The Truth About Gun Control Read online

  ENCOUNTER BROADSIDES: a new series of critical pamphlets from Encounter Books. Uniting an 18th-century sense of political urgency and rhetorical wit (think The Federalist Papers, Common Sense) with 21st-century technology and channels of distribution, Encounter Broadsides oVer indispensable ammunition for intelligent debate on the critical issues of our time. Written with passion by some of our most authoritative authors, Encounter Broadsides make the case for liberty and the institutions of democratic capitalism at a time when they are under siege from the resurgence of collectivist sentiment. Read them in a sitting and come away knowing the best we can hope for and the worst we must fear.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  The History of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

  The Colonies, the Revolution, and the Constitution

  The Racist Origins of Gun Control

  The NRA Enters the Fray

  Tyranny and Genocide

  The Modern Gun-Control Debate

  Right to Carry

  The Supreme Court

  The Philosophy of Gun Bans

  State-Imposed Pacifism

  Barack Obama

  Who are the Sovereigns?

  Copyright

  THE SECOND AMENDMENT is under siege, and not for the first time. Today’s war on Second Amendment rights, led by President Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, continues an American culture war that has been going on for half a century. The roots of the gun-control movement can be traced back even further, to Reconstruction and attempts to disarm the freedmen, and before that to the British gun-confiscation program that sparked the American Revolution.

  President Obama, having finished his last election, is wielding his newfound flexibility and using the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., to promote massive bans on firearms and magazines. Yet the president’s prohibitions would have made no difference at Sandy Hook. The killer fired 150 rounds during the 20 minutes it took the police to arrive – a rate of fire that could be duplicated by any firearm produced in the past 150 years. He changed magazines repeatedly, dumping half-full magazines on the floor.

  The gun-control debate always has its micro-issues du jour – plastic guns, “cop-killer bullets,” so-called assault weapons, waiting periods, gun registration, and so on. The first three things on the list do not really exist. All the issues are simply the battles of the day in a much larger struggle. What is ultimately at stake is the same question that precipitated the American Revolution: whether the American people are the sovereigns in their own country or whether they should be ruled from above, for their own good, according to the supposedly benevolent commands of the elitist rulers of a top-down, European-style society.

  THE HISTORY OF THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS

  Self-defense is the most fundamental of all natural rights. So agreed the founders of international law, including Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suárez, Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and Emmerich de Vattel. They built the classical system of international law through moral and logical reasoning, starting with self-evident truths about individual human rights. Foremost among these rights was self-defense.

  A necessary corollary to the natural right of self-defense is the right to defensive arms.

  What is ultimately at stake is the same question that precipitated the American Revolution: whether the American people are the sovereigns in their own country or whether they should be ruled from above.

  For most people, some sort of arm is the only practical way in which they can vindicate their inherent right of self-defense. A woman who is attacked by a gang of three rapists usually needs a weapon to defend herself.

  Thus, as the U.S. Supreme Court correctly stated in the 1876 case U.S. v. Cruikshank, the Second Amendment right to bear arms, like the First Amendment right to assemble, is an inherent human right that predates the Constitution. The First and Second Amendments protect these rights but do not create them. Rather, each right “is found wherever civilization exists.”

  Or, as John Locke wrote in The Second Treatise of Civil Government, because God has created every person, every person therefore has the right and the duty to protect his or her God-given life from criminals, including criminal governments.

  John Adams and Thomas Jefferson disagreed on much. But they agreed on the fundamental right to self-defense. Adams supported “arms in the hands of citizens, to be used at individual discretion” for “private self-defence.” Like Adams, Jefferson was a great admirer of the Italian scholar Cesare Beccaria, who founded the modern science of criminology, with his international best seller On Crimes and Punishments (Dei Delitti e Delle Pene). An oft-quoted passage from Beccaria observes:

  The laws which forbid men to bear arms … only disarm those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity and the most important in the civil code will respect the lesser and more arbitrary laws…? These laws make the victims of attack worse off and improve the position of the assailant. They do not reduce the murder rate but increase it, because an unarmed man can be attacked with more confidence than an armed man.

  THE COLONIES, THE REVOLUTION, AND THE CONSTITUTION

  To the Americans of the 13 colonies, self-defense was both a right and a duty. Americans had been used to having firearms from the first days of European settlement. Unlike in Europe – where the aristocracy maintained a monopoly on hunting – hunting in America was wide open from the first days of white settlement (indeed, from the days when the first Indians crossed the Bering Strait).

  All colonies except Pennsylvania required gun ownership by militiamen (most adult males). Many colonies also mandated gun ownership by the head of a household – including a woman, if she was the head – and sometimes required the carrying of guns when traveling or when going to public meetings, such as church services.

