FREEDOM is the second essay in SILENT AMERICA. It started out as a series of comments in Rachel Lucas’s blog (which for some reason I cannot seem to link to, but it’s www.rachellucas.com) on the subject of gun ownership. Rachel mentioned she had a friend who wanted to buy a gun, and asked if anyone could help her make the case.
The honest truth is I had never given the matter any thought at all. My dad was a hunter and 2nd Lt. in the U.S. Army, so we always had guns in the house and I was taught how to respect them from the day I was born. But I had never owned a gun, and only fired a real one on two or three occasions when visiting my dad as a teen and young man.
However, I remember very, very clearly watching a store clerk pull down two Daisy Winchester BB guns — one for me and one for my brother — and as he did, I can still hear my father telling us what would happen to us if we EVER pointed it at another person, car or house. I don’t remember all the details exactly but it involved a lot more than the worst thing we thought he could do at the time; namely, take the BB guns away.
Anyway, I started thinking about it, and wrote three or four long replies in Rachel’s comments section. She thought they were good enough to combine and publish on her front page, and the response was so overwhelming that she personally created Eject! for me out of thin air — did all of the set-up and got it hosted and everything, for which I am eternally grateful and without which I would not be here.
Many long-time readers think this was the first impression I made on the web, back in late 2003. Actually, the reason this is the second essay is because about a month earlier, I had returned to LA from attanding my father’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, and I was (and remain) a huge fan of Steven Den Beste and his USS Clueless blog. Steven had posted an article on the nature of American armies versus Arab ones, and I wrote him to tell him of my experience at Arlington. He posted the letter in full, and that, with very minor modifications, became the first essay in the Silent America book: HONOR, which I will re-post here next week.
Anyway, that’s the story. Here’s FREEDOM]
When I was a little kid, I asked my dad about an image I had seen of really huge numbers of prisoners being marched to their execution in a forest clearing, guarded by perhaps five or ten men with rifles. I wanted to know why they didn’t just rush the guards? I mean, it’s one thing if they were heading to another crappy day at work camp, but these people were being led off to be killed. I mean, for God’s sake, what did they have to lose?
I was six. My dad looked at me. He had served in the latter days of WW2 in Europe as a U.S. Army intelligence officer. No parachuting onto the decks of enemy U-Boats at night to steal Enigma machines — just newly-minted, 2nd Lieutenant grunt work. He’d been to the camps though, seen some horrible things. When I asked him why they didn’t fight back or run for the woods, he said, without any arrogance or contempt or jingoism, “I don’t know Billy, I can’t figure that one out myself.” Then there was a long moment. “But I can’t imagine Americans just walking off like that, either.”
Now before the combined military might of the European Union responds with a very harshly worded letter, let me clarify something: When he said he couldn’t imagine Americans marching off to their deaths, he meant, obviously, Americans like the ones he knew. Kids who grew up hunting, kids who got a BB gun for their fifth birthday (never Christmas though — you could shoot your eye out!)
I don’t believe for an instant in any genetic nonsense about slave races or nations of pure-bred heroes. That’s a deadly trap, and the end result of such thinking is a place on the watchtower machine-gunning starving prisoners. But humans are the most successful species this planet has seen not for being ferocious or fast or strong or even intelligent, but for their malleability. Humans can, and do, adapt to anything. It is their culture that determines what is in their hearts.
Consider the case of Jews in Germany, during the 1930’s:
Here was a people who had been so tormented and prosecuted and psychologically beaten down that they came to believe the outrageous slander that they were guests in their own county. Behind their shuttered doors at night, they created cocoons of astonishing culture and beauty, a symphony of violins and cellos and poetry and literature. They were far over-represented in occupations we rightly esteem as among the most noble of our species: surgeons, musicians, teachers and scientists.
By any measure of human decency, these were the people that should have been helping to lead a ravaged Germany back to respect and prosperity. Yet they were massacred in their millions by brutes and sadists who could barely write their own names.
If it is possible to write a clearer lesson on human nature, then I cannot imagine it, nor can I imagine the amount of blood it will take to convince people unwilling to look reality in the face; that reality being that compassion, culture, law and philosophy are precious, rare and acquired habits that must be defended with force against people who understand nothing but force. The great failure and staggering tragedy of European Jews is that they could not accept that some of their neighbors were not as decent, humane and educated as they were. A culture that learned to survive by turning inward simply never was willing to face the reality of what they were up against; namely, that hoping for compassion and humanity from the likes of the Nazis was akin to reading poetry to a hurricane. This denial — and that is the only word for it — is, in the final horrible analysis, a form of unconscious arrogance, a refusal to see things for what they are. A people of astonishing internal beauty simply could not look into the face of such ugliness without turning away. And now they are dead.
And there are many intelligent, enlightened, gentle and good-hearted people today who believe exactly the same thing. If we let this moral blindness continue to gain ground, then they will get us all killed, too. And then who will put their boot on humanity’s neck for the next thousand years?
