
The Cold War has not ended.  The only thing that has happened is that 
the two sides have exchanged roles.

The USA has a higher imprisonment rate (400 per 100,000 population)
than any country in Europe by a factor of 10 or so.  In California,
it is over 600 per 100,000 population.  The prison population in
California is now over 100,000, a quadrupling since 1980.  Most of
these inmates were convicted under the drug prohibition laws.  Police
now confiscate property, without trial, under a "good faith probable
cause" standard, in the name of depriving the horrible ghastly drug
dealers of their ill-gotten gains.  Conduct an opinion poll, and a
majority will answer "yes" if you ask them whether civil liberties and
due process should be diluted in order to Send Our Young People The
Message That We Are Serious About Winning The War On Drugs.  I don't
know whether anyone has measured such a figure among gun owners, but
I would expect the same result.  They certainly seem to vote that way.

According to Jack Herer's book _The Emperor Wears No Clothes_, over
TWELVE MILLION YEARS of prison time have been served under the
marijuana prohibition laws, by people who were minding their own
business and causing no harm to others (and less harm to themselves
than users of tobacco, with 400,000 confirmed kills/year).  Under
the "War on Drugs" campaign of "zero tolerance" due process protections
have eroded, and mandatory sentences of ten years without parole have
proliferated.  By and large, gun owners have voted for the politicians
who favor such measures.  And now, all the precedents--not only
legal, but political:  "My fellow Americans, we must send our young
people the message that we are serious about winning the War On
Murder"--are going to be applied to the oncoming wave of gun
prohibition laws.  Gun owners are about to get a taste of the medicine
they voted for believing it would be used only on those with different
tastes in recreational drugs.

What goes around comes around.