  The right and duty of self-defense applied to a householder protecting her children and to militiamen protecting their communities from foreign enemies or from tyranny. Self-defense was a seamless web; the difference between self-defense against a criminal invader in the home, against a gang of highway robbers, or against a criminal tyrant with his standing army was only one of scale. The tyrant’s gang was just bigger than the other ones.

  The American Revolution began because of gun control. For years the Americans and the British intensely disputed whether the king and Parliament had the authority to govern the domestic affairs of the Americans and tax their internal trade. The dispute turned into a war when King George and his ministers attempted to disarm the Americans.

  In the fall of 1774, the king embargoed the delivery of firearms and gunpowder to America. At the same time, royal governors began sending out the Redcoats to seize the “public arms” – the firearms and ammunition that some colonies stored in central armories to supply arms to militiamen who could not afford their own. The reason these seizures did not start an immediate war was that they were carried out in predawn raids, before any resistance could assemble.

  The right and duty of self-defense applied to a householder protecting her children and to militiamen protecting their communities from foreign enemies or from tyranny.

  But in the early hours of April 19, 1775, Paul Revere and William Dawes rode to warn the people that the British were coming. The spark struck out by their steeds in their flight kindled the land into flame.

  Church bells rang and guns fired, spreading alarm. The Americans turned back the British at Concord Bridge. Although the British accomplished their objective to seize guns during house-to-house searches at Lexington and Concord, the Americans swarmed into action, harrying the British on their retreat back to Boston. “Every man was his own commander,” one American later recalled. The British suffered far more casualties than the Americans that day and might have been wiped out, had not the Americans begun to run out of gunpowder.

  The British gun-confiscation campaign continued, with the British navy burning down Falmouth (today known as Portland, Maine) when the citizens refused to surrender their arms.

  During the war, the American militia usually needed support from the Continental Army to prevail in open-field battles against British regulars. But everywhere, the militia, on their own, denied the British access to the countryside. Although the British, with control of the sea, could move quickly from one seaport to another, wherever they went there would be instant armed resistance, for the militia would rise wherever the British deployed. As historian Daniel Boorstin later put it, “The American center was everywhere and nowhere – in each man himself.”

  Recognizing that an armed people could not be governed without consent, the British proposed (as detailed in British Under Secretary of State William Knox’s “What Is Fit to Be Done with America?”) that once the Americans had been defeated, “the Arms of all the People should be taken away.” American manufacture of firearms would be outlawed and the militias prohibited. Firearms were not only a tool that the Americans used to fight for self-government, but firearms possession in itself also fostered the spirit of self-government.

  The original public meaning of the Second Amendment, and its analogues in state constitutions, was safeguarding the natural right to own and carry arms for all legitimate purposes. This included the inherent natural right of self-defense (which was not controversial at the time), and it also ensured that there would be an armed body of people from whom the m
ilitia could be drawn. As Michigan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Cooley, the most eminent constitutional scholar of the latter 19th century, wrote, “The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is, that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms; and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose.”

  Before the Civil War, the great antislavery writer Lysander Spooner used the Second Amendment to argue that slavery was unconstitutional.

  THE RACIST ORIGINS OF GUN CONTROL

  Before the Civil War, the great antislavery writer Lysander Spooner used the Second Amendment to argue that slavery was unconstitutional. Since a slave is a person who cannot possess arms, and the Second Amendment guarantees that all persons can possess arms, no person in the United States, therefore, can be a slave. “The right of a man ‘to keep and bear arms,’ is a right palpably inconsistent with the idea of his being a slave,” Spooner wrote.

  On the other hand, in the infamous Dred Scott decision, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney announced that free blacks were not citizens; if they were, he warned, free blacks would have the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

  Immediately after the Civil War, Southern states enacted Black Codes that were designed to keep the ex-slaves in de facto slavery and submission. Mississippi’s provision was typical: no freedman “shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition” without police permission. In areas where the Ku Klux Klan took control, “almost universally the first thing done was to disarm the negroes and leave them defenseless,” recounted the civil-rights attorney Albion Tourgée, who represented Homer Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson. The Ku Klux Klan was America’s first gun-control group, as well as America’s first domestic terrorist organization.

  Congress responded with the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, insisting that “the constitutional right to bear arms, shall be secured to and enjoyed by all the citizens.” Congress followed up with the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment to ensure that no state could ever again violate the civil rights of Americans.

  Repeatedly, the congressional proponents of the 14th Amendment announced that one of its key purposes was to guarantee that the freedmen could exercise their Second Amendment right to own guns for self-defense, especially against Klansmen. Senator Samuel Pomeroy (R-Kan.) extolled the three “indispensable” “safeguards of liberty under our form of government”: the sanctity of the home, the right to vote, and “the right to bear arms … [so] if the cabin door of the freedman is broken open and the intruder enters … then should a well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the polluted wretch to another world.”

