If it saves one child: The myth and the reality
By Clive Edwards
web posted February 2, 2009
"If it saves one child" is the misguided and hypocritical political slogan of the anti-rights movement. Misguided because those of us who understand firearms understand that a firearm is more likely to protect a child than harm her; hypocritical because most anti-self-defense proponents promote abortion. In Canada, 30 abortions take place for every 100 live births. Abortion costs Canada 110,000 children a year.
By way of comparison, about 23 total males and females of all ages die of firearms accidents per year (Statistics Canada, Mortality, Summary List of Causes , 2004, Publication 84F0209XWE) That is twenty –three total accidental deaths in Canada, out of about twenty-eight million firearms in the country and six to eight million Canadians who own or have access to firearms.
For the most part, abortion is a mere social or financial convenience for the mother. Abortion is rarely used solely to save the life of the mother, or to "mercy-kill " a deformed child. It is primarily a form of post conception birth-control.
Firearms, on the other hand, are used to defend Canadians from death or injury between 60,000 and 80,000 times per year. ("Armed self-defense: the Canadian case." Gary A. Mauser, Journal of Criminal Justice, 1996)
It seems to me that according to the statistics, any sane society wanting to abide by the slogan, "if it saves one child" should ban abortion and promote firearms use, as was the case in the relatively crime free years pre-Trudeau. A libertarian society at the very least would ban neither. It is therefore obvious that gun control as practiced in Canada and much of the west has nothing to do with rational thought or moral right but, like abortion, is about control and social engineering.
The goal of the anti-rights, pro-abortion crowd is to make self-defense, particularly self-defense with a firearm, as illegal as abortion used to be before Trudeau. Pro-abortionists refer to the child, not yet born, as embryonic matter, not a person. In the same way, our evolving criminal justice system refers to those the suspect of a crime as "perps", not a person.
Law has replaced morality as the concordance of what is right and wrong, good and bad, required and prohibited. The courts and petty bureaucrats have replaced God as the ultimate authority, at least in the minds of most Canadians.
Atheism is required to maintain dictatorship. The conceit of atheism is that law is the highest authority. Schizophrenia is the normal state of being in atheism. Ones values change with the laws and the laws change with the seasons. A citizen (or at least those of the criminal justice persuasion) will kill for a law that may not be on the books next week or next year, and be prepared to kill for a law that does not even exist now but may tomorrow.
Right and wrong, without a moral compass, become "Will I get caught?" and "What will my friends think?" Or worse, "If the law allows it, it must be good. If it is against the law, it must be wrong."
The moment we defer to the law without considering our own moral compass we are abdicating our responsibility and our duty as well as our right. Laws are created by men for the convenience and empowerment of government, rarely if ever for the benefit of the citizenry. In many cases laws are created for purposes that are evil.
The only protection we as citizens have against evil laws is the ability to defend ourselves against the state. The only thing that gives a government considering evil laws pause is that the citizens may resist implementation of bad laws by use of arms. That is why the only civil right that means anything at all, because it guarantees all other rights, is the right to arms.
This does not require all citizens be armed all the time. It does mean that when a citizen's tolerance for evil reaches a certain point, determined by him, he shall not be hindered from acquiring and possessing arms for his defense.
It should be obvious to all that a government claiming the right to disarm the citizenry in the name of "saving one child" is disingenuously trying to secure itself and the evil it is doing. Since such a government no longer represents the citizens it comes to disrespect and fear them.
In Canada, this is an extension of the attitude of entitlement. Just as most Canadians have rejected their responsibilities and duties both to themselves and their country, but clamor for government largesse, so have our politicians and bureaucrats.
Canadian politicians and bureaucrats have all the trappings of rulers: high pay often for little work, pensions that would embarrass lesser women; and of course, they cannot lose their jobs, no matter how useless or evil, or how bad the economy gets. All working Canadians could become unemployed, yet all government workers would be protected from such a reality. That is the real purpose of the new government spending deficits. Those already bribed by government largess must continue to receive their bribes, lest they turn against the government that should not have been bribing them in the first place.
Back before the memory of most Canadians, even those with liberal educations, three secular books tried to warn us about the evil to come. These books were Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949).
Huxley suggests that if we were granted unlimited sex and drugs we would turn over all our rights and responsibilities to the state. Families would no longer exist (cloning having taken the place of procreation), neither past nor present exist: only a present tense of pleasure.
Orwell, ever the killjoy, suggests a gray reality where wars are constant, lies are truth, words are redefined at the whim of political correctness, and no one is immune from constant government surveillance.
"War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength." These mottos from 1984 could very well be from present day Canada, or more specifically, Canada's school system, where our children are taught to be good little schizophrenics, take their drugs, and judge their self worth by how appealing they are to the opposite sex (or, under recent official favor, the same sex).
History is revisionist, religion is maligned and parents are suspect. So much for our school system, which turns out future denizens of our "Brave New World: 1984".
Rather than being warned by these dystopian novels we used them as blueprints to create reality. Throughout the 1960's we lived sex and drugs and rock and roll (Brave New World) and now we have the hangover of Animal Farm and 1984.
Why are most Canadians OK with murdering innocent unborn children yet do not support capital punishment for those who have proven themselves evil? These same people also balk at injuring or killing someone ready, willing and able to do them harm. I suggest it is because these people are cowards, both morally and physically.
Is it morally consistent to want to preserve the life of a child yet take away that child's future rights by relinquishing your own? Just as it is not right to burden our children with our debts, it is not right to give up rights that we are entrusted with passing on to our children. To not honor the trust held for future generations may be due to laziness or corruption. It is the height of evil. 
Clive Edwards is a British Columbia based writer. (c) 2009 Clive Edwards
