The ongoing debate over gun control is just another attempt by liberals to make the average American dependent on the government in order to increase liberalism's power.

Contrary to many conservative pundits, the primary reason for liberals wishing to disarm the population is not to prevent a popular uprising against the effective liberal abrogation of the Constitution -- liberals lack the ability to even conceive such a thing could ever happen -- but rather to increase the dependency of the average American on the government.

By disarming law-abiding Americans, liberals will instill fear into people. No longer will people be able to protect themselves; they will be totally dependent on the government. People who can't protect themselves will be less likely to oppose increases in taxes or the size of government so long as voters are promised that they will be safe.

People who depend on the government will also tend to be less likely to criticize the government for the simple reason that they know that government can choose to ignore its obligations to them. Most people are aware that whenever government is forced to cut back it always cuts back on critical public services while it hardly ever cuts government employees -- contractors yes, union members no.

In Northern California, for example, when a library bond failed, the libraries drastically cut the hours the libraries were open, and made sure the new hours weren't convenient, rather than concentrating the budget they had on meeting the needs of the people. Similarly we see with the sequestration the Federal government is intentionally cutting services to the people, such as the military and tours of the White House, while continuing to spend money on lavish vacations for the president. Americans know that the government will do pretty much anything to keep from having to shrink and that when push comes to shove the government bureaucracy and the political class will put their interests ahead of the country.

Amazingly, even liberals agree that the government doesn't work in the interest of the people unless forced to. They constantly complain about the military-industrial complex and the government working together to bring wealth to certain government-related groups at the expense of the country. But for some reason, liberals ignore their own push for greater power at the expense of the people.

The liberal nanny state is not based on a liberal desire to improve the lives of others; it's based on liberals desire to be nannies -- that is, to run the lives of others.

If liberals were actually motivated by a desire to prevent gun violence, they would be in favor of laws which make it easier to convict criminals who use guns -- throwing out bizarre rules that allow guilty parties to walk because of technicalities, for example -- laws which make it easier to put people who are insane into facilities where they could be helped, and laws which increase the punishment associated with gun violence. Instead, liberals are all for making it hard to convict criminals who use guns, opposed to making it easier to ensure that those suffering from mental illness get the treatment they so desperately need, and fully in favor of early release for even violent criminals if a judge determines that the prisons aren't providing a nice enough experience. Liberals even support furlough programs for convicted murderers, as we saw from the infamous Willie Horton case.

Liberals have historically lusted for power to control how others live far more so than typical liberal boogiemen like Catholics who oppose abortion or Evangelicals who want voluntary nondenominational prayer in school. There's a chasm between saying that killing an unborn human should be illegal -- which is acting to protect the rights of unborn human beings, not telling individuals how they should live -- and telling people how large a cup of soda they can buy can be -- which is aimed at controlling people rather than protecting the defenseless. In liberal lingo, drinking soda is a victimless "crime" while abortion involves one person, the mother, acting against the interests of another person, her unborn daughter.

In the traditional nanny situation, an adult is paid to run the lives of someone else's children. This makes sense in that children lack the intelligence and information necessary to run their own lives. Letting children do whatever they want will mess up the children's lives, as shown by countless studies -- along with common sense. But the system works only if the nanny is wiser than the children. A nanny who drags the children where she wants to go, say a casino or an opium den, is not going to succeed in making the children's lives better.

The modern liberal nanny state is dysfunctional at its core because unlike children, the average American adult is fully capable of successfully navigating his own way through life. There is no justification for anyone to have the right and authority to control the average American the way a nanny can control the lives of the children in her charge.

The role of government as envisioned by the Founders was to help ensure that the interactions between citizens would be fair and moral. But that type of government denies the politicians the power to impose their moral and ethical beliefs on the hoi polloi. Liberals, with their lust for power, can't tolerate a system where they can't impose their beliefs on others, so they work to change the relationship between government and the people.

Liberals work ceaselessly to change America from a country where the government draws all authority from the people to a country where the people are dependent on the government and hence where people are controlled by the government.

In some sense modern liberalism is in direct conflict with the First Amendment. The intent of the establishment clause of the First Amendment is to ensure that no one religion is enshrined above all others. Allowing any one group to impose their beliefs on how people should live their lives is condemned by the First Amendment.

For example Catholics shouldn't be able to make people eat fish on Fridays and Jews shouldn't make pig farming illegal. While both Catholics and Jews, and most Christians, are perfectly comfortable with keeping government from supporting a specific denomination, liberals are not. Liberals believe that their views, no matter how small the issue, are above all others and as such should be enforced with the full power of the government. While liberalism isn't a traditional religion, the aspects of life it wishes to control are essentially the same in nature as the religion-specific rules of most faiths; not eating pork for Jews is similar to liberals condemnation of smoking and large glasses of soda.

Eliminating citizen's right to protect themselves is just the latest prong in liberals campaign to make Americans wards of the state. Tax laws and rates designed to make saving money for retirement difficult while being so obtuse as to require even average Americans to hire accountants, interference in the medical sector that drives up costs forcing many Americans to depend on the government for health care in their old age, massively intrusive laws such as ObamaCare which grant huge flexibility to unelected bureaucrats to define what the law actually says, and using the money of working Americans to make a welfare dependent class are all aspects of liberals soft revolution aimed at inverting the core assumption of the great American experiment that government is subject to the people.

While we must pursue multiple paths to blunt liberals latest assault on our Second Amendment rights making the average low-information voter aware of the liberal self-interest at the core of calls for gun control may be an effective method to thwart the latest liberal attempt to make us all serfs.

You can read more of tom's rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious and feel free to follow him on Twitter