The Geniuses Who Think They Can Ban Evil

No sooner had word of the diabolically evil massacre in Aurora reached the airwaves than liberals began to exploit it politically. Waiting not even a day for the families to grieve, the likes of The Chicago Sun-Times, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, mayor Michael Bloomberg and the philandering race-baiter Jesse Jackson leapt into action.

Their mission: to politicize the debate and gain some purchase for their long-discredited argument that preventing the law-abiding from defending themselves with firearms would prevent gun violence.

But consider the irony of residents of New York City and Chicago issuing screeds for more gun control. Both cities enforce draconian (and unconstitutional) bans on the right to keep and bear arms. And both cities are awash in gun violence, despite their myriad gun control measures:

• Every week in Chicago, criminals kill, maim and wound the guilty and innocent alike. Last month, over a single weekend, 8 were shot to death and more than 40 wounded.

• New York City is likewise awash in "illegal" guns as criminals have no problem acquiring them; this July has seen a 28% rise in city shootings since last year.

And for those liberals who believe that it is only the fact that neighboring areas -- with more lax gun control policies -- are responsible, consider the following attacks:

• In Norway, a neo-Nazi slaughtered 92 innocents; Norway is a country that effectively bans guns (as do its neighbors);

• One victim of the Aurora attack, Jessica Ghawi, had narrowly survived a mass shooting in a Canadian mall in which two died and seven others were wounded. Canada greatly restricts access to firearms and, to the best of my knowledge, Eric Holder has not yet attempted to smuggle heavy weapons into that country.

Can you ban guns? Of course not: firearms and gunpowder have been manufactured for centuries and any half-decent machine shop could manufacture semi- or fully-automatic weapons.

Can you ban mass-murder? Of course not: the Aurora murderer -- who I refuse to name -- could have detonated a gasoline bomb in the crowded theater. Islamist terrorists manufacture suicide belts and recommend driving cars into crowds.

Can you ban evil? Of course not.

Cinemark Theaters, in fact, bans guns -- which is one reason why no member of the audience could open fire on the mass murderer.

But in the liberal's Utopian worldview, evil can somehow be stopped. If only society's elite -- the master-planners -- can be given enough control over human activity, they could construct a perfect government and prevent all violence. Notice, however, that society's elite are always protected by arms.

To prevent all violence requires, of course, complete control by the elites over the masses. Which is why North Korea is completely free of gun violence (at least, among the citizenry).

In the book More Guns, Less Crime, economist John Lott conducted the largest statistical analysis of the impact of firearms on safety ever performed in the United States.

He found that the gun control advocates -- who had always predicted that concealed carry permits would result in the streets running red with blood, shootouts in parking lots, and the like -- were completely and utterly wrong. To his great surprise, he found that the more weapons possessed by the law-abiding, the safer society becomes as a whole.

In fact, history has proven that the reverse is true: disarming a population is frequently the precursor to genocide. It occurred in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Cambodia under the Maoist Pol Pot. Millions paid the ultimate price for giving up their firearms -- and their God-given right to protect themselves.

As usual, the idiots in the press -- as well as their Statist sycophants like Bloomberg and Jackson -- must ignore all of history. They must ignore facts, logic and reason to claim that they can ban evil and order society to suppress evildoers -- if only they can be granted total control over you and your God-given right to defend yourself.