On the Gun Control Discourse

            Hi Everyone! I hope your Christmas was joyful and peaceful. Here it is, New Year’s Eve, eve, so to speak. The week since Christmas was quiet and mostly uneventful. There were a couple of exceptions. Aren’t there usually? One of our packages, sent by Nicole’s family, won’t be delivered until January thanks to UPS’s high degree of logistical competence. It contains a lot of homemade Christmas candy and what not, so we hope it’s still good by the time it arrives. Meanwhile, I came down with a minor something or other a few days ago after eating a philli-cheesesteak sandwich, which I’ll never be having again. That’s alright. A sleeve of saltine crackers and a two liter of ginger ale saw me through. I’ve never appreciated how good the real Canada Dry actually is until now. It’s now the Sunday before the conference, and while I do have a special post planned for New Year’s Eve, I wanted to take a few minutes and weigh in, finally, on one of the issues facing us today.

 

            In light of the recent massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, we’ve embarked on a nationwide discussion about guns in America, who should have them, who should not have them, and so on and so forth. In the main, this discourse is a good thing. I see nothing wrong with a healthy airing of divergent views that might lead to positive legislative changes. To that end I commend the NRA for at least taking part in the national conversation. What interests me is that a lot of folks who are in my age bracket and who are university-related are advocating a total ban on the ownership of handguns or, at least, bans so restrictive as to amount to the same such as the existing bans in the United Kingdom and Japan, or the controls found in countries like Germany. Such ban advocates argue, reasonably enough, that the number of handgun incidents per capita is much lower in those countries than here. In fact, in Britain it’s 40 times lower. Japanese firearm possession is extremely heavily regulated and has been since the seventeenth-century, and without a license, a Japanese citizen may not even hold a firearm in his or her hands. In Germany, gun ownership is restricted to those who can prove a valid reason for ownership, not including self-defense, and licenses are forbidden to those who don’t meet the eligibility criteria including mental competency. In addition, the ‘Waffengesetz’ or Weapons Act, bans automatic weapons in German civilians’ hands altogether. So that being said, why not ban them here, some ask? Why indeed.

 

            I learned to target shoot on a farm outside Clarksville, Tennessee. The man who taught me, who I call my godfather, had a hard time figuring out a teaching method as you can imagine. A friend of his suggested he stand next to the target and strike it with a wrench. Somehow, my godfather just didn’t think that one was a good idea. Ultimately, we developed a method whereby he would peg a stone at the upright metal target and I would aim and shoot. We eventually developed such a streamlined technique that I was ultimately able to go off the sound of the stone striking the first target and to hit all five in the line of standup targets from my knowledge of their positions alone. It was neat to watch it happen from what I’m told. As a totally blind guy, I’m here to tell you it was even neater to pull it off.

            I have no problem with responsible folks owning firearms. America is, and has always been, a gun culture. The first colonists bore muskets for hunting and self-defense. That they also sometimes used them to perpetrate slaughters of their own against the various Native American tribes they encountered is a fact I won’t ignore, so I mention it lest I be accused of lacking a balanced view of our history. Every period of our history has been replete with the image of the gun. Like it or not, Americans are people of the firearm. Unlike countries like Great Britain, the firearm wasn’t something we developed here and then regulated. We brought it here and then developed it further. It has always been with us. Some guns, such as the Colt pistols of the late nineteenth-century, are historical symbols of our past. The settling of the West comes to mind.

            While I don’t own firearms myself and likely never will, I recognize the role they have played in our cultural history. Then there’s the perennial question of Second Amendment rights. Regardless of the volumes of case law surrounding it, the best place to look for an interpretation of the thing is the text itself. The amendment, as it was ratified by the states and approved by Jefferson, reads, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

            A militia unit was made of civilians who bore arms on occasion for local defense. They were by no means a standing army, and militia units were essential in the days before standing armies were both large enough and logistically worthwhile enough to have in the U.S. The rough equivalent today would be our various states’ national guard units, which can be called up by the governor. So, I have to remind two groups of people of something here. To the gun nuts, the Second Amendment was never intended to be a license for rampant gun hoarding. To the “Ban Most or All Guns” crowd, you will find that the Second Amendment will prevent this from happening unless we amend the Constitution yet again. While the drafters of the Constitution didn’t see any reason people should own forty or fifty guns at a time for giggles, they certainly didn’t intend to have a disarmed populace.

 

            The biggest problem I have with these proposals of total bans or near-total bans is this:  they won’t work. This isn’t Britain or Japan. If we swept in and tried to relieve most folks of their guns, we’d have a second revolution on our hands. More practically, however, is the fact of the black market. Remember prohibition? Ok, so maybe you weren’t as geeky as me and you didn’t pay attention in high school or college history classes. That’s alright. The bottom-line is prohibition failed. It failed utterly, and part of its results were rings of gangsters and profiteering bootleggers smuggling booze across the borders into the United States. Ultimately, the prohibition amendment was overturned. The same and worse would happen with guns. Do you think most of the street gangs and organized crime syndicates are walking around carrying legally registered handguns? If you think they are, stop a member and ask for his permit to carry or PC. Let me know how that goes. So to conclude, I’m all for responsible ownership and responsible oversight of purchase. I could even understand banning certain types of military-grade hardware. I see no reason for Joe Smith to own an AK47 or an H and K submachine gun. In fact, for quite a while, those items were illegal. They may still be in some areas. But I am very cautious about this enthusiasm I’m seeing for banning all or most guns or trying to turn America into a gun-free society. Guns are part of the American identity much like the dollar or the flag or, though I’m only somewhat certain about this anymore, the bible. So I think that whatever we do, we should take our cultural heritage into account and act sensibly with respect towards the future.