You’re Wrong on Guns, Rachel!

     You too, Hillary.  And watch out Bernie; you won’t win the Democratic nomination if you decide to support gun restrictions.  It should be clear to us all, as it is to all Republicans, that if the Democratic candidate for President next year openly supports restriction on weapons, the Republican candidate will probably, against all odds, win the election.

     Remember candidate Al Gore in 2000.  Florida and the Supreme Court notwithstanding, all that he had to do to win the election over Bush II was to carry his home state of Tennessee with its eleven electoral votes.  But he didn’t because as Vice President he had supported Bill Clinton’s ill-conceived, rightist position on the gun-control issue, which most voters in Tennessee opposed.

     Virtually all MSNBC spokespersons and their newspaper, magazine, and blog consultants and guests have raised a cry after the Umpqua incident that we must do something about mass shootings, and yet nothing specific they have proposed to date would help stop such shootings.  What their proposals would do is make the control of our weapons by the federal government easier, and they would make gun acquisition more difficult for those who obey the laws.  But I protest their uniform ignorance of the deeper issues involved when they claim—as Rachel, Chris, Lawrence, Chuck, Chris, Steve, Al, Ari, Joy, and most of the others who appear on that network have done—that by supporting more gun restrictions they are expressing the leftist view on this issue.

     That is dead wrong.  Gun control is, and always has been a rightist proposal.  Stop and think about that.  As I explained in my recent book, Human Nature: A New Theory of Psychology, the only proper definitions of the terms leftist and rightist are, respectively, individualists and collectivists, for that is the true polarity in the political (or pragmatic) reasoning of all humans.  But only collectivists (which includes liberals as well as conservatives) will propose that the natural, inalienable rights of real individuals should be subordinated to the apparent needs of some collective—whether it be a family, a community, a company, a church, or a nation.  Whenever any artificial collective asserts such rights, it is advocating the suppression of a natural right of the real individuals who compose it.  And clearly in this case that right is the right of self-defense, which (as I said elsewhere):

. . . That right is as natural and inalienable as eating, sleeping, loving, and breathing.  So why should we surrender it to the massive centralist government that rightist elitists created for us in 1787 and hope to rule us with forever?

. . . The gun restrictions proposed by our collectivistic rightists, whether liberals (moderate rightists) or conservatives (extremist rightists), are irrational because they put the cart before the horse.  Only after they have helped us establish a moral government that serves and protects every individual equally can they reasonably ask us to lay down our arms.

     How could so many in our media make such a mistake?  It’s simple; when they finished school, they stopped thinking about political theory, and instead addressed the practical problems of their life as if theory was not the essence of every understanding we have and every practical decision we make.  Thus, we have Rachel Maddow (who, according to my psychologic theory, has a thought reversal) and her friends either saying or presuming that “progressives” and “liberals,” and hence all “leftists,” support gun restrictions while only “conservatives” or “rightists” oppose them.  And then they add that Hillary’s anti-gun position is a brilliant tactic that puts her to the “left” of Bernie on this issue.  Not so; Bernie has always been to her left on this, because she is (in the terms of my theory) an elitist and a conservative, just as Bush II is.

     The only danger Bernie faces here is if he backtracks.  He need only read this and my other essays on this subject in my blog to see all the reasons why he must stand fast on his leftist principles here.  He probably won’t, though, because according to my analysis of his character he, like many people, is conflicted in his reasoning on left-right issues.

     [See my more-detailed articles last month on this subject: Rethinking Gun Control and On Gun Control.]