, dead hands' thing works for me" -- then you know that even in the U.S., statists will go to literally any lengths to impose their vision on the rest of us.

I've said it before: we are not different in kind from communist dictators in China, from genocidal tribesmen in the Sudan. We are all of the human species. The capacity to inflict massive, government-sponsored horror on our fellow citizens has not been magically removed from our genes.

The fact that we live in the most free prosperous society that has ever existed on the face of the earth is an accident of birth for each of us. We only retain that freedom as long as we keep raising our children to believe in it. No government or society lasts forever. When men like Kaul usher in their new vision, where people like him -- experts and media elites -- know what's best for the rest of us, they want us disarmed so the process is easier.

BTW, Kaul is factually wrong. It is perfectly legal to be a communist in the U.S. and the communist party is alive and well. That's as it should be. I'm not afraid of bad ideas, as long as nobody is preventing me from speaking out about them, and as long as I can defend myself if someone tries to force them on me. In the nations with the worst examples of mass murder in the name of communism, the victims were disarmed. Like he wants us to be.

His sophistry about communist deaths is interesting. He has to hedge his death numbers with the restriction "American Commies," because communists are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions world-wide, and directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of U.S. military in Korea and Vietnam. But I digress.