People with guns kill a lot more of them, though, with far more ease and effectiveness. To my mind, there’s no question that glorifying guns and making them a normal, daily part of life contributes to the brutalization of a society that cheapens life and makes it far more likely that disagreements will lead to violence and then to murder.

Canada is a country where firearms are fairly highly regulated. It’s rare for a person to own a handgun; rarer still to have permission to carry it. Do you know where most of the illegal handguns in Canada come from? The United States, where they’re stolen by the hundreds each and every day from desk drawers, night tables, automobile glove compartments. Yes, thanks to the Second Amendment in the US, criminals in Canada have a much easier time getting hold of illegal weapons than they would if the US were responsible, or we had no border with them.

A case in point: many years ago, my cousin was having an affair, cheating on her husband with his best friend. Her husband found out, and attacked his friend with a knife, stabbing him several times. None of the wounds was fatal, and the husband could be pushed away and subdued. All the people in the story are still alive today. But if my cousin’s husband could have been able to just grab a gun and shoot from across the room instead of having to get right up on top of his friend, would that friend be alive? Would my cousin, his wife, be alive, for might he not have shot her too? What about the man himself when he saw all was lost, or the infant daughter he could not responsibly leave behind? Four people might be dead today instead of none, not because of human nature, but because of the utility of death that a firearm represents.

We would do better to focus our efforts on building societies in which theft is unlikely and violence is rare, rather than simply crying “freedom!” and handing out the guns. Anarchy doesn’t amount to “freedom” any better than cancer amounts to “growth”.

I don’t dispute that the European settlers established Rhodesia as a modern state in the Westphalian sense, and used their contacts to establish trade and industry with the world. What I, and world, object to is that having done so, they refused to share that state and its advantages with the bulk of the population on the basis of race. The vast majority of the people of Rhodesia — the REAL people of Rhodesia — were in effect subjects, not citizens. The unavoidable implication was that they were inferior in all regards, simply because of the colour of their skin. That’s unacceptable and when Rhodesia broke away from Britain on that basis, the world was correct in its response. Say what you want about Mugabe… what has he to learn from Smith? How to divide a nation? How to exclude those different from oneself? How to fail at true democracy? How to disenfranchize those of another race? Well, clearly, Mugabe studied Smith’s example very well indeed.

And in my observation, the only thing that “trickles down” is urine. Anything more valuable than that, people tend to cling to and refuse to surrender a gram they don’t have to, regardless of how hard others had to work to secure it for them. Rhodesia was a case in point. The British regime there had generations to raise the educational standards of the native population to Western levels, but they didn’t. It was in their interests to keep them ignorant, and then to blame them for their own unsophistication. They finally got fed up and took what was due them, but without many of the skills to maintain the infrastructure, and today’s Zimbabwe is, in part, the result of that. Though that said, they’ve had nearly 30 years to improve things and they haven’t made much of a go of it, like, say, Singapore has.