Trust Me: You Believe in Gun Control (Guest Voice)
Trust Me: You Believe in Gun Control
by Tina Dupuy
If you ask the typical hyper-political gun owner (and I have … at Thanksgiving dinner), why it’s important to own a gun, they’ll bark about the Constitution. Yes, the Second Amendment: “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed!”
This of course is the slogan the National Rifle Association adopted in the 1970′s. It was then that owning a gun became an absolute right endowed by God and the Constitution. A blessing passed down by our forefathers to obliterate game and protect our property. The NRA was founded in 1870 and for its first hundred years it was for gun control and didn’t mention the Second Amendment as their cause.
Adam Winkler points out in his delicious book, “Gun Fight,” what we call the “wild west” had some of the strictest gun control laws we’ve seen as a nation. The shoot out at the OK Corral took place, after all, because Wyatt Earp was trying to disarm the outlaw Cowboys in accordance with a Tombstone ordinance. The KKK was among other things, a gun control organization. They were trying to keep guns out of the hands of newly freed slaves … but still gun control.
The part of the Second Amendment omitted from the NRA’s slogan is: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…” Yes, well regulated—it’s in the Constitution!
Now, to some, guns are as sacred as scripture. If you ask, again, this typical hyper-political gun owner why they need to stockpile assault rifles, you will get an answer much like Pat Flynn’s, a recent candidate for a Senate seat in Nebraska. “Really, we have our guns to protect ourselves against the government, number one,” Flynn said in a debate right before the primary. “Hunting’s number two. But protecting us against our government is number one.” Remember, Flynn was trying to land a job in the government (he didn’t win his party’s nomination, by the way).
The idea is that we have to be just as armed as our government in order to be safer or have more liberty (or something). The U.S. government has unmanned drones armed with supersonic laser-guided anti-armor Hellfire missiles, “bunker busters,” and nuclear weapons. Are far-right politicians saying we need civilians to have shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles “for protection?” Of course they’re not. They actually do want limits on ownership.
And if you ask the most vehement gun rights advocate why gun owners shouldn’t have nuclear weapons, I’d bet you’d get the same answer as to why we don’t want every country to have the capability: “Because they could get into the wrong hands.”
So weapons-grade plutonium should be limited. But the ever-handy semi-auto Glock pistol with a 30-round high-capacity magazine is an absolute right?
A recent gun buyback drive in Los Angeles resulted in someone turning in a rocket launcher. Comforting.
So we’re not actually talking about limited vs. unlimited. We are talking about degrees of weapon ownership.
Guns fall into the wrong hands all the time. More guns and fewer requirements for ownership doesn’t curb this. George Zimmerman was the wrong hands. Zimmerman, a Florida man now infamous for shooting an unarmed black teenager at close range after a 911 operator told him not to engage the alleged suspect and wait for police to arrive, is now being defended by said hyper-political gun owners. There’s no reason a Neighborhood Watch captain should be patrolling his block with a criminal record and a pistol. Zimmerman was a catastrophe realized. Even in the wake of new evidence about this case, the fact remains if Zimmerman didn’t have a gun, 16-year-old Trayvon Martin would be alive.
The United States is number one in the world in civilian gun ownership. And since we’re not last in gun violence (we’re the 14th highest in deaths—way higher in just injuries) it’s safe to assume that increasing the number of guns doesn’t decrease the number of gun deaths. Just like cutting taxes doesn’t increase revenue—making gun ownership unlimited doesn’t make us safer. It’s a lie. A fairy tale of the gun lobby. Completely unsupported by data or logic. A falsehood.
So unless you think all Americans should get Daisy Cutters this Christmas—you believe in regulations as to who gets a weapon, what kind and where they can have it.
Gun control laws are not tyranny—as the family of Trayvon Martin can testify to—a de-regulated militia is.
© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com. Her column is licensed to run on TMV in full.
This column has been edited by the author. Representations of fact and opinions are solely those of the author.
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Preaching to the choir in this quarter Tina. I own guns but my gun owner sensibilities were formed before the NRA became a political organization and are grounded on common sense. Simple question: Are we better as a country with decades of the neo-NRA legacy than we were before? For the slow to get a clue that is a rhetorical question.
One can support gun control laws or support the position the the NRA. But one does have to answer the following questions.
1. How effective are federal laws controlling illegal drugs?
2. How effective were laws controlling alcohol during prohibition?
3. How effective will new gun conrol laws be if enacted.
I would like to see some evidence the feds can do a better job enforcing existing laws before making new ones.
You certainly know how to knock down the numerous straw men you set up. Is your ignorance willful or just of the old fashioned variety?
