I wrote a version of this essay in July, 2016, in the aftermath of the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting. That was before I had my blog. I’m updating it here for posterity, and because – against all odds – the school shooting in Florida earlier this month may have actually been a tipping point in the war against NRA-inspired domestic terrorism.
When I was about five years old, the United States was involved in a war in Korea. I was much too young to understand anything about it. Since the conflict was over before the first television broadcasts penetrated into my corner of Kansas, I’m not sure how I even came to form an opinion. But somehow, I was really gung-ho. I told my father that I hoped I got to fight in a war someday. He gave me an astonished look and said, “I hope you never do.”
I grew up in Kansas in the 1950s, a time and place where hunting and fishing were traditional bonding activities between father and son. My father wasn’t really fond of either activity, but he dutifully took me on hunting and fishing expeditions a few times. I suspect he was relieved when it became clear that I liked the idea of hunting and fishing much more than I enjoyed the actual outdoors experience. But I did like the gear. And I liked shooting guns. We had a single shot .22 rifle and an old .410 shotgun, and my father would sometimes drive me out into the countryside and set up a row of bottles and tin cans that I could shoot at.
By the time I reached my teens, I’d lost my taste for battle. I was a bookworm, with no desire to hurt anyone. But weapons still fascinated me – especially old ones. Modern assault rifles look like weapons a robot would carry in a bad science fiction movie. But I’d be thrilled if I woke up on Christmas morning and found that Santa had left me a catapult, a blunderbuss, a crossbow, or a Thompson sub-machine gun.
I mention all this simply to say that I can kinda-sorta understand how a certain segment of gun owners feel about their shootin’ irons.
What I don’t get, though, is the paranoia that frequently accompanies gun ownership in America. It is a truism that every time a crazy person goes on a shooting rampage, people who already own firearms rush to the store to buy more guns and ammo.
I kept wondering what these people planned to do with all those guns. There aren’t many activities which require a basement full of automatic weapons and ammunition. Protection against intruders? Nah, one or two weapons is all you’d need. Hunting? Not unless you were facing a flock of velociraptors. I suppose if you were planning a Las Vegas-style mass murder, you’d want to have as much firepower as possible. Maybe some gun hoarders are aspiring mass murderers, or at least people who like to fantasize about being a mass murderer. But surely those folks are in the minority among those who compulsively hoard weapons. There had to be another explanation.
And sure enough, an angry comment on a friend’s Facebook wall became my “aha” moment. “The idea of an armed populace is to ensure we as a people don't find ourselves being loaded onto cattlecars. The idea is to strike fear into any would be despot’s heart. Those willing to give up freedom for security deserve, and will get...neither.”
There’s a lot going on in that statement, so I’ll unpack it in stages. The second sentence is a paraphrase – a distortion, really – of a quote by Benjamin Franklin, who wrote "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Franklin was defending the right of a government (Pennsylvania Colony) to levy taxes to pay for frontier defense during the French and Indian War (or the Seven Years War, as it was known in Europe, from 1756-1763). In other words, Franklin was defending the power of the state against the rights of the individual – the powerful Penn family, in this case, who refused to acknowledge the colony’s right to levy taxes.
With that out of the way, let’s do a comparative risk analysis of the respective dangers of firearms in the hands of mass murders vs. the likelihood of an American despot rounding up political dissidents and shipping them off to concentration camps. Sadly, American history is replete with examples of mass relocation of undesirable populations. In the 19th century, the American government pushed multiple Native American tribes out of their homelands and onto much less desirable reservations (killing many of them in the process). In the mid-20th century, Japanese-Americans were placed in internment camps during World War II.
The common denominator in these shameful actions is that the perpetrators were all white, and the victims were all minorities. Americans of German and Italian descent were never put in detention camps during World War II. They were white. They got the benefit of the doubt.
This inconvenient truth doesn’t fit the gun nuts’ persecution fantasies. Consciously or unconsciously, they project their own worst motives onto Democrats. Their paranoia reached its apex during President Obama’s administration, when Deplorable Nation told itself that any minute now, this Kenyan Muslim was going to rescind the Second Amendment, impose sharia law, make them get gay-married, and confiscate their arsenal. Somehow, he never got around to doing any of that. Perhaps he was too busy overseeing the Bowling Green Massacre and the Battle of Jade Helm.
But even if there was a certain Bizarro-World logic to this paranoia in 2016, why are gun nuts still compulsively adding to their arsenals after every massacre in 2018? Are they worried that their boy, Donald Trump, is going to turn on them?
