The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
March 12, 2013
A Series of Lectures for People Who Prefer Pondering to Pandering
A Bleeding-Heart-Liberal Hunter for Strict Gun Control
In medieval Europe, most of the land belonged either to the monarchs or to the nobility. Thus everything on the land also belonged to them. That included whatever wild game was located on the land.
Originally, in ancient times and up through the 15th century, game was hunted by means of spears or bows and arrows. Then, in the 16th and 17th centuries, firearms came into usage. With them the royalty and nobility and landed gentry began to hunt animals and birds with their guns. But because the land was theirs, and only they could hunt, using any weapons at their disposal, only the upper crust employed guns in the pursuit of game. Very few Europeans owned firearms. That cultural pattern holds true to this day.
Starting in the early 17th century, in 1607 in Virginia and 1620 in Massachusetts, and later for later colonies, English colonists left England to establish homes in America. Because they were carving out an existence in a relative wilderness where no white people had ever lived before, they were convinced they needed firearms for two primary purposes. First, they might need to use them against the people already living here, the so-called Native Americans. Some of the Indians did little to dissuade the colonists from taking over their land. They just moved farther west, where they knew there was a lot more land, much of which was relatively uninhabited. But many of the Indian tribes fought the settlers in a failed attempt to drive them back across the ocean. Thus did the colonists use firearms to fight the natives.
The second reason for the colonists to have guns was so that they could take up hunting themselves. Most of them had not done it in England, but they could and did do it in America. To keep from starving to death, they needed the meat which hunting provided.
It is important for us to understand that from the very beginning of the colonization of North America, guns became an integral part of the culture. Firearms had been utilized only by the highest ranks of society in the Old World, but in the New World, almost everyone, or at least most of the men, had guns. Shooting game or people thus became as American as apple pie, which is to say that firearm violence has always been a unique feature of American life. No other modern nation anywhere in the world originated with so many guns in the hands of so many of its citizens. That is a fact worth keeping in mind when thinking about strict gun control.
As all of what came to be known as the United States of America was settled, wild game either flourished or was threatened with extinction. The passenger pigeon, once an extremely widespread game bird, was driven to extinction by hunters in the 19th century. The American bison, or buffalo, also became almost extinct. Hunters were a great threat to certain species of animals, whether they were game animals, birds shot for their feathers, or dangerous predators. The large cats known as cougars, panthers, or mountain lions were almost driven to extinction by men with guns. Now these large felines are few and far between in the United States.
Furthermore, as more and more Americans gravitated to cities, hunters became a smaller and smaller percentage of the population. There are no critters to hunt in cities. Now, at most 1 or 2% of the American populace are avid hunters, which I shall define as anyone who goes hunting many times during the hunting season for any animals or birds which are legal to hunt. Perhaps another 2 to 5% are occasional hunters. (The National Rifle Association might refute what I have just said, but every claim of the NRA should be viewed with serious skepticism - - - or so say I.)
Furthermore, very few people hunt any longer to put food on the table. It is much, much cheaper to purchase meat in the finest butcher shop, if one is able to find such, or in the finest grocery stores, than to buy guns, ammunition, camouflaged clothing, hunting licenses, to pay the costs of driving or flying to where game is plentiful, and paying for food and lodging in a more-than-one-day pursuit of furry or feathered creatures. By my calculations, any meat I have brought home from hunting to eat (and every animal I have ever shot I brought home to eat, whether I actually liked the meat or not, unless I disliked it so much I never shot it) cost about $100 a pound for birds and $40 a pound for venison. Hunting is a very expensive way to provide provender for the domestic larder. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deliriously deluding himself.
I grew up in the Midwest. In my family of origin there was a mother, a father, and four sons, of whom I was the youngest. Everyone in our family except my mother hunted. (She did like to fish, however, in case anyone also wants to take moral issue with that particular sport in the discussion period.) Two of my brothers were always very committed hunters. My father and my youngest brother were not very much interested in hunting, although they did hunt a little. As an enthusiast, I was midway between the two male Miller Nimrods and the two Dabbler-Hunters.
