gun control

I invite you to wade through the next few paragraphs as best you can. This is a collection of thoughts and conclusions, examples of a point of view held by many. These quotes come from a book I am reading for the second time. The author of the book researched it well. No doubt he found a vast cornucopia of similar statements, but this is what he presents in his book.  I couldn’t have summed up this philosophy any better than the bunch of experts quoted here:

To some, it is incomprehensible that America has not followed the lead of other democracies and sharply restricted civilian gun ownership. Writes the founding chair of Handgun Control, Inc, “The rest of the civilized world looks with horror at the lack of gun controls in the United States.” To essayist Garry Wills, gun control is the very essence of civilization: “Until we are willing to outlaw the very existence of civilian handguns, we have no right to call ourselves citizens or consider our behavior minimally civil.” He writes that “Every civilized society must disarm its citizens against each other.” Maryland’s former Senator, Joseph Tydings (a leading sponsor of gun control until his 1970 defeat, widely attributed to an NRA ad campaign) found it “tragic that in all of Western civilization the United States is the one country with an insane gun policy.” President Johnson decried “the insane traffic in guns” and called for national gun registration. As his attorney general Ramsey Clark put it, “Every civilized nation but one has acted to control guns…..In Britain, France, the Soviet Union, Italy, and West Germany, the ownership of a firearm is a strictly regulated privilege.” Former Massachusetts Congressman Robert Drinan calls for an “international commission against violence,” which would criticize nations with the worst handgun records. “This international agency has to civilize barbarous countries like the United States.” “In our kind of civilization, I can’t tolerate any kind of weapon,” writes a Harvard law professor. Former Screen Actors Guild President Edward Asner demands a handgun ban because “it is time to set the house of civilization in order.” Time Magazine asked, “How can America think of itself as a civilized society when day after day the bodies pile up amid the primitive crackle of gunfire across the land?”

Firearms advocates are sometimes seen as so far outside the paradigm of civilization that their very adherence to human or sane standard is questionable. A scientist calls America’s gun habits “simply beastly behavior.” “Gun Lunatics Silence the Sounds of Civilization,” writes the Miami Herald; the paper’s columnist finds NRA reasoning “difficult to understand from a civilized view.” The reason for the NRA’s failure to understand civilization? “Handgun Nuts Are Just That—Really Nuts.” To Atlanta newspaper columnist Lewis Grizzard, gun owners are simply “bulletbrains” Another columnist considers gun-control opponents “dolts” and “bumpersticker cretins.” The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence diagnoses gun ownership as a “national paranoia.”  A little more tactfully, Senator Edward Kennedy decries the “mindless proliferation of handguns.”

I borrowed this last bit from a book titled, “The Samurai, the Mountie and the Cowboy”—David B. Kopel. If you have not read this book, and you find yourself mired in arguing the value or harm of firearms with some rigid folks, you should read this book. And no, I’m not stating that any side of this argument is aligned against total morons. That clearly is accepted by one side of the argument, but it would be total hubris on my part. But you should read this book. Regardless whether you are a pro or a con person. Just read the book.

Kopel's book goes on to borrow this definition of firearms owners:

The typical firearms owner is a rural or smalltown (sic) Protestant male— no surprise to many prohibitionists. Science fiction author Harlan Ellison, in an editorial urging his readers to send donations to Handgun Control, recalled his first thought when he heard that Mark Chapman had murdered John Lennon. “You watch, he’ll turn out to be a Christer.” “Why should a civilized society tolerate 30 gun deaths every single day?” wondered New York City newspaper columnist Harriet Van Horne in a column where she sneered at “Backwater, Tenn.” and “the Gospel tent tradition of poor, backward, rural America.” Manhattan’s satire magazine Spry headlines its article about the rest of America, “Big Dumb White Guys with Guns.”

If gun owners may not comprehend a civilized society, in the view of control advocates, then certainly the National Rifle Association does not. Handgun Control, Inc’s Jeanne Schields calls NRA members “macho men who don’t understand the definition of a civilized society.”

I’ll spare you the bulk of the rest of this, but let me pick just a few random tidbits from the book….

