Cuba: Lessons In Gun Control And Medicine
By Larry Pratt (12/07/04)
If we are willing, we can learn much from the experiences of others. Or, as it has been said in the negative: "Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it."
A look at the history of Cuba should make us run screaming in terror from anything smacking of socialism. Brain surgeon Miguel Faria has laid it all out for those who will check out his book Cuba in Revolution.
Faria is a refugee from Fidel Castro's socialist "paradise." He still has family trapped inside that socialist island prison -- a prison that has imposed draconian gun controls throughout the island. Any prison will attempt to achieve total control of guns and restrict their possession to just the guards. Well, it turns out that the most effective tool for gun control in Cuba is the poverty spawned by socialism. Nobody can afford a gun.
Communist Cuba offers an interesting parallel to Nazi Germany. Both Hitler's Germany and Castro's Cuba were preceded by regimes that imposed gun control to keep guns out of the wrong hands. In both cases, gun control failed to keep the bad guys from getting all the guns they wanted and using them to consolidate their grip on power following seizure of the reins of government.
Hitler took several years to disarm the population using gun registration lists, but Castro moved against private gun ownership the second day he was in power. He sent his thugs throughout the island using the gun registry lists -- compiled by the preceding Batista regime -- to confiscate the people's firearms. Different tactics, same objective. A defenseless people don't give the all-wise leader any lip.
Another parallel between Cuba and Nazi Germany is the prostitution of psychiatry. Psychiatrists were willing tools of the Nazi regime to "diagnose" opponents as mentally ill. Cuba is no different. And the mental hospitals are horror chambers where victims of the Castro thugocracy are drugged into submission. Alternately, they are electro shocked into compliance.
Lest we think America is immune from psychiatry's willingness to pursue a political agenda in the name of science, we should recall the University of California at Berkeley study earlier this year. A number of psychiatrists concluded that they had identified the personality type that adequately described both Hitler and Ronald Reagan.
Medicine beyond the field of psychiatry has not been immune from practicing politics instead of medicine. Medical journals have been filled with gun control opinion masquerading as science. We can thank Dr. Faria for having coaxed the very politically correct Centers for Disease Control (CDC) into doing a review of the literature on gun control. This lead to one of their first honest moments -- they concluded that there was no evidence that gun control has ever worked in the United States.
As we know from the crime data, gun control actually accompanies higher crime rates, and empowering citizens to carry guns on the street actually lowers crime. We wish Dr. Faria success in getting the CDC to take the next step and recognize this. After that, we can hope he will get the psychiatrists to admit that one has to be crazy to take their political opinions seriously.
[An interview with Dr. Faria on Larry Pratt's Live Fire can be heard on the web at http://www.gunowners.org/radio.htm.]
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