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A standard for the civilized man is his willingness to step into his world, unarmed, unafraid. English officers in the North African campaign in World War II charged German lines with only a swagger stick in hand, considering their task to direct men rather than engage in individual combat. German officers meeting them tended to less idealism. Whereas the Scots bristled with blades, and the Americans, well, they were Americans of a sort rarely encountered in such bastions as a modern university, where we expect to find the thinking of our brightest and best.
Most educated American men of the twentieth-first century couldn’t sharpen a kitchen knife. Outside media venues, he’s rarely seen a firearm, aside from the ones he doesn’t notice carried by uniformed officers of the law. He goes to work, he goes to the mall, and there is no presence of weapons. Some of our feminist counterparts tell us the desire to possess a weapon is an attempt at psychological compensation for anatomical inadequacies.
An ability to conduct interpersonal conflict in an efficient manner belongs to an uncivilized past. Under law, if someone in your family is shot, and the perpetrator is brought to justice, the docket will not read, your name against theirs. It will be the Commonwealth versus the individual. To give up revenge is the cornerstone of the social contract. Forward thought, advanced beyond legal traditions dating back to the Magna Carta and Blackstone, demands the aggrieved party refuse to name the killer of his brother. Rather he would say, “My brother was killed by a Glock,” individual responsibility being a vestige of primitive origins. No physical act ever occurs in isolation. Unfortunate family dynamics, histories of racism, and lack of education all bear weight. Several countries in Europe, Great Britain and Denmark are two, recognize this thinking. Were a woman wakened suddenly and faced with eminent rape, the instinct for survival is recognized. If she injures her attacker with a randomly acquired bedside lamp, she is excused. If she plucks up a baseball bat left in ready proximity for the purpose of defense, she goes to prison.
If we are to live in a world where we practice forgiveness and acceptance of the sometimes poor impulse control or questionable motives of our fellow human beings and are reluctant to incarcerate them for their indiscretions, it seems we would not want those individuals to arm themselves. Disarmament as an idealistic moral point outweighs any discussion of its value as a practical solution.
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Attempts in the United States to curb the proliferation of arms came after the Civil War to counteract the fear a freed slave population would arm themselves. If these earliest laws failed the test of the newly minted fourteenth Amendment, the will remained. States passed laws prohibiting concealed carry of weapons, laws always intended to be selectively enforced. Police engage in stop and frisk in poor neighborhoods, never in an upscale hotel. Those naïve in the practical aspects of law enforcement have always harbored the belief that the law is the law. It isn’t. Never was.
A few years ago if you glimpsed a hidden handgun, you could assume the man carrying it was either an off-duty cop or a criminal. Today the proliferation of legal concealed carry sweeps the country.
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Equal enforcement of the law has always been a dream lacking in practical appeal. Enforcement of the law is the prerogative of the executive branch. They use what I call the grocery store motif. They take the laws which suit them off the shelf and enforce them. Those laws which displease are allowed to sit upon the shelf and gather dust. It can’t be changed. Otherwise it wouldn’t matter who was sheriff or Governor.
From the strictly hands off regard for individual liberties of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, we evolved to accept that the power of government is only limited by its interests. For all the inadequacies, inefficiencies, and problems of a large bureaucracy, the highest and best service a man can render is now seen to be to shape our government closer to our ideal, an ideal of man at his best. Eighteenth Century Constitutional principles are based upon a rather nasty view of the nature of man.
By the 1960’s, we evolved to a situation where the average man had the right to own a weapon and a government which told him he couldn’t carry it. This average man conducted his daily business unarmed.
Then came the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, and an angered President determined to do something. That something was the ’68 Gun Control Act.
