A NATION OF COWARDS
Jeffrey R. Snyder
OUR SOCIETY has reached a pinnacle of
self-expression and respect for individuality rare or
unmatched in history. Our entire popular culture -- from
fashion magazines to the cinema -- positively screams the
matchless worth of the individual, and glories in
eccentricity, nonconformity, independent judgment, and
self-determination. This enthusiasm is reflected in the
prevalent notion that helping someone entails increasing
that person's "self-esteem"; that if a person
properly values himself, he will naturally be a happy,
productive, and, in some inexplicable fashion,
responsible member of society.
And yet, while people are encouraged to
revel in their individuality and incalculable self-worth,
the media and the law enforcement establishment
continually advise us that, when confronted with the
threat of lethal violence, we should not resist, but
simply give the attacker what he wants. If the crime
under consideration is rape, there is some notable
waffling on this point, and the discussion quickly moves
to how the woman can change her behavior to minimize the
risk of rape, and the various ridiculous, non-lethal
weapons she may acceptably carry, such as whistles, keys,
mace or, that weapon which really sends shivers down a
rapist's spine, the portable cellular phone.
Now how can this be? How can a person who
values himself so highly calmly accept the indignity of a
criminal assault? How can one who believes that the
essence of his dignity lies in his self-determination
passively accept the forcible deprivation of that
self-determination? How can he, quietly, with great
dignity and poise, simply hand over the goods?
The assumption, of course, is that there
is no inconsistency. The advice not to resist a criminal
assault and simply hand over the goods is founded on the
notion that one's life is of incalculable value, and that
no amount of property is worth it. Put aside, for a
moment, the outrageousness of the suggestion that a
criminal who proffers lethal violence should be treated
as if he has instituted a new social contract: "I
will not hurt or kill you if you give me what I
want." For years, feminists have labored to educate
people that rape is not about sex, but about domination,
degradation, and control. Evidently, someone needs to
inform the law enforcement establishment and the media
that kidnapping, robbery, carjacking, and assault are not
about property.
Crime is not only a complete disavowal of
the social contract, but also a commandeering of the
victim's person and liberty. If the individual's dignity
lies in the fact that he is a moral agent engaging in
actions of his own will, in free exchange with others,
then crime always violates the victim's dignity. It is,
in fact, an act of enslavement. Your wallet, your purse,
or your car may not be worth your life, but your dignity
is; and if it is not worth fighting for, it can hardly be
said to exist.
The Gift of Life
Although difficult for modern man to
fathom, it was once widely believed that life was a gift
from God, that to not defend that life when offered
violence was to hold God's gift in contempt, to be a
coward and to breach one's duty to one's community. A
sermon given in Philadelphia in 1747 unequivocally
equated the failure to defend oneself with suicide:
He that suffers his life to be
taken from him by one that hath no
authority for that purpose, when
he might preserve it by defense,
incurs the Guilt of self murder
since God hath enjoined him to seek
the continuance of his life, and
Nature itself teaches every creature
to defend itself.
"Cowardice" and
"self-respect" have largely disappeared from
public discourse. In their place we are offered
"self-esteem" as the bellwether of success and
a proxy for dignity. "Self-respect" implies
that one recognizes standards, and judges oneself worthy
by the degree to which one lives up to them.
"Self-esteem" simply means that one feels good
about oneself. "Dignity" used to refer to the
self-mastery and fortitude with which a person conducted
himself in the face of life's vicissitudes and the
boorish behavior of others. Now, judging by campus speech
codes, dignity requires that we never encounter a
discouraging word and that others be coerced into acting
respectfully, evidently on the assumption that we are
powerless to prevent our degradation if exposed to the
demeaning behavior of others. These are signposts
proclaiming the insubstantiality of our character, the
hollowness of our souls.
It is impossible to address the problem
of rampant crime without talking about the moral
responsibility of the intended victim. Crime is rampant
because the law-abiding, each of us, condone it, excuse
it, permit it, submit to it. We permit and encourage it
because we do not fight back, immediately, then and
there, where it happens. Crime is not rampant because we
do not have enough prisons, because judges and
prosecutors are too soft, because the police are
hamstrung with absurd technicalities. The defect is
there, in our character. We are a nation of cowards and
shirkers.
