I haven’t posted anything for a while about the Left’s latest spasm of gun-control hysteria, so let’s catch up a bit with some miscellaneous items.
By far the loudest of the torch-and-pitchfork mob has been the swinish, unapologetically ignorant prig Piers Morgan, whose idea of a “debate” has been to insult and shout down his guests, mock the rationale behind the Second Amendment, point out in a plonking tone that Britain has a lower gun-homicide rate than the U.S., and wave around pictures of AR-15s. If he were serious about using gun-control legislation to reduce homicides, he’d be focusing on handguns, which account for the vast majority of gun deaths. But, statistics be damned (along with the Fallacy of Misleading Vividness); he’d rather talk about rifles, which kill fewer people each year than hammers and clubs.
After shouting down the soft-spoken gun-crime expert John Lott, and then scoring cheap points by hosting the stentorian loony Alex Jones (the one adversarial guest he’s refrained from interrupting), Mr. Morgan made the tactical error of inviting Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro, a whip-smart young man with good manners and a solid command of the issues. Mr. Shapiro, unfazed by Mr. Morgan’s self-righteous indignation and barrage of non-sequiturs, pressed him sharply, demanding that he show some intellectual rigor on two key issues: first, on not going after handguns if you’re really serious about reducing gun murders, and second, on the very reason we have a Second Amendment at all — namely that the Founders, in their wisdom, saw the pre-existing right of the people to bear arms to be a necessary safeguard against tyranny, and so insisted that it must never be infringed. Mr. Morgan’s response to this last was to splutter and jeer; he asked Mr. Shapiro if he had any idea “how absurd” he made himself look by suggesting something so silly. Mr. Shapiro pointed out that history is replete with examples of free societies, including many Western democracies, descending into tyranny — and that the Founders saw very clearly that this was serious risk that could arise very naturally in any society, thanks to permanent and self-evident realities of human nature. Mr. Morgan, busy sneering, didn’t bother to reply. He still hasn’t.
I don’t think Piers Morgan is a stupid man (though I’ll admit I’m beginning to wonder). But if he actually wants to be taken seriously in this “debate”, he should be trying to persuade gun-rights advocates, rather than insulting them. In particular, if he really thinks that, despite the clear lessons of history, the United States of 2013 is somehow immune to tyrannous usurpation of the peoples’ liberty, he should use his television program to explain why. He should invite historians to join him in examining the countless examples we have of such usurpations, both in the West and elsewhere, and then make a persuasive case that it simply can’t happen here. Don’t hold your breath, though: leaving aside the fact that it can’t be done, I don’t think Piers Morgan is man enough to try.
OK, moving right along: Here’s a fine piece by Mark Steyn on what totalitarian gun control has done for Britain. (Britain’s rate of violent crime is far higher than our own, in case you hadn’t heard.)
Here are two items from blogger, author, and armorer Michael Z. Williamson:
First, a proposal to regulate cars as we regulate guns.
Second, a gun-control catechism.
Here’s a brief exegesis of the Second Amendment, by another Williamson.
Lastly: if gun-ban zealots could stop shouting at us long enough to do so, and would open their minds just wide enough to admit some actual data, they might take the time to read this report, issued from the heart of the Cathedral itself.
10 Comments
I am shocked to discover that after my patient and exhaustive efforts, you remain unconvinced of the necessity for reasonable gun control legislation.
The Second Amendment has no relevance here. In the Heller case, four Justices rejected the notion that it enshrines the right of private citizens to own guns. The five Justices who posit that right agree that it does not encompass the right for all people to own all weapons under all circumstances. Just as freedom of the press does not allow newspapers to publish troop movements, and freedom of speech does not allow slander or incitement to riot, the Second Amendment is not absolute. Hence in the majority opinion, Scalia explicitly specified that the government has the unchallenged right to regulate gun ownership. (“The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”) While the gun lobby cloaks itself in the constitution, it has no basis in fact or law to do so.
Your suggestion that gun control advocates are not “going after handguns” is incorrect. Requiring the registration of firearms, mandating background checks, and closing the gun show loophole affects handguns as well as everything else.
If “history is replete with examples of free societies, including many Western democracies, descending into tyranny,” then what exactly are those examples? China, Russia, Cambodia, Korea, and pre-World War II Japan were neither Western nor democratic when tyrannical governments took power. The post-war democracies in Western Europe? No tyrannies there. Australia, Canada, New Zealand? Nope. Even in Weimar Germany, where a nascent democracy was more or less overthrown with the Reichstag fire and subsequent events, there was widespread popular support for the dictatorship which emerged. And for the German Jews who were the target of a tyrannical government: what exactly do you suppose their ownership of guns would have accomplished against an army which was able to occupy everything from Leningrad to the English Channel?
