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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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by Gordon Francis Corbett The right to keep and bear arms is a vital prerogative bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers. Their care and foresight, enshrined in our Constitution's Second Amendment, lets us defend ourselves, our families, or even our Nation, technologically. Recently some have fogged the picture. The disarmers say that we should impose gun control, as though otherwise, firearms would fire spontaneously and aimlessly. That sounds like a plot by Stephen King. Gun control is a euphemism for personal disarmament. Its proponents would forbid private ownership of firearms. The disarmers confuse important opposites: cause and effect, and tool and user. They forget that firearms are tools, that tools do only what users make them do, and that responsibility for what a tool does goes to its user. To avert human trauma, the disarmers would forbid guns altogether. This would almost preclude our meeting mortal threats with deadly force. That, in turn, would achieve an important pacifist goal. Pacifists reject deadly self-defense because they believe that nothing justifies hurting another human being. They regard the criminal's and his victim's lives as sacrosanct, and the taking of either as wrong. Television has brought pacifist voices into our living rooms. News reports have shown us doctors screaming about the social cost of gun ownership. "I see it in my emergency room every day. I see victims with holes in their chests and holes in their heads." Seeing gunshot wounds shocks anybody. But why were these people shot? Were they shot while fighting fellow drug dealers? Were they shot while resisting police officers? Were they shot while robbing innocent people? Those doctors do not know. The disarmers need to understand human rights. Philosopher Ayn Rand defines a right as, "...a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context." She attributes ownership of rights to individuals. Some pacifists may concur, while denying the right to defend oneself; but non-pacifist disarmers assert the existence of collective rights. They reserve unto government the right of self-defense. For them, government has inherent rights transcending its citizens' rights. Therefore, a nation may use powers supposedly not derived from those rights, such as the use of deadly force. They have miscalculated. Religious natural-rights philosophers agree with our Founding Fathers that "...all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...." Atheistic natural-rights advocates derive them from our ability to think. Both agree that proper governmental power flows from our individual rights, which we hire government to protect. Euclid said, "the whole is equal to the sum of its parts." Only if individual rights support a given power, may government use it. Consequently, collective rights do not exist. Some say that, while they condone self-defense, they condemn technological self-defense. Would you limit your ninety-year-old grandmother to a butcher knife when a burglar crawls through her window? If she has a pistol, she could survive. And, because felons often flee armed citizens, Granny might not have to shoot. The disarmers rightly say that owning guns creates danger. The National Safety Council's statistics prove that. But the cure for accidents with tools is learning their proper use. The National Rifle Association has long taught safe firearms handling. The disarmers would simply confiscate the guns. This violates our Second Amendment. 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." The anti-gunners tell us that well-regulated means well-controlled and, therefore, that the Second Amendment refers to a State National Guard. Wrong. "Well-regulated" refers to the militia members' level of equipment and proficiency. "Militia" means unorganized militia, which comprises every citizen between eighteen and forty-five. But, the disarmers remonstrate, modern sociological and military thinking makes the Second Amendment outmoded; therefore modern courts disregard it. Consequently, they argue, we must face reality and trust our leaders. Horsefeathers. At best, sociologists report. They describe how human beings interact. They do not describe how people should do that. That is what ethicians do. And the decision of whether to defend oneself is an ethical one. Modern military science does not make the Second Amendment obsolete. That is pure baloney, any way you slice it. Ask the Soviets, whom Afghan rebels shot to pieces. As for trusting our leaders: never was blind faith worse invested. Our politicians never follow a philosophic standard; they are weather vanes, who turn upon the gimbals of expediency. They do something to solve a problem, often without thinking it through, and others later pick up the check. For verification, ask the Japanese-Americans our politicians imprisoned after Pearl Harbor. While fewer than one percent were suspected of spying for Japan, and none was ever proven an Imperial agent, our politicians forced them from their homes and property