In the Midwest of my youth, as well as now, there is much more available game than in many other parts of the country. Because it is there to be shot, hunters go out to shoot it. They have always done it, and they likely shall continue to do it, as long as furry or feathery tails flee for cover at the approach of pedestrian Homo sapiens or eagerly sniffing canines. In the Midwest, West, and South, hunting is as much a part of the overall culture as lobster boils in the Northeast or rodeos in the Southwest.
There are over three-hundred-million firearms in this country. That is an average of one gun for every man, woman and child of the American persuasion. Probably only twenty-five-million of those guns have ever been used for serious hunting. That leaves about two-hundred-seventy-five million weapons which have nothing to do with hunting. (The NRA would no doubt dispute this, but I insist that my statistics, snatched right out of thin air, are as accurate as any of the numbing numbers they parade before us as though they are, you should pardon the expression, Gospel.)
Many people oppose hunting because they believe it represents cruelty to animals. Usually the game dies very quickly, if the marksman is proficient at what he does. That may be a small consolation to hunting objectors, but probably it isn’t, at least in my experience with hunting objectors. However, it would be utterly disingenuous for me or anyone to deny that, over hundreds of years, countless millions of animals or birds have been shot, but not fatally. They limp off or fly off somewhere to die in pain, never to be part of what game laws define as “the bag limit.” Without question that is a dilemma, even an ethical dilemma. And without question that is sufficient reason for some people to declare hunting to be unethical. In our discussion, that will likely come up. I am pointing it out for you as an objection should you forget to add it to the ammunition of your objections. But I would also note that every animal that is severely wounded but not consumed by the shooter is quickly consumed by other creatures cavorting around out there in the natural order. Nothing dead in nature lasts long as deceased exposed flesh. Only bones survive, and even they not all that long. Mice and other critters are orthopedic connoisseurs.
In his poem In Memoriam, Alfred, Lord Tennyson used a phrase which has lived on long after most of the poem was forgotten. He spoke of “nature red in tooth and claw.” It connotes the idea that the natural order in the animal kingdom is definitely not the peaceful, loving environment portrayed by folks who are extreme members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. No, the truth is that that nature really is red in tooth and claw. Those of you who have watched the natural order closely realize that the food chain followed by almost every species necessitates that other species be killed and eaten in order to sustain themselves, at least among the carnivores. Big birds kill little birds (Sesame Street notwithstanding), big animals kill little animals, and it has ever been thus. Charles Darwin came to that conclusion on the basis of extensive natural studies all over the world. The fittest survive because they are able to catch and consume the less fit, Darwin said. In the big scheme of things, hunters account for relatively few numerical losses of any animals in the natural order. Creatures killing other creatures determine most of the natural redness of tooth and claw. Still, ancient hunters did manage to exterminate several species of very large animals, such as mammoths, mastodons, and aurochs. No naturalist could or would deny that. These animals were so big and slow that many hunters with spears could surround and slay them.
Psychologists declare that human bonding is imperative for positive mental health. That is especially true for males, who seem far less likely than females for a variety of reasons to establish close bonds. I will not go into why that may be true; I will only state that apparently it is true. I tell you this to state unequivocally that for me, some of the best male bonding of my life occurred in conjunction with hunting. As a pastor of various congregations, I made friendships with fellow hunters which never would have happened without the shared experience of being in fields or woods pursuing game or alternately pursuing fresh air when no game was to be found. Whether we were successful with what we were hunting, we were always successful in the hunt. We were there, we were with one another and other hunters, we shared stories and recollections and widely acknowledged but also widely enjoyed prevarications. “Do you remember the time when…?”, and everyone knows it wasn’t like that at all, but it was great to recollect it anyway.