America has had shocking abuses of personal liberty, from the Alien and Sedition Act to separate-but-equal. The constitution allowed the genocide of the indigenous population and the enslavement of blacks. However we have never, ever come close to being a tyrannical society, and the abuses of civil rights have come with widespread popular support. Elections have never been called off, we have never had a coup, and black helicopters have yet to swoop down from the sky to collect weapons. What makes you think that American democracy is a fragile sham?
Moreover, since tyranny is an eye-of-the-beholder thing, your argument allows any group of like-minded individuals, in their sole discretion, to decide that the government has descended into tyranny and must ne resisted. Timothy McVeigh had a sincere and deep-seated belief that we had a tyrannical government, so he blew up a government building. Let’s suppose that a group of neo-Nazis — or NRO editors — decided that Obamacare is proof positive of a tyrannical government depriving Americans of their sacrosanct right to go without health insurance, so they gather their Bushmasters and blow away Barney Fife. You’re OK with that? For this absurd fantasy of right-thinking Americans taking up arms to combat a totalitarian government, you’ll allow pretty much anybody to get pretty much any weapon he chooses, even when this practice has led to the slaughter of far too many innocents to be counted. But hey, that’s the cost of freedom, right?
There are few, if any, “gun ban zealots.” That’s a straw man argument. The Biden commission will not recommend banning guns. The issue is not banning guns: it is largely about regulating who may own them and mandating registration so their owners can more easily be apprehended if their weapons are used unlawfully. Part of the issue is banning a subset of weapons and accessories which have no use in sport but which facilitate the ability to shoot large numbers of people in a short amount of time. The damage which these weapons have caused is obvious, yet those who resist banning them are unable to answer a simple question: what is the benefit to society in allowing people to own them, and why would that putative benefit outweigh the harm which comes from them?
The level of gun violence is so extreme that the burden of proof no longer lies on those who seek to fix the problem, but rather on those who insist on the status quo. We have never had meaningful gun control, and there is a very simple argument for it: places where guns are regulated have much lower levels of homicide than places where they are not regulated. Either you think that the current state of affairs is hunky dory, or you think that there are things we can do which would reduce the level of violence in our society. Which is it?
I think that is a fair question, and one that I have not seen answered publically.
In my humble opinion, I believe that the largely unspoken answer is: fear of the slippery slope. Opponents of any ban, I believe, fear that any such ban will serve as a legal precedent for future bans, until a nearly complete ban of weapons is accomplished.
And, again in my humble opinion, such a “foot in the door” strategy is not unknown to us. Obamacare is precisely that sort of legislation.
There are few, if any, gun-nuts. Everybody wants to see gun ownership regulated in a sensible way.
The problem is that there are already many laws on the books that should be working but aren’t. For example, there is the National Firearms Act of 1934, which required the registration of firearms. The intent of the law was to make it easier to convict a criminal who possessed a gun.
Does it work? No, because it does not apply to felons, only to law-abiding citizens. That’s what the Haynes decision was all about.
Peter, I’ll try to be brief.
Where is “here”? So you are saying that the Second Amendment, which says that “the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”, has no relevance in discussions about what steps the government may take to enact restrictions on the right of the people to keep and bear arms? Just want to make sure I understand you correctly.
What I said was that Piers Morgan expressed no interest in going after handguns, but instead chose to focus on the vague and functionally meaningless category of weapons known as “assault rifles”.
Whether mandatory Federal registration of guns is Constitutionally permissible is still very much an open question, given, for example, the finding in Follett vs. Town of McCormick that to require licensing or registration in regard to the exercise of any constitutional right is itself unconstitutional. Obviously the composition of the Court will matter a great deal when it comes to this.
Regarding your question about descent into tyranny, you seem to be of the opinion that as long as there is “majority support”, then somehow it isn’t tyranny. So Hitler’s accession to power, and extermination of the Jews, isn’t an appropriate example of a descent into tyranny, and something that decent people should resist? I have a feeling my mother-in-law’s extended family would disagree with you. Oh wait, they were all disarmed by the Nazis, and then slaughtered in death camps. Never mind.
What you seem to forget, or simply don’t know, is that it is exactly the seizure of liberty by majorities and factions that the Framers saw as the path by which America would decay into tyranny.
Ask the Viet Cong, the mujahedeen, or for that matter the Minutemen, about the effectiveness of armed and dedicated local patriots against mighty militaries. Anyway: no matter how the Jews might have fared, it would have been better than what they got.
Indeed it has. For example, during the Wilson administration, people were jailed just for reading the Constitution. This is an argument against the possibility of tyranny in America?
Well, as for that last, you might ask the folks at Waco, for example. But your argument here, if I can call it that, is that it “can’t happen here” because it hasn’t happened yet?
