“Nothing in this world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
ML King
“Dangerous Knowledge” or “Dangerous Ignorance?”
My esteemed friend and colleague, Tim Kelly, is about to publish a book about children, parents, and guns. I’ve just reviewed the draft, and it is excellent, and will shortly become reading that I will be recommending.
It struck me, as I was reviewing Tim’s first draft:
As they become tall enough to reach that high, we routinely teach our children not to touch hot stoves.
About the same time, we teach them not to run in front of moving vehicles, not to swallow various liquids they discover in the cabinet below the kitchen sink, not to play with electrical wiring.
Inherent to Planet Earth, and to our civilization in particular, is a host of dangerous things and life-threatening circumstances, and as parents we do our best to guide our developing children through this perilous world, yet not “protect” them to the point where they never discover anything for themselves.
Accordingly, I find it curious that those who are opposed to personal freedom, while carefully teaching their children about hot stoves and moving cars, vehemently refuse to teach them about, nor even acknowledge the existence of, guns!
Guns are surely dangerous and “in our world” too, aren’t they?
How can pretending they don’t exist be helpful?
Yet, those opposed to personal freedom insist that there is “safety in ignorance.” With them, the more ignorant we are, the safer we are!
While these leftists never pass-up a chance to vilify guns and gun-owners, they admittedly don’t know what they’re talking about. They themselves are utterly incapable of handling guns appropriately, and they’re proud of it. Similarly, they can’t identify one gun from another.
All they know for sure is that they hate guns and anyone who owns one, and they naively (but desperately) want all guns, all knowledge of guns, violently legislated/regulated out of existence.
Yet, they lack a parallel animosity toward cars, swimming pools, portable fans, hot stoves, etc, and they know all about these other dangerous things and expertly how to use, live with, and enjoy them all, despite admitted peril inherent to every one of them.
But, when it comes to the subject of guns, it’s pretty obvious anti-freedom leftists don’t trust themselves (nor should they), and trust fellow citizens even less!
Leftists can’t imagine there is a place in this world for good and decent people, because they are neither, and they know it.
“I had discerned ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant.
I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others, because nurturing that discourse was easy, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.”
The Socialist Manta, articulated by Tara Westover
/John
