 The following is the author's introduction to the book 
 SELF CONTROL, NOT GUN CONTROL, to be published in late
 1995 by Synapse--Centurion.  Reproduction on computer
 bulletin boards is permitted for informational purposes
 only. Copyright (c) 1995 by J. Neil Schulman.  All other
 rights reserved.


                          INTRODUCTION:

                  SELF CONTROL, NOT GUN CONTROL

                       by J. Neil Schulman


           "Who controls the maze, controls the rat."
                  --Aesop, Lao Tzu, Pavlov, or
   the lady who designed the downtown L.A. freeway interchange



     This is not a diet book.

     Full disclosure requires that since the title of this book
mentions self-control, I'd better get that idea out of the way
right up front, because if this \were\ a diet book, I'd honestly
have to advise you against buying it. 

     With diet and exercise, I have successfully lost large
amounts of fat several times in my life and kept it off for years
at a time.  But slowly, like some relentless force of gravity,
the fat has managed to migrate back onto my body, and I am
currently much fatter than I am happy being.

     But I am not fatter than I choose to be.

     The word "diet" -- if you trace its origin back to the Greek
word \diaita\  -- literally means "manner of living."  The
profession I have chosen involves writing, reading, watching
movies and TV, listening to music and talk radio, sitting in
chairs listening to people speak, lecturing, and debating ideas
-- all of which exercise my mind a lot more than they exercise my
body.  These are not high-fat-burning activities.  Therefore, any
time I devote to the physical exercise of my body has to be
stolen from time I'd otherwise be spending on doing the brain-
oriented things I regularly do  -- not only as my means of
producing income, but as the source of my intellectual passions
and pleasures.

     There are two purely physical activities, however, that I
like even more than the intellectual ones I listed above: eating
and sex.  But, all other things being equal, eating good-tasting
food makes you fat, and the ability -- and opportunities -- for
having great sex varies directly as the ratio between the human
body's muscle and fat.

     I have consulted with a mathematician friend, Dafydd ab
Hugh, and this can be stated as an equation:
                     
    [Capital Sigma] = F + ( [lower-case mu] / [lower-case phi])

where Sigma is Sex, F() is an increasing function, mu is muscle,
and phi is fat.

     This is the equation that rules my desire for the physical
pleasures of life.  Medieval theologians would say I am torn
between the competing sins of gluttony and lust.  Every mouthful
of delicious food I eat puts me farther away from the opportunity
for great sex with some hard-bodied goddess.  Past a certain
point, I find solace in eating more delicious food than my body
can burn, and I get fatter.  When I get sexually anxious enough
to overcome my desire for food, I start eating spinach and
trudging up the Stairmaster.

     The Stairmaster is an exercise device, usually found in
health clubs, that allows you to climb stairs without ever
reaching the top.  It was invented by a man named John
Harrington.  I bet John got the idea by reading the stories of
how King Eurystheus had to come up with twelve impossible tasks
for Hercules to perform.  If King Eurystheus had had a
Stairmaster to put Hercules on, he could have skipped having
Hercules clean out the Augean Stables.

     Another common exercise device found in health clubs is a
treadmill.  This is a sidewalk that goes nowhere, and takes you
forever to get there.

     Then there are weights, and health clubs have various
contraptions for lifting them.  One expends great effort lifting
things that, at the end of the efforts, are in exactly the same
place they were when you started.

     Have you detected the insanity here yet?  Throughout human
history, hard labor was necessary for survival.  Nobody liked it
but there it was.  Now, a lot of us make our money by using our
brains rather than our backs, so we get soft and fat, which is
bad for us.  So we go to places where we pay good money we earned
with our brains to do hard physical work which produces no goods
whatsoever.

     Why has no one picked up on this?  Instead of paying slave
wages to migrant workers for picking grapes, grape growers should
hire Teri Hatcher -- the gorgeous Lois Lane on \Lois & Clark\ --
away from being the spokesmodel for Bally's Health Clubs.  Teri
could seduce us brain-workers into \paying\ the grape-growers for
the privilege of picking their grapes.  The grape-growers would
hire hard labor at a \negative\ cost and we'd get hard bodies in
return.

                               ***


     So this isn't a diet book.

     My previous book, \Stopping Power\, was subtitled "Why 70
Million Americans Own Guns."  It examined the ability of
privately-owned firearms to produce individual freedom and
individual security.  This current book is going to follow the
format of \Stopping Power\ in that it's also a book I grew from
articles and essays rather than a book I outlined in advance; but
this book will "spray and pray" ideas full-auto rather than my
more directed-fire last book.

     \Stopping Power\ set out to prove that guns are instruments
of power, and the people with guns are the people with power.  If
that power is used more by criminals and tyrants than by decent
ordinary people, then you get a crime-ridden and tyrannical
society.  If that power is, alternatively, treasured and
exercised by decent individuals to defend themselves from
gangsters and powermongers, then freedom from crime and tyranny
is the social result.

     \Self Control, Not Gun Control\ explores assorted issues
which revolve around the uses and abuses of power.  Some of the
materials in this book will again deal with firearms; but much of
it will deal instead with how power is exercised --  either by
individuals who wish to rule their own lives, or by other
individuals who wish to rule their lives for them.

     For that, in fact, is the primary political question in any
society: if you can not, may not, or do not exercise the power to
control your own life, someone else must and will.