  Reconstruction and the 14th Amendment forced Southern states to repeal laws explicitly forbidding blacks to have guns. So the white-supremacist legislature in Tennessee enacted the 1871 “Army and Navy” law, barring the sale of any handguns except the “Army and Navy model.” The ex-Confederate soldiers already had their high-quality Army and Navy guns. But cash-poor freedmen could barely afford lower-cost, simpler firearms not of the Army and Navy quality.

  Many Southern states followed Tennessee’s lead, with facially neutral laws banning inexpensive guns or requiring permits to own or carry a gun. As one Florida judge explained, the laws were “passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers … [and] never intended to be applied to the white population.” (Watson v. Stone, Florida, 1941.)

  Jim Crow laws became the foundation of gun control in America. These laws spread north in the early decades of the 20th century, aimed primarily at immigrants (Italians and Jews in New York City) or labor agitators (California), or in response to blacks’ having defended themselves against race riots (Missouri and Michigan).

  In the 1950s and 1960s, a new civil-rights movement arose in the South. White-supremacist tactics were just as violent as they had been during Reconstruction. Blacks and civil-rights workers armed for self-defense.

  John Salter, a professor at Tougaloo College and chief organizer of the NAACP’s Jackson Movement during the early 1960s, wrote, “No one knows what kind of massive racist retaliation would have been directed against grassroots black people had the black community not had a healthy measure of firearms within it.”

  Civil-rights professionals and the black community generally viewed nonviolence as a useful tactic for certain situations, not as a moral injunction to let oneself be murdered on a deserted road in the middle of the night. As the 1959 NAACP national convention resolved, “We do not deny but reaffirm the right of individual and collective self-defense against unlawful assaults.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. agreed, supporting violence “exercised in self-defense,” which he described “as moral and legal” in all societies; he noted that not even Gandhi condemned it.

  THE NRA ENTERS THE FRAY

  National alcohol prohibition, enacted in 1920, spurred national violence, which resulted in the conservative Eastern business establishment – along with some religious pacifists – demanding handgun prohibition. In their view, the solution to the failure of alcohol prohibition was more prohibition.

  The handgun-prohibition campaign of the 1920s drew the National Rifle Association into the political arena, where it has remained ever since. The NRA had been founded by Union Army officers in 1871 to promote citizen marksmanship and civic virtue. Among its early presidents were Ulysses S. Grant (former president of the United States) and (“the hero of Gettysburg” and the 1880 Democratic presidential nominee).

  In the 1920s, as today, the NRA’s main political strength was its ability to mobilize its ever growing membership to contact government officials and express opposition to constricting the rights of law-abiding citizens.

  After the NRA defeated the first handgun-prohibition campaigns, Franklin Roosevelt’s first attorney general, Homer Cummings, attempted to push a bill to require the national registration of all handguns, coupled with a tax that was more than a week’s wages for a working man. Cummings hoped that his bill would set the stage for a handgun ban.

  The handgun restrictions were part of the National Firearms Act (NFA), which also imposed stringent controls on machine guns and short-barreled shotguns. Once Congress heard from NRA members and removed handguns from the bill, the NRA dropped its opposition, and the NFA become law.

  Eighty-nine years later, the phony issue of “assault weapons” is based on a hoax invented by the gun-prohibition lobbies and spread by willfully ignorant media. There are some ordinary guns that look like machine guns. The Colt AR-15 rifle and the Ruger Mini-14 rifle are two examples. These guns do not function like machine guns. They fire only one round each time the trigger is pressed, just like any other ordinary gun. They are not more powerful than other guns; as rifles go, they are intermediate in power. That is why they are often used for hunting small game, such as rabbits or coyotes, or midsize game, such as deer. In their most common calibers, they are not powerful enough for big game, such as elk or moose.

  The phony issue of “assault weapons” is based on a hoax invented by the gun-prohibition lobbies and spread by willfully ignorant media.

  Yet many underinformed people think these guns are machine guns. They do not know that machine guns have been severely regulated since 1934. To acquire a machine gun requires a $200 transfer tax, fingerprinting, federal registration, and permission from local law enforcement. Since 1986, the manufacture of new machine guns for sale to anyone outside the government has been prohibited.

  Gun-prohibition groups have fooled some people into believing that guns like the AR-15 are machine guns. As gun-prohibition strategist Josh Sugarmann explained in a 1988 memo, the guns’ “menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons – anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun – can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

  Today, semiautomatic handguns comprise 82% of new handguns manufactured in the U.S. Citizens buying such guns often choose guns with standard magazines holding 11 to 19 rounds. For rifles today, magazines up to 30 rounds are factory standard.