"They don't hate our guns. They hate US.": Bob Herbert plays Uncle Tom on the government monopoly of force plantation.

Bob Herbert, New York Times Columnist and advocate of a government monopoly of force.

A moment of clarity over Milo's Sweet Tea and Diet Mountain Dew.

I was sitting in the back room of a gun store here in Alabama the other day, chatting with a long time friend about Bob Herbert's latest NYT column, A Threat We Can’t Ignore over drinks. He had a Milo's Sweet Tea and I had a Diet Mountain Dew.

A call for more gun control, it began with this:

Even with the murders that have already occurred, Americans are not paying enough attention to the frightening connection between the right-wing hate-mongers who continue to slither among us and the gun crazies who believe a well-aimed bullet is the ticket to all their dreams.

Then, had this right about the middle:

There is no Obama gun ban on the way. . . . What’s important to grasp here is that this madness has nothing to do with hunting, which the politicians always claim to be defending, and everything to do with the use of firearms to resist policies and lawful government actions that some gun owners don’t like.

Herbert then concluded:

Gun craziness of all kinds, including the passage of local laws making it easier to own and conceal weapons, is on the rise. . . It might be wise to pay closer attention than we’ve been paying. The first step should be to bring additional gun control back into the policy mix.

"Gun crazies." "Slither(ing) among us." Lumping ordinary American gun owners in with National Socialist (read collectivist) terrorists so that we can all be repressed. And note -- Herbert thinks we're paranoid for thinking Obama is going to give us more gun control. His solution? Why, more gun control, of course.

My friend sighed, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. We're all older than we were in the 90s the last time this kind of stuff was rolling out. We're older, wiser and sadder, I think, than we were then. No less determined, but we've been here before.

"You know something, Mike?" he asked in sadness and quiet discovery. "I just realized something. All this time I thought it was our guns they hated, but that's not it. They don't hate our guns. They hate US. You and me. We're free individuals and they can't stand it."

I could only agree. However, there was one thing Herbert wrote with which I agreed.

"This . . . has . . . everything to do with the use of firearms to resist policies and lawful government actions that some gun owners don’t like."

Or, to put it the other way round, this has everything to do with the government being able to force compliance from citizens who desire to retain their property and liberty contrary to the wishes of Herbert and his friends. Just as after Heller, when we began to hear calls from the victim disarmament crowd about repealing the Second Amendment, we now hear demands for the codification of a government monopoly on violence.

That's what this whole thing about "sporting use" is all about. Other than PETA, the collectivists don't really care if poor little Bambi ends up in somebody's pot. Heck, even Herman Goering was a great white Aryan hunter. What they object to is not necessarily the firearm, but the combination of a firearm and the hands of somebody trained and willing to use it to defend his liberty. That's what scares the crap out of them.

So my friend is right. At the end of the day, Herbert and his ilk don't hate firearms. Firearms in the hands of the government which can be used to bully us into compliance are perfectly OK with them. What they really hate, or I should say, who they really hate, are free people, individuals, armed citizens who insist on their rights to liberty and property and have the ability to maintain them against government tyranny.

Let us postulate that they get their way. Of course they won't, not without a civil war. But let us say that they do. Now, at a wave of Bob Herbert's magic wand, all the law-abiding are disarmed. The government is not. The criminals are not, because, after all, they're criminals. The police cannot be everywhere at once, not even close, so this government monopoly of force becomes a government and criminal duopoly of force. The law-abiding are now, ipso facto, all potential victims. They are not citizens reponsible for their own defense; they are serfs, slaves, unable to effectively resist either the government or the criminals.

This is Bob Herbert's perfect world. It is ironic that African Americans like Herbert, Jesse Jackson and Gene Robinson would embrace this victimhood. The veterans of the Deacons for Defense and Justice who guarded civil rights advocates like Martin Luther King, Jr. with their military pattern firearms and their lives against Klan violence would, I am sure, call them "Uncle Toms" working on the government's plantation. And why wouldn't they?

Image from "No Guns For Negroes."

(I urge everyone to get a copy of JPFO's latest video, No Guns For Negroes, which was produced in concert with the Congress of Racial Equality's Chicago branch with the assistance of its Chairman, Ralph W. Conner. You can get a DVD of this solidly researched documentary by sending a $25.00 or greater donation to CORE at P.O. Box 2015, Chicago, Illinois 60690-2015. Their email is: coreblog08@gmail.com. Or, you can buy it on-line from JPFO by going to www.jpfo.org.)




By carrying their firearms concealed (and remember, this was in violation of the law back then), that would make the Deacons "gun crazies" in Herbert's alternate universe. So you see, this is not about race, except that the first gun control laws were designed to keep guns out of the hands of slaves and free blacks. No, it is about hate. Masters, the people who seek to run nations like plantations, hate free men and women with firearms. Uncle Toms hate them too, for we remind them that they are, in fact, Uncle Toms instead of free individuals.

Deacons for Defense and Justice.

Either you trust the people, as the Founders did, or you don't. The advocates of a government monopoly of violence, even defensive violence, are in the end all collectivists of different stripes. All tyrannical regimes insist upon a government monopoly of violence -- Nazis, Communists and now, Bob Herbert and his friends.

For our part, we don't hate them. We simply wish to be left alone. But here's the rub. We may not hate them, but if they force us into conflict by further predations on our property and liberty, our not hating them will not keep us from killing them in righteous self defense.

And THAT is why they hate us. That is why they libel us by lumping us in with collectivist terrorists.

Because they fear us.

They fear that we, the heretofore law-abiding armed citizenry of the United States, of all races, creeds and colors, will be able to resist when the time comes for them to shove their tyrannical ideas down our throats.

And you know what?

They should be afraid.

They should, in fact, leave us the hell alone.