Joe Katzman from Winds of Change pens how Mugabe changed his mind about guns.

As many of you know, I’m from Canada. We have a pretty different attitude to guns up here, and I must say that American gun culture has always kind of puzzled me. To me, one no more had a right to a gun than one did to a car.

Well, my mind has changed. Changed to the point where I see gun ownership as being a slightly qualified but universal global human right. A month ago in Yalta, Freedom & The Future, I wrote:

“Frankly, if “stopping… societies from becoming the homicidal hells Mr. Bush described in his Latvia speech” is our goal, I’m becoming more sympathetic to the Right to Bear Arms as a universal human right on par with freedom of speech and religion. U.S. Secretary of State Condi Rice’s personal experience as a child in Birmingham ÄAlabamaÅ adds an interesting dimension; I hope she talks about this abroad.”

This week, I took the last step. You can thank Robert Mugabe, too, because it was his campaign to starve his political/tribal opponents and Pol-Pot style “ruralization” effort (200,000 left homeless recently in a population of 12.6 million) that finally convinced me. Here’s the crux, the argument before which all other arguments pale into insignificance:

The Right to Bear Arms is the only reliable way to prevent genocide in the modern world.

And Zimbabwe is the poster child for that proposition.

It is a long post, well worth reading and examining. Here it is.