Do You Feel Lucky?
In 1991, when then-Attorney General
Richard Thornburgh released the FBI's annual crime
statistics, he noted that it is now more likely that a
person will be the victim of a violent crime than that he
will be in an auto accident. Despite this, most people
readily believe that the existence of the police relieves
them of the responsibility to take full measures to
protect themselves. The police, however, are not personal
bodyguards. Rather, they act as a general deterrent to
crime, both by their presence and by apprehending
criminals after the fact. As numerous courts have held,
they have no legal obligation to protect anyone in
particular. You cannot sue them for failing to prevent
you from being the victim of a crime.
Insofar as the police deter by their
presence, they are very, very good. Criminals take great
pains not to commit a crime in front of them.
Unfortunately, the corollary is that you can pretty much
bet your life (and you are) that they won't be there at
the moment you actually need them.
Should you ever be the victim of an
assault, a robbery, or a rape, you will find it very
difficult to call the police while the act is in
progress, even if you are carrying a portable cellular
phone. Nevertheless, you might be interested to know how
long it takes them to show up. Department of Justice
statistics for 1991 show that, for all crimes of
violence, only 28 percent of calls are responded to
within five minutes. The idea that protection is a
service people can call to have delivered and expect to
receive in a timely fashion is often mocked by gun
owners, who love to recite the challenge, "Call for
a cop, call for an ambulance, and call for a pizza. See
who shows up first."
Many people deal with the problem of
crime by convincing themselves that they live, work, and
travel only in special "crime-free" zones.
Invariably, they react with shock and hurt surprise when
they discover that criminals do not play by the rules and
do not respect these imaginary boundaries. If, however,
you understand that crime can occur anywhere at anytime,
and if you understand that you can be maimed or mortally
wounded in mere seconds, you may wish to consider whether
you are willing to place the responsibility for
safeguarding your life in the hands of others.
Power And Responsibility
Is your life worth protecting? If so,
whose responsibility is it to protect it? If you believe
that it is the police's, not only are you wrong -- since
the courts universally rule that they have no legal
obligation to do so -- but you face some difficult moral
quandaries. How can you rightfully ask another human
being to risk his life to protect yours, when you will
assume no responsibility yourself? Because that is his
job and we pay him to do it? Because your life is of
incalculable value, but his is only worth the $30,000
salary we pay him? If you believe it reprehensible to
possess the means and will to use lethal force to repel a
criminal assault, how can you call upon another to do so
for you?
Do you believe that you are forbidden to
protect yourself because the police are better qualified
to protect you, because they know what they are doing but
you're a rank amateur? Put aside that this is equivalent
to believing that only concert pianists may play the
piano and only professional athletes may play sports.
What exactly are these special qualities possessed only
by the police and beyond the rest of us mere mortals?
One who values his life and takes
seriously his responsibilities to his family and
community will possess and cultivate the means of
fighting back, and will retaliate when threatened with
death or grievous injury to himself or a loved one. He
will never be content to rely solely on others for his
safety, or to think he has done all that is possible by
being aware of his surroundings and taking measures of
avoidance. Let's not mince words: He will be armed, will
be trained in the use of his weapon, and will defend
himself when faced with lethal violence.
Fortunately, there is a weapon for
preserving life and liberty that can be wielded
effectively by almost anyone -- the handgun. Small and
light enough to be carried habitually, lethal, but unlike
the knife or sword, not demanding great skill or
strength, it truly is the "great equalizer."
Requiring only hand-eye coordination and a modicum of
ability to remain cool under pressure, it can be used
effectively by the old and the weak against the young and
the strong, by the one against the many.
The handgun is the only weapon that would
give a lone female jogger a chance of prevailing against
a gang of thugs intent on rape, a teacher a chance of
protecting children at recess from a madman intent on
massacring them, a family of tourists waiting at a
mid-town subway station the means to protect themselves
from a gang of teens armed with razors and knives.
