I have said it here before and say it again. The real reason for gun control is not to reduce crime, make us a safer society, or to protect children. It is to make the people helpless against an oppressive government. Statistics has shown that gun control does not reduce crime; history shows that gun control allows the government a free rein to do what it pleases to anybody. That, I believe, is also one of the reasons for universal health care; the government can indirectly ban private ownership of firearms by declaring that guns are a public health issue and so will not pay for any gun related injuries. They would all costs of medical treatment by suing the gun owner. Would not make any difference if the injury was caused by accident or shooting and intruder in your home, the gun owner would be responsible. The second amendment would still be there but it would be useless.

I have found that anti-gunners fall into four broad categories:

1. The Elititists. They think it's OK for the upper crust, the nouveau riche, anyone with money to have guns, but not the Common People, the hoi polloi, the plebs. They're always using the old "police or military only" or "good cause" line. Naturally THEY always have good cause to own a firearm.

2. The hypocrites. They overlap heavily with the elitists. They are usually political office holders who are always guarded by Secret Service, police, etc.-they and their families. But they think the storekeeper in the bad neighborhood or the woman being stalked by an abusive husband or boyfriend is supposed to rely on 911 and a corrupt and incompetent police department. Two of the biggest hypocrites were Carl Rowan and Warren Burger. Rowan fired a handgun at a teenager he saw in his swimming pool in Washington D.C., gave several conflicting-and false stories-over how he got the gun. He was tried, the jury deadlocked, the judge declared a mistrial, Rowan was not retried. Burger said in an interview on PBS's McNeil-Lehrer report that the NRA's stand on the 2nd Amendment "has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word 'fraud", on the American public." Yet when reporters came to his residence to cover a breaking story, he greeted them with a handgun in his hand. Then there's Diane Feinstein with her license to carry from San Francisco.

3. The gun control fetishists. They're the one who think that 95% of the crime problem is due to guns and eliminating them would eliminate 95% of crime. They're the ones who are always saying "If only we had the same strict gun controls as (name of country here) we wouldn't...." If you suggest that problems such as moral and family breakdown, drug use and illegitimacy may be factors in the crime, they snort at you and walk away (or change the subject.).

4. The hoplophobes [*] . Jeff Cooper got it right with that word. An irrational fear. I do know of a few people who have genuine traumatic experiences involving firearms, but for most of the hoplophobes it is simply an irrational fear. As opposed to the rational fears of the Elitists and Hypocrites who fear that when the common people possess firearms, they might decide that they have no use for elitists and hypocrites.

Despite its political origins and reputation, there is a possibility for a person to have this phobia in a purely clinical sense. For instance, a patient that has no opinion on law or public policy per se, but becomes terrified when they notice a policemen's sidearm or a photograph of a rifle or knife. Hoplophobia is described as an uncommon phobia in Contemporary Diagnosis And Management of Anxiety Disorders.