Mario Cuomo: “NRA hunters who drink beer, don’t vote and lie to their wives about where they were all weekend.”

Anti-gun physicians advise the public that gun-ownership by law-abiding citizens is a public health disaster. Gun owners are portrayed as “ unstable, violent, and dangerous.” Garry Wills calls them “gun fetishists.” and “traitors, enemies of their own patriae,” They are an alien, infectious presence, in the words of a Miami Herald columnist, “thus, we find ourselves surrounded by gun-toting, psychopaths, druggie urban trash from the North, dangerous yokels from the South, van gypsies, half wits, and other losers of every stripe imaginable.”

Our cities are, “besieged by  an enemy within” the “sordid race of gunsels.”

I’ll bet you didn’t know this but according to D H Lawrence “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” American historian Richard Hofstadter traces the problem to American gun owners. “We were once again proven a savage, uncontrollable, unpredictable, gun-ridden, and murderous people.” lamented psychologist Robert Coles.

Violence is “as American as cherry pie.” claimed H Rap Brown.

And, apparently it is all our fault.

A little perspective is in order. These are selected quotes taken out of context. The motivation of those quoted is not mentioned. Some quotes are no doubt words from people trying to make a point. Certainly, some come from folks behaving like politicians and they might have sounded differently if the wind changed. Some are from people who get paid to spout these opinions, and money goes a long way toward shaping their ethics. And some come from people who simply like to hear themselves think. 

But all of these quotes have one thing in common. They are fully intended to convey somebody’s ernest opinion. They are all about anger. Heck, forget anger. They are all about hate. These quotes come from the hatred of the speakers, and they are expected to fuel the hatred in the people who listened to or read these statements. And they are fully intended to punish, to injure, the people they are insulting and attacking.

They hate people like me, and those other people who own firearms, or who merely support the right of people like me to own firearms. The folks quoted here, and that group who agree with everything these critics claim, believe that we have earned their hatred, and we have earned that whole bunch of nasty, insulting, demonizing pejoratives memorialized above. These folks will tell you, over and over and over again, that American gun owners and the people who support the 2nd Amendment are responsible for every crime committed with a firearm in this country. And shame on us.

Some of us consider the NRA to be the good guy. Who but the NRA has taught gun safety for 100 years. Who beside the NRA has argued that enforcing existing laws against criminals misusing guns actually be enforced. Who besides the NRA promotes self defense, which has stopped hundreds of thousand of violent crimes. The NRA supports our Constitution. The NRA is the oldest civil rights organization in this country. 

My favorite pejorative was laid on the NRA a while back. The NRA was referred to as “execrable”. If you look this up, it kinda translates into that which one flushes down the toilet. That is how they attempt to describe their vile hatred for the NRA.

I try not to let this bother me, but really…..I’m moronic scum? I’m not supposed to take this personally? I’m not moronic. A bit weird maybe, but clearly not moronic. And sorry, but I’m not scum. I’ve invested a lifetime into helping people. Scum? Excuse my irrational response to this, but I’ve never been a polite person…..Fuck you. 

OK back to civil discourse…

Eleven thousand homicides are committed with firearms each year in America. Plus or minus. Wow! According to some, such a number makes the US the worst place ever. But I ask you to pause for a moment to consider that the people who tend to repeat this comment over and over again are the very people who think the US is always the worst place ever. Whatever……

Folks argue over this number. Those people quoted above no doubt would say the number is much higher. But they like to include those homicides that happened when good people stopped bad people from doing bad things. This means the justified self defense shootings where good people stopped bad people who attacked them. And this includes the justified shootings when police defended themselves from criminal attack. Some think these justified homicides may exceed 2000. Those attackers died, and guns were used to stop them, but none of this is a crime. It is a response to crime, an appropriate response to violent crime. 

I suppose those folks who would disarm all of us would be happy if none of these people were able to defend themselves when attacked, and it would just be too bad that the criminals killed them. It’s not the criminals’ fault, after all. Never is. And the more people who are killed, the better supported is their argument to ban guns.