Bringing it all back home, I’ll note there have been two gun-related mass murders in Tucson in recent years. The first was in 2002, when a disgruntled student shot up a classroom in the University of Arizona’s College of Nursing, leaving four people dead. The second occurred in 2011 outside a grocery store at a campaign event for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, in which six people died and a dozen others were wounded. During that same period, exactly no one was herded onto a cattle car by a despotic government. In fact, there hasn’t been a single cattle car herding incident since I moved to Tucson in 1973.
I want to add that I’m pretty dubious about the cattle car analogy itself, which smacks of Holocaust victim blaming. Even if Jewish families in Europe were all equipped with the best weaponry available to private citizens at the time, they couldn’t have fought off the Nazis. The site of the slaughter would have been the ghettoes rather than the camps, and there would have been a few Nazi casualties. But anyone who thinks that armed civilians could have stopped the Wehrmacht is crazy.
Similarly, we have ample evidence that American militia types are kidding themselves when they fantasize about scaring the government. From the Branch Davidian siege near Waco in 1993 to the Bundy brothers’ clown show at a wildlife refuge in Oregon in 2016, they’ve all failed. The lucky ones simply made fools of themselves. The rest of them are dead.
Face it. If a modern government wants you, they’ll get you, dead or alive. Your assault weapons won’t help much against a police swat team, much less a military unit with tanks and drones. Resistance – or at least armed resistance – is indeed futile.
But there’s something else wrong with the Facebook commenter’s position. His rationale for gun hoarding completely ignores the actual text of the Second Amendment. The full text makes it clear what the Founding Fathers were trying to achieve by including it in the Bill of Rights. It says: “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.”
Plainly, the Founding Fathers saw the right to keep and bear arms as a means to maintain the security of the state. The STATE, folks, not individual gun owners. The government, in other words.
In 18th century America, we had no standing army and no central repository of weapons. When an army was deemed necessary, citizen soldiers answered the call, and brought their own weapons. Voila: a well-regulated militia. “Well-regulated” meant that those citizen soldiers followed orders in a chain of command that began at the top with the President as Commander in Chief.
But gun nuts don’t talk about the first half of their favorite constitutional amendment. They aren’t interested in being well-regulated, or in following orders. They seem more interested in defying the government than protecting it.
Not every gun owner is stupid-crazy. I have friends who are gun enthusiasts, and they’re solid citizens. They store their guns (mostly antique pistols) responsibly and don’t use them to commit crimes.
But that still leaves plenty of gun nuts running around. I knew one back in the 90s. He qualified as a gun nut rather than simply gun owner because he turned every conversation into a ringing defense of the Second Amendment and the need for a “second American revolution.” Most of his co-workers were scared of him. He spent his weekends tramping around southern Arizona with the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps. They’d dress in camouflage and look for Mexican immigrants passing through Cochise County. The Minutemen were led by recently convicted child molester, Chris Simcox. Other prominent Minutemen included convicted murderer Shawna Forde, as well as J.T. Ready, a Neo-Nazi who killed four people and then committed suicide. Nice folks, eh?
As for me, I’m often annoyed by my government, but until Donald Trump took power, I’ve never been afraid of it. I am afraid of people like my former co-worker and his pals. I’m willing to trade a microscopic amount of liberty (in the form of an assault weapons ban, for instance) in order to make it harder for stupid-crazy people to kill me and my neighbors. That’s an easy call.
The Second Amendment strikes me as an 18th century anachronism, rooted in even older English Common Law. If it were up to me, I’d repeal it.
Failing that, why can’t we simply insist that the first 13 words be interpreted as absolute boundary conditions for the last 15 words? If you’re a member of a branch of the United States military – active duty or reserve – you’re entitled to keep and bear whatever arms your commanding officer thinks you need. Ditto for law enforcement personnel. Everyone else, not so much.
If you want an assault rifle, become a soldier or a cop.
If you say you’re a hunter, or that you need a firearm to protect your home, fine. You can choose from a wide variety of single shot rifles, shotguns, and pistols that will more than meet those needs. Each purchase will be entered into a nation-wide database, and will come with a title, just like a car. You’ll need to have a firearms license, just like you need a driver’s license, which will require you to pass a simple written test on applicable gun laws. And if you sell one of your guns, you’ll need to do an official title transfer, just as you would if you sold your car. If you’ve been convicted of a violent crime, you forfeit your right to own a gun.
Can't do the time, don't do the crime.