You will not find your redacted second amendment anywhere on the NRA website nor in any of its materials. You wish to claim “typical hyper-political gun owner[s]” ignore the first phrase because they don’t give it preeminence and ignore the last. Yes, the second amendment does say, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…” Well regulated as in “well trained” and “well drilled” and NOT as in “many laws governing.”
Then you get to the Wild West You suddenly wish to hold this up as a model? The people of California apparently can’t even abide the sight of an unloaded weapon in public.
And yes, we do have our guns to protect us from the government. The purpose of the second amendment is quite clear in the historical record. Yes, the government has an awesome arsenal. Perhaps you should note how well that’s working out in Afghanistan. Do you really believe the military is going to be even that effective against our own citizens on our own soil? I doubt it.
In addition, no one is talking about an absolute right. Your preferred boogeyman, the NRA, certainly isn’t. Such a thing does not even exist. No one wishes the mentally unstable, those convicted of violent crimes, and those who have shown in whatever manner that they are incapable of being trusted with the responsibility this right entails. The problem is you wish to presume people are irresponsible. You wish society to merely assume people cannot handle firearms until they can somehow prove they can. You wish to assume them guilty until they can prove themselves innocent.
As far as your ramblings on Zimmerman go, you don’t know the facts. No one does except for Martin and Zimmerman. I believe Zimmerman should have been arrested the night it happened. I don’t know what agenda the police were wrapped up in at the time to not do so. As soon as Zimmerman started to follow Martin he lost all presumption of self-defense, imo. That does not mean he cannot have acted in self-defense. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. We just don’t know. That doesn’t stop you from pontificating, however.
You say, “making gun ownership unlimited doesn’t make us safer. It’s a lie. A fairy tale of the gun lobby.” The only lie here is that the gun lobby is working to make gun ownership unlimited. They simply are not.
Gun control laws may be tyranny and they may not be. Some are reasonable and some are not. I have no doubt we would disagree as to which is which.
Tyranny starts when they come for the guns. Wyatt Earp pistol-whipped one of the Clancy’s earlier in the day.
In 1998, I went to Austria to visit a friend. I ended up going with her and her mom and a bunch of Austrian high school kids on a trip up to a sports camp in the Alps. Great fun, btw, lovely scenery.
On an outing with the kids, we were sitting at a big table in a restaurant, and the kids kept asking me about Americans and guns. Did I have a gun? Did anyone else I knew have a gun? Did people get shot in the street where I lived? Had anyone I known been shot? Had I ever been shot at?
They were very concerned, and I tried to assuage their fears that Americans are not gun-slinging buckaroos who shoot each other over parking spots. No, we really *don’t* go around with semi-automatics strapped to our shoulders on an every day basis.
It was a real eye opener, and this was 14 years ago. The US’s love affair with firearms has only gotten worse since then.
I live in farm country. Everyone has at least a rifle. Most people have a rifle and a hand gun, but it isn’t just me who has noticed that the lack gun safety and responsibility are becoming a real problem. One of the staunchest gun rights advocates I know is appalled by the lack of responsibility of gun owners. He goes on about how if his dad had caught him going near the gun cabinet, there would have been hell to pay. Gun safety was like the Pledge of Allegiance and the Ten Commandments. They were known by all and sacrosanct. Guns weren’t toys. You didn’t play with them, and you sure as hell didn’t bandy them about like they were pea-shooters.
Now in my area alone we have hunters who don’t identify their target and shoot horses, cattle, dogs and people. Some woman and her golden retriever were jogging on a road that bordered state game lands, and they were shot by a man who thought she was a turkey. A neighbor has lost two beef cattle to hunters who thought his steers were deer. Another farmer has resorted to writing COW in hunter orange on all his livestock in hopes of making sure none of them are mistaken for deer. There are bullet holes in the side of one of my client’s old house from hunters who shot in the direction of a residence.
In a freak accident, a man cleaning his gun, fired it into the air and killed an Amish girl more than a mile away.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2011/12/amish-teens-death-ruled-a-homcide-in-ohio/
Although, that man should have known better and should never have fired his gun into the air like that.
In our area, teens winging rifles around have shot horses, deer and dogs on shoot-em-up joyrides. In other states, people have found their pets shot in their own yards. Just recently, I read about a family who lost a puppy when someone shot it in their own front yard. Another horse was found dead in the pasture, bled out from a gun shot wound.
This is ridiculous. The biggest threat to gun ownership is idiots with guns doing reprehensible, irresponsible things with them. Incidents like those just give fuel to the anti-gun lobby and make their case stronger.