“Absurd fantasy”? Would you mind explaining to us, then, why the Second Amendment exists at all?
To jog your memory, here’s Hamilton:
Here’s Justice Joseph Story, who was appointed to the Court by James Madison:
Here’s Tench Coxe:
That last makes clear that the whole point of the right of the people to bear arms is that they be able to function, should they deem it necessary, as an effective militia. With this in mind, it seems particularly incoherent to focus on banning civilian possession of “military-style weapons”.
Not so. Where I live, as a conservative in occupied territory, I’ve had many, many conversations with my uber-liberal chums about this. If they had their way, the only people with any guns at all would be government officials.
This misses the point altogether. What makes keeping and bearing arms a vital individual right, explicitly protected in the Constitution, has nothing whatsoever to do with “sport”. As Kevin Williamson said in the linked item above:
You go on to claim:
No, the burden of proof is on those who seek to infringe rights that are explicitly protected by the Constitution.
I suppose that depends what you mean by “meaningful”. Many places have extremely stringent guns laws.
This is simply false. You seem to believe, along the lines of what Michael Williamson described in the “catechism” linked above:
The places with the strictest gun control — Chicago, for example — have the highest gun-homicide rates. Get away from these areas, and the rate falls precipitously. (This, by the way, brings up some downright radioactive aspects of this issue: for example, 98% of all gun assaults in New York City in a recent year were committed by blacks or Hispanics. To focus overmuch on that, however, is just asking for trouble.)
From the Harvard study I linked to at the end of the post:
Please read Mark Steyn’s excellent item, also linked above.
When Britain banned and confiscated almost all guns, the gun homicide rate went up. Meanwhile, there’s Kennesaw, GA, which in 1982 passed a law requiring that citizens own guns, and then saw its crime rate drop by 89%. It has the lowest crime rate of any city its size in the country.
Hunky-dory? Please. Background checks? Registration? These are places where some compromise might be found. But focusing on silly measures like banning scary-looking rifles (only a tiny fraction of gun homicides are committed with any sort of rifles, scary-looking or no) isn’t going to accomplish anything, and will only further polarize an already dangerously fractured nation.
Okay, I failed to be brief.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Q7YRDL90E
I am consumed with my activities as a job creator, so I lack the time to refute every one of the errors in your prolix post. Regrettably, I must limit myself to the most egregious ones.
1) The Second Amendment has no relevance for the simple reason that there is no Constitutional impediment preventing the government from banning assault weapons, prohibiting felons and madmen from owning guns, or requiring gun owners to register their weapons. As Justice Jackson said, the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and nothing in the Bill of Rights is absolute when there is a conflict with public safety. Hence divulging military secrets and shouting fire are not protected by the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment does not protect you from being searched at the airport, and so forth. Similarly, the Second Amendment does not all citizens to own all weapons under all circumstances. There was no constitutional objection to banning automatic weapons, nor would there be one to banning private ownership of fighter aircraft or nukes. If the most conservative Justice of my lifetime — the original originalist, Antonin Scalia — explicitly acknowledges this, the notion that somehow the Second Amendment enshrines Americans’ right to own weapons of mass destruction has less currency than a trillion dollar coin.
2) “The folks at Waco” were a group of people led by a well-armed madman who had killed four Federal agents. The government had both the right and the obligation to capture the killers and protect those inside the compound. Suggesting that this necessary act of law enforcement was an example of government tyranny is sheer nonsense. Moreover, if you want to argue that citizens should be able to arm themselves to the teeth, you could scarcely have found a worse example than David Koresh.
3) The notion that Washington’s higher murder rate than Virginia is a reflection on the efficacy of gun control laws is both facile and incorrect. Washington is across the river from Virginia. Chains being no stronger than their weakest link, the fact that you can legally buy whatever weaponry you choose ten minutes from where you live makes any difference in local gun control laws irrelevant. (The Aurora shooter bought six thousand bullets over the Internet. You could make the case that any society which allows people to buy weapons anonymously at gun shows and online effectively has no gun control.)
More importantly, Washington has a higher homicide rate for the same reason that more people get shot in Newark than in Princeton, despite the fact that both cities are subject to New Jersey gun laws. As you correctly note, blacks are responsible for a hugely disproportionate amount of gun violence, and there are a lot more of them in Washington than Virginia. The variable which causes the disparity in homicide rates is ethnicity, not Washington’s easily cirumbented gun laws.
4) Shapiro tells us that history is “replete” with examples of Western democracies turning into tyranny, and you assure us that there are “countless examples.” However, you are unable to name a single example of a post-war country which has gone from democratic rule to despotism. They don’t exist.
