If you wanted to capture somebody, take away their freedom, and keep them in subjection, would you want them the have guns? No, of course you wouldn't. (Duh.)
That's why the police don't want criminals to have guns. They empower the criminals to shoot back at the police, which might result in some of the cops ending up dead, and not just the bad guys only. The problem with using the law to restrict criminal firearms use is that criminals enjoy breaking laws. Since criminals would generally ignore, not to mention be pleased to violate, any gun control measure that any legislature could conceivably enact into law, why bother to fool around with gun control measures at all? The only effect they could have is to worsen the strategic and tactical position of the law-abiding citizen, relative to the crooks.
One characteristic of gun-control proponents is dishonesty. The result of gun-control implementation in every country where it has been tried is to increase violent crime, including violent crime committed with guns, which increases despite the fact that the criminals must realize (gasp!) that by carrying a gun when they mug somebody in a dark alley, they are breaking the law. The possibility of being punished for carrying an unlicensed firearm just doesn't seem to scare crooks a whole lot. Yet gun-control advocates pretend that the situation is otherwise. They know better, of course. They have a hidden political agenda, of which gun control is merely a part.
The criminals have, you see, already adjusted mentally to the idea that they will be jailed if they are caught. The penalty for, say, robbing somebody of $1000 is already so stiff that any extra penalty resulting from the illegal possession of a gun doesn't make much difference to them. The big whammy of a gun control law falls on the honest people who, had they been permitted to carry guns, would have used them in self-defense or in defense of their loved ones or their property. That is why gun control is so INSANELY STUPID.
Even "moderate" gun-control measures are stupid, such as licensure. Do criminals bother with licenses? No. Certainly not. What, then, does licensure accomplish? It gives the government the chance to deny citizens permission to keep and bear arms, on one flimsy pretext or another. How about "background checks"? Criminals commonly steal their guns, or they buy them from blackmarket vendors who buy them from gun thieves or smugglers, and in either case, the criminal by-passes the mandated check. What, then, do background checks accomplish? They give the government the chance to deny citizens permission to keep and bear arms, on one flimsy pretext or another.
Does a common thread emerge from these "moderate" gun-control provisions? Might we be justified in anticipating that further gun control measures will also contain this feature? In any case, is it not unseemly for a free citizen to have to go crawling on his knees to a government authority in order to get its "blessing" for the exercise of one of his basic constitutional rights? Licensure and background checks give the lie to the notion that the 2nd Amendment has any real controlling influence on government power: You never need a special license to do what it is really your right to do.
Consider the language of the 2nd Amendment.
AMENDMENT TWO (1791).
A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Liberals, who are characteristically dishonest in political matters, have alleged that the right to keep and bear arms belongs only to members of a government-organized national guard. The falseness of that opinion is easily appreciated when you realize that there was no such thing as a uniformed "national guard," as we know it today, when the 2nd Amendment was written, and thus the amendment could not possibly mean what the liberals say it does.
During the American Revolution, every free man was a citizen soldier. After the Revolution, the Founding Fathers wanted to make sure that the citizen stayed free, in particular from any future government tyranny. It was precisely to establish a curb to the power of consolidated government that the common citizen—i.e., any citizen who was not himself a threat to society—was given advance permission, under the full sanction of the supreme law of the land, to own and to carry guns. That permission was built directly into our form of government; no additional permission of any sort should be required. When federal or state laws require it anyway, those laws infringe your right, precisely as the Constitution states that the government must never do.
An infringement is not quite the same thing as a violation. All violations are infringements, but some infringements are less than violations. If the government simply and categorically forbids you from carrying guns, then it has violated your 2nd Amendment right (and so also infringed it). But the government can infringe your right without going quite so far as to commit a violation. Licensure is an infringement because it puts a condition on the right to keep and bear arms that the Constitution was amended to make unnecessary. The 2nd Amendment is advance permission, a gift from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to you. Those esteemed gentlemen would be very displeased if they knew that any goddamn dirty politicians had come along later and attached strings to their gift.
infringe -v.t. 1. to commit a breach or infraction of; violate or transgress. -v.i. 2. to encroach or trespass.
(The word "infraction" comes from the Latin infractus, which means to break, bend, or weaken.)
Have you ever noticed how conspicuous you feel when you wear a sidearm? I expect that rookie cops get that feeling a lot, too, but maybe they get used to it after a while. And there's lots of effete moderns in society who, noticing that (a) you are wearing a pistol in a holster and (b) you are not also wearing some kind of uniform that identifies you as a policeman or a security guard, will gladly make your conspicuity more uncomfortable by crying "He's got a gun!" in affected alarm.
I might call that behavior the "Barney Fife Syndrome." (I can invent Syndromes just as validly as some silly old clinical psychologist can.) At such times, you wish that Sheriff Andy Taylor would appear and calm down the citizen who, though he has as much right to carry a gun as you do, chose to leave his gun at home, under his pillow, where nobody will know that he has one except the government.
Barney: "Andy, h-he's got a gun!"
Andy: "Now, Barney, he's got a right to carry a gun; it's his legal right under the constitution. Have you seen him misbehave with it?"
