Part IX: Debating The Second, Again
February 26, 2003
10:51 AM CST
Every so often, I get mail that is so misdirected that I have to respond to it here, rather than in Reader Mail. The writer is a Brit who has crossed pens with me a couple of times before. This particular email whined about how Britain isn’t really becoming a totalitarian state (despite surveillance cameras on every street corner, RIPA, the move to abolish jury trials, gun banning, etc), but here’s the part I really want to take on:
“In any country there is a balance between freedom and responsibility. We can all feel thankful that your police have finally caught the lunatic going on a shooting spree in the vicinity of Washington. 10 people dead but millions living in fear before the killer was caught napping, literally. But the USA is still not willing to advocate some degree of gun control. Letting anyone buy a lethal weapon without proper licensing and tracing is letting freedom go too far. It’s about time you considered whether your site is being responsible in its paeans to weapons of death.”
Let me start with the obvious ones:
- As far as guns are concerned, we in the United States have a balance between freedom and responsibility. We have the freedom to own guns, and if we abuse that freedom, we go to jail, or if we’ve killed someone, we are executed. Seems pretty straightforward to me. Most gun owners (75 million or more) seem to achieve that balance all by themselves, without the State deciding on the responsibility for them. A few thousand criminals acting reprehensibly should not outweigh the rights of two hundred million law-abiding citizens.
- Yes, ten people were killed by the Maryland shooters. Average number of shooting deaths in the selfsame area during a “normal year”: 34, out of a population of about 2.7 million (you do the arithmetic: my calculator doesn’t show that many decimal places when I calculate the percentage: it just comes up as “0"). Even if you add the 10 to the annual average, the percentage remains insignificant. You have a twentyfold higher chance of dying by choking on your food, and a two hundredfold higher chance of being killed in a car accident, in that selfsame area.
- We already have “some degree of gun control”: there are approximately 20,000 state and Federal laws which govern gun purchasing, ownership and use. Given that the Maryland shooter managed to slip through the cracks of a system which purports to prevent dangerous assholes like himself from buying a gun, wouldn’t you say that the system failed? Fact is, we have too much gun control already; ever wonder why the sniper chose Maryland, a state which has really harsh restrictions on gun ownership? Could it be that he wanted to reduce the chances of having an armed citizen shoot back at him?
- You may question whether my site “is being responsible in its paeans to weapons of death”, so let me answer this in three ways.
1. My First Amendment right allows me to say whatever the fuck I want, without fear of someone else deciding for me whether it is “responsible” or not. My own good sense tells me where to draw the line, and it should be quite clear that I’ve done so, unless of course the reader is gun-averse (more on this, later).
2. More than a few people have written to me for advice in how to use a gun, which guns to buy, how to teach their kids how to shoot, and so on. Yes, there is an outside chance that one of them might one day use a gun to rob someone else; but one of these writers may equally use his new gun to defend himself from a robber or potential murderer. Given the average profile of people who write to me, the second eventuality is far more likely than the first. And let me tell you, I would be the proudest man in the world if one day someone wrote to me to tell me that—with the gun I’d recommended to him—he’d wasted some goblin who had broken into his house and was threatening his wife and kids.
3. The word you need to understand is “hoplophobia”, a term coined by Jeff Cooper to describe an irrational fear of weapons (from the Greek oplo: weapon). A fear of weapons is an irrational fear—it runs counter to ages of genetic human conditioning whereby weapons have provided a measure of comfort against the fear of harm. Yes, guns can cause death, and they do. In the United States each year, guns also prevent crime, anywhere from 1.5 million to 2.5 million times.
I am afraid that you have misunderstood me, greatly. I fully understand the primary function of guns in the human condition: to protect oneself against the aggression of others. If other people are going to use them for the purpose of aggression, why, that’s all the more reason for me to own one (or in my case, considerably more than one). If we have learned anything from recent history, it is that the practice of depriving law-abiding citizens of the means to defend themselves simply emboldens the predatory, and makes them more rapacious. Check the crime statistics trends in Great Britain over the past twenty years, for example.
What you refer to as “paeans” are nothing of the sort. I write about guns the way other people write about their favorite cars, or their favorite books or movies—I talk about guns with respect and affection. I’m not afraid of guns—and if my writing helps others overcome their fear, then that’s wonderful.
The history of the United States has proved that a free, armed citizenry is the guarantor of a nation’s wellbeing. We’ve had no Hitlers, no Stalins, no Pol Pots, and for that matter, no “Bloody Marys” invading our country nor infesting our government, nor will we— as long as We The People are armed, and can defend ourselves. In my earlier post, I mentioned that gunshot homicide affects less than four thousandths of one percent of the population—when you weigh that against the three hundred million-plus people who have lived here free of tyranny for over two centuries, it is a tiny price to pay.
And yes, there was slavery in the U.S. for the first 80-odd years of our history, but the institution of slavery was eventually ended—with guns, lest we forget.
Let me conclude this Rant by quoting another of my readers:
“It’s a no-brainer that this country, however imperfect, is a vastly superior domicile than any other on Earth. It’s also a no-brainer, after observing the REAL history of just the twentieth century, that America will not remain free if we allow ourselves to be disarmed.”
Yup.