So those who hate gun owners would inflate the numbers of people killed when they were killed by someone with a firearm. Even with this, ah, subtle exaggeration….the number would still hover just a bit below eleven thousand a year. To keep the math simple, let’s settle on an even eleven thousand people killed by someone using a firearm. And let’s establish that there is a separate killer for each murder, which is not real but it is useful for this discussion because it keeps things simple. That leaves us with eleven thousand murderers who used firearms to kill eleven thousand people each year.

That is terrible. Eleven thousand murderers. The haters say we are the only nation on earth with such numbers, except for those other countries left unmentioned, and that all gun owners are happy to have eleven thousand murders each year. Let’s just take these numbers. And let’s introduce one other number.

Best guess is we have one hundred and ten million people in this country who own firearms. Could be more. But boy does this make the math easy. Eleven thousand murderers. One hundred and ten million gun owners. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but doesn’t that mean that 0.01% of gun owners will commit murder this year? And 99.99% will not? And if this is true, how is it that non-criminal gun owners are responsible for all those murders?

According to those quoted above, America is nothing but a war zone with random murders, shootings, chaos. Parts of America seem like this. But not all of America. I don’t trust my memory anymore, for good reason, but the numbers I remember go something like this. There are just over 3000 counties in America. Seventy percent of the murders each year take place in three percent of these counties. Something like 80% of the counties in any given year report zero murders. America is not a war zone. Ninety out of 3000 counties are war zones. Likely there are reasons for this, but 110,000,000 Americans who mostly don’t live in these counties are not the reason. Unless you believe what those quotes above state.

As we can see from above, this alone is ample justification to attack every gun owner because they say we all are the reason why we have so many murders in America. This on the surface appears to be a nonsensical statement. But go back and read those quotes that began this exercise. That we are responsible for all these murders is clearly stated there.   

Generally, the haters are saying that the non-criminal gun owners and those who support them stand in the way of our government’s efforts to prevent criminals getting guns to do their damage. You know, we stand in the way of common sense restrictions on guns. If it were not for us, criminals would not ever acquire guns. That is just common sense.

Yeah. You got me. I’m always against common sense. But if I was a proponent of common sense, I too would be proposing lots of new laws to end violence. Here is what I would suggest:

I would make it illegal to kill people with a gun. We should make it illegal to threaten to kill people with a gun. We should make it illegal to deliberately hurt someone with a gun, and also to threaten to hurt somebody with a gun. We should make it illegal to steal from someone, or some business by using a gun. We should even make it illegal to threaten to do this by using a gun. We should make it illegal for people with a criminal history to possess a gun. We should make it illegal for anybody to knowingly sell a gun to people with a criminal history. We should make it illegal to knowingly give a gun to a person with a criminal background. We should make it illegal to transport a gun across state lines to give or sell to a criminal. We should make it illegal to buy a gun for someone else who has a criminal background. We should make it illegal to buy a gun from any licensed dealer without a background check. We should make it illegal to lie when attempting to buy a gun from a licensed dealer. We should make it illegal for anyone to steal a gun. We should imprison people for longer and harsher times who commit crimes by using a gun.  

In my feeble mind these would be common sense restrictions on the sale, exchange of, possession and use of a firearm to commit a crime of violence. Let’s take guns away from the criminals and let’s attempt to deter criminals from using guns to commit violence. I really don’t know of any gun owners, or supporters of law abiding gun owners, or even the execrable NRA, who wouldn’t support these common sense restrictions on guns. Heck, I would. 

But still the haters will condemn us, because we are against common sense restrictions on guns….. They demand far more restrictions on gun owners because they say we want it to be easy for criminals to get guns.

OK, what do the haters consider common sense restriction on guns…..

Consider the end point of all the arguments against good people having arms. Common sense eventually demands a total ban on civilian possession of firearms. Let’s get after those nefarious bastards who own guns. You cannot trust them, because they don’t care about crime and violence. Order a complete and total ban, and demand that everyone turn in in every gun…or else. Call out the national guard and the military, go door to door, invade and search every home, confiscate every weapon and imprison every gun owner who doesn’t willingly surrender every firearm. Pay the neighbors to inform on their friends. Build the camps to house those many that the prisons cannot hold, when they refuse to turn in their guns. Disarm those one hundred and ten million people. Confiscate three hundred million firearms. Common sense dictates this.

