Understanding of how the two are related is going to be the key to smaller government, where everyone benefits.

With a changing of the guard in Washington and across many state governorships, some on the road back home to smaller government are bracing us once more

for sacrifice and some pain. There is no question that the people will have to participate in how we get smaller government, but not in the way we were told.

The time for compromise and sacrifice are actually over because most of the boondoggles are about to be over. With them gone, there is lesser need for compromise on a lot of things. From now on, our only sacrifice will be the time and trouble of supervising our public servants. For some, it is this supervision instead of being supervised that unsettles, but we are the sovereign, and we put the self in self-rule, making suprervision of officials a duty of all.

Whether some are comfortable or uncomfortable with self-rule is immaterial: it is our way of life for the good of the country. The repeal of gun laws is integral to smooth running governments who operate within budget, respond to constituents and who are free from scandal.

When the republicans take office in 2011, a lot of us expect the incoming Congress to repeal a chunk of gun laws as unjust and unconstitutional.

But there is more. Republicans and the officials and constituents who share republicanism values – those who understand that we are a republic and not a democracy, for instance – will know that an armed citizenry deters and fights crime best. Get a much better handle on violent crime and you have found the unlock block to uncontrolled spending. They key to smaller government is to withdraw the keystone of nearly all boondoggles, gun control.

With conservatives in office, Americans can likely see one vital thing: that personal independence works best when the target of violence has a free hand in being their own first line of defense.

If republicans stand for this kind of independence, they will be able to reduce the size of government by unfunding tons of anti-violence programs which attempt to take the place of the armed citizen and the citizen’s authority to act. Note that where the crime is the highest – and funding is the most wasteful – is in major cities with major gun control. With no force to resist violence, crime thrives. Don’t forget that gun control and gun laws are an absentee concept in how crime is cultivated. Anti-violence programs do little when every single crime is yet another failure of the program.

The sunlight on this reveals what gun control has been hiding: personal independence and the citizen authority to act. The best evidence, of course, is in how successful that independent authority to act is elsewhere in states which do not have severe gun laws.

The correctness and the dignity of the repeal of all gun laws is in the republicanism value that not only do the officials obey the constituents and respect their rights in this republic, but that they trust them because they believe in the system of republicanism.

Hurry, 2011, hurry.

— LA Gun Rights Examiner John Longenecker publishes the Safer Streets Newsletter.