Global Warming, and Gun Control
By L. Neil Smith
© Copyright JPFO. Inc
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Okay, let's get this straight, right up front: global warming has been totally and thoroughly discredited as the shameless, heartless fraud that most of us knew it was from the very beginning. That's not really what this article is about, so if you haven't gotten the word, go to http://tinyurl.com/22u8uy -- it's a good place to start reading up.
Global warming is a hoax, exactly like the "discovery" of Piltdown Man in 1912 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_man, but with a tightly-focused political agenda in mind. It is the last gasp of the Old Left. (Around here, environmentalists are called "watermelons": Green on the outside, Red on the inside.) Its purpose is to fulfill the Marxist imperative to "seize the means of production", even if it means, in effect, repealing the Industrial Revolution. But this time, instead of justice for workers, the excuse is that we must "save the Earth".
One of the appeals of the whole environmental thing is to those unfortunates (and with our Puritanical history, there are millions of them) who already hate themselves so badly that it spills over to their own families, to their country, and to their species. It's also perfect for people who have run out of other things to feel guilty about.
The really sad and stupid thing is that most politicians and their accomplices in the Old Media are still pushing global warming as if it hadn't been disproven. They have plenty of motivation: since we all exhale carbon dioxide, and almost everything productive that we do produces the gas as well, their "carbon footprint" flimflam would give them control over everything on Earth, and every aspect of living on it.
There is no length, no matter how absurd, punitive, insane, or evil, to which these latterday Leninists are not willing to go in the pursuit of power over their fellow human beings. I've even seen an article http://tinyurl.com/yvk4rn attacking solar energy technology, once the very epitome of political correctness, for the crime of greedily using up more than humanity's "fair share" of the sun's energy, depriving animals and plants they claim have an equal right to it.
As we've already seen, back in the bad old Soviet Union, and now with privileged left-wing "celebrocrats" like Ted Turner, Jane Fonda, and Al Gore, the collectivist nomenklatura would get to keep their toys and luxuries, because they're far, far too important ever to be inconvenienced.
But in a surrealistic world where a specimen like Gore can win a Nobel Prize, among other things by claiming with a straight face that cigarette smoking is a cause of global warming, they could (and would) force peasants like you and me to switch from our healthy red meat to lentils and soybeans or something equally insipid. They could (and would) move entire populations around to suit them, exactly like Pol Pot did to his fellow Cambodians (supposedly FEMA has already built the concentration camps http://tinyurl.com/32jxd4 ), murdering about a third of them in the process. They could (and would) put a swift end to what they presently call "binge flying", setting transportation progress back to around 1903. They could (and would) take away our "inefficient" stand-alone homes, and our "wasteful and polluting" automobiles.
And above all, our guns.
Yes, that's what I said, our guns. A lot of otherwise politically savvy gun owners have believed until now that we have no interest in all of that global warming malarky. They couldn't be more mistaken. The individual right to own and carry weapons is among its primary targets.
Guns emit pollutants, after all -- carbon dioxide and particles of lead just for beginners -- and driving our evil, gas-guzzling SUVs out to the range burns "fossil fuels", creating even more "greenhouse gases". Hunting, of course, involves several deplorable human vices, most of them dating back 100,000 years or so, to the discovery of fire.
Much more importantly, of course -- although they're not very likely to mention this in public -- guns give individuals, including otherwise helpless children, cripples, and old people like those who died at Waco in 1993, the means to resist being treated like farm livestock "for the duration of the emergency" (however contrived that emergency happens to be) by an arrogant, insatiatable collectivist government.
And private ownership of guns engenders the wrong attitudes toward authority -- just ask the British government of North America circa 1776.
The scientific truth, of course, is that the Earth warms and the Earth cools, all by itself, with lots of help from the sun. It always has and it always will. Until recently, it has been warming very slightly -- and so have Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Nobody is going to tell me that my Dodge Durango and my .45 Grizzly Win Mag are doing that!
Back in the time of Tyrannosaurus rex, it was a lot warmer than it is today, and there was at least half again as much oxygen in the air. (Apparently the surplus oxygen got used up when the famous dinosaur- killing asteroid strike set every tree on Earth on fire.) If they could, herbivorous dinosaurs like Hadrosaurs might have tried to use global cooling as an excuse to take the predators' claws and teeth away. Good thing their brains were even tinier than the average gun- grabber's.
Yes, the Earth will be around, in perfect working order, for a long, long time to come. When at last it isn't, we'll just move on to another planet. And when the sun burns out, we'll move to another star. In the meantime, and until we do, what we need, perhaps, to protect us from intellectual dinosaurs like Gore, is an addition to the Bill of Rights requiring the formal separation of science and state.
That might work out pretty well for medicine, too. --
A fifty-year veteran of the libertarian movement, L. Neil Smith is the Author of 33 books including The Probability Broach, Ceres, Sweeter Than Wine, And Down With Power: libertarian Policy In A Time Of Crisis. He is also the Publisher of The Libertarian Enterprise, now in its 17th year online.
Visit the Neil Smith archive on JPFO.
© Copyright Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership 2012.
