The Truth About Gun Control Read online

  Ordinary citizens choose these handguns, rifles, and magazines for the same reason that ordinary police officers usually do: because they are often the best choice for lawful defense of self and others.

  Police officers who have a Springfield Armory semiauto pistol with a 12-round magazine on their hip and an AR-15 rifle with a 30-round magazine in their patrol car are not carrying those guns to go hunting or because they are intent on mass murder. These guns are standard police guns today because police, like ordinary citizens, know that criminals do not always attack one at a time and that violent attackers do not always fall down after a single hit – especially if the attackers are energized by methamphetamine or other drugs.

  In such circumstances, the police officer, like the law-abiding citizen, may not have two seconds to spare to change magazines.

  TYRANNY AND GENOCIDE

  Attorney General Cummings’ repeated efforts for national gun registration were thwarted by the NRA. Then in 1941, Congress enacted the NRA’s idea to ban gun registration.

  Congress was looking in horror at mass shootings, and at mass murders by many other methods, taking place in Nazi-occupied Europe and in the Soviet Union. Congress could see how gun-registration lists compiled by democratic governments – such as the Weimar Republic in Germany or the Third Republic in France – were being used for gun confiscation, once the totalitarians took over.

  So when Congress passed the Property Requisition Act to allow the federal government to take property needed for national defense against tyranny, Congress made sure that the American people would retain their ability to resist tyranny. The 1941 act forbade the federal government to seize guns, to require the registration of guns (except for the guns already covered by the 1934 NFA), or “to impair or infringe in any manner the right of any individual to keep and bear arms….”

  Where Hitler or Stalin ruled, gun control was an essential step toward genocide. Gun-registration lists were used to confiscate guns from the prospective victims. After the victims were helpless, the extermination began.

  Gun confiscation for genocide was not practiced solely by Hitler and Stalin. Every episode of genocide in the last century has been preceded by assiduous efforts to first disarm the victims: Turkish Armenia, the Holocaust, the USSR, Soviet-occupied Poland, Guatemala under the military dictatorship in the 1950s, Mao’s China, Chiang Kai-Shek’s White Terror, Uganda under Idi Amin, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Srebrenica, Zimbabwe, Darfur. And many more.

  Consider three steps: 1) registration; 2) confiscation; 3) extermination. Steps 1 and 2 do not always result in step 3. But step 3 is almost always preceded by steps 1 and 2.

  Gun prohibitionists scoff at the idea that armed victims could fight genocide. History shows that they can. Especially in Eastern Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania during the Holocaust, some Jews were able to obtain arms and carry out guerilla warfare against the Nazis, saving many lives.

  Of course not every government that uses registration lists for mass confiscation is intent on genocide. There is no genocide in Australia or Great Britain. The genocidaires seem to consider gun confiscation to be a crucial precondition for genocide.

  * * *

  THE MODERN GUN-CONTROL DEBATE

  During World War II and the early Cold War, gun control in America was not exactly a popular idea. As Americans were seeing, Nazis and Communists could inflict tyranny and murder because guns had previously been registered and confiscated.

  Things changed in the mid-1960s. Violent crime was rising sharply. Race riots scorched nearly every big American city. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 and two months later of Senator Robert Kennedy (by a Palestinian angry at Kennedy’s strong support for Israel) broke the dam.

  In September, Congress enacted the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA). As amended, the GCA is the main federal law for ordinary firearms. Many state and local governments also enacted far-reaching new gun laws.

  This was hardly enough to satisfy the prohibitionists. They aimed to do to the American people what the Ku Klux Klan had tried to do to the freedmen: disarmament.

  Their first major breakthrough was the District of Columbia in 1975. Acquisition of new handguns was outlawed. Use of any firearm for self-defense in the home was prohibited.

  The most left-leaning state in America – Massachusetts – was supposed to be next, with a handgun-confiscation initiative on the ballot in November 1976. The gun-confiscation lobby called themselves People vs. Handguns. The people thought otherwise. Confiscation was rejected in a 69 percent landslide, partly because of widespread police opposition.

  So prohibitionists decided that if they could not confiscate handguns, perhaps they could get the public to just ban new handguns. California’s 1982 “handgun freeze” initiative was crushed, with 63 percent voting no.

  The prohibitionists tried again in 1993-94 in three left-leaning Wisconsin towns: Milwaukee, Kenosha, and Madison. The long-term result of the Wisconsin confiscation votes was that the people of Wisconsin voted overwhelmingly in 1998 (1,205,873 to 425,052) to add a right to arms to their State Constitution.

  Beginning with the first state constitution right-to-arms guarantee (Pennsylvania, 1776), 44 states now have a constitutional right to arms. In every state in which the people have had the opportunity to vote directly, they have endorsed the right to arms by landslide margins. Since 1968, the people of 23 states have chosen, either through their legislature or through a direct vote, to add a right to arms to their state constitution, to readopt the right to arms, or to strengthen an existing right. In addition, 37 state constitutions specifically protect the right of self-defense – sometimes as part of the arms right and sometimes stated separately.

