The right to bear arms and strawberry flavoured liquorice shoelaces - a parable

You might ask, what on earth does the right to bear arms have to do with candy?  The answer may be "the survival of a nation".  Tom Utley in the Daily Mail in England writes of a manuscript he received, entitled "The Icon of St. Elias". The futuristic story is an ideological remake of George Orwell's "1984".
Utley hasn't had to look too far to find the precursors of such a future in the government of Britain's plan to establish a $500 million database on the life history of all its nation's 12 million children. From Mr. Utley:

Among other things, the Children's Index will record whether a child's parents are providing a 'positive role model', how the child is performing at school — and even whether youngsters are eating the daily five portions of fruit and vegetables recommended by the Government.

Presumably, children will be questioned at school each morning on what their parents fed them the night before.

The database, we are told, will be made available to social workers, teachers and doctors, who will have the power to flag up 'concerns' when they think that children are not meeting the criteria laid down by the state.

This really is frightening stuff: an administration gone absolutely berserk with power. What earthly business is it of this government — or any future one — what my children eat, at my kitchen table, in my house?

If I sound nervous, that is because there was a time about six years ago when our youngest — 13 today — would eat almost nothing but strawberry-flavoured liquorice shoelaces, HAP (honey and peanut butter) sandwiches and packets of crisps. How would that look on the Children's Index?

Oh, Patricia Hewitt — dear, sweet, kind Secretary of State for Health — I promise you that we tried to make him eat up his greens. He just wouldn't. Please don't take him away from us.

I have other worries, too, which make me dread the arrival of a phalanx of social workers at my door, to condemn me as a lousy 'role model' and march my boys into care.

Those who have followed the development of social control laws in Britain should be squirming over the eminent sense such a program makes to the parliamentary machinery currently held in a headlock by liberal nanny-statists "over 'ome". To continue from Mr. Utley:

But there is a very serious point to all this. This new computer database is part of the Government's response to the heart-rending tragedy that befell eight-year-old Victoria Climbie, who died in 2000 after being treated with appalling cruelty by her great aunt.

The idea of the Children's Index, says the Government, is to act as an early warning system to identify children at risk.

But this completely misses the point of what went wrong in Victoria's case. It wasn't that nobody alerted the authorities to her plight. On the contrary, police, doctors and social workers all had contact with her during her abuse — in which she suffered no fewer than 128 injuries.

They were alerted in the time-honoured way — not by a computer, but by good-natured and public-spirited people, who noticed that something was terribly wrong with the way the poor child was being treated.

Mr. Utley predicts, given the reality that the state makes a lousy parent, that the "Children's Index will not save a single child's life".

But where's the hook to gun-loving Americans, you ask? The much vaunted Gun Registry in Canada was regularly touted as a necessary social database and tool to protect Canadians from the "abuses" of firearms owners in Canada, who apparently had been running roughshod over women and children for decades, but doing it so clandestinely that practically nobody noticed. At least, not until the Coalition for Gun Control and Al Rock and the Liberal Party declared a public disaster and proceeded to produce the Canadian equivalent of the Children's Index for gun owners. "If it only saves one life" became, and still is, the mantra of those nanny-statists who continue to believe that Canada remains in the grip of rampaging firearms owners just waiting for the opportunity to kill, and kill again (don't believe this? Spend some quality time with the so-called mayor of Toronto, David Miller).

Fast forward to this past, and next, week. The world's avowed nannyists are currently meeting at the United Nations to review the protocol on illicit trade in firearms. Many statist representatives and NGOs want the protocol process to expand and continue through to at least 2012. While Kofi Annan, the General Secretary of the U.N., states in his lead remarks on the website that the program is not intended to target civilian ownership of firearms, it should be clear that that is exactly who it is aimed at. Couched in phraseology aimed at preventing the flow of military weapons between non-state combatants, it really is about preventing citizens from being armed. After all, that is who and where these firearms go to.

A review of the intervenor list will clearly show two distinct groups: the civilian organizations who represent the belief that citizens must maintain the right to civilian arms ownership, and those organizations who are dedicated to removal of all firearms from any but state hands. It is strategic that many of the latter groups represent victimization. It has been long a tactic of nanny-statists to foster guilt in those they wish to control.

Of the nations lining up to support and continue the protocol, are a veritable who's who of states with known histories of totalitarian and human rights abuses, and those with bureaucracies committed to the nanny-state dogma. Canada, despite a change in government, remains front and centre in promoting the belief that an armed citizenry is bad for governance, and its mission continues to promote the previous Liberal government's agenda of citizen and victim disarmament.

The United States, because of their constitutionally entrenched right to maintain a civilian check on governmental power, by force, if necessary, have said, flatly, no - any move to limit the guarantees in the Second Amendment will not fly. History is replete with examples of states and despots who, in the name of "peace and good government", have supported disarmament of civilians. Genocide has occasionally been the consequence.

There is no doubt that the ravages of civil war and anarchy take a toll on soldiers and civilians alike. But freedom and democracy sometimes demand, and exact, a heavy toll in the fight against those who would take them away. Make no mistake, there is no democracy in an autocratic nanny-state. At the U.N., there are many state governments who are using the nanny-state NGOs to legitimize the disarmament of their citizens (there are now so many NGOs, that the U.N. could quite correctly be called the U.NGO.).

As the world moves toward overpopulation and critical resource depletion, survival of a nation will depend on its ability to defend itself, and ultimately, for its citizens to defend themselves, in order to defend their nation.