Those responsible for pushing the law through understood its inadequacies and acknowledged they had work ahead. They compared their situation to the Civil Rights movement, believing it a matter of persistence and education to bring the country around. Perhaps they were unaware that all early gun laws were based in racist fear or that Martin Luther King had applied for and been denied a concealed weapons permit. Black leaders endorsed gun control. A sea change had occurred among them. The principles of Brown v. The Board of Education, 1957 that had so changed the world would have never stood the test of the private ballot. Thurgood Marshall’s words echoed, “Do what’s right. If that’s not the law, let the law catch up.” An enlightened Federal government could push the will of a largely disinterested people aside and do what was right, especially if it were done by a bureaucracy carefully designed to appear distant from the elected government. Without Eisenhower’s willingness to use the power of the Federal government to enforce Brown v. The Board of Education, the court decision would have been meaningless. Had the decision been in 1955 before his election to a second term, he would have faced the choice of do what’s right or win a second term.
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A point of high hope was the measure on the ballot in the state of Massachusetts in the 1970’s to ban handguns entirely. The measure lost two to one. The American people needed more preparation before a major initiative could hinge itself to a popular vote.
The next great measure was Bill Clinton’s assault weapon’s bill of 1992 after he was safely elected under promises of respecting the Second Amendment—whatever that meant. This one had real possibilities. These weapons were almost unknown in the civilian population, and they looked exactly like military machine guns. Who would fight for them? It could be a great symbolic victory. This was the thing: inch by inch. At any given time in any state legislative session hundreds of bills waited. If one out of a hundred passed in a watered down form, that was so much progress. The horrible NRA, whose measure we take from The New York Times, would exhaust its resources; once that was accomplished it would only be necessary to describe the next bill as gun safety, common sense, and who would look at the buried provisions and last minute amendments?
Angered Second Amendment supporters are starting to exercise their right to open carry and where the laws don’t support this, they change them.
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Unpredicted setbacks occurred. Democrats lost their majority in Congress. Clinton’s assault weapons bill sunsetted, and although in its watered down form it didn’t prevent anyone from buying a large capacity semi-automatic rifle, these rifles no one wanted became the darling of the gun buying public. Twenty-five percent of the guns sold today are of this configuration. Odds are if you ask a new buyer why, he answers, “while I still can.” These rifles began showing up in mass shooting.
A few years ago if you glimpsed a hidden handgun, you could assume the man carrying it was either an off-duty cop or a criminal. Today the proliferation of legal concealed carry sweeps the country. Rather than spending lobbying time to slip through a restriction on firearms, gun control organizations fight what appears a losing effort to stop a national concealed carry bill. And the issue will not confine itself to gun control. Newly appointed conservative judges who support the Second Amendment in its literalist interpretation will likely repeal Roe v. Wade and virtually every other bastion of the living Constitution. We’ll go back to a country where a legislator or a judge’s conscience means little in the shadow of long dead white men like Madison, Monroe, and Jefferson.
By all means if you are on a moral crusade to disarm the country, continue, consequences mean little in the face of a moral ideal. But perhaps you have more in common with most urban, suburban, and small town Americans, who live a life where a gun is never glimpsed, you feel no need to devote yourself to the issues surrounding them, and you would like to keep it that way. If so, it may be time to stand down. Angered Second Amendment supporters are starting to exercise their right to open carry and where the laws don’t support this, they change them. People who would ordinarily never spend the money to own a gun are buying them because they don’t like being told they can’t.
For the first time in Hillary Clinton, we’ve had a Presidential candidate who almost openly endorsed gun control. Whether you accept she did or not, The NRA said she did, and those millions of votes it cost her, and the activism they generated certainly damaged her campaign. People on college campuses almost universally looked to what they saw as an inevitable election of our first woman President as the opening of a new era. They’re in tears and shock.
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Over time the voice of America has shifted to represent mainly the educated, the articulate, the urbane. We look to our journalists and university professors to create what we have begun fondly to call the conversation. We’re comfortable looking to these people to lead us into the future. If we want to continue this trend, it may be time to stop looking at those nameless inarticulate people of the interior as a conquered people, diminishing in number, diminishing in influence, an ugly reminder of a past we want to both put behind us and rewrite. Otherwise, keep jabbing the sharpened stick, and the conversation will be replaced by a low growl.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
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