But since we live in a society that by
and large outlaws the carrying of arms, we are brought
into the fray of the Great American Gun War. Gun control
is one of the most prominent battlegrounds in our current
culture wars. Yet it is unique in the half-heartedness
with which our conservative leaders and pundits -- our
"conservative elite" -- do battle, and have
conceded the moral high ground to liberal gun control
proponents. It is not a topic often written about, or
written about with any great fervor, by William F.
Buckley or Patrick Buchanan. As drug czar, William
Bennett advised President Bush to ban "assault
weapons." George Will is on record as recommending
the repeal of the Second Amendment, and Jack Kemp is on
record as favoring a ban on the possession of
semiautomatic "assault weapons." The battle for
gun rights is one fought predominantly by the common man.
The beliefs of both our liberal and conservative elites
are in fact abetting the criminal rampage through our
society.
Selling Crime Prevention
By any rational measure, nearly all gun
control proposals are hokum. The Brady Bill, for example,
would not have prevented John Hinckley from obtaining a
gun to shoot President Reagan; Hinckley purchased his
weapon five months before the attack, and his medical
records could not have served as a basis to deny his
purchase of a gun, since medical records are not public
documents filed with the police. Similarly, California's
waiting period and background check did not stop Patrick
Purdy from purchasing the "assault rifle" and
handguns he used to massacre children during recess in a
Stockton schoolyard; the felony conviction that would
have provided the basis for stopping the sales did not
exist, because Mr. Purdy's previous weapons violations
were plea-bargained down from felonies to misdemeanors.
In the mid-sixties there was a public
service advertising campaign targeted at car owners about
the prevention of car theft. The purpose of the ad was to
urge car owners not to leave their keys in their cars.
The message was, "Don't help a good boy go
bad." The implication was that, by leaving his keys
in his car, the normal, law-abiding car owner was
contributing to the delinquency of minors who, if they
just weren't tempted beyond their limits, would be
"good." Now, in those days people still had a
fair sense of just who was responsible for whose
behavior. The ad succeeded in enraging a goodly portion
of the populace, and was soon dropped.
Nearly all of the gun control measures
offered by Handgun Control, Inc. (HCI) and its ilk embody
the same philosophy. They are founded on the belief that
America's law-abiding gun owners are the source of the
problem. With their unholy desire for firearms, they are
creating a society awash in a sea of guns, thereby
helping good boys go bad, and helping bad boys be badder.
This laying of moral blame for violent crime at the feet
of the law-abiding, and the implicit absolution of
violent criminals for their misdeeds, naturally
infuriates honest gun owners.
The files of HCI and other gun control
organizations are filled with proposals to limit the
availability of semiautomatic and other firearms to
law-abiding citizens, and barren of proposals for
apprehending and punishing violent criminals. It is
ludicrous to expect that the proposals of HCI, or any gun
control laws, will significantly curb crime. According to
Department of Justice and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms (ATF) statistics, fully 90 percent of violent
crimes are committed without a handgun, and 93 percent of
the guns obtained by violent criminals are not obtained
through the lawful purchase and sale transactions that
are the object of most gun control legislation.
Furthermore, the number of violent criminals is minute in
comparison to the number of firearms in America --
estimated by the ATF at about 200 million, approximately
one-third of which are handguns. With so abundant a
supply, there will always be enough guns available for
those who wish to use them for nefarious ends, no matter
how complete the legal prohibitions against them, or how
draconian the punishment for their acquisition or use.
No, the gun control proposals of HCI and other
organizations are not seriously intended as crime
control. Something else is at work here.
The Tyranny of the Elite
Gun control is a moral crusade against a
benighted, barbaric citizenry. This is demonstrated not
only by the ineffectualness of gun control in preventing
crime, and by the fact that it focuses on restricting the
behavior of the law-abiding rather than apprehending and
punishing the guilty, but also by the execration that gun
control proponents heap on gun owners and their evil
instrumentality, the NRA. Gun owners are routinely
portrayed as uneducated, paranoid rednecks fascinated by
and prone to violence, i.e., exactly the type of person
who opposes the liberal agenda and whose moral and social
"re-education" is the object of liberal social
policies. Typical of such bigotry is New York Gov. Mario
Cuomo's famous characterization of gun-owners as
"hunters who drink beer, don't vote, and lie to
their wives about where they were all weekend."
