Like water wearing down a mountain, the new year's crop of gun control proposals is an ongoing attempt to erode our constitutional liberties in the name of safety. Considering the poor performance of similar restrictions in the past, it seems odd that the Left continues to push such ineffective legislation as a solution to crime. Until you understand that gun control is not rooted in opposition to crime, but in establishment of a Marxist "balance of oppression."

There are two classes of people who own guns. There are two classes of people who drive cars. There are two classes of people who walk into the lobby of your local bank or liquor store with acquisition on their mind.

There is the legitimate class, the everyday class, the get-up-and-go-to-work class that obeys traffic laws, works for a living, and doesn’t even litter. Then there’s the shadow class, the marginal class, the folks who don’t work, but always seem to have a few bucks in their pocket. They live in dingy apartments and hang around bars and racetracks. They're surly, shadowy people who always seem to exude either malaise or menace.

Whatever they are, they are people who have rejected convention. As a result, they are often excluded from society’s benefits, especially those that derive from conformity. They dress strangely and keep odd hours, which diminish their chances for success. They don’t like rules, either because they don’t understand them or because they don’t like authority. That hostility contributes to their career stagnation.

So they don’t tend to be people on the fast track to corporate success. Yet they see others in society who have earned its material benefits, and they want a share. They just aren’t willing to pay the price to get it. They aren’t willing to get up at 6 in the morning and face a 2-hour commute. They aren’t the type to knuckle under to a boss who's so dense he absorbs light. They don’t want to give up their evenings and weekends because a big project is in trouble and they have to bail it out at the 11th hour. They don' t want to miss happy hour, "The Simpsons," or the third race at Santa Anita. How to enjoy all that freedom and still drive a Lexus?

Their path to material well-being is short and simple. To get the finer things in life, they appropriate them from people who have earned them. After all, it's not fair that they have so much while the poor, downtrodden, shiftless lowlife has so little. Since people are generally reluctant to give up things they’ve gained so dearly, the thieves need to use force. Being relatively inarticulate in matters of economic dialectic, they need a visual aid to convince their victims of their moral rectitude. They need a gun.

Righteous people conform. If they are required to register before they can buy a firearm, they do. If they have to fill out forms, they do. If they’re not supposed to park in the handicapped spot, they don’t. They'll sit at a broken stoplight at 3 in the morning because their conscience is stronger than their ego.

Members of the shadow class make their own rules. If they want a gun, they get a gun. It doesn’t matter whether there are laws requiring registration or licenses or paperwork. Rules don’t matter to them. Disregard for convention is a defining characteristic of their class.

Regulations which require cooperation from the gun buyer are not likely to trouble them. There is always an alternative method of obtaining any substance desirable. If they want liquor, they can buy it in a store. Or they can steal it. Or they can distill it themselves. Or they can let someone else distill it illicitly and buy it from them.

Pop quiz: Which method would the legitimate class use to obtain a firearm: A) Buy it from a buddy they met in prison who needs the cash to buy crack; B) Buy it from a fence who got it from a burglary just over the state line; C) Buy it from the local gun shop, completing form ABCD/1234 in triplicate, and showing a Gun Purchase License, a Gun Purchase Permit, a driver’s license, a Gun Purchase Investigation Clearance, and his kindergarten transcripts; D) Steal it from some liberal's house while he is at a "Free Mumia" rally.

Just as there are legitimate and illegitimate methods of obtaining a firearm, there are legitimate and illegitimate uses to which it may be put. Legitimate uses include target shooting, hunting, home defense, display on the wall of the den, and hiding in a box under the bed. These uses are legitimate on two levels. The Constitution forbids any restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms. And no damage accrues to innocent persons when firearms are used for any of the above activities.

Illegitimate uses of firearms include random murder, premeditated murder, coercion and intimidation, robbery, or as a sort of fulminating ghetto fashion accessory, like gold chains or baseball caps worn backward. These activities result in people getting hurt, property getting damaged, or innocent people getting the bejeebers scared out of them.

So feel-good gun control that constrains the legitimate class does nothing to keep firearms out of the hands of criminals. Depriving some homeowner of a wall decoration isn’t going to stop a gang-banger in Compton from capping a couple of homies. The man who takes his son skeet shooting isn’t the same man - or even the same class of man - who knocks over a liquor store so he can buy cocaine. The only people who believe that rules made for one class will affect the other are people who have never seen the dichotomy, and consequently believe that all people think the same way and honor the same values.

