by Paul Craig Roberts

Some years or decades ago I researched and reported on the Sullivan Act, one of America’s first gun control laws.

New York state senator Timothy Sullivan, a corrupt Tammany Hall politician, represented New York’s Red Hook district. Commercial travelers passing through the district would be relieved of their valuables by armed robbers. In order to protect themselves and their property, travelers armed themselves. This raised the risk of, and reduced the profit from, robbery. Sullivan’s outlaw constituents demanded that Sullivan introduce a law that would prohibit concealed carry of pistols, blackjacks, and daggers, thus reducing the risk to robbers from armed victims.

The criminals, of course, were already breaking the law and had no intention of being deterred by the Sullivan Act from their business activity of armed robbery. Thus, the effect of the Sullivan Act was precisely what the criminals intended. It made their life of crime easier.

As the first successful gun control advocates were criminals, I have often wondered what agenda lies behind the well-organized and propagandistic gun control organizations and their donors and sponsors in the US today. The propaganda issued by these organizations consists of transparent lies.

Consider the propagandistic term, "gun violence," popularized by gun control advocates. This is a form of reification by which inanimate objects are imbued with the ability to act and to commit violence. Guns, of course, cannot be violent in themselves. Violence comes from people who use guns and a variety of other weapons, including fists, to commit violence.

Nevertheless, we hear incessantly the Orwellian Newspeak term, "gun violence."

Very few children are killed by firearm accidents compared to other causes of child deaths. Yet, gun control advocates have created the false impression that there is a national epidemic in accidental firearm deaths of children. In fact, the National MCH Center for Child Death Review, an organization that monitors causes of child deaths, reports that seven times more children die from drowning and five times more from suffocation than from firearm accidents. Yet we don’t hear of "drowning violence," "swimming pool violence," "bathtub violence," or "suffocation violence."