Bolsheviks and Nazis alike practiced collective punishment. The Reds would take hostages against “good behavior” of residents of a town and shoot them if any resistance was offered. Nazis would sometimes kill everyone in a town near which one of their troops perished. We look at such practices with abhorrence, though US and Allied bombings probably killed a few innocent bystanders of their own. As a culture, we don’t view collective punishments as acceptable…or do we?

When one insane man in the UK murdered a group of kids in 1987, hundreds of thousands were punished for his sins. British gun owners were deprived of their guns and not given a choice about it. That was collective punishment in its pure form, affecting only people who had no connection to the crime at all.

By that logic, if someone stabs another person with a fork, it would be acceptable to confiscate the contents of your kitchen drawer. If someone deliberately uses any tool at all to harm others, then your rights would be violated. Collective punishment pushers say: “but it’s not just one bad person misusing those tools!” Granting that, why would mis-use of a tool by two people justify violation of your personal rights? Or by any number of other people — even if you are the only person in the world who is peaceful and non-violent, so why should your forks be seized?

The problem with gun control and other control schemes is that they violate individual rights deliberately, sometimes with excuses and more often by the “might makes right” principle. And that’s precisely how much of the world ended up disarmed in the face of totalitarian menaces.

If a person approaches you and says “please walk with me”, you can consider the request and either oblige him or refuse. But if the same person says “walk with me or I will kill your parents/you/some other person”, then the substance of the order is irrelevant. The person showed the willingness to harm you and should be defeated as soon and as decisively as possible.

What makes gun control such a special case is that complying with the initial demands progressively reduces your future ability to refuse further demands on your life, liberty and property. Sometimes people comply anyway, trading concessions for time to escape, to regroup and seek allies or to wait out the imposition. But those who oppress others never rest, and I don’t think that we want to give up our homes just to escape from such menaces. The evasion is happening, as exemplified by the New Jersey and Illinois residents relocating to more gun-friendly states. Re-grouping and allying with like-minded people is also happening, with national and state legal initiatives to roll back gun control. The fighting hasn’t yet started because, unlike gun control pushers, pro-gun people are not sociopaths. We don’t use force when other options are available, even if that gives us imperfect and time-deferred victories. And that’s why a few hundred thousand gun control pushers living among the tens of millions of politically active gun owners are still alive. They failed to push hard enough to be treated as an immediate, dire and inescapable threat.

And, in the end, our guns merely hold gun control pushers at bay. The victory over that unethical ideology will come from the cultural rejection of collective punishment. In my lifetime, Brady creatures and their ideological allies will be viewed with the same derision as the Ku Klux Klan.