The Strategy Page

(Nov. 19) reports that, “President Mugabe and his cronies must be scared,

since the police have been ordered to embark on a nationwide firearms audit

starting on the 21st. They want the public to take their firearms and

firearm certificates to their nearest police station, so the number of guns

and types can be verified.” As is typical in such situations, “The

authorities are using the excuse of rising crime for this exercise.” In

fact, crime is rising in Zimbabwe, because the criminal “government”of

Robert Mugabe is intensifying its genocidal persecution of the people of

Zimbabwe. As Paul Gallant, Joanne Eisen and I have detailed,

“gun control” is the sine qua non of Mugabe’s vicious regime.

Mugabe is unquestionably a tyrant. Every theory of government which permits

forcible resistance to tyranny would identify overthrowing Mugabe as plainly

just. Every theory of just war which recognizes the suffering of people in a

foreign country would authorize the use of force by any nation to remove

Mugabe. For same reasons that the world should have acted in Germany in the

1930s and in Rwanda in the early 1990s, every nation has a moral obligation

to do what it can to liberate Zimbabwe. Because diplomatic efforts to remove

Mugabe have failed, the United States ought to begin supplying weapons and

other aid to the people of Zimbabwe, so that they can save themselves from

genocide, and so that they can install a government chosen by themselves.

The failure of the United Nations to act is one more instance of the UN’s

pathetic favoritism of tyrants, and one more reason why all freedom-loving

people should resist the UN’s gun prohibition programs.