The first thought that occurs to conservatives when viewing the current liberal attack on Second Amendment rights is that liberals are trying to disarm everyone so the government can become more of a dictatorship and less of a democracy. That's why we see so many comparisons to the many dictators who have disarmed their populations before instituting anti-democratic rule.

But it is quite likely that liberal distaste for guns stems from a deeper, unacknowledged aspect of the liberal psych -- the wish to eschew responsibility for their actions leads them to make things, not people, guilty for everything: "the gun made him do it." A key aspect of modern American liberalism is the rejection of the traditional Judeo-Christian moral code. Liberals believe in casual sex, government rather than personal charity, and the right of individuals to live off of society rather than carry their own weight -- to the extent possible given their abilities -- among other things which violate the laws laid down by God. But it should not be surprising if violating the laws defined by an all knowing, all loving God result in adverse consequences.

A common liberal misperception about the nature of God's laws is that they exist merely to establish that God is the top dog; that people have to dance to His tune.

In reality, the Judeo-Christian worldview holds that God's laws are designed to help us be as happy as we can in this life, and in the next. God is a loving Father, not a cop hiding in order to catch us speeding so it makes sense that He would define laws to help us not to oppress us. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that violating His laws results in suffering and a variety of adverse consequences.

But liberals, like anyone who does something wrong because the near term "rewards" overcome concerns about long term consequences, work desperately to avoid the responsibility for, and the consequences of, their actions. The most obvious example of this is sex. Liberals believe that they have a right to casual sex without consequences and without responsibility. In the past, this mindset was historically limited to a few libertines by the simple twin realities of pregnancy and disease. Sadly the invention of the pill and the ability of antibiotics to cure most STDs allowed people living in the 1960's to delude themselves into thinking they could sleep around without consequences.

We can ignore the emotional and psychological consequences of casual sex because while they are well documented they appear sufficiently subjective to allow liberals to ignore them. Instead let's concentrate on some clearly objective consequences of sexual "liberation".

First note that contraception does not end the "risk" of pregnancy in any sexual act. The truth is that the Pill is not 100% effective, and condoms are far less effective. Assuming the Pill is taken precisely as prescribed and the woman doesn't have diarrhea, use antibiotics, or have any other complicating conditions -- or ever forget to take the Pill --the Pill is roughly 98% effective. That sounds good but what that means is that for every 100 women using the Pill perfectly 2 will get pregnant each year. Doing the math and assuming a woman is sexually active from say 16 to 40 -- and liberals do condone sex by young children with other young children -- it turns out that the average woman has a roughly 38% chance of an unintended pregnancy at least once in her life. The problem of unplanned pregnancies also grows because most women, and men, think the pill is essentially perfect. As such more people began engaging in casual sex. This in turn lead to a growth in unplanned pregnancies just because more people were having sex in situations where they never would think of having a child.

Similarly STDs, after a short period in the 1960s, became far more common and far less treatable culminating with AIDS in the 1980s.

How did liberals react to the discovery that casual sex has consequences? They reacted by trying to eliminate responsibility. They made abortion legal so that they could be sure they could engage in casual sex without having to worry about pregnancy. They directed disproportionate amounts of medical research dollars into dealing with STDs, an approach they'd never condone for other behavior-related diseases such as lung cancer. But most of all, they plugged their ears and declared that everything was all right so that they didn't have to take responsibility for the consequence of their actions.

It didn't faze liberals that 1.4 million unborn babies had to be killed each year so that they could enjoy sex without consequences. It didn't bother them that they were often spreading incurable STDs, such as genital herpes and AIDS, because they declared -- in direct contradiction to evidence -- that condoms were a failsafe way to avoid infection.

All that mattered to liberals is that they did not have to take responsibility for their actions. That they could continue to engage in casual sex without feeling bad about themselves.

We see the same thing when looking at the liberal attitude towards helping the poor. Liberals are less willing than conservatives to directly pitch in their own time and money to help those in need -- look at how the media mocked Romney for helping load water bottles while the same media stayed silent about Obama never doing anything himself to help those in need.

Old school liberals, like FDR, saw the corrosive consequences of the welfare state. In his 1935 inaugural address FDR said

The lessons of history, confirmed by evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence on relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is a violation of the traditions of America.

But when confronted with incontrovertible evidence of the ill effects the modern liberal welfare state on blacks, modern liberals simply pushed for more of the same. Instead of accepting personal responsibility and joining conservatives who worked in the trenches to help the truly needy, liberals continued to deny their personal responsibility and instead said that daddy... the government should take care of the poor. All liberals had to do was make sure the "rich" gave the government enough money.

We all know that liberals don't believe that they should be held responsible for what they say. From Clinton lying under oath to being comfortable with people publicly calling for the assassination of President Bush, liberals demonstrate that they do not feel they have a personal responsibility to either speak the truth or to avoid inciting violence.

In the current gun debate we see another example of liberals wishing to deny their contribution to the crime. Just as legalizing pornography led to an increase in rape by spreading the lie that a woman's no often meant yes, continual pushing of the envelope of what is acceptable violence in entertainment by the liberal media establishment has led to a desensitization of Americans to brutality. Now it's true that the vast majority of people who watch violent entertainment or even vicariously participate in virtual violence in video games would never hurt a fly. Sadly however there are always a few people at the fringes of society who are vulnerable to the message that violence is a good way to solve things; or to become famous. Prior to modern liberals entertainment might have been dark but never explicitly bloody.

The real core of the liberal response to Newtown is the instinctive liberal denial of personal responsibility. To acknowledge that it was the shooter rather than the gun that was responsible for the mass murder of children at Newtown would undermine the entire edifice of modern liberal self justification. Even though liberals do not condone the shooting of children, they have to find some way to shift blame from the individual to some thing; otherwise they'd have to confront the emptiness at the core of so many of their beliefs. If a man is responsible when he fires a gun why isn't he responsible when he spreads an STD or gets a woman pregnant? Like all essentially good people who sin, liberals are averse to admitting the consequences of their actions and to accepting responsibility for what they've done. When good people delude themselves as to the nature of their actions, it is insanely hard for them to face the truth and acknowledge their real responsibilities.

Understanding the reason for liberal attempts to restrict our Second Amendment rights does not directly impact on the battle to protect the rights that so many Americans have died for. But understanding that we're not contesting with a rational argument, but rather with a knee-jerk reaction based on a refusal to acknowledge the need to be responsible for one's own actions may help us develop strategies that more effectively counter liberal hysteria; a hysteria based not on concern for children but rather on a need to protect liberal core beliefs in a personal lack of responsibility for their own actions.

You can find more of tom's rants at http://obvioustalk.blogspot.com/