Our government has treated smokers and alcohol consumers like second-class citizens for months. And they had zero recourse – the government just trampled their rights and privileges underfoot.
There was no basis in science or reason for the tobacco and alcohol bans. Instead the government implemented them unilaterally, and without any consultation with the public. Even when experts and scientists explicitly and repeatedly stated that they serve no purpose. And will, in fact, do far more harm than good.
The ANC government didn’t care.
A propaganda campaign of fear and misinformation
With the help of the corporate media, who manufactured artificial legitimacy for the bans by running propaganda campaigns based on fear and misinformation, the government instituted the bans for our “own good”. We needed to be protected from ourselves. This was in the public interest.
Our government treats free and adult citizens like naughty children. And they used the irresponsible misbehaviour of a minority of people as the reason to punish all of us.
Entire industries were damaged (in some cases irreparably and permanently) and even outright destroyed. The bans caused tens-of-thousands of permanent job losses. The fiscus lost approximately R50-million per day in taxes from the tobacco ban. And another R50-million per day from the alcohol ban.
None of these facts stopped the ANC government from implementing and maintaining their puritanical prohibitions. Even as the buffoonery of this course of action became abundantly clear, they steadfastly refused to lift it.
Prohibitions have significant unintended consequences
Of course prohibitions don’t work.
I don’t know why people think it would work for cigarettes and alcohol, when it has miserably and completely failed to curtail the availability of hard drugs and prostitutes. History teaches us that all that alcohol prohibition achieved in the 1920s United States, was to create a flourishing criminal industry that became incredibly rich from supplying illicit alcohol.
Yet few people seemed interested in any of these lessons.
While the puritanical lockdown fanatics foamed at the mouth in their bovine support for the government’s bans, smokers and drinkers got their fix anyway. I personally don’t know of a single person who stopped smoking or drinking during lockdown. And the available statistics indicate that this held true almost entirely across the board.
All that the ban on cigarettes and alcohol achieved was to inflate prices massively, decrease the quality of the available contraband, criminalise potentially millions of citizens, put tens-of-thousands of productive citizens and their industries out of work, and enrich real and dangerous criminals to an astounding degree.
Treating law-abiding citizens like criminals is a crime
In essence, the cigarette and alcohol bans were outright pro-crime policies.
All of the above applies to guns in South Africa.
In almost every single paragraph above, you can substitute “tobacco” and “alchohol” with “firearms”, and it will still ring entirely true. The parallels between the government’s approach to citizens consuming tobacco and alcohol, and their approach to civilians owning guns are so close as to be identical.
Gun owners are by now used to being treated as second-class citizens. We have been for decades. And nobody else stood up for us: we had to do so ourselves. We had to fight our own battles. On more than once occasion against an unjustifiably hostile public opinion. Increasingly strict gun control hasn’t disarmed criminals – they easily enough obtain fully-automatic military firearms as things presently stand. Yet government refuses to acknowledge the failure of their agenda, and pushes on regardless.
Just as they did the alcohol and tobacco bans.
Wake up and take a stand
I hope that the arbitrary and senseless unilateral actions by the ANC government against consumers have caused an awakening.
I hope that people are finally beginning to see why gun owners keep kicking up a fuss.
And I hope that from now on forward, we can all stand together and fight for our rights.
Not separately as smokers, drinkers, and gun owners. But united as freedom-loving South Africans who have had enough of this endless tyranny where we are treated as criminals and children.
Enough.
Written by Gideon Joubert.
Gideon is the owner and editor of Paratus.
