Venezuela bans private gun ownership

[thegoogolplex123]

118. Ignorance is bliss, isn't it?

Well, your own post does little to show that your opinion - and education - aren't worth jack shit.

"Guns are essential for freedom? Okay, freedom from what? Invariably it's either TEH EBIL GUBBMINT, or, sometimes, TEH EBIL GUBBMINT WHAT COME HERE."

Funny how the OP never said that, they merely said that citizens should be able to protect themselves against criminals (if that includes government criminals, sure, but he never specified that). Perhaps its time you took some courses on reading comprehension? Or is your own twisted perception of reality so contrived as to render you effectively blind to what other people are actually saying?

"Or are you just throwing "freedom!" and "liberty!" around like the old Adam West batman threw around "kapow!" and "doing!", just meaningless punctuation words?"

The OP only said the words 'freedom' and 'liberty' in their post three and zero times, respectively. You said these words eight times in your post. Classic example of pot calling the kettle black, eh?

You claim that these ideas 'don't mesh with anything held by the left.' Aside from the question of who you are to determine 'what ideas mesh with the left' (seeing from your attitude of denial you seem to portray), the evidence shows that 'the ideas of the left' have frequently, especially over the last century, produced the worth genocides and destruction seen by humankind, rivaling that of World War II itself. The policies and ideology of left-dictators like Mao in China, which lied firmly within the orthodoxy of Communism and Marxism-Leninism, led to the deaths of, by low estimates, approximately 73,237,000 people. The casualties of World War II lie around 60 million. A similar situation created by the Bolshevik revolution led to 58,627,000 deaths and 3,284,000 not including civil war, massive famine and starvation, and dictatorial oppression in one of the worst examples history has to show of totalitarianism.

Chinese economic reforms, which began more than three decades ago, have opened the Chinese economy and lifted millions out of poverty – in a country that was once starving under a failing command economy led by Communist rule.

For several decades, China had followed the Soviet Union down a robustly totalitarian path with well-known catastrophic results. The massive famine caused by one of the greatest disasters in world history, the Great Leap Forward engineered by Mao Zedong and the Communist Party from 1958 to 1961, killed somewhere between 40 and 50 million people. To put things in perspective, the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million. The Great Leap Forward disrupted a largely stagnated economy and was followed only by the oppressive purges of the Cultural Revolution. Nearly two decades later, economic reforms started by Deng Xiaoping began introducing the principles of market capitalism into the Chinese economy. This process involved the decollectivization of agriculture, the opening up of foreign investment, and starting of businesses by entrepreneurs. Further reforms in the late 1980s privatized and contracted out much of the state industry, lifting up price controls, regulations, and protectionist policies.

The technological progress and economic growth caused by these reforms – something I personally witnessed during my journey – has been very rapid, making China the second largest economy after the United States. Since the beginning of these reforms, the Chinese economy has increased at an astonishing rate of 9.5% per year, per capita incomes have grown at 6.6% annually, average wages have risen sixfold, and absolute poverty has declined from 41% to 5% of the population.

Wherever communism and left-ideology has set foot upon has brought little but destruction. Cambodia? 2,627,000 Korea? 3,163,000. DMR of Afghanistan? 1,750,000. Ethiopia? 1,343,610. Vietnam? 1,670,000. Yugoslavia? 1,072,000. Shows a trend, don't you think?

Since lieutenant colonel Hugo Chávez Frías rose to the presidency in 1999, seven years after his attempted military coup d’état against Carlos Andrés Pérez, he has promised to deliver Venezuela from poverty. At present, however, the climate of Venezuela is one dominated by poverty, rampant corruption among political institutions, lack of media freedom, water and food shortages, deteriorating public infrastructure, electrical shortages, high inflation, price controls and, perhaps most prominently, unparalleled levels of crime and violence. Leaving the Maiquetía International Airport, one is greeted by the sight of millions of ‘ranchos,’ poorly built living spaces found in impoverished areas, covering the mountains surrounding the valley of the nation’s capital, Caracas. Armed street gangs, drug trafficking, gunfights, and homicide are common features of daily life in Caracas. Approximately two homicides occur per hour on average, amounting to over 335 homicides every week. ’Kidnapping express’ often occurs throughout the city and even travelling from the airport to the city. Going out at night is strongly not recommended.

Revolution, economic nationalism, hatred of the United States, faith in the government as an agent of social justice, and a passion for the figure of ‘el caudillo’ over the rule of law and public institutions, are among the hallmark features of Chávez’s self-proclaimed and self-styled ‘Bolivarian’ revolution (Bolívar would be certainly rolling in his grave). His presidency is characterized somewhat nebulously by a mix of left-wing populism, economic nationalism, Marxism-Leninism, revolutionary socialism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, left-authoritarianism and, most notoriously, shameless anti-Americanism.

I'm from Venezuela and I know and have experienced first hand every day just how much damage left-ideology brings. Perhaps it's time you took those ideological blinders from your mind and opened it up to the harsh truths of reality.