I’m not sure exactly how this relates to sustainability, but I have a gut feeling that it does.  But the real reason I’m posting this is that it is such a simple, straightforward answer to the crap arguments made endlessly (and mindlessly) by the US gun lobby.

It’s from White Coat Underground, one of my daily fixes of common sense and sanity in an all too often crazy world.  I won’t rehash the gun lobby’s arguments – if you don’t know them already they’ll soon be coming to a TV news, newspaper, magazine, web site near you.  Over to White Coat Underground:

Guns have never played a part in the maintenance of a democracy in the US. Gun ownership in the colonies, which existed for more than a century before the revolution perhaps made it easier to form an army to oppose the Brits, but really, without the external support of France, without the distances involved, the war would have lasted much longer. The colonies were, fundamentally, un-rulable and the real question was how much blood would have to be spilled to prove it.

The civil war, in which a large number of Americans rebelled against what they saw as an unjust government killed people—lots of people. It destroyed large swaths of the country. And the war was not won because Unionists kept guns at home, but because the industrial north could manufacture sophisticated weapons in large numbers.

The so-called disarming of the population feared by the gun-nuts isn’t happening, and if it did (we can only hope), it wouldn’t change our form of government, wouldn’t change our ability to resist tyranny from home or abroad. If the US government really wanted to become a dictatorship (unlikely to ever happen), disarming the population wouldn’t even be necessary. The navy could simply drop a JDAM on people they didn’t like.

But we do have constitutional protections against dictatorship, and they’ve worked for centuries. We have a tripartite government with checks and balances, [and] we have a military that is forbidden from intervening domestically.

More strength to the forces for gun control in the US.