Obama’s Push for Gun Prohibition

US President Obama pushes for a radical overhaul of gun laws.

From Bloomberg,

President Barack Obama unveiled the most ambitious gun-control agenda in decades today, announcing a $500 million package of legislative proposals and executive actions aimed at curbing firearms violence, from mass shootings to street crime.

The president, counting on a shift in public opinion since the shooting rampage at a Connecticut elementary school last month, challenged Congress to mandate background checks for all gun buyers, ban high-capacity ammunition clips, and reinstate a ban on sales of assault weapons

Obama signed 23 executive actions aimed at circumventing congressional opposition to new gun restrictions, including several designed to maximize prosecution of gun crimes and improve access to government data for background checks.

Couched in social morality, Obama’s proposal, which has been psychologically anchored on spur of the moment public impulse (availability heuristic), resonates of his predilection for the expansion of government, and importantly, for a spending $500 million blitz.

Again from the same article:

The administration also plans to address legal barriers that may prevent states from sharing relevant medical information, to review standards for gun locks, require federal authorities to trace firearms recovered in criminal investigations and direct the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes of gun violence.

The new spending would go mostly for training and data- collection programs. Obama wants $10 million for the CDC to conduct further research, “including investigating the relationship between video games, media images, and violence.”

Another $20 million would expand a reporting system to gather data when firearms are used in violent deaths, whether homicides or suicides. To encourage states to share criminal and mental health records for the federal background database, Obama proposes spending $20 million this year and $50 million next year.

School districts and police departments would get $150 million to hire school resource officers, psychologists and social workers and another $65 million for teacher training.

Obama again urged lawmakers to approve an existing request for $4 billion to help communities keep 15,000 police officers on duty.

So gun control looks like stimulus camouflaged mostly for the bureaucracy.

Yet like almost all prohibition laws once this gun control comes into effect the likelihood is to bring the assault weapon and sporting rifle ban into the underground (shadow economy).  And along with the other typical consequences: greater fraud, corruption, and higher risks of violence.

This reminds me of a quote attributed to Russian revolutionary and USSR Premier Vladimir I Lenin

A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie.

Incidentally, Lenin’s Russian Civil War resulted to a death toll of 8 million people where only 2 million were from combat deaths according to eNotes.com.

Of course, Lenin introduced the infamous concentration camps or the Gulag

So like all aspiring tyrants, gun control has been the traditional recourse for assuming total social control.

Further, Obama’s thrust to use of “mental health” as checks on gun ownership represents the assumption that bureaucrats know better and have better moral standings than the citizenry have been premised on statolatry or the fiction of the puritanical or deifed state.

Additionally, the gun control regulation opens the portals of public censorship via "investigating the relationship between video games, media images, and violence.” 

The psychiatric treatment approach through social policies has been used as a prominent tool to attain total social control—the therapeutic state

Writes Professor Thomas Szasz at the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International: (hat tip Bob Wenzel) [bold and italics original]

“Although we may not know it, we have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.”

“When I use the term therapeutic state, I use it ironically, it’s therapeutic for the people who are doing the locking up, who are doing the therapy, it’s not therapeutic for the victims, for the patients.”

“In the therapeutic state, treatment is contingent on, and justified by, the diagnosis of the patient’s illness and the physician’s prescription of the proper remedy for it… Today, the therapeutic state exercises authority and uses force in the name of health.” The Founding Fathers “could not have anticipated…that an alliance between medicine and the state would then threaten personal liberty and responsibility exactly as they had been threatened by an alliance between church and state.”

“Inasmuch as we have words to describe medicine as a healing art, but have none to describe it as a method of social control or political rule, we must first give it a name. I propose that we call it pharmacracy, from the Greek roots pharmakon, for ‘medicine’ or ‘drug,’ and kratein, for ‘to rule’ or ‘to control.’”

“Formerly, people rushed to embrace totalitarian states. Now they rush to embrace the therapeutic state. When they discover that the therapeutic state is about tyranny, not therapy, it will be too late.”

“This phenomenon illustrates what I call the creeping therapeutic state. I see it as insidious, especially given the cooperation between the government and the media. This is allowed on television. But advertising Scotch, a legal drink, is not allowed. This subtly undermines the rule of law, the principle that if something is legal, then it’s legal, and if it’s illegal, then it’s illegal. A prescription drug is illegal; pharmacists cannot sell it to you unless you have a prescription. These are illegal drugs, but nobody calls them illegal drugs. So I see this as pernicious, as an example of what F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises talked about—that the opposite of freedom is not brutal tyranny but capriciousness.”

The US has been in a transition to the land of the UNfree or what I call as the Philippinization of the US, and the consequences that goes along with it.

As I previously noted,

F. A. Hayek once warned that Americans are headed towards the road to serfdom. His admonitions appear as becoming a reality with the deepening of America’s police state aside from snowballing political and economic fascism, signs of which the US could be in a slippery slope towards dictatorship.