  RIGHT TO CARRY

  By the early 1970s, the legal carrying of handguns for protection in public places had been suppressed in most states. The typical system was that carrying required a permit; the permit required “good cause” in the view of government administrator; and ordinary citizens who merely wanted to protect themselves were almost never considered to have good cause. About a half-dozen states were exceptions to this general rule.

  Starting in Florida in 1987, state after state enacted licensing-reform laws. The laws prevented abuse of discretion by using objective standards. If an adult passes a fingerprint-based background check and a safety class, then she “shall” be issued a concealed-handgun carry permit. Today in 41 states, a law-abiding, competent adult has a clear path to a lawful concealed carry.

  So in those 41 states, when Americans go to a shopping mall, a restaurant, a park, or most other public places, they are in a place where some people are lawfully carrying firearms.

  Whether licensed carry causes a statistically significant decline in violent crime is a subject of scholarly debate. The evidence is overwhelming that there is no statistically significant increase in crime. In every state where “shall issue” has become the law, it has disappeared from the gun-control debate within a few years. Most Americans have acclimated to an environment in which public carrying of defensive handguns is common, safe, and unremarkable.

  The right to keep and bear arms is not a 1791 anachronism. It is alive in the hearts and minds of the American people.

  Forty-five years ago, it was common to assert that hunting was declining; so as a once-rural nation was now urban, gun ownership would soon be a discarded relic of America’s past. However, the Second Amendment isn’t just about hunting.

  Rural, urban, and suburban, Americans have continued their 400-year-old practice of arming themselves more heavily than the people of any other nation in the world. As of 1948, Americans owned guns at a per capita rate about equal to what the French and Norwegians do now. (One gun per three persons.) Per capita gun ownership has tripled since then, so there are now slightly more American guns than there are Americans.

  The right to keep and bear arms is not a 1791 anachronism. It is alive in the hearts and minds of the American people.

  THE SUPREME COURT

  For a long time, the U.S. Supreme Court paid little attention to the Second Amendment, Likewise, the court was timid about the First Amendment for most of America’s history; it was not until 1965 that it dared to hold that a congressional statute violated the First Amendment (Lamont v. Postmaster General, striking a statute requiring registration for exercising First Amendment rights).

  Although the Second Amendment appeared in several dozen Supreme Court cases before 2008, it was almost always as a minor character – a typical individual right among a litany of other individual rights.

  The court upheld the National Firearms Act (stringent laws about short shotguns and machine guns) in the 1939 case U.S. v. Miller. Unfortunately, the opinion written by the notoriously indolent Justice James Clark McReynolds was so terse and opaque that scholars spent decades arguing about what it meant.

  The Supreme Court spoke up decisively in 2008. District of Columbia v. Heller ruled that the government could not ban the acquisition of handguns, nor ban armed self-defense in the home. McDonald v. Chicago (2010) ruled that state and local governments must obey the Second Amendment – just as they must obey the First Amendment and almost all the rest of the Bill of Rights.

  THE PHILOSOPHY OF GUN BANS

  Gun rights are not liberal vs. conservative, urban vs. rural, Democrat vs. Republican, or any other stereotype. The great Democratic Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey embodied liberalism’s optimistic faith in the federal government and the federal Constitution. He believed that “one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms…. The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyrann
y which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.”

  In the culture war, the gun-prohibition movement has explicitly sought to make gun owners into social pariahs, like cigarette smokers: instead of being considered a personal right, gun ownership would be viewed as a repulsive personal habit. Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who in 1994 was director of the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, stated that the CDC hoped to make the public perceive firearms as “dirty, deadly – and banned.”

  President Obama in January 2013 announced that he would be seeking more funds for CDC gun-control research. Much of this “research” has been junk science designed to create factoids about why ordinary people should not own guns. Even before 2013, the Obama administration was funneling grants to prohibitionists in order to produce antigun factoids as, supposedly, medical science. Guns are to be stigmatized as “disease vectors” and gun owners claimed to be disease carriers.

  STATE-IMPOSED PACIFISM

  Gun prohibition has many bases, among them the pacifist-aggressives – people who want to use the force and violence of criminal law to make everyone else live by their personal philosophy of not using defensive force against violent attackers.

  For example, the Presbyterian Church (USA) has declared that it disapproves of “the killing of anyone, anywhere, for any reason.” Because the church believes defensive gun ownership is immoral, it supports the confiscation of all handguns. The United Methodist Church, which founded the National Coalition to Ban Handguns (now named the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence) declares that people should submit to rape and robbery rather than endanger the criminal’s life by shooting him.