5) The fact that it hasn’t happened here indicates that it will never happen here. We are a durable republic which has grown stronger and prospered for over two centuries, and have survived catastrophes from a civil war to disco music. Despite a country which has been polarized by the Vietnam war, Watergate, the Clinton impeachment, the Iraq war, and today’s follies, we’ve yet to see a Stalin wannabe emerge from the shadows to launch a coup. While Senators once caned each other on the Senate floor, this is something not even Rand Paul contemplates. The likelihood of a tyrannical government arising from a mature democracy is slightly less than the likelihood of me winning the Masters Tournament.
The gun lobby has used the crackpot fantasy of American democracy as a fragile sham as an appeal to the narcissism of gun owners, who can then consider themselves as the last true patriots fighting against a world gone mad. One wonders what a group of middle aged guys with Bushmasters would accomplish fighting an army with tanks, troops, and predator drones, or what exactly they would do to overthrow a perceived tyranny. The fabulists who make this appeal give tacit encouragement to excitable followers such as Timothy McVeigh and Alex Jones, as the eye-of-the-beholder perception of tyranny does not distinguish between madmen, malcontents, and those who are in the reality-based community. The fiction of impending tyranny has been enormously successful in achieving the gun lobby’s strategic goals — the hysterical reaction which invariably comes with even the whiff of sensible gun control laws sells lots of weapons — but has used it to fight for cop killer bullets, allowing people on the terrorist watch list to own guns, block the government from collecting data on gun violence, and so forth. Any movement which gives supremacy to the gun rights of terrorists and cop killers over public safety has a Lady MacBeth problem: no matter what they do, they can’t get the blood off their hands.
With that, I will give you the last word, as I need to hurry off to Office Depot to get some green eyeshades so I can return to my spreadsheets.
Peter,
1) What do you suppose the purpose of the Second Amendment to be, if not, as the contemporary opinions of those involved in the drafting of the Constitution make abundantly clear, to act as a safeguard against usurpations of liberty, both external and internal?
2) I mentioned the fiasco at Waco only in response to your assertion that “black helicopters have yet to swoop down from the sky to collect weapons”.
3) Yet we seem eager to limit the rights of hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans in response to the misbehavior of a tiny minority, who clearly are not deterred by gun-control laws in the first place.
4/5)
“Post-war”. That’s funny. (Why did we have that war again?) But if you want post-war democracies that have lapsed into tyranny, that’s not a problem. You might survey the continents of Africa and South America. Rhodesia, for example, once a prosperous democracy, is now a loathsome dictatorship. Chile’s democracy descended into tyranny under Pinochet. Venezuela under Chavez also provides an instructive example. There are others.
As the Founders realized, this can happen anywhere; it is simply a liability of unchanging human nature. That it hasn’t happened here only means that it hasn’t happened here, not that it can’t, and you are naive to imagine otherwise. (As you pointed out, the tyranny that arose in Germany in the 1930’s had a good deal of popular support; I’m beginning to suspect that such tyranny as might arise in the U.S. will be able to count on yours.)
“A group of middle-aged guys”?. No, Peter, you are, I think, living as you do in your complacent, condescending, coastal-California cultural cocoon, perhaps a bit out of touch with the mood of America’s heartland. If, God forfend, push ever does come to shove, there will be a distributed resistance involving millions of people. As for their chances, you seem also not to have much understanding of what is known as “asymmetrical warfare”. Examples include: the Vietnam war, the Afghan resistance to both the Soviets and the US, and — wait for it — the American War of Independence, in which lightly armed rebels prevailed against the world’s mightiest military.
Again: are there constitutionally permissible gun-control measures which might actually have some significant effect on murder rates? Perhaps there are, and they would likely involve background checks, rules for safeguarding weapons in homes where there are mentally ill residents, etc. But in this rush to let no crisis go to waste, the focus is all about silly, vivid things like scary-looking “assault rifles”. This is statistically absurd, and driven only by “optics”, massive public ignorance about how firearms actually work, and political sensationalism.
Another famous example:
Also: returning once again to your item 3) above, Peter, the real point here is that your claim that “places where guns are regulated have much lower levels of homicide than places where they are not regulated” is simply not true. Not only is the correlation itself false, but empirical studies (like the Harvard study above, and the work done by scholars like John Lott) strongly suggest that the causative effect of strict gun control is, for commonsense reasons, exactly the opposite of what you claim it to be.
Also on your point 3 Peter, (and more specifically since you’ve “butressed” by mentioning the Aurora shooter).
I don’t know you’re aware of it but that one specific theater where that event took place was the sole theater within a 125 mile radius which happened to be regulated [as was rightfully doneso by the private property owner] and designated to be a “no carry property.”
The recent mall episode one would’ve thought could’ve should’ve resulted in a far higher number of victims but perhaps for the fact that property had not been so regulated – allowing an armed bystander merely to point a weapon toward the shooter at which point the shooter’s next bullet was self-service.