quote of the day

I am a bit late on this one, but it seems like there is no shortage of things to write about these days, and no time in which to actually do so. Sometimes, being a verbose bastard is a pain in the ass…

All that said, today’s quote comes from Joe Huffman’s post regarding a quote of the day from Mahatma Ghandi – meta-quote-of-the-day?

The pacifist, or anyone, who claims, “Violence never solves anything.” Or, “Violence is never the answer” enables the murder or enslavement of themselves and/or their followers.

Someone who honestly, truly, and completely believes that “violence is never the answer” can never defend themselves from an agressor, whether that attacker is a common criminal on the street, or a totalitarian government looking to expand its control. Someone who entirely ascribes to that belief will be able to offer naught but stern language to someone trying to murder them or their families.

Unfortunately, when anti-rights nuts say things like, “Violence is never the answer,” they leave unspoken the impled, “… for non-law-enforcement civilians,” hiding at the end of that statement. In fact, those petty authoritarians have absolutely no problems employing force-by-proxy themselves by enlisting the support of law-enforcement agencies and the government in their quests to abridge, restrict, and deny your basic, Constitutionally-protected rights, but even with that hypocrisy evident in their every word and deed, they likewise have no problems denying you the ability to use force to defend yourself.

In the end, that is effectively the sole goal of “gun control” – consolidating power in the government, and those who are best at influencing it. So long as individual, private citizens remain armed and capable of resisting the government, no matter how futilely, that can never happen, and the anti-rights nuts will never be able to see their petty-authoritarian dreams come to pass.

And, in a beautiful case of coincidence, Hsoi points us towards an essay that will save me a lot of typing:

A rule not ultimately backed by the threat of violence is merely a suggestion. States rely on laws enforced by men ready to do violence against lawbreakers. Every tax, every code and every licensing requirement demands an escalating progression of penalties that, in the end, must result in the forcible seizure of property or imprisonment by armed men prepared to do violence in the event of resistance or non–compliance. Every time a soccer mom stands up and demands harsher penalties for drunk driving, or selling cigarettes to minors, or owning a pit bull, or not recycling, she is petitioning the state to use force to impose her will. She is no longer asking nicely. The viability of every family law, gun law, zoning law, traffic law, immigration law, import law, export law and financial regulation depends on both the willingness and wherewithal of the group to exact order by force.

Go read the whole thing, and then come back here and tell me that violence is never the answer, if you held to that belief already.