Similar vituperation is rained upon the NRA,
characterized by Sen. Edward Kennedy as the
"pusher's best friend," lampooned in political
cartoons as standing for the right of children to carry
firearms to school and, in general, portrayed as standing
for an individual's God-given right to blow people away
at will.
The stereotype is, of course, false. As
criminologist and constitutional lawyer Don B. Kates, Jr.
and former HCI contributor Dr. Patricia Harris have
pointed out, "[s]tudies consistently show that, on
the average, gun owners are better educated and have more
prestigious jobs than non-owners.... Later studies show
that gun owners are less likely than non-owners to
approve of police brutality, violence against dissenters,
etc."
Conservatives must understand that the
antipathy many liberals have for gun owners arises in
good measure from their statist utopianism. This habit of
mind has nowhere been better explored than in The
Republic. There, Plato argues that the perfectly just
society is one in which an unarmed people exhibit virtue
by minding their own business in the performance of their
assigned functions, while the government of
philosopher-kings, above the law and protected by armed
guardians unquestioning in their loyalty to the state,
engineers, implements, and fine-tunes the creation of
that society, aided and abetted by myths that both hide
and justify their totalitarian manipulation.
The Unarmed Life
When columnist Carl Rowan preaches gun
control and uses a gun to defend his home, when Maryland
Gov. William Donald Schaefer seeks legislation year after
year to ban semiautomatic "assault weapons"
whose only purpose, we are told, is to kill people, while
he is at the same time escorted by state police armed
with large-capacity 9mm semiautomatic pistols, it is not
simple hypocrisy. It is the workings of that habit of
mind possessed by all superior beings who have taken upon
themselves the terrible burden of civilizing the masses
and who understand, like our Congress, that laws are for
other people.
The liberal elite know that they are
philosopher-kings. They know that the people simply
cannot be trusted; that they are incapable of just and
fair self-government; that left to their own devices,
their society will be racist, sexist, homophobic, and
inequitable -- and the liberal elite know how to fix
things. They are going to help us live the good and just
life, even if they have to lie to us and force us to do
it. And they detest those who stand in their way.
The private ownership of firearms is a
rebuke to this utopian zeal. To own firearms is to affirm
that freedom and liberty are not gifts from the state. It
is to reserve final judgment about whether the state is
encroaching on freedom and liberty, to stand ready to
defend that freedom with more than mere words, and to
stand outside the state's totalitarian reach.
The Florida Experience
The elitist distrust of the people
underlying the gun control movement is illustrated
beautifully in HCI's campaign against a new
concealed-carry law in Florida. Prior to 1987, the
Florida law permitting the issuance of concealed-carry
permits was administered at the county level. The law was
vague, and, as a result, was subject to conflicting
interpretation and political manipulation. Permits were
issued principally to security personnel and the
privileged few with political connections. Permits were
valid only within the county of issuance.
In 1987, however, Florida enacted a
uniform concealed-carry law which mandates that county
authorities issue a permit to anyone who satisfies
certain objective criteria. The law requires that a
permit be issued to any applicant who is a resident, at
least twenty-one years of age, has no criminal record, no
record of alcohol or drug abuse, no history of mental
illness, and provides evidence of having satisfactorily
completed a firearms safety course offered by the NRA or
other competent instructor. The applicant must provide a
set of fingerprints, after which the authorities make a
background check. The permit must be issued or denied
within ninety days, is valid throughout the state, and
must be renewed every three years, which provides
authorities a regular means of reevaluating whether the
permit holder still qualifies.
Passage of this legislation was
vehemently opposed by HCI and the media. The law, they
said, would lead to citizens shooting each other over
everyday disputes involving fender benders, impolite
behavior, and other slights to their dignity. Terms like
"Florida, the Gunshine State" and "Dodge
City East" were coined to suggest that the state,
and those seeking passage of the law, were encouraging
individuals to act as judge, jury, and executioner in a
"Death Wish" society.
