 |
| This picture was not taken in my basement. |
A couple of years ago on these pages, I swore up and down that I had no further interest in any political issue, that I was "dropping out" of the American political system, never again intended to vote, and frankly just didn't care who was "running" the country. You can all go kill each other, I as much as said. Leave me out of it.
By and large I'm sticking to that.
But a nationwide brouhaha has a way of sucking you in, so to speak, and the current fuss-'n-feathers over gun control, only the latest installment in a national scream-fest which began more than forty years ago when Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan, has intruded itself into my peace and quiet. So I am going to break precedent and speak up on this issue. Those who know me just might be surprised at what I have to say.
For the record, I do not own a gun. My father, a Border Patrolman, taught me to shoot when I was a boy. I had my first bolt-action .22 rifle at age eight. I was out bird-hunting in Mexico with my dad and his friends, bringing down dove with a Winchester pump-action 12 guage shotgun, when I was ten. My dad took me to the Border Patrol pistol range and taught me to shoot a Smith and Wesson .38 when I was 12. So I am no stranger to guns, but haven't fired one in nearly a decade, the last time being when I was out skeet-shooting with my brother-in-law in Reno, Nevada in 2003. If I had the $400-plus that a quality handgun would cost, I would spend it on something I need more, like a decent sound system or a leather-bound set of Faulkner.
These days a lot of my Facebook friends are yelling and screaming at each other over gun control. My loudmouth former editor from my newspaper days here in Chula Vista, Michael Burgess, is nearly apoplectic over the issue, or so it would seem to people who don't know Michael as well as I do. His fondness for hollering is something with which I became intimately acquainted when I worked for him. Michael is British, and a dyed-in-the-wool left-winger, so naturally he favors more and stiffer gun control. He's been yelling at me about this on Facebook even though I have disavowed any particular interest in the issue.
On the other side of the debate, I've been hearing from another former newspaper colleague, my friend J.D. Hawk. J.D. opposes an assault-weapons ban, and he recently sent me a link to a mini-debate on the issue between Piers Morgan and former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura. Morgan is a Brit like Michael, and favors a national tightening of U.S. gun laws. (Why do the British think it's their natural purview to constantly badger the Americans about the quality of life? England has been a third-class country since the end of World War II. But that's a discussion for another day.)
Ventura, the first Libertarian ever to be elected to a governorship, opposes tighter gun laws. I watched the two of them argue about it for a few minutes on YouTube yesterday: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ENcfdAoWkU.
Both men made valid points. But as much I have always despised the cant, the hypocrisy and the muddy --yea, often nonexistent -- thinking of the Left, and as much as I bridle at Brits telling Americans what to do, I found that it was Morgan, not Ventura, who expressed an opinion similar to my own, although I was also in agreement with Ventura on some points.
Morgan stated, as gun-control advocates always do these days, that he has nothing against the idea of private citizens owning firearms. He and his ilk simply want to clamp down on easy access to assault weapons and countless rounds of ammunition. Morgan pointed to recent tragedies in Connecticut and Colorado involving assault weapons in support of his argument that a ban on assault weapons would reduce such mass-shootings.
Well, I don't know. The nut-case who shot up Virginia Tech a few years ago, killing 32 people and wounding 15 before killing himself, used handguns to do the deed, not a Kalashnikov. I offer this not as an argument in favor of banning handguns, but as a counter-argument to those who think banning assault weapons would solve the problem. There will always be Travis Bickles out there, and all the federal legislation in the world won't keep them from getting guns if they want them. Morgan's comparison of the gun situations in England and France with that of the U.S. does not hold water: neither England nor France has the vast size and demographic variety of the United States, nor do either of those countries have the American tradition of civil libertarianism.
But I also found a flaw in Ventura's argument. He went to the Second Amendment, as gun advocates usually do. He pointed out, correctly, that the framers of the United States Constitution, when they adopted the Second Amendment, were not thinking, as we moderns do, of hunters and gun collectors. Their idea was to maintain the possibility of a strong citizen militia, which could resist the incursions of a tyrannical government. Ventura pointed this out, and he was right.
The situation in 1789 strongly merited such a concern. The American colonies had just thrown off the yoke of the British tyrant George III, and well-armed citizen militias had played no small role in that. George Washington's Continental Army might not have prevailed had it not been for its "grassroots" support in the countryside, the rabble-in-arms depicted in Mel Gibson's film The Patriot, which harassed the British forces with guerrilla tactics throughout the war; the same citizen militias who became legendary American myth-heroes in such places as Lexington and Concord.
True, very true. But a lot has changed since 1789, when warfare was a question of soldiers banging away at each other with muskets and staging bayonet charges. When everyone was using muskets and squirrel guns, the idea of a citizen militia posing a serious threat to a professional army was a tenable one. That's no longer the case, not in 2013. No matter how much firepower a private citizen might stockpile in his or her basement, the idea of a handful of miltia fighting off, say, the American military, is a fantasy at best. Remember Waco? That wasn't a militia in that compound, but it serves as an illustration of what happens to zealots who take on the government.
Does this mean that I'm defending federal power? By no means, as St Paul says in his Letter to the Romans. Janet Reno should have been prosecuted for what she did at Waco in 1993. Suspicion of government power is one of the oldest, and finest, of American traditions. Our forefathers had it. The Second Amendment was an expression of it.
In fact much of the U.S. Constitution, not just the Second Amendment, was an expression of that American suspicion of government power. The framers of the Constitution, for example, divided the new government into three sections, Executive, Judicial and Legislative, precisely for the purpose of creating a balance of power, preventing any one sector from consolidating too much power, which in turn could lead to tyranny. The framers had just thrown off foreign tyranny; now they sought to prevent domestic tyranny.
History seems to indicate that they did a good job. "The Constitution will stop 'em every time," as Harry Truman once said. Now, some may point and snigger at that statement, seeing as it was Harry Truman who created the CIA and the modern Security State, but the sentiment, Truman's record notwithstanding, is an American one, reflecting a very American attitude. Richard Nixon could not stand up against the Constitution, (with a little help from a couple of reporters) nor could Huey Long or any other would-be tinpot dictator in American history that I can think of.
This, along with the realities of the modern world, makes the idea of a "well-armed citizen militia" rather quaint. When the nascent United States was small and everyone shared a common goal, the removal of British power from these shores, armed citizen militias were vital. Today, with no common enemy to fight except their own government, self-formed militias tend to become the stuff of comedy, well-armed paranoiacs hiding in holes and attracting the attention of the FBI, which, while surely guilty of its own share of power-abuse, has more important jobs to do than try and keep track of a bunch of nutjobs with Uzis running around in the woods looking to pick a fight with their own government, as opposed to that of George III.
For these and other reasons, I favor an assault-weapons ban. I wholeheartedly support the right of any American citizen to own as many pistols, rifles and shotguns as he or she wants, but while insisting that I do not think an assault weapons ban is going to prevent gun tragedies, I also do not see any reason for anyone other than the military and the police to have assault weapons. No one else really needs them, unless you really believe that a citizen militia hiding in the hills of some western state is going to put an end to the abuse of power in Washington. Such challenges should and must be mounted, but by other means than those of the street gang or the drug cartel, both of which are going to have assault weapons no matter what Barack Obama or anyone else might choose to mandate.
I agree.
ReplyDelete