Americans should “mark” their dwellings with “gun free” signs.

That ought to work well for criminals.

The longstanding gun control advocate and Communitarian thinker Amitai Etzionai has advocated recently at the Huntington Post (HP) in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut, child massacre what many might consider to be the ultimate in gun control folly.  Etzioni’s latest venture in gun control follows in the footsteps of his agenda laid out in 1991 for a “Domestic Disarmament” entailing a virtually absolute ban on private handgun ownership.  Yet the arguments made by Etzioni and others for such gun control measures have not become any more convincing with the passage of time.

Calling on individual Americans to “not wait for our elected officials” like President Barack Obama to take effective action against future shooting sprees, Etzioni demands that Americans “should do our share.”  They should namely “mark” their dwellings with “gun free” signs.  “Parents,” moreover, “should notify their friends that they would be reluctant to send their child over for a play date unless the home was safe from guns.”  Not only should individuals turn their guns into plowshares at the scrap heap, but “[r]esidential communities should pass rules that ban bringing guns onto their premises, clearly marking them as gun free.”  “Anyone who puts up such signs will become an ambassador for gun control,” Etzioni envisions, “because they are sure to be challenged by gun advocates to explain their anti-gun positions.”

Citizens contemplating domestic self-defense will be quick to note the perhaps literally fatal flaws in Etzioni’s reasoning.  People publicly advertising their “gun free” status might very well not become an “ambassador for gun control”, but rather an ambassador for future criminal predators seeing in such signs veritable targets. 

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