Variations on a Theme

Via Kim comes this outstanding post from Ally Eskin of Who Moved My Truth?: Gun Ownership. Here's a taste:

I grew up hating guns and being very fearful of them. I was raised to fear them, as for the first part of my life, I was told to fear them, and for the second part of my life, I had a parent who kept a firearm irresponsibly. So I was definitely not one for the NRA member recruitment team. However, I married a man who kept several firearms, and before long, I learned to shoot handguns. I'm not a great shot, but I'm well within the 9" paper plate requirement, and some days, I'm on-target and impressing myself. When I bought my first gun, a Smith & Wesson 38 Special snub with a hidden hammer, I took a step that frightened me. I was holding in my hands a weapon that could kill someone. It was a heady, terrifying notion. I realized I did not trust myself. What if I got angry? What if I went insane? What if I was sleep-walking? Hey, I know it sounds crazy....but I was shocked by the implications of owning a firearm. It took several years, but here is what gun-ownership has taught me: self-ownership.

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I learned something incredibly valuable about myself....something no one could teach me or instill in me. I am a trustworthy individual. I can now handle my guns with complete comfort because I know who I am and what I am capable of.

This is a recurring theme on this site, such as in this letter to Kim that I've linked to a couple of times before, or Eric S. Raymond's essay that writer quoted, Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun. I've discussed the tendency of the gun-phobes to fear their own self-control in my essay, Trust and in other places. Bill Whittle wrote most eloquently on the topic in his inaugural essay Freedom.

It all boils down to TRUST, and in order to trust in your fellow citizens, you must first trust yourself. You must know, in your soul, that you are trustworthy. You must have self-ownership. You must consider yourself sovereign, a member of equal standing in your society, not a subject of it. You must believe yourself worthy of your rights as a human being, and you must believe that your fellow citizens are also worthy until they individually prove themselves otherwise.

Else, to paraphrase Bill Whittle, the end result of such thinking is people on watchtowers machine-gunning starving prisoners.