     It is notable that proponents of government control over
private guns wish always to bring the subject around to children. 
Their rhetoric always focuses on the tragedies that result when
the ignorant or undisciplined among us -- and children certainly
are numerous there -- misuse firearms.   For their political
purposes, advocates of government control over private guns are
exactly right to do so.

     But the difference between a child and a grown-up -- and I
am speaking personally as the father of a four-year-old girl --
lies not in the child being any less passionate than the grown-up
in the pursuit of her goals, but merely less practiced in the
selection and achievement of them.  Kids are born with an adult-
sized willfulness.  The job of growing up involves learning to
harness that will to the better judgments of the brain and heart.

     Our society does not handle the transition from childhood to
adulthood well.  Biological puberty makes us physical adults
usually between ten and fifteen years old; our brains need a few
years practice after the onset of physical maturity to be able to
control reproductive impulses with any rationality; our current
society passes out condoms to thirteen-year-olds but discourages
marriage until they're thirty.

     But the point is, the psychological difference between the
child and adult is the relative ability of adults to control
their own lives and negotiate various problems and dangers.

     Let's solve the problem of children and guns right here,
since it can be solved easily.  Firearms -- like automobiles,
like matches, like pharmaceuticals, like rat poison -- are safe
and useful when used properly and dangerous and destructive when
used improperly.   

     Some children can handle responsibility; some adults can't. 
The successful ability to make rational decisions about potential
dangers is a function of an individual's natural gifts, the
parenting skills with which they were raised, and their
individual life experiences. 

     Beyond the age of reason when the brain has completed its
growth -- which is around the age of seven -- the rates at which
individuals master various tasks vary.  In emergencies, three-
year-old human beings have punched 9-1-1 and called for help. 
Five-year-old human beings have saved their parents using CPR
which they saw performed on television.  Ten-year-olds have
soloed as airplane pilots cross-country.

     At seven-years-old, Mozart was composing symphonies, Sarah
Chang was performing violin concertos, and Bobby Fischer was
winning chess tournaments.  Admittedly these are prodigies ...
but why should laws be written which hold the prodigious to the
lowest-common-denominator?

     Our society's current practice of imposing uniform age
standards on the transition from childhood to adulthood -- in
driving prohibitions, alcohol and tobacco prohibitions -- is
collectivist bigotry.

     There are some children whom I would trust with a match or a
gun without hesitation; there are some adults whom I would keep
away from anything as dangerous as a can of hair spray.

     In my novel, \The Rainbow Cadenza\, I portray a space
habitat with a social contract called, simply, the Lease.  The
Lease says nothing more than that signatories agree to answer for
any liabilities for their debts or damages to others.  Any adult
may sign it.  The test for adulthood is the ability to read and
understand the Lease.  No one is required to sign the Lease --
this is a libertarian society I'm portraying -- but anyone who
doesn't sign the Lease must either find someone to act as a legal
guardian ... or go somewhere else.  In my imagined society,
responsible adulthood is a matter of reason and choice; childhood
ends when you are capable of ending it. 

     My friend, Dafydd ab Hugh, puts it more succinctly: if you
can't be trusted with a gun, you need a keeper.

     I do not believe this is a utopian goal.  As a matter of
fact, I see our current society's problems as a function of not
understanding the differences between childhood and adulthood in
its political decisions.

     Socialism in all its pathological variants -- communism,
fascism, Nazism -- treats the government as a wise parent and its
citizens as irresponsible children.  The current term for this is
infantalization.  Paternalist thinking is at the base of even the
more moderate politics of the United States.  I have often
remarked that the United States has two political parties: the
Mommy Party and the Daddy Party. 

     The traditional Democratic Party -- the "mommy" party -- has
wanted the government to take care of all our physical needs from
cradle to grave, with government child care and education,
welfare, social security, government health care, and government
jobs -- and plenty of government oversight for any remaining
nominally-private activities.

     The traditional Republican Party -- the "daddy" party --  
expects us to pay our own way, but is more concerned with our
moral upbringing: we must pray, avoid sex out of marriage, work
hard, stay out of trouble -- and there's hard punishment for
anyone who disobeys.

     Of the two philosophies, the Daddy Party's is less
destructive to society, but both approaches still miss the point. 
You don't turn children into adults by shielding them from either
economic or moral failure: you turn children into adults by
letting them learn from their mistakes so deep down they know the
reason for not doing it again.

     Politicians are the most arrogant, self-important busybodies
in the country.  They honestly believe that if they don't solve a
problem, it won't be solved.  If there's a scarcity of something
the public wants or needs -- child care, Shakespeare in the Park,
literacy, a colony on Mars -- the private entrepreneur sees this
as an opportunity to enter the market and provide it.  The
political entrepreneur in a legislature or executive mansion sees
it as an opportunity to create a program --  and starts by making
it impossible for the private entrepreneur to compete with the
government.

     Gun control is at its essence a product of socialist
thinking.  It has all the earmarks of virulent socialism.  Gun-
controllers don't want us to have guns because we -- poor
children -- are too emotionally unstable and careless to handle
them without shooting ourselves and our friends.  Gun-controllers
don't want us to have guns because in their view we're not
supposed to protect ourselves: that's what the police are there
for.  Finally, gun controllers don't want us to have guns because
they have been working hard for the last century to create a
cradle-to-grave socialist utopia -- and now that they have vast
bureaucratic mechanisms running our lives, they're terrified
that we might come to our senses and shoot the bastards who 
have enslaved us.

     They are right to be afraid.  That's what the guns are for.

     Not that arrogant tyrants don't deserve being                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        