No HCI campaign more clearly demonstrates
the elitist beliefs underlying the campaign to eradicate
gun ownership. Given the qualifications required of
permit holders, HCI and the media can only believe that
common, law-abiding citizens are seething cauldrons of
homicidal rage, ready to kill to avenge any slight to
their dignity, eager to seek out and summarily execute
the lawless. Only lack of immediate access to a gun
restrains them and prevents the blood from flowing in the
streets. They are so mentally and morally deficient that
they would mistake a permit to carry a weapon in
self-defense as a state-sanctioned license to kill at
will.
Did the dire predictions come true?
Despite the fact that Miami and Dade County have severe
problems with the drug trade, the homicide rate fell in
Florida following enactment of this law, as it did in
Oregon following enactment of similar legislation there.
There are, in addition, several documented cases of new
permit holders successfully using their weapons to defend
themselves. Information from the Florida Department of
State shows that, from the beginning of the program in
1987 through June 1993, 160,823 permits have been issued,
and only 530, or about 0.33 percent of the applicants,
have been denied a permit for failure to satisfy the
criteria, indicating that the law is benefitting those
whom it was intended to benefit -- the law-abiding. Only
16 permits, less than 1/100th of 1 percent, have been
revoked due to the post-issuance commission of a crime
involving a firearm.
The Florida legislation has been used as
a model for legislation adopted by Oregon, Idaho,
Montana, and Mississippi. There are, in addition, seven
other states (Maine, North and South Dakota, Utah,
Washington, West Virginia, and, with the exception of
cities with a population in excess of 1 million,
Pennsylvania) which provide that concealed-carry permits
must be issued to law-abiding citizens who satisfy
various objective criteria. Finally, no permit is
required at all in Vermont. Altogether, then, there are
thirteen states in which law-abiding citizens who wish to
carry arms to defend themselves may do so. While no one
appears to have compiled the statistics from all of these
jurisdictions, there is certainly an ample data base for
those seeking the truth about the trustworthiness of
law-abiding citizens who carry firearms.
Other evidence also suggests that armed
citizens are very responsible in using guns to defend
themselves. Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, using surveys and other data, has determined that
armed citizens defend their lives or property with
firearms against criminals approximately 1 million times
a year. In 98 percent of these instances, the citizen
merely brandishes the weapon or fires a warning shot.
Only in 2 percent of the cases do citizens actually shoot
their assailants. In defending themselves with their
firearms, armed citizens kill 2,000 to 3,000 criminals
each year, three times the number killed by the police. A
nationwide study by Kates, the constitutional lawyer and
criminologist, found that only 2 percent of civilian
shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly
identified as a criminal. The "error rate" for
the police, however, was 11 percent, over five times as
high.
It is simply not possible to square the
numbers above and the experience of Florida with the
notions that honest, law-abiding gun owners are
borderline psychopaths itching for an excuse to shoot
someone, vigilantes eager to seek out and summarily
execute the lawless, or incompetent fools incapable of
determining when it is proper to use lethal force in
defense of their lives. Nor upon reflection should these
results seem surprising. Rape, robbery, and attempted
murder are not typically actions rife with ambiguity or
subtlety, requiring special powers of observation and
great book-learning to discern. When a man pulls a knife
on a woman and says, "You're coming with me,"
her judgment that a crime is being committed is not
likely to be in error. There is little chance that she is
going to shoot the wrong person. It is the police,
because they are rarely at the scene of the crime when it
occurs, who are more likely to find themselves in
circumstances where guilt and innocence are not so
clear-cut, and in which the probability for mistakes is
higher.
