Social Engineering Gone Wild!

Your ability to father children in exchange for a speedy gun permit.

Does this sound like a good deal to you?

According to the Saturday Washington Times article, “India uses gun license as sterilization incentive,” it’s actually happening in India:

Government officials in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh have begun offering fast-track gun licenses to men who agree to undergo sterilization, so they will not feel less manly.

The region is part of Chambal Valley, notorious for its rampaging gangs of robbers and bandits, and many villagers desperately want to possess firearms. Vasectomy camps – regularly set up in many parts of the country as part of a solution to India’s population explosion – often fail to meet their targets. Most men refuse to be sterilized, thinking the process strips them of their manliness.

The region has failed repeatedly to attract villagers to government family planning programs, said Maneesh Srivastava, chief administrator of the district of Shivpuri. “In fact, we never managed to meet even one-fourth the annual sterilization target.” After a survey found that most men refused vasectomies because they did not want to lose their “manliness,” the government adopted a new strategy. “We decided to match it with a bigger symbol of manliness: a gun license,” Mr. Srivastava said, and “it has worked wonders.”

Of course getting a firearms license is still easier in India than in the District of Columbia, where local laws make it virtually impossible. In India “tens of thousands of applications have been pending for years. To be eligible, an applicant has to prove that he faces a grievous threat to his life and does not have a criminal record,” the article notes. (At least there’s a waiting list in India, unlike D.C.)

But here’s the money quote from the article: “Vasectomy camps are viewed with suspicion in India.”

Only in India?

Nonprofit advocacy groups and foundations in the U.S. haven’t said much yet on this innovative progressive approach that blends involuntary family planning with gun control, and has the side benefit of preventing the birth of a new generation of gun rights enthusiasts.

It is liberal, statist efficiency at its best.

But despite the policy’s Nazi overtones, at least one U.S.-based group does favor vasectomizing the poor of the Third World. The Indian program has the support of Pathfinder International, which has received more than $600,000 in donations from the Palo Alto-based Erik E. & Edith H. Bergstrom Foundation since 2003.