(Carolyn Loughton, who lost her 15-year-old daughter Sarah at Port Arthur, is petitioning against the sale of the Adler A110 shotgun in Australia.)

Citizen, remember!

The fact I have been hurt in a horrifying atrocity makes me entitled to all of your rights and liberties, for all of eternity, claimable by myself. Should you not agree with the above statement, then you are, in fact, guilty of compassion.

It does not matter that bills have already been passed to enable the darkest dystopian dreams of sci-fi writers – mass gun confiscation, a registry of all gun owners, etc. It does not matter that the government has been empowered to rule, in secret, on what future regulations to pass and what liberties you will be allowed to retain.

I am The Victim’s Mother. I can come at any time and demand more and you are totally defenseless against me, because I am the The Poor Innocent Victim’s Mother. Because your friends and neighbors are human, and because compassion towards a woman holding her dead child’s photograph in her hands is what most people will feel, this will empower my political masters to do anything we want.

The history of this practice – of rounding up victims’ mothers to protest for the political cause in question – dates back at least to the Prohibition. There are are more comical episodes – few people today remember Patricia Pulling and Kathleen Staples, for instance.

Sometimes I state that the True Revolutionary should be fearless, ruthless, and shameless. Incidents such as this one are examples why. The natural compassion we feel towards people like Staples, Pulling, and Loughton is essentially a tool in the hands of endless well-motivated do-gooders who seek to gnaw at the foundations of free society.

Some people in the liberty movement have taken to outright rudely mocking the endless throng of Victim’s Mothers which come out every time something tragic happens in our society. While this is something that’s hard to recommend to the mainstream politician, these acts of rude mockery exist because some of us have come to understand that the compassion that Victim’s Mothers elicit is such a powerful tool to bleed us dry.

I don’t need to turn to the experience of other people to discuss this. I have lost a loved one to a drug overdose, and for a while this did turn me to be anti-drug. This was fundamentally wrong. I realize now that the pain I’ve felt is not a hold over the humanity of others, nor over their dignity and freedom. Sadly the Loughtons and Pullings of this world never will.