Seems the authoritarians out there are at it again in the aftermath of the CT school shooting. As usual, they're arguing that gun use and ownership needs to be restricted for private citizens. Cause, y'know the government would never lie to you or round you up now that they have all the guns, right?

In any case, I keep hearing one terrible argument in even libertarian circles, and it goes like this:

I'd love to magically have guns disappear, but since we can't...

Using such as an argument against gun control is entirely ridiculous and dangerous. Not only does it ruin your rhetorical position, as it emotionally concedes the point, which is a cue for the chimps out there to shout you down; But it also implies something far, far more sinister.

It says that you pine for a world where the physically strong dominate the weak. Without guns, anyone with a stronger arm and a long weapon rules the roost. Women and short people need to think real long and hard about that one -- without an equalizer on your hip, peonage and rape is gonna look real easy.

I've also heard lots of people advance the argument that it's OK to have gun control, as long as you have contracted (or are coerced) into a police-protectee relationship. This is also a remarkably foolish argument, as there are some things which simply cannot be delegated. Like one does not hire another to eat or defecate for themselves, hiring another to defend one's self is similarly an impossibility for all but the wealthiest. Even then it is a pale substitute; can one really trust a bodyguard to be there 24/7, and to not betray? Ask the Roman Emperors how that one turned out for them.

In the end, I think the thing that really terrifies all these authoritarians is the statistics on self defense; And this isn't just talking about how more guns reduces the incidents of aggression overall. In every case, resistance to aggression (regardless of how it is done) overall increases one's chance of surviving the incident. This is borne out even in the macro events; being in open rebellion beats the heck out of concentration camps. As such, the authoritarians have a sort of annihilation panic going on; they know their behavior is self-destructive at some level, and as such must rationalize before cognitive dissonance sets in and they feel uncomfortable in the slightest. After all, the whole point of being authoritarian is so that you don't have to think for yourself!

Which I suppose hits back again at the root of all this. Authoritarians delusionally believe that they can delegate authority over themselves and others which they either do not possess or cannot delegate. Some feel they are delegating their ownership of others, and hence control of their actions, to the "authorities". This is clearly wrong, as telepathy does not exist; rights do not exist without the ability to use them.

However, this is something of a straw-man, as most believe something even more ridiculous. That being the "sum of the parts having emergent properties" argument. They hold that while no one has the right to coerce, agglomerations of people ("society" or "the common good" or "the collective") does. Well, I'm all for there existing some emergent properties in some systems. However, I find it a great leap of imagination to believe that emergent properties exist from a summation of parts that equals 0, as no single member of the agglomeration has the claimed authority.

I suppose it is the internalization of this delusion that makes most of those holding it eschew self defense; as otherwise they would have to think for themselves about why they are not internally consistent (and they foolishly believe they can have authorities think for them). So, they go on their merry gun-grabbing way until the reality of self-defense statistics stares them in the face, at which they have a few choices:

The vast majority get emotional and angry to distract oneself from reason (democrat), or start looking out for themselves while not taking the time to become logically consistent (republican). Some do embrace reason however. Hopefully they take it all the way to liberty.