This solution has often been suggested, but those nasty folks without common sense consistently oppose this, and clearly there are too many of these people getting in the way to accomplish this. So often, the people with common sense want to ban all guns, but they pretend they do not. They say this often, to fool us. And their propaganda machine, the mainstream media feeds the lies.

Over the years they have tried to ban a few guns at a time, but only the most evil guns. So far, they have only tried to ban revolvers and pistols, semi-automatic firearms, scoped hunting rifles, plastic guns, expensive guns, inexpensive handguns, imported firearms, standard capacity magazines, high-powered firearms, large caliber guns, pump action rifles and shotguns, semi-automatic shotguns, lever action rifles, air powered guns, any weapon with cosmetic features that are evil, military style firearms, any weapon invented after the Revolutionary War, virtually every type of ammunition, and any firearm that can’t only be used when you have the key.

So see, they don’t really want to ban all guns. 

America should ban guns incrementally. Mandate a few more laws restricting guns. One at a time. Maybe those dolts won’t notice. They are moronic scum after all. Put the frog in the water and set the stove knob on low. Done well, this will end violence in America. They promise….

Who promised? Well, politicians mostly. Politicians from one political party. This one political party is virulently eager to disarm America. They are so eager that they will say most anything to get this job done. Over the last few decades they have been caught exaggerating so many times, lying so many times, cooking statistics to condemn the good guys, and hiding the truth so they can convince us to ban guns. And they are the ones with the vile assaults on the integrity of gun owners. They are the ones who deny any benefit to owning guns, and they deny that law abiding people ever defend themselves from criminal attack by using guns. 

Oh, and they are the ones who scoff at the notion that a free citizenry might someday prevent tyranny from taking over our government. Perhaps this is why this one party tries so very hard to disarm the people who might try to prevent their tyranny from taking over our government.

Well, they didn’t actually promise that banning guns will end violence. They only implied…. After all, if guns are the reason we have violence, if guns cause people to be violent, common sense implies…..

That bunch of laws I proposed a few paragraphs ago…well we already have those laws. All of them. We’ve had them for decades. So far, they haven’t stopped the criminal misuse of firearms. Likely they have done a little to slow down this violence, but they haven’t stopped it. Yet I still support these laws. I support these laws because they are intended to impact criminals.

That bunch who claim common sense dictate that this is not enough. They proposed dozens of new laws, but every single anti-firearms law that has been proposed for the last 20 or so years has not been intended to inconvenience criminals. Nope, the folks with common sense have given up on laws aimed at criminals. In fact, they have done so little to enforce those existing laws that are intended to stop criminal violence that they leave some of us thinking they truly want more criminal violence committed with guns, so they can attack the gun owners even more virulently. 

These days, all the laws they would impose upon us are intended to make it more difficult, and eventually impossible, for the people who are not criminals to own firearms. See start of this essay.

These laws would include far more bans on certain evil guns, mostly based upon the popularity of these guns but also their cosmetic features, demands for intrusive background checks, mandatory licenses to own firearms or to purchase or trade or inherit firearms, registration of all firearms, taxes on the good people to pay the cost to society caused by criminals, taxes on ammunition, licenses to purchase ammunition, ballistic fingerprinting of guns, storage of guns to prevent their use in personal defense, limiting the number of guns one person can own, limiting the number of guns one person can purchase in a given time frame, waiting periods, prohibition of transporting or shipping firearms, penalties for using firearms for self defense. And more and more and more.

These have all been tried from time to time and place to place. Not one has reduced crime or violence, and some have actually increased crime and violence. All have impacted the law abiding people. As was the plan all along.

Every truly horrid tyrannical government in history on this planet has disarmed its subjects. The worst mass murderers in all of history have been governments slaughtering their own people. Even the most cursory introduction to world history would demonstrate this again and again. That’s why we no longer teach much history to our children, and what we do teach has been thoroughly scrubbed. 

Tyranny invents enemies to put themselves into power, and to keep their subjects believing they must stay in power. From those quotes above, who might be the enemies this time?