For over thirty years I went deer hunting in Wisconsin with my oldest brother. Originally it was just the two of us with several of his hunting buddies, but eventually the group became his son-in-law, and then his son, and then his grandsons, and then his great-grandsons. I cannot over-emphasize how much those family hunting get-togethers have meant to me. It wasn’t the deer per se which mattered; it was being with the deer hunters, and especially with Bob. I have had literally hundreds of dreams hunting deer with my brother over the past 50+ years, and all of them have provided unmatched somnolent excitement and enjoyment. Bob died last July, and frankly, it is because of hunting that I miss him the most. It will never again be the same for me.
Hunting matters to those to whom it matters, and it not only doesn’t matter to others, to many of the others it ought not to be allowed. Perhaps. But I can attest that for me personally, that would be an enormous loss, even though whatever hunting days I have ahead of me cannot possibly equal those behind, simply because it is harder to haul an elderly carcass over hill and dale than it once was. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, as it says in holy writ.
And all that brings us, believe it or not, to the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. Here is what it says, and this is all 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.”
Remember how, earlier, I said that many if not most early American colonists possessed firearms, either to provide game for the table or protection for the household? Well, the Second Amendment has to do with neither activity. It just doesn’t, and to say that it does is a legal, linguistic, and etymological travesty.
In 1934 and 1938, Congress passed two National Firearms Acts. By them they established a licensing system for firearms dealers, and they effectively prohibited machine guns in private ownership by charging exorbitant taxes on such weapons. The US Supreme Court upheld the 1934 law. The then-Solicitor General, Robert Jackson (who later became an Associate Justice on the Court) argued that the Second Amendment is “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security.” Further, Jackson declared that the amendment made it clear that the right to bear arms “is not one which may be utilized for private purposes but only one which exists where the arms are borne in the militia or some other military organization provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state.”
In 2008 the United States Supreme Court, citing the Second Amendment, declared that most Americans have the right to own a firearm or firearms. The states or the federal government may place restrictions on the ownership of guns, they said in their decision, but they cannot outlaw gun ownership as such, or even the ownership of nearly all particular weapons. The District of Columbia had ruled that it was illegal for residents of Washington, DC to own handguns. In District of Columbia vs. Heller, the court said that law was unconstitutional, and that it is legal for anyone to own pistols and other firearms for protection.
Here is the non-legal opinion of a non-lawyer about the decision of the five lawyers who approved the Heller case, in their 5-to-4 finding: They did so for obviously political, not legal, reasons. They did so because they are judicial and social and political conservatives. They did what they did with a clear preference for individual rights to take precedence over the good of society. Three hundred million guns represent a great threat to our society. And especially on the grounds of the Second Amendment, the decision of the Firearms Five is a miscarriage of justice.
Let me repeat, for emphasis: “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.” If the Constitutional Convention which wrote and approved the Constitution had merely wanted to provide Americans the right to own guns, they would have said, “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” But they didn’t say that. They first referred to a well regulated Militia, which they further insisted was necessary to the security of a free State. Does “State” there mean “nation,” as in the United States of America, or does it mean South Carolina or Massachusetts or Virginia? Either way, the key word is “Militia.” Prior to the adoption of the Constitution, each of the thirteen states had its own militia, as all states still have, through their National Guard. And, by dint of the Constitution, the federal government was to have its own military. In the American Revolution, there really had been no such entity as “the American Army.” There were members of thirteen separate state militias, most of whom reluctantly agreed to serve under General George Washington or other colonial generals.
The point is this, it seems to this non-lawyer: The authors of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution were saying that militias, whether state or federal, and the guns they used, were needed to protect the body politic, not to protect your body or mine. There was no notion that guns should be legal for self-defense, but rather that they were legal solely for state or national defense. However, they also wanted to state, although they didn’t do it very clearly, that the federal government was not to have the power to take guns away from the people in order to defend itself from the people. The Second Amendment is not very well written, but it does seem to imply that. What it neither implies nor says, however, is that every citizen has the right to own a gun. But that is what the Firearms Five decreed, by a majority of just one judicial vote, is now the purported law of the land. The decision of Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito does not reflect Constitutional Originalism, even though Messrs. Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts would make that claim. Instead it reflects thinking which originated solely with them. Never before had the Supreme Court, or any other court, taken the position on the basis of the Second Amendment that almost every American has a Constitutional right to own a gun.