“Is your ignorance willful or just of the old fashioned variety? …
Yes, the government has an awesome arsenal. Perhaps you should note how well that’s working out in Afghanistan. Do you really believe the military is going to be even that effective against our own citizens on our own soil? I doubt it….
The problem is you wish to presume people are irresponsible. You wish society to merely assume people cannot handle firearms until they can somehow prove they can. You wish to assume them guilty until they can prove themselves innocent. …
That doesn’t stop you from pontificating, however. …”
Hard to argue against such persuasion, eloquence and logic.
I am sure we’ll see more of it.
Joe Reeser: Hi there, I see you’re new here and welcome. Read the commenters rules at the top of the masthead. People can debate, discuss and teach here. There will be no attacking writers or other commenters. Everything you said above can be said without attacking anyone. Facts persuade. Use them. Read the commenters rules: there are more.
Thanks.
Archangel/ Dr.e
nra member,
w/ cc
I think there are fewer guns floating around in NY due to gun control laws. Don’t know about the Feds, sometimes they aren’t very good regulators/enforcers.
“So we’re not actually talking about limited vs. unlimited. We are talking about degrees of weapon ownership.”
I can’t speak for the position of the NRA (or for men made of straw), but I don’t think there are many actual people, NRA members or not, who would disagree with that we need some limits. Just as small-government conservatives wouldn’t advocate for absolutely no taxes.
The issue is that gun-rights advocates are unlikely to see weapons-grade plutonium and a semi-auto Glock pistol to be near the same degree.
For me, the issue is only secondarily about safety, and primarily about freedom. Of course we should have effective public protection, but a police force will never be able to protect every person against every, or even most, crimes. Therefore, a person does have a right to arm him or herself for additional protection. And yes, a person also has the right to have the means to protect him or herself against a hypothetical tyrannical government. Of course, if a person causes harm due to malice or negligence, they should be held accountable, and reasonable rules should be in place to prevent those things from happening when possible, without imposing prohibitive restrictions on the personal right to protect oneself.
There are many instances where people have to prove that they are responsible and competent– getting a driver’s license for example.
Also, almost daily we read about some kid who got a gun that his dad left lying around and shot someone at school or some mentally unstable individual who went on a rampage and took out several co workers before shooting themselves. Yes, I assume many people are not responsible enough to handle deadly weapons. They drink, they drug, they lose their temper, etc etc.
Our rights are balanced against the safety and well-being of others– which is why you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater even though the First Amendment says you can.
I am a gun owner, and support the principle of having as few regulations as possible.
That said, I believe it’s dangerous to assume that gun rights can, in any realistic way, protect us from ‘tyranny’ in the context of today’s technological and legislative environment.
Dangerous because our preoccupation with gun rights can distract us from threats to freedom that affect us more profoundly _and clearly the far Right is being played like a fiddle by those wishing to create just such a distraction.
Thus our guns just become lollipops that we’re allowed to play with while our government, and the corporate wealth controlling it, systematically legalizes torture, indefinite detention without arrest, reads our private e-mails, militarizes the police forces and equips itself with sinister thermal and acoustic crowd-control technology and also armed aerial drones.
The argument that keeping handguns protects us from tyranny is absolutely fatuous. A respected Church deacon in my hometown was recently thrown into a federal jail for shining a flashlight on a Homeland helicopter hovering over his rural home at night. Full-body scanners and physical groping are routine in airports, and there is no more freedom of movement when air travel involves subjecting yourself to ritual humiliation. Tyranny obviously is already here, and guns did not stop it. If the government wants to ratchet it up, it can and will, and guns will not slow it. While the far Right should remain very committed to gun rights, the issue shouldn’t be used to distract or lull us into an illusion that guns will protect us from authoritarianism. Modern technological development and legislative changes have skewed the balance.
And which amendment guaranties a drivers licence? You also advocate having the State decide who is allowed to be a reporter and regulating free speech right?
yes and no, it’s not like having a handgun is going to allow one to take on all comers but the idea that there is a sizable population that may resist w/violence certain acts by the Govt can and in the past has made an impact on those choices. It doesn’t have to mean you can beat the Govt, the impact of just standing up can make a difference. Remember the Alamo, Wounded knee, Ruby Ridge, etc.
Great reply, Spenc. People still kill, guns, especially ones with 30-round clips, just make it easier. Ah, the smell of freedom, with cordite and tyranny, it’s so American.
Guns are absurdly prevelant in America. I enjoy them, but they do seem to just flow like water around here. I don’t want to subvert any amendments, but when you look at stats like over 100,000 americans get shot every year, and roughly 30,000 of them die as a result, you have to wonder what the hell is wrong with us.
