The gun-control crowd continues to believe that violence in America is due to the fact that so many people own guns. If guns could just be made to disappear, the argument goes, the violence in American society would finally disappear.
What about Switzerland? In that country, most everyone owns guns and keeps them in their homes. The Swiss people are among the best-armed people in the world. Interestingly enough, no one, including the U.S. government, ever jacks with the Swiss by invading or regime-changing Switzerland. Switzerland also never has any problems with tyrannical regimes rising to power within the country. Switzerland also has no chronic terrorism problem, like the United States does, and therefore has no need to wage a “war on terrorism.”
So, given that there isn’t a large amount of violence in Switzerland, notwithstanding widespread gun ownership, there has to be something other than widespread gun ownership here in the United States that is causing the violence
There is.
In fact, there are two things going on here that are not going on over there in Switzerland: the drug war and foreign interventionism.
Violence and the drug war
The drug war is a root cause of massive violence in America. It has given rise to violent drug gangs, drug cartels, and drug lords, along with violent turf battles between them. The situation is no different in principle than when alcohol was made illegal.
The drug war also gives rise to exorbitant black-market prices, which cause drug addicts to commit violent crimes, such as robberies and muggings, to get the money to pay such prices.
None of this would be occurring if drugs were legal. The drug dealers would be pharmacies and reputable drug companies. The drug gangs, drug cartels, and drug lords would be out of business overnight. They can compete in illegal markets but they can’t compete in legal markets.
If drugs were legalized, prices of drugs would plummet. Drug addicts would no longer have to commit violent crimes to get the money to finance their habit because prices would be relatively low. When do we ever see winos robbing people to get the money to buy a bottle of wine?
In fact, that’s pretty much the approach toward drug addiction and drug abuse that Switzerland has taken. Their’s isn’t the ideal libertarian system in which government plays no role in drug abuse at all, one in which drug abuse is left entirely in the hands of the private sector, but the Swiss have taken an overall approach of treating drug addiction and drug abuse as a rehabilitation problem rather than a criminal-justice problem.
So, why not simply legalize drugs rather than confiscate guns? The drug-war crowd won’t let that happen because so many people in the drug-war establishment are dependent — addicted, if you will — to the enormous money that comes with the drug war, not only in salaries but also in bribes and asset forfeiture.
Violence and foreign interventionism
The second difference between Switzerland and the United States is foreign interventionism. Even since the end of the Cold War, when the U.S. government lost the Soviet Union as its official enemy, the U.S. national-security establishment has been killing massive numbers of foreigners in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Killing foreigners has become a permanent and perpetual part of American life.
Not so with Switzerland. During the entire time that the U.S. government has been killing hundreds of thousands of foreigners, the Swiss government hasn’t killed any.
Driving the U.S. killing spree has been a mindset of total indifference to the value of human life in foreign countries. That mindset has been reflected by the U.S. government’s position to never keep track of the number of foreigners it is killing. It just doesn’t matter. What matters is the value of American life, not foreign life.
The assumption, of course, has always been that that decades-long killing spree, along with the mindset that drives it, would never adversely affect the American people, so long as the number of U.S. casualties remained relatively low. The American mainstream media has played into this process by downplaying coverage of the hundreds of thousands of people who were being killed overseas.
What interventionists failed to account for, however, was the possibility of copycat murders here at home, committed by people who were off-kilter mentally. Of course, we have seen people commit copycat murders when, say, private serial killers are killing people. Why wouldn’t the same thing happen when the U.S. government is the killer?
Interventionists would point out that the killers here at home are killing Americans rather than foreigners? Yes, that’s true, but it’s entirely possible that a person whose mind is off-kilter is not going to draw the same distinction on the value of human life that U.S. officials and interventionists do. It’s entirely possible that the off-kilter American copies the U.S. government’s massive, permanent, and perpetual killing spree by placing no value on any life, American or foreigner.
I say this: Let’s end the U.S. government’s drug war and the U.S. government’s killing spree abroad, and then let’s see what happens. I say that violence in America would plummet, which would then eliminate the excuse for gun control. Of course, maybe that’s why the gun-control crowd opposes that two-pronged solution to the problem. It would eliminate their excuse for gun control.