There are no American Indians trying to take back their land anymore by armed resistance. There are no Mexicanos streaming across the border to lay siege to the Alamo. Occasionally there are riots here and there around the country, and when they happen, the National Guard may be called out to restore order. But when they do so, the individual Guardsmen don’t go to their private gun cabinets at home and pull out their Model 1600 12-gauge Remingtons or their .308 Winchesters. They go to the armory and are issued their military riot guns, being told to use them with the most extreme caution, lest there be another Chicago 1968 or Kent State 1970.
I would not be addressing the subject of this lecture were it not for the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado or the Amish School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania or Virginia Tech University or the Tucson shooting of Gabby Gifford and several others or the theater in Aurora, Colorado or the Oak Creek, Wisconsin shooting in the Sikh temple would not have prompted this, either individually, or all together, along with the many scores of other mass murders in our nation over the past quarter of a century. It was the deliberate slaying of twenty first-graders and six adults by an apparently deranged young man which has brought the issue of gun control front-and-center in American culture and politics. And America now is asking itself, Has the balance been tipped? Is enough finally enough? Are we as a people, despite the Supreme Court, to decide that a reasonable and responsible gun policy is to be adopted by Congress for our land?
Here is what is not going to happen, at least not now.
1) There shall be no mass confiscation of guns. That is politically, legally, and administratively impossible. Under no conceivable crisis shall that ever happen.
2) Mass killings shall not pass into oblivion, no matter what measures may now be taken. You should expect dozens of other mass killings to occur over the coming years. It is absolutely inevitable.
3) The US shall not immediately drop precipitously in the list of nations where guns are the primary means of homicide or suicide; we shall continue to head the list.
4) Hand guns will not be outlawed.
5) Assault rifles will not be outlawed.
Here is what should happen, but won’t.
1) Hand guns should immediately be outlawed. They are of no use for hunting, unless one is an absolutely outstanding marksman, and realistically they are of no use for the National Guard. Pistols are far more dangerous to pistol owners than to people against whom they might, in very rare instances, be used for protection. Most people who are shot with a handgun are shot within a range of ten feet or less, especially if the shooter is not a professional law enforcement official. The primary purpose of pistols is for shooting people, period. Yet the Supreme Court of the United States, by its District of Columbia vs. Heller decision, loudly proclaimed American citizens have the right to own pistols. What a passel of political pistols are the Firearms Five!
2) Assault rifles should immediately be outlawed. There is no reason for them to be in the hands of any private citizens. They were invented solely for military use, and the reason they were invented is solely to fire many rounds very quickly at enemy soldiers. They are people-killers for soldiers, not hunting rifles.
3) Federal law forbids the private purchase or ownership of machine guns, Stinger missiles, and so on, and everyone accepts that. Why not include pistols and assault rifles in that list as well? It is irrational not to do so.
Here is what may, and probably shall, happen.
1) Background checks of prospective gun buyers shall be instituted for all firearms sales, including gun show sales. This will eliminate a few, but not very many, mass killings. It is much more a symbolic action than a real action. But it should be written into law anyway, if only because it will at last strike a blow against the powerful gun lobby.
2) Background checks may prevent many people with mental illness from purchasing guns.
3) Clips holding more than ten bullets shall be outlawed, I hope. This will actually save more lives as the result of mass shootings than background checks, because the shooters will not be able to fire so many rounds so quickly. But obviously this measure in itself it will not eliminate mass murders. Ultimately it is not the number of bullets which needs the most correction; rather it is the number of guns. We have a quarter of a billion too many guns in our country. But if mass murderers can fire fewer rounds, so much the better.
4) A law will be passed which will enforce major penalties for “straw purchasers” who buy guns to sell to criminals. That will be a very good thing, because it will severely cut down on criminals getting guns from otherwise legitimate buyers.