That’s a LOT of people. That’s a higher casualty rate than Korea, Vietnam, both gulf wars and Afghanistan combined, AND any American deaths outside of those conflicts that are terrorist related. And that’s just what we do to ourselves. I can tell you if there was an outside entity killing/wounding that many Americans every year it would mean war. Seems like there would be some sort of middle ground.
First of all, you need to look at the numbers a little more critically. The numbers you quote are thrown around by the Brady Center and the VPC without any explanation.
If you look at the CDC stats for 2009 (the latest they have available), you will see that of those 30,000 you mention, over 18,000 are suicides.
And you can’t argue that suicides wouldn’t happen if all the guns magically disappeared. Japan proves that argument wrong.
So that leaves about 11,000 people a year who die from firearms-related violence.
The Department of Justice estimates that over 80% of all firearms-related homicides are criminal-on-criminal (think gangs shooting at each other over drugs).
That leaves around 2000 law-abiding people who are killed by a firearm each year. It’s a tragic toll, but compared to other causes it’s not even a runner-up for the CDC’s top ten lists.
But that is the real number to look at, in this context, since gun-control laws only affect law-abiding citizen.
Criminals, by definition, will ignore or circumvent any law passed to control their access to any weapons they desire.
Criminals will never leave their firearm outside a ‘gun free’ zone. They will never worry about hitting an innocent bystander, or whether they should even draw their firearm at all.
On the other hand, the Department of Justice sponsored a study a few years ago, where they ranked various groups by the percentage of violent crimes that group committed.
Concealed carry license holders, as a group, were found less likely to commit violent crimes than any other group in the study. (Surprisingly, this study also included law enforcement officers and members of the military.)
So, here we are, at the basic and fundamental flaw in all arguments supporting ‘gun control’.
If you are using crime as an excuse to pass ‘gun control’ laws, you are trying to use the one mechanism (the legal system) that criminals openly flout.
It makes absolutely no sense, and that explains why 60 years of intensive gun-control haven’t reduced crime one bit.
Ironically, it’s the roll-back of these insane gun-control laws and once again allowing normal, law abiding citizens to carry firearms for their own self defense that has actually lowered crime.
Go back to the CDC one more time. Take a look at the top 10 causes of death in the US. Violent crime isn’t there any more. It used to be.
As gun-rights advocates predicted long ago, criminals will hesitate to attack people if they think their victims might be armed.
Obviously all crime won’t go away overnight. There’s a long way to go yet.
First, large swaths of the country are still being denied their rights as a US Citizen on a daily basis.
Secondly, sometimes criminals don’t care if their victims are armed. Let’s not forget that 80% of homicides using firearms are criminals attacking other criminals, who they fully expect to be armed.
But articles like Ms. Dupuys are a huge step backwards.
If gun control advocates want to be part of the conversation, they have to start actually being ‘sensible’, not just redefining the word to mean whatever they want it to.
They will have to start using facts, and arguing with logic, not just by plucking on peoples emotions, ignorance, and fear.
Articles like this are dinosaurs. They once roamed the land in herds, but now the last of them have wandered into the tar pits.
So long. Good riddance. Time for the rational mammals to have their shot.
Spencer 60: welcome and read the Commenters Rules on the masthead. We keep a civil commenting area. A central commenters rule is Stay to the TOPIC of the article, not the writer, not other commenters.
Thanks,
archangel/dr.e
What Tina DuPuy fails to bring to this discussion is the statistically ascertained and very relevant fact that regardless of NRA, pro-gun or not, gun-control, etc., etc., wherever in the US that there is a more liberal (now there’s a contradiction in a use of the word regarding this issue) gun ownership rights to the benefit of law abiding citizens, organized crime and assault on unarmed fellow citizens is notably far less than in cities, counties and States where more constraining gun ownership and firearms possession is restrained. THIS IS A FACT from both hospital emergency room records nationally, and FBI records!
Gun control should not be about owning or possessing guns by a law abiding citizenry, but about the ‘kind’ of weaponry that should be in the hands of the citizenry. The current laws are not only adequate to this end but clearly meet the need for the citizenry to own, have, hold and possess firearms.
To give greater substance to a well armed citizenry being the bulwark for supporting national security also, it should not be lost on gun-control fanatics that Switzerland requires all households to have a firearm as part of their citizen supported national security, and has mandated such for a long period of their history, with one of the lowest incidents of crimes committed with guns in the world. Now there’s an interesting point for M. DuPuy to chew on!
All very good points Spencer, thanks for bringing them to my attention.