Arms and Liberty
Classical republican philosophy has long
recognized the critical relationship between personal
liberty and the possession of arms by a people ready and
willing to use them. Political theorists as dissimilar as
Niccolo Machiavelli, Sir Thomas More, James Harrington,
Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
all shared the view that the possession of arms is vital
for resisting tyranny, and that to be disarmed by one's
government is tantamount to being enslaved by it. The
possession of arms by the people is the ultimate warrant
that government governs only with the consent of the
governed. As Kates has shown, the Second Amendment is as
much a product of this political philosophy as it is of
the American experience in the Revolutionary War. Yet our
conservative elite has abandoned this aspect of
republican theory. Although our conservative pundits
recognize and embrace gun owners as allies in other
arenas, their battle for gun rights is desultory. The
problem here is not a statist utopianism, although
goodness knows that liberals are not alone in the
confidence they have in the state's ability to solve
society's problems. Rather, the problem seems to lie in
certain cultural traits shared by our conservative and
liberal elites.
One such trait is an abounding faith in
the power of the word. The failure of our conservative
elite to defend the Second Amendment stems in great
measure from an overestimation of the power of the rights
set forth in the First Amendment, and a general
undervaluation of action. Implicit in calls for the
repeal of the Second Amendment is the assumption that our
First Amendment rights are sufficient to preserve our
liberty. The belief is that liberty can be preserved as
long as men freely speak their minds; that there is no
tyranny or abuse that can survive being exposed in the
press; and that the truth need only be disclosed for the
culprits to be shamed. The people will act, and the truth
shall set us, and keep us, free.
History is not kind to this belief,
tending rather to support the view of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and other republican theorists that only
people willing and able to defend themselves can preserve
their liberties. While it may be tempting and comforting
to believe that the existence of mass electronic
communication has forever altered the balance of power
between the state and its subjects, the belief has
certainly not been tested by time, and what little
history there is in the age of mass communication is not
especially encouraging. The camera, radio, and press are
mere tools and, like guns, can be used for good or ill.
Hitler, after all, was a masterful orator, used radio to
very good effect, and is well known to have pioneered and
exploited the propaganda opportunities afforded by film.
And then, of course, there were the Brownshirts, who knew
very well how to quell dissent among intellectuals.
Polite Society
In addition to being enamored of the
power of words, our conservative elite shares with
liberals the notion that an armed society is just not
civilized or progressive, that massive gun ownership is a
blot on our civilization. This association of personal
disarmament with civilized behavior is one of the great
unexamined beliefs of our time.
Should you read English literature from
the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, you will
discover numerous references to the fact that a
gentleman, especially when out at night or traveling,
armed himself with a sword or a pistol against the chance
of encountering a highwayman or other such predator. This
does not appear to have shocked the ladies accompanying
him. True, for the most part there were no police in
those days, but we have already addressed the notion that
the presence of the police absolves people of the
responsibility to look after their safety, and in any
event the existence of the police cannot be said to have
reduced crime to negligible levels.
It is by no means obvious why it is
"civilized" to permit oneself to fall easy prey
to criminal violence, and to permit criminals to continue
unobstructed in their evil ways. While it may be that a
society in which crime is so rare that no one ever needs
to carry a weapon is "civilized," a society
that stigmatizes the carrying of weapons by the
law-abiding -- because it distrusts its citizens more
than it fears rapists, robbers, and murderers --
certainly cannot claim this distinction. Perhaps the
notion that defending oneself with lethal force is not
"civilized" arises from the view that violence
is always wrong, or the view that each human being is of
such intrinsic worth that it is wrong to kill anyone
under any circumstances. The necessary implication of
these propositions, however, is that life is not worth
defending. Far from being "civilized," the
beliefs that counterviolence and killing are always wrong
are an invitation to the spread of barbarism. Such
beliefs announce loudly and clearly that those who do not
respect the lives and property of others will rule over
those who do.
In truth, one who believes it wrong to
arm himself against criminal violence shows contempt of
God's gift of life (or, in modern parlance, does not
properly value himself), does not live up to his
responsibilities to his family and community, and
proclaims himself mentally and morally deficient, because
he does not trust himself to behave responsibly. In
truth, a state that deprives its law-abiding citizens of
the means to effectively defend themselves is not
civilized but barbarous, becoming an accomplice of
murderers, rapists, and thugs and revealing its
totalitarian nature by its tacit admission that the
disorganized, random havoc created by criminals is far
less a threat than are men and women who believe
themselves free and independent, and act accordingly.