And this brings us to the National Rifle Association. When it was founded, the NRA was essentially an interest group for hunters. When I first started hunting deer almost fifty years ago with my brother Bob, I would read some of the many issues of The American Rifleman he had around the house. When he died, he had saved every issue he ever received, all chronologically boxed, so my poor sister-in-law had to dispose of his prized possessions, which no one in the family wanted. I tell you this to let you know the mentality of some gun owners. To them the NRA is sacrosanct; it is the Holy of Holies, the Summum Bonum. However, nearly every story in those early issues of The American Rifleman was about some aspect of hunting, and hunting all manner of game animals all over the world, but especially in the USA. That is why I enjoyed reading them. They were like Field and Stream or Sports Afield. But the political and anti-federal-government tripe that now fills the magazine: such a mess that is!
In the last twenty years or so, the NRA has become primarily an organization promoting the sale of firearms, plus what they call the protection of Second Amendment rights. The NRA is the gun manufacturers’ best friend. It entices gullible gun owners, many of whom already have too many guns, to purchase still more guns. It is like trying to convince a macho chap who already owns a spiffy gas-guzzling muscle car that he needs to have four or seven or ten muscle cars. One of the primary appeals of the NRA is geared toward naive overgrown boys who believe they need more lethal phallic symbols to verify their manhood. The NRA turns hunters into collectors, and is handsomely paid for doing so by the arms merchants.
It is the NRA’s fanatical devotion to the Second Amendment that should most concern us. Make no mistake about it: the National Rifle Association, and especially its executive vice-president, Wayne LaPierre, is extremist. It is not just a pressure group or lobbyist like other pressure groups or lobbyists; it is the Mt. Everest, the 800 pound gorilla, il capo de tutti capi, of such organizations. No other political lobbyists in Washington, including AARP, AIPAC, or the NEA, have the influence of the NRA. More than two hundred Members of Congress are on its lobbying payroll by means of campaign money they receive from the NRA.
Through its publications and its pronouncements, the NRA has overtly and covertly turned countless thousands of people, mostly men, into anti-government libertarian fanatics. Christopher Dorner is the rogue LAPD cop who was fired, and became a dedicated cop-killer. The NRA may be creating platoons or companies or battalions of Christopher Dorners every year. There were four times as many anti-government militias in 2012 as in 2008: four times! As American citizens, we need to recognize that the NRA is potentially if not actually a dangerously extremist organization. In a democracy, we are obliged to allow such groups to exist, and it is imperative for all of us, regardless of the nature of our politics, to recognize that. Furthermore, it would not only be legally impossible to outlaw the NRA, it would likely become very hazardous merely to try to do so. Almost certainly an untold number of NRA members or supporters would use their guns to fire at any federal or state officials who attempted to enforce a ban on this institution dedicated to guns. Please understand: The NRA is here to stay. That is not necessarily as it should be, but it certainly is as it shall be.
However, the NRA should become the national laughingstock it deserves to be. The NRA is as plausible as the leadership of Congress from both parties. It is as even-handed as anything likely to be said by Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid. It is as objective and reasonable as Al Qaeda or Bashar Assad. Unfortunately, the NRA is not funny; it is not funny at all. It is deadly serious. Its obsessive devotion to gun ownership above all other societal considerations is invidious, insidious, and sinister. (That all means the same thing, but it makes it sound worse, which is good.) When the NRA was all about hunting, it was wholly acceptable, and even admirable, depending on how you choose to view hunting. But when it became fanatically dedicated to gun ownership, regardless of the damaging social implications of its positions, it turned into an almost invincible Washington, DC 501-C3 non-profit organization.
The NRA was delighted by the Heller decision because it finally enshrined in case law what it had so long touted, namely, that the Constitution guarantees citizens the right not only to own arms but to bear arms for their own protection. To repeat, I, a non-lawyer, cannot understand how the Second Amendment says that at all. The Second Amendment has only to do with guns for 18th century state or national militias, not with 21st century individual citizens having guns either for hunting or for their own protection.
