The Fallacy of "If Only One Life is Saved"

In the typical twisted logic of a progressive, President Obama recently said of increased gun control, "if there's one life we can save, we've got an obligation to try." This is simply a collectivist idiom designed to make giving up ones rights sound noble. Millions of Americans sacrificed their lives for the freedoms we now enjoy, but President Obama would have us believe that if a freedom might lead to the injury of some  innocent person, than that freedom should be mitigated or excised away; it's government saying, you are not smart enough to make the decisions that rule your life, so the government must step in and do it for you; it is the road to self enslavement. The collectivist will always take some tragedy and drive up the hysteria ("never let an emergency go to waste"), then explain that unfortunately some individual rights will need to be given up for the greater good and there is no tragedy that can not be politicized by the left; it is not out of the realm of possibilities that Gabrielle Giffords injured brain was unable to even understand her anti-gun speech given recently in a congressional hearing ). The reasoning of "If only one life is saved," is collectivist rhetoric that  will never accomplish it's stated purpose of saving lives, or like gun bans, the regulations will only be symbolic at the time, but will morph into into the call for more restrictive regulations in the future. Even worse, we give up our freedoms because we are told, every individual right taken away may have the consequence of saving a life). The collectivist politician(s) continue to promise not only what they can never deliver, but what the have no intention on delivering. The purpose behind such actions are described by Thomas Sowell ;

 "The whole point of the collectivist mindset is to concentrate power in the hands of the collectivists -- which is to say, to take away our freedom. Freedom is seldom destroyed all at once. More often it is eroded, bit by bit, until it is gone. This can happen so gradually that there is no sudden change that would alert people to the danger. By the time everybody realizes what has happened, it can be too late, because their freedom is gone". Obama's Rhetoric

In a society with individual rights, regulations and laws are a governmental request for voluntary compliance. But with a concentration of power and a loss of individual rights (history has shown that collectivist societies breed totalitarian and oppressive regimes) there is no need voluntary compliance. Collectivists like President Obama like to use the same terminology as our founding documents but give them a collectivist meaning. A perfect example is the "general welfare" clause in the US Constitution. Any person who has spent any time reading the Federalist Papers, know that far from being a social mandate, " promoting the general welfare"  was  the end result of the Constitution, and it's guarantee of individual rights and limited government. Finally lets look at the gun problem logically. There hundreds of millions of guns in the hands of law abiding citizens and only a handful of nut-jobs that may want to slaughter the our children in the schools. Do we ban future sales of certain weapons that are rarely used in this slaughter, or do we guard the children? I have a son starting High School next year and I know what I want..and it's not a symbolic gesture.