While gun control proponents and other
advocates of a kinder, gentler society incessantly decry
our "armed society," in truth we do not live in
an armed society. We live in a society in which violent
criminals and agents of the state habitually carry
weapons, and in which many law-abiding citizens own
firearms but do not go about armed. Department of Justice
statistics indicate that 87 percent of all violent crimes
occur outside the home. Essentially, although tens of
millions own firearms, we are an unarmed society.
Take Back the Night
Clearly the police and the courts are not
providing a significant brake on criminal activity. While
liberals call for more poverty, education, and drug
treatment programs, conservatives take a more direct
tack. George Will advocates a massive increase in the
number of police and a shift toward "community-based
policing." Meanwhile, the NRA and many conservative
leaders call for laws that would require violent
criminals serve at least 85 percent of their sentences
and would place repeat offenders permanently behind bars.
Our society suffers greatly from the
beliefs that only official action is legitimate and that
the state is the source of our earthly salvation. Both
liberal and conservative prescriptions for violent crime
suffer from the "not in my job description"
school of thought regarding the responsibilities of the
law-abiding citizen, and from an overestimation of the
ability of the state to provide society's moral moorings.
As long as law-abiding citizens assume no personal
responsibility for combatting crime, liberal and
conservative programs will fail to contain it.
Judging by the numerous articles about
concealed-carry in gun magazines, the growing number of
products advertised for such purpose, and the increase in
the number of concealed-carry applications in states with
mandatory-issuance laws, more and more people, including
growing numbers of women, are carrying firearms for
self-defense. Since there are still many states in which
the issuance of permits is discretionary and in which law
enforcement officials routinely deny applications, many
people have been put to the hard choice between
protecting their lives or respecting the law. Some of
these people have learned the hard way, by being the
victim of a crime, or by seeing a friend or loved one
raped, robbed, or murdered, that violent crime can happen
to anyone, anywhere at anytime, and that crime is not
about sex or property but life, liberty, and dignity.
The laws proscribing concealed-carry of
firearms by honest, law-abiding citizens breed nothing
but disrespect for the law. As the Founding Fathers knew
well, a government that does not trust its honest,
law-abiding, taxpaying citizens with the means of
self-defense is not itself worthy of trust. Laws
disarming honest citizens proclaim that the government is
the master, not the servant, of the people. A federal law
along the lines of the Florida statute -- overriding all
contradictory state and local laws and acknowledging that
the carrying of firearms by law-abiding citizens is a
privilege and immunity of citizenship -- is needed to
correct the outrageous conduct of state and local
officials operating under discretionary licensing
systems.
What we certainly do not need is more gun
control. Those who call for the repeal of the Second
Amendment so that we can really begin controlling
firearms betray a serious misunderstanding of the Bill of
Rights. The Bill of Rights does not grant rights to the
people, such that its repeal would legitimately confer
upon government the powers otherwise proscribed. The Bill
of Rights is the list of the fundamental, inalienable
rights, endowed in man by his Creator, that define what
it means to be a free and independent people, the rights
which must exist to ensure that government governs only
with the consent of the people.
At one time this was even understood by
the Supreme Court. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876),
the first case in which the Court had an opportunity to
interpret the Second Amendment, it stated that the right
confirmed by the Second Amendment "is not a right
granted by the constitution. Neither is it in any manner
dependent upon that instrument for its existence."
The repeal of the Second Amendment would no more render
the outlawing of firearms legitimate than the repeal of
the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment would
authorize the government to imprison and kill people at
will. A government that abrogates any of the Bill of
Rights, with or without majoritarian approval, forever
acts illegitimately, becomes tyrannical, and loses the
moral right to govern.
This is the uncompromising understanding
reflected in the warning that America's gun owners will
not go gently into that good, utopian night: "You
can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead
hands." While liberals take this statement as
evidence of the retrograde, violent nature of gun owners,
we gun owners hope that liberals hold equally strong
sentiments about their printing presses, word processors,
and television cameras. The republic depends upon fervent
devotion to all our fundamental rights.