A quick glance through the evening paper should dispel that ivory-tower theory. But a stroll through “the bad part of town” should drive the point home. It’s time for legislators who were born and raised in the insulated environs of privilege to take off their Italian loafers and step into the real world the rest of us live in. Take the BMW for a drive through the east side of St. Louis or Los Angeles. Pull over to the curb and see how many cultural norms you share with the folks chatting on the sidewalk. Then, if you're still suffused with egalitarian good will, you can have the rescue squad take you to an inner-city trauma center.

No gun control proposal is legitimate unless its sole aim and consequence is to keep guns out of the hands of those who would use them illegitimately. But most gun-haters live in a state of denial about the value of guns. That hatred -- actually a phobia -- stems not from a desire to stunt the growth of crime, but from an agenda that requires the disarmament of America.

The latest trend for the gun-haters is to pretend gun violence is invading the suburbs. The anti-gun crowd will point to Columbine and Atlanta as examples of gun mayhem that is not a fixture in the inner city, but has come into the quiet streets where we live and work. They prey on the fears of suburban moms, a demographic known for its hysteria and malleability.

However, the facts tell a different story. Most gun violence, indeed most violent crime period, is wreaked by and against black males aged 14 to 24. Media events like Columbine are far and away the exception rather than the rule. They make headlines not because they're common but because they're rare. It's not even front-page news if some drug dealer on the South Side gets capped. If you want to stop people from killing each other, get the guns out of the ghetto.

But that's not the target of the gun confiscators. Their goal isn't to disarm criminals, but to strip innocent men and women of their last protection against marauding bottom-feeders. The ultimate end of the anti-gun nuts is to bare the throat of the middle class to the depredations of shadow-world predators. It's a move to impress the socialist imprimatur on our culture, by extorting vulnerability from the comfortable burgher and his hand-wringing spouse.

The middle class is anathema to Marxist social engineers. It is "the bourgeoisie," a monolith of self-contented apathy whose inertia must be overcome if the Glorious Revolution is to succeed. Most property is concentrated in the middle class, and a war on property starts with a war on its owners. The proletariat, what I've called the "marginal class," must destroy the snug, insulated environment of the bourgeoisie, then advance into the vacuum waving the Red banner. But that historical duty becomes considerably more difficult if the good townsfolk have a shotgun over the mantle, and a 9-shot home-defense system.

With the predatory, socialist-dependent underclass armed, and the sleepy suburbanite snuggled into his Barcalounger, the Red advance could begin. Disarmament would ease the path. But nobody's going to stand up on an American dais and admit he wants to subjugate the middle class. Ironically, the middle class is the cash cow, the engine that powers the juggernaut poised to roll over it. So the socialists have to sell the idea that lying down before the lion is an angel's cause.

"It's for the children," we're told. The apparatchiks paint angst and concern all over their faces and lament the horrible needless deaths rampant on our shady lanes. They promise that by making us defenseless, our children will be better protected.

We are held hostage to the socialist ideal. The underlying thesis is that we have no right to our property, or to live in relative comfort and safety. We have no right to take up arms to defend ourselves, since property must always be subordinate to people. The Marxist stamp grants a proletarian thug the right to violate your privacy, your dignity, and your life, on behalf of the dialectic. You own property only at the pleasure of the underclass. You enjoy the comfort of your home only by their grace. And once the economic machinery has been converted to serve the proletariat, you have outlived your usefulness.

This isn't a scenario likely to warm the cockles of the average schmo's cholesterol-laced heart. He's soft in the head as well as the belly, so he'll accept delivery of the guilt sent him by "concerned" liberals. Deep down, he buys the party line that his sport-utility vehicle came at somebody else's expense, and that his Dockers deprived some needy family somewhere of ugly, baggy pants. His whole lifestyle rests on the exploitation of others, and it's only fair that he pay some subliminal price for that.

So he willingly disarms. He yields his life and the lives of his family to the predators skulking behind specious logic. And the enemy creeps a little closer to his front door ...

Gun control is a front for the advancement of the socialist agenda. Giving in to the idea that guns are dangerous concedes to the notion that it is better to let some lowlife steal your property, rape your wife, and beat you half to death than it is to expedite his passage into the next world. Your property was all gained at his expense anyway, so in a moral sense, he's entitled to it as much as you are. That is the core of the socialist doctrine, and you fight that cause when you take up arms to protect yourself.

I recieved a note from Mr. Guthmiller which read in part:

"You're more than welcome to use it any way you want, provided you credit Free Republic as the source of first publication...

"Thanks for all the support you've shown. It's truly gratifying, and you help spread the message through these kinds of grass roots efforts. Otherwise, it's like yelling into the hurricane."