Opinion: Passion is not proof

So, the president demands that we disarm because insane people criminally use guns. He implies that we can trust people like him to protect us. If only we would stop clinging to our outmoded 18th Century "rights," the world could be made safe for the innocent.

Just 105 years ago, another divisively extreme progressive president promised us that we would fight a war to make the world safe for democracy. Once Kaiser Bill and his Prussian militarists were defeated, we could all come together in a League of Nations to bring about a new age where disputes were settled peaceably.

Both of these idealistic dreams appeal to an adolescent desire to solve all the world's problems as if they were engineering challenges. If only there were no legal guns, we could rest easy because we would then be safe from gun violence. If only the world had a single authority empowered to arbitrate disputes so as to prevent the obscenity that is war, we could all rest in peace.

However, these idealistic fantasies are based in a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. Guns are a means to the end of violence; in gun-free Britain they are experimenting with knife control because violence has continued unabated. Reason is an effective means of resolving conflicts if, and only if, both sides determine to be reasonable.

Taking away one's right to bear arms will not make us any safer in our civilian lives than the League of Nations and the United Nations Organization shielded us from war. The problems of individual and collective violence cannot be solved through laws that seem logical to genteel advocates of reason.

If gun control laws worked, then my old neighborhood in the Bronx would be the most peaceful place in the USA. New York City's gun control laws are among the harshest in our nation. Yet, a shocking rate of violent crime continues to plague Bronx residents as a part of their normal daily routines.

If the United Nations Organization could keep the peace, then Russia would have never invaded the Ukraine. Does anyone believe that the UNO will deter the Chinese Communist Party from trying to conquer Taiwan? The only times that the UNO effectively acted to oppose wars of aggression were in 1950 Korea and 1991 Kuwait.

Gun control has never, ever worked in the fashion that its advocates promise. International Law and transnational committees have never, ever worked as their proponents envisioned. The fervency of their convictions are belied by the reality of their policy's consistent and predictable failures.

As with Communism, true believers say that the reason their gun laws never work is because they are not universal. If only everyone was bound everywhere to their restrictions, their utopia would be born. No, it is absolutely unreasonable to assert that a demonstrably and consistently ineffective policy should be adopted universally.

The reason that these starry-eyed idealists have never succeeded in effectively addressing violence is because they lack humility. Instead of considering the problem of human crime from many angles, today's gun control advocates use criminal tragedy as a mere pretext to shamelessly pursue their predetermined agenda.

"There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." — "Hamlet," William Shakespeare

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In Maine and then Idaho, Ralph K. Ginorio has taught the history of Western civilization to high school students for nearly a quarter century. He is an “out-of-the-closet” Conservative educator with experience in special education, public schools and charter schools, grades 6-12. He has lived in Coeur d’Alene since 2014. Email: rginorio@cdapress.com