Guns and the NRA are major factors in the USA being one of the most violent nations on earth. Here is the ranking of the top five countries in the world for gun ownership: 1) The US; 2) Yemen; 3) Switzerland; 4) Finland; 5) Serbia. Three, the US, Yemen, and Serbia, use guns primarily to kill people, Switzerland requires every male citizen up to about age 60 to have a military weapon in their homes in case the nation is attacked (which may be a minor reason why it has infrequently been attacked; perhaps a Second Amendment philosophy really works in its intent. However, I think the high mountains nearly everywhere have protected Switzerland far better than a rifle in every man’s closet.); and as for Finland, either they are afraid of Russia or they hunt a lot, I’m not sure which might be the dominant factor. A Non Sequitur cartoon shows St. Peter beside the pearly gates. A large sign declares, NO GUNS ALLOWED. The gatekeeper says, “Yeah, you’d think it’d be a given, but apparently it needs to be pointed out to Americans.”
Without question, America’s slavish commitment to gun ownership directly or indirectly results in thousands of Americans being killed every year because of guns. A front-page article last week in USA Today said that gun-shot wounds in this country cost taxpayers $12 billion every year through court proceedings, insurance costs, and hospitalizations paid for by government health programs. The costs are far greater for gun-shot wounds than for drunk driving. Because of the way our culture evolved, we will never outlaw guns altogether. But as long as the NRA exists, it will lead many of its uncritical members and supporters to suppose that bleeding-heart liberals are always poised in dark corners to do just that. And that is a sad indictment on a gun-sick society.
The NRA should be utterly ashamed of their inflexible positions, but they have lost all ability to feel shame. Their television commercial after the Newtown massacre called the President an “elitist hypocrite” because his daughters are protected by Secret Service agents, when all the rest of us presumably can protect our ordinary selves only by packing iron. Their arrogance is without bounds.
Newtown and the recent gun debate have sent gun sales soaring. It happens every time there is a mass shooting. Stocks in firearms manufacturing corporations have also soared. The President’s interest in gun control may be the primary factor for these marked upticks.
The Arkansas State Senate passed the Church Protection Act, 28-4. It authorizes anyone attending a religious service anywhere in the state to carry a concealed weapon. The extent of American commitment to guns is seemingly without limit, and the NRA does everything it can to stoke the fires of firearms. What a blasphemy is that Arkansas law!
- Nevertheless, as much as I dislike the NRA, it is unfair to blame it for being the genesis of our firearms culture, because it definitely is not. We were committed to guns centuries before the NRA even existed. It has reflected our culture much more than it has determined our culture. However, it adds to the toxicity of a populace which somehow managed to acquire three hundred millions guns, which needs none of them for protection, except for police weapons, if they are counted in the three hundred million, and I don’t know whether they are.
It is absurd to conceptualize or to promote guns as a primary means of self-protection. Ball bats are far safer and more useful than guns for the average citizen for self-protection. Far more people are murdered because we have so many guns available than were we to have no guns at all. “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” is a maddeningly cynical slogan. It is a deliberately misleading lie. The murder rate in every nation which has strict gun laws is far lower than our murder rate. Guns do kill people. Through the centuries of the existence of this violent nation, they have killed a few million people, including those used in our Civil War. Some of those who were killed would have died by other means had there been no guns, but because there were so many guns, so many have needlessly died.
Ironically, after every mass murder, guns sales go up, because people fear the government will prevent the sale of any more guns. Two of my closest relatives bought guns after Sandy Hook. One, who theretofore had owned no weapons at all, bought a shotgun. The other, who owns several guns, bought a pistol, which he previously had not owned. So now I guess they think they are prepared to defend themselves when anarchy breaks out.
That profoundly saddens and dismays me. These two men (it is not surprising they are men) are by no means stupid or insensitive. They are good thinkers. Yet they felt compelled to buy guns to protect themselves and their families, supposing, I presume, that it will soon become very difficult to purchase guns. That would be splendid, but it won’t happen soon, if ever. And so the number of firearms sales just keeps going up and up and up. Firearms manufacturers love Sandy Hooks and Columbines. They are outstanding tragedies for business.
