Introduction
I’m listening to a discussion about Alberta (aka ‘Taliberastan’) on the radio and their efforts to ban books in that province.
It’s like Project 2025 has migrated here and the rest of Canada seems powerless to prevent it.
Let’s dial back for a second and ask this simple question: are books really harmful?
Here’s a quick snapshot:
- number of people killed (intentionally or otherwise) by books in the last century: 0
- number of people killed (intentionally or otherwise) by guns in the last century: 25,000,000 (250,000 global average per year x 100)
Of course, that latter number doesn’t include the major world wars or any other war, skirmish, dustup or blowups resulting from arming people for the sake of territory acquisition or the act of just being dicks. That would put this latter number into the hundreds of millions of unnecessary deaths.
My point? Books don’t kill people. Guns kill people.
Banning books simply draws attention to the fact that there’s probably an interesting idea in there somewhere. Here’s what Stephen King had to say about Alberta’s absurd moment of moral purity:
And Canada’s very own Margaret Atwood had an equally important reaction when she learned that ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’ was added to the list of books to be removed from public school libraries:
Why Don’t We Ban the Bible?
We might as well ban the Bible. That’s right. There are numerous reasons why the original ‘good book’ should be removed from all public shelves:
- The Bible describes marriage for young girls as something awful and that wives are far from being an equal.
- The Bible does not value babies and often caused them to be eaten as food.
- The Bible promotes racism, genocide, and mass murder.
- The Bible teaches young boys that God sees nothing wrong with raping young girls as long as they are virgins.
- The Bible causes millions of children (and adults) to have nightmares, depression, and mental anguish.
- The Bible does not only tolerate slavery; God endorses it.
- The Bible teaches that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being cruel to animals.
- The Bible gives children many obscene examples for how to speak with colorful and vulgar language used by their God.
- The Bible requires the death penalty for over thirty “crimes,” some of which violates the U.S. Constitution.
- The Bible reduces science and the accumulation of knowledge to something akin to magic and witchcraft.
Don’t get me wrong … I don’t hate religion. I just think we have to go back to another old adage (from the Bible) that says ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’.
Back to Books vs Guns
Some people might get really bad ideas from books, like how probably millions of people thought Milton Friedman’s ‘Free to Choose’ or ‘Capitalism and Freedom’ was packed with great ideas as opposed to being a manifesto for the elites that now run this planet.
Mein Kampf was a bestseller briefly, but good ideas? Absolutely not.
There are loads of terrible books out there packed with vicious ideas about how we should do things, but the reality is that books don’t hurt people.
Guns on the other hand?
Countries around the world have spent countless TRILLIONS of dollars on weaponry and modes of removing life from the human body (and millions of other species of animals in the process).
In The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson writes about how humans seem to be proficient with building weapons that destroy the lives of our own species: ‘Our tools are expressions of our intentions.’
In other words, we get what we pay for. As long as we all continue to sign up for and support war mongers or the pathetic ‘we need to spend more than our enemy’ rationale, we’re doomed.
Books? Haven’t hurt a single person.
If we spent even a trillion dollars on books, we might just have a fighting chance of survival.
So, let’s ban more guns before we continue to think that books are the problem.