Barney: "Uh, no—but he's got a gun! Oh, the constitution. Well, all right. But I'm going to keep my eye on him!"
Andy: "Sure, Barney, you do that." (rolls eyes)
Unfortunately, not only are too many moderns too much like Barney Fife, more of our serious men of law enforcement today are more like Darth Vader than Andy Taylor. The government actually encourages citizens to be effete, degenerate, distrustful of their fellow citizen, exposed-and-helpless feeling. When citizens feel this way, they welcome measures that tend to centralize and compartmentalize power, and thus is a governmental tyranny born from the fear of one's neighbor.
I should pause here to mention something. Andy Taylor was a laid-back sheriff in a television series set in a small southern town called "Mayberry," which, despite its location, didn't seem to have its quota of Black residents. The producers of the series evidently knew that they couldn't make Andy's character plausible if, as sheriff, he actually had to deal with Black violence on a regular basis. Hence, we only see him arresting nice people with bad habits, such as Otis the Town Drunk, or every now and then confronts an armed man who, though angry, just needs to be reasoned with. If Mayberry had been a real southern community, say about 30% Black, Sheriff Taylor wouldn't have lived more than a month unless he changed his manner quickly. Hence, multiculturalism produces policemen who are either mean (to be effective) or ineffective (so they don't have to be mean). In a multicultural society, cops who try to be effective, without also being mean, usually end up dead.
But who likes mean cops? I sure don't. I approve of "Officer Friendly" who tries to help people. I like a community where crime is so rare that a policeman has time to help the lost child get home, or to help find a stray dog, and where the mayor will get kicked out of office if he so much as cheats on his wife. Wouldn't YOU like to live in that kind of town too? Too bad. We're "multicultural" now. To get that kind of community back again, multiculturalism has got to go. Until then, the police will be either mean, ineffective, or dead, and no moral standards can be imposed on politicians because every moral standard has a cultural basis. When you hold an official accountable to the values of a particular culture, you offend the ideal of multiculturalism; hence, multiculturalism kills official accountability as well as compromises police agencies.
I mentioned a while ago that gun-control proponents were duplicitious sneaks and that the effect of gun-control laws was to shift the balance of power in favor of criminals. A related point needs to be made clear: When gun control is implemented, it is no longer true that every law-breaker is dishonest.
(A similar thing is true of "hate speech" laws.)
The "social contract" between a government and its citizenry is implicit, and its provisions can be debated, but most would agree that the citizen's part is to obey the laws while the government's part is to ensure the rights of the citizen and to protect the citizen from harm. When a government violates either of those provisions, it stands in breach of contract. The government may claim that it had to violate people's rights for their own good, but every perceptive person will notice that this is the lame excuse of a tyrant.
A thief, in a country under a tyrannical government, is as dishonest as he is anywhere else. But someone who meekly obeys the tyrant's laws is also dishonest. The honorable reaction to tyranny is to break the laws that are tyrannical. This doesn't mean that you should go wild and shoot your neighbors. It does mean that you should ignore any law that increases the power of the tyrant—as you should ignore any law that requires you to harm yourself.
As we've reasoned out, gun control laws won't prevent criminals from using guns. Those laws will only tilt the balance of power in their favor. It does the government absolutely no good to claim that gun control laws will help to protect the law-abiding citizen: that claim is false; it is obviously false; it is so obviously false that it requires some sort of mental defectiveness on the part of the believer (such as stupidity). When gun control laws appear, the prudent honest citizen breaks them; i.e., he becomes a criminal.
And it should occur to the more intelligent members of the tyrant's police and military forces that when they are used to oppress the nation that they were born from, then it is their own relatives, collectively speaking, against whom their guns are raised. FBI Agent Roy, Marine Sergeant Bob, and State Trooper Pete won't be ordered to kill their own brothers, but they might easily be ordered to kill each other's brothers. And if these government agents don't have the sense to realize that their superiors can sic them on each other's families in this way, if they don't even know that such manipulations are possible, then they are simply too dumb to be let run loose.
A paycheck would not be a sufficient inducement to an honest man to tolerate that kind of situation. In other words, the pay is the bribe to the hypocrites who do put up with it.
If Jerry Abbott were a US Justice sitting on the supreme court, deciding a case involving a gun control law, here is what he would write in his opinion. The private ownership of guns and the right to carry guns was established by the founders of our country as a part of its form of government. It was enacted as a deliberate "citizen's check" against a possible tyranny. The 2nd Amendment is as much a part of the Constitution as any other part, and the right to keep and bear arms is as weighty a law as are the provisions for selecting Senators or Members of the House of Representatives. Any weakening of that right, or any paperwork tomfoolery such as registration or licensure, by government is an infringement even when it it is not a violation. All infringements of the right to keep and bear arms are unconstitutional. For trade in guns, the 2nd Amendment case is less clear, but the 9th and 10th Amendments specify that any ambiguity is to be resolved in favor of rights being retained by the people. All attempts to impose infringements on gun rights are made by subversives, and regardless of what his official capacity or political station may be, such a criminal is a traitor who deserves to be killed with a gun. Though, come to think of it, such an easy death may be too good for him.