anyway. We have always had gun control in our country: gun owners' gun control. Some sixty-five million Americans own 200 million firearms and they control them well; in any one year, only two-tenths of one percent of these weapons are used for crime. And ninety percent of them are stolen. What about the AK-47? It and similar weapons Americans own are not assault rifles; true assault rifles are selective-fire submachine guns. Some say that semi-automatics easily become fully automatic; but possessing and installing parts that convert them incur separate stiff penalties. Americans have semi-automatic assault rifle lookalikes. They are as safe for peaceable owners, and as dangerous to criminals, as are other weapons of like calibers. Nonetheless, because gangsters use them, and because madmen slaughter with them, the disarmers would deny them to the aggressors' innocent targets! That is insanity. Whose side are they on? Have the disarmers never realized that if an armed citizen had seen Patrick Purdy at that Stockton schoolyard on 17 January 1989, he could have shot Purdy and saved some lives? Would they have cared if he had used an AK-47 like Purdy's? Purdy's fantasy prevented his thinking clearly. Otherwise, he would have used, not an AK-47, but a shotgun. Minus its magazine-stopper, a pump-action shotgun might hold seven rounds. Seven rounds of Double-Ought buckshot would have hit more people, in less time, than did Purdy's thirty Kalashnikov rounds. We Americans have millions of these shotguns. If, instead of his AK-47, Purdy had used a pump-action shotgun, would the disarmers be saying that they are "simply too dangerous to remain in private hands?" And, the disarmers ask, "How many cartridges should we let Patrick Purdy's soul brothers fire before having to reload?" (The answer, of course, is "None!"). Correlatively, their reasoning extends to the query, "How many guns shall we let Patrick Purdy's soul brothers be given, buy second-hand, or steal?" (Similarly, the answer is "None!"). By extension, to enhance the public safety, they should have to ban not only semi-automatic rifles, but all firearms. The disarmers hate facing what really caused this massacre. Before Stockton, Purdy had committed several felonies; but, to save time and money, his prosecutors and judges let him plead guilty to misdemeanors. Misdemeanor convictions do not preclude owning firearms. So, Purdy bought his weapons, and he took them to school. Let us face facts. We do not have a gun problem. We have a crime problem. When judges and prosecutors withhold punishment from criminals, we get carnage. We can stop it by ending plea-bargaining. We can stop it by sending more criminals, more rapidly, to more prisons, for more time, or for execution. We can stop it by electing honest men who will steer by the star of justice. Second, instead of disarming us, our lawmakers should make it easier for honest citizens to own weapons. We need peaceable shooters who know when they may shoot criminals legally and who will do it. That will reduce crime; criminals hate being shot. Criminologists James Wright and Peter Rossi report, in a study for the National Institute of Justice, that criminals try to select weaponless victims and unoccupied buildings. It will also reduce the criminals. In a different study, criminologist Gary Kleck reports that Americans defend themselves annually 645,000 times with handguns and perhaps 300,000 times with long arms. Civilians legally kill 1,500 to 2,800 felons every year, while police officers shoot only 300 to 600. We must remember that the peaceable citizen threatens only those who willfully endanger him. He owns firearms, not to start violence, but to survive it. He prefers trial by twelve to burial by six. The anti-gunners hate semi-automatic rifles because "they are made for just one purpose: to kill human beings." In fact, every firearm can kill human beings. That made the Founding Fathers guarantee our right to own them; but that also drives our opponents to abolish our guarantee. They have already banned the (non) assault rifles. Tomorrow, they will confiscate the handguns. Later, they will prohibit the remaining long arms. Thus, they will reduce the Second Amendment to archaic words, written in ancient script, on dusty parchment. The disarmers' misguided benevolence must not stampede us. We are free men and women. We won that freedom with out War of Independence; we kept it with our Constitution. The First Amendment may form that document's soul, but the Second Amendment is its spine. Every lawmaker, every elected executive, and every bureaucrat swears to defend it. Either we make them honor that pledge, or we default on the American Revolution and let a tiny group of dreamers destroy a precious right, while crime marches on. Those powerless against predators soon become their prey. Only people with will, weapons, and skill survive.
(Gordon Corbett is a freelance writer living in southern Oregon. He was a contributing editor at The Freedom Express, the publication in which this essay first appeared. ©1998 by Gordon Corbett. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.)
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