  The Brady Center runs a “God Not Guns” coalition, which proclaims that the exercise of Second Amendment rights is inherently sinful, demonstrating a refusal to trust in God. Their work is promoted by Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian who is the founder of the pacifist, hard-left Sojourners magazine and who is the leading figure of the Christian Religious Left in modern America.

  Not all pacifist-aggressives are religious. Marxist and radical feminist Betty Friedan insists that battered women must not use violence against their attackers because “lethal violence even in self-defense only engenders more violence.” David Clarke, the father of the D.C. handgun and self-defense ban, claimed that his antigun laws “are designed to move this government toward civilization…. I don’t intend to run the government around the moment of survival.” In other words, it is more “civilized” for you to be murdered by a criminal than to defend yourself with a gun. A perverse definition of civilization.

  For religious reasons or others, the gun-prohibition movement aims to outlaw self-defense with a firearm. As Sarah Brady announced to the Tampa Tribune in 1993, “To me, the only reason for guns in civilian hands is for sporting purposes.” Her husband, Jim Brady, identified the circumstances in which he believes people should be allowed to possess handguns: “[F]or target shooting, that’s okay. Get a license and go to the range. For defense of the home, that’s why we have police departments.” Sarah Brady’s long-term goal, she told The New York Times, is a “needs-based licensing” system. Under the Brady system, all guns would be registered. The local police chief would decide if a person who wanted to buy a gun had a legitimate “need.” Sarah Brady listed hunters and security guards as people who have a legitimate need, but not regular people who wanted guns for self-protection.

  Gun prohibitionists denounce self-defense as a person’s “taking the law into her own hands.” This is false. Using deadly force or the threat thereof to defend against a violent felony is legal in all 50 states. There are many circumstances when exercising the choice to use force for self-defense or defense of another is entirely lawful. Using such force, therefore, cannot be “taking the law into one’s hands” any more than exercising other lawful choices, such as signing a contract.

  Gun rights are not liberal vs. conservative, urban vs. rural, Democrat vs. Republican, or any other stereotype.

  When criminals use force, though, they are violating the law and thereby taking the law into their own hands. When citizens use or threaten force to stop the lawbreaking, they are taking the law back from the criminals and restoring the law to its rightful owners: themselves.

  The gun-prohibition movement is ultimately based on an authoritarian wish that the American people were not the people for whom the word individualism was coined by Alexis de Tocqueville. They yearn for America to be like Europe, where gun ownership is a sporting privilege for a few and not a right of the people.

  They want a top-down society in which (supposedly) sophisticated and intelligent elites make wise and rational decisions about how ordinary people should live their lives. To these authoritarians, the self-sufficiency that gun ownership represents is an insult.

  The authoritarians agree with the German sociologist Max Weber’s 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” in which he announced that the very definition of a state is “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.” Few Americans have read Weber, but his principle has been the core of the gun-control movement and anathema to the gun-rights movement.

  BARACK OBAMA

  For whatever ideological reason, Barack Obama has a long record of embracing the antigun agenda. He is currently campaigning for a national gun-registration system. Instead of using the politically toxic word registration, he calls for a “national database” of guns. He endorses laws that he says will expand background checks. What he does not say is that every law that has been introduced in the past several years under the title of “background checks” was written by Michael Bloomberg’s staff and contained provisions for national gun registration.

  Could prohibition then follow registration? Consider the record of Barack Obama before he became president. He endorsed handgun prohibition. He endorsed the D.C. and Chicago handgun-prohibition laws. He endorsed the prohibition of all semiautomatic firearms (which are the overwhelming majority of new handguns and a large fraction of long guns).

  He called for banning all gun stores within 5 miles of a school or park. This is the same as calling for a ban on gun sales, since every inhabited portion of the United States is within 5 miles of a school or park.

  Ever since 1968, federal law has required that the only way a customer can purchase a firearm from a licensed retailer is through a transaction at the gun store, where the buyer picks up the gun. (Hysterical claims about “Internet gun sales” ignore the fact that the Internet seller must ship the gun to a licensed firearms dealer in the customer’s home state; the customer can only pick up the gun after the in-state dealer completes the standard background check.)

  President Obama has endorsed legislation to give the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives nearly limitless discretion to outlaw rifle ammunition.

  He proposed a 500 percent tax increase on guns and ammunition.

  He has voted for legislation to ban every so-called assault weapon (very broadly defined) and even old-fashioned bird-hunting guns – such as every double-barrel and break-open shotguns in 28 gauge and larger.

  Barack Obama has endorsed federal legislation that would eliminate the laws of the 41 states that allow ordinary citizens, after passing a fingerprint-based background check and a safety-training class, to obtain a permit to carry a concealed handgun for lawful self-defense.

  WHO ARE THE SOVEREIGNS?

  While some nations consider law to be the vehicle of the state, the American tradition views the law as the servant of the people. As a federal district court put it, “the people, not the government, possess the sovereignty” (Mandel v. Mitchell, 1971).