Brian Miller of The College Conservative makes an excellent point below about gun ownership. The left’s desire for more gun control has a great deal to do with their abdication of personal responsibility.

Gun Control, Freedom, and Responsibility

In political debates, you often wish the other side would just fess up and get to the root of the issue, as seen from your side of course. The problem is, they rarely see the root the same way, and instead you keep yelling at each other till your voices give out.

Occasionally however, a miracle happens. Your opponent will admit that he sees your vice as a virtue, or vice versa. Or perhaps, they will say that in our modern world certain virtues are no longer worth practicing, and it is just easier to pass the responsibility on to someone else.

I’ve done my best to stay away from the gun control debate in the wake of the Newtown massacre. The reactionary arguments from both sides of the political divide were shameful. But now the time has passed, and the debate is being forced upon us.

In a recent entry in the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates gets to the root of the left’s problem with guns – Responsibility.

Consider the core of Mr. Coates’ argument:

“It is not enough to have a gun, anymore than it’s enough to have a baby. It’s a responsibility. I would have to orient myself to that fact. I’d have to be trained and I would have to, with some regularity, keep up my shooting skills. I would have to think about the weight I carried on my hip and think about how people might respond to me should they happen to notice. I would have to think about the cops and how I would interact with them, should we come into contact. I’d have to think about my own anger issues and remember that I can never be an position where I have a rage black-out. What I am saying is, if I were gun-owner, I would feel it to be really important that I be a responsible gun-owner, just like, when our kids were born, we both felt the need to be responsible parents.”

Mr. Coates would have gun control because it is easier than personal responsibility. This is the exact mentality that every conservative since Edmund Burke has warned would only make people more dependent on government.