We will never outlaw the sale of all firearms; never. Our culture has become too much a gun culture for that ever to happen. But we can make it much harder to purchase firearms. We can try to prevent the wrong kind of people from being able to buy guns. Obviously if they want them, they can get them illegally, because there are so many millions of guns out there which could be bought on what would become a huge black market. But if tomorrow Congress decreed that no more privately-owned guns can be purchased, and the President signed the bill, and the Supreme Court did not declare it unconstitutional, there still would be 300,000,000 black market guns available.
Let me be totally candid. Theoretically I would not disapprove if the federal government decided that for the overall good of American society, all guns must be turned in. I say “theoretically,” because I am certain such a decision would literally spark a bloody civil war in which many, many thousands of Americans would die. The most radical of gun owners would hole up in their homes or elsewhere and carry on a guerrilla war for as long as they and their ammunition could hold out. Because I know a total gun ban would never happen, I don’t spend any time thinking about it, nor should you. Nonetheless, were it to happen without a civil war, I would support such a governmental action. We simply have far too many guns for our own good. I confess I would miss the hunting, although with my advanced years there shall be no more serious hunting anyway. But I would still dutifully turn in my two shotguns and my high-powered rifle. I have disposed of all my other guns. At my age, who needs numerous phallic symbols?
Realizing a total ban on guns shall never occur in the USA, I nevertheless believe it would be greatly to the advantage of the whole nation if the federal government instituted a universal weapons-purchase program, knowing that it would never be universally followed. If they paid an average of $100 per weapon, it would amount to thirty billion dollars for all three hundred million guns. It would be money exceedingly well spent. For years we were blowing that much every month in Iraq or Afghanistan. Why not save American lives right here at home?
But all this is just so much ephemeral philosophical palaver. In the words of millions of gun owners, “It ain’ta-gonna-happen.” Such a purchase could happen, and perhaps it should happen, but tragically, it almost certainly will not happen. Never.
So what will happen? Well, after Sandy Hook and in his State of the Union address, the President of the United States said he wants to push for a ban on assault weapons, to get a universal background check on the sale of all guns, and to ban high-capacity clips. He can’t run for re-election anyway, so he should put all the power of his office into the passage of these three minimal measures. If he loses on all or any of them, then at least he will have tried. The benefit of being a second-term President is that one can strongly support what is the right thing to do, even if it is likely to fail. But in any case, the President should push the legislation, and let the chips fall where they may. Then the voters can decide in the next election whether they thought their Members of Congress voted the way they should have. Assuming a majority of the voters of South Carolina agree with me (which would be a very faulty assumption), it means that of our eight Representatives and two Senators, we would vote out of office seven House Members and two US Senators. If gun ownership were to become an inviolate single-issue vote, we would see how the people would declare their thinking in the next elections. And I can assure you this: there are far fewer gun-owners than people who do not own guns, even though the NRA would vehemently deny that.
If we, the people, continue to affirm and to accept the world’s most dangerous and egregious gun culture, we deserve all the carnage which such a society inevitably produces. But if we concluded that for the health and well being of our country, we must seriously start to cut back on the number of guns we possess, we would also begin to have far fewer gun-related homicides and suicides.
I am of the opinion that contacting our Congress-people usually has no effect on how they cast legislative votes. The only way to prevent them from voting the way they do on legislation is to vote them out of office. Toss out all, or at least most, of the blighters.
I conclude with words spoken by Gabby Gifford in her appearance before the Senate committee which heard testimony on firearms violence. The bullet fired into her brain by yet another crazed American man with a gun makes it hard for her to talk. In her unique, bullet-determined halting manner, she said, “Speaking is difficult, but I need to say something important. Violence is a big problem. Too many children are dying. You must act. Be bold; be courageous.” And then, in perhaps the single, most eloquent of her moving and powerful few words: “Enough.”