I recently visited a website that featured a picture of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, with the caption: My hero! Someone who thinks his way out of trouble! The implication, of course, is that force and violence are universally to be rejected and despised as unworthy of thinking people (or Vulcans).
Well bucko, Spock carried a phaser as well as a tricorder, and he used it when he had to. If the Star Trek future represents a hope for our species at its most reasonable and open-minded best, it would be well to remember that the Enterprise carries a hell of a lot of photon torpedoes because the cause of human decency cannot be advanced if all the decent humans lie dead.
Freedom is preserved by free people. Our 40th President wrote that “no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.”
Free people know in their heart that they are free. Back again for a moment to a culturally rich, bathed in literature and opera, non-simplisme culture like 1940s Germany: I also asked my father what would happen if the Gestapo came for us one night. He said he couldn’t stop them from taking us, but he could damn sure take a few of those bastards with them, and I decided right there that I’d do the same thing.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulags, in countless other miserable terrifying pits of murder, some people woke up to the idea that resistance is NOT futile. Which is why that old saw, which in my terribly, tragically misspent liberal youth I used to sneer at as the mark of a real idiot – “they can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers” – suddenly makes a new kind of sense to me.
That is not the statement of someone who doesn’t want to give up a snowmobile or a Beemer. That is a statement that draws a line in the sand for the government, or any other oppressor, to plainly see. You want to take this freedom away from me? COME AND GET IT.
I believe gun ownership is the truest form of freedom, and here’s why: It says you are your own person, responsible for your own actions. You are not willing to be collectively punished for the misdeeds of others. In fact, those that abuse this freedom by committing crimes are thought of and dealt with much more harshly by gun owners, as a rule, than Hollywood celebrities, precisely because a free person understands the responsibility that comes with freedom.
To the many thoughtful and intelligent Europeans and Canadians who scorn the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution as the dangerous plaything of illiterate, mindless oafs who enjoy loud noises, let me simply refer you to that great unbiased and incorruptible teacher: History.
Ask yourselves why intellectual elites so love totalitarian states where people are unarmed and dependant sheep. Look at the examples of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and Saddam, and the horrors they have inflicted at will on their own people. And when contemplating your ever-so-sophisticated foreign policy, ask yourselves what real options you are left with when facing a determined, heartless bastard like Hitler, Napoleon, Ghengis Khan or Attila.
Maybe the time for real evil like that has finally gone. I hope you are right, I really do. I don’t want to go fight those bastards; I’d rather barbeque and watch the Gators. I’m sure the Jews in 1930 Germany thought such things could never happen again, not in the heart of European culture and civilization. I’m sure every bound and beaten musician, surgeon, philosopher and painter being lined up at the side of a ditch thought exactly that.
Try and understand this about Americans like myself and others who can look such horrors in the eye: We are not going out like that. Get it? We’ll put up with handgun murders if we have to, but we are not going down that road. As a general rule, we are quiet, peaceful, decent people with better things to do than referee endless bloodbaths abroad. But it is possible to get our attention. And believe me, you have it now, and I believe the time will come when you will regret calling us cowboys and Nazis and idiots, because the day may come when you once again need the help of a free and determined people, fighting forces you ignore not from superior sophistication but from sheer moral cowardice.
Great Britain, the philosophical home and mother to this nation, has responded to a horrible shooting tragedy by essentially disarming their entire population. That is their decision alone to make, and history will record whether it was a wise one or not. But consider this:
A Marine Corps officer wondered to himself whether such an order would be carried out in the United States. He was surprised to see that most of his men would not follow an order to disarm the populace by force.
This, to my mind, is the fundamental difference between the Europeans and the U.S.: We trust the people. We fought wars and lost untold husbands and brothers and sons because of this single most basic belief: Trust the people. Trust them with freedom. Trust them to spend their own money. Trust them to do the right thing. Trust them to defend themselves. To the degree that government can help, great – but TRUST THE PEOPLE.
It would take an army — not an army of celebrities or trial lawyers, an actual SHOOTING ARMY — to forcibly disarm this nation. Who will do the dirty work? Volunteer citizen soldiers, that’s who – and the first guns they’d have to turn in would be their own.
See, we don’t have shock troops here, boyo. No Republican Guards, Special or otherwise; no Hussars, no Cossacks, no SS; we lack Praetorian elites, Napoleonic bodyguard units – any of that ideologically inculcated poison. Just kids serving their country, making some money for college. You think those people would fire on a crowd of American citizens fighting to preserve the Constitution, when they themselves have taken the same oath? Think again.
Unlike the those poor, unarmed, psychologically battered Jews, Poles, homosexuals and uncounted other souls lost in the mid 1940s, NO ONE is pulling ANY kids out of this crowd’s house at night and going home fully staffed, ready to try again tomorrow. Understand? THAT is the point.
Here is a sociological experiment that might have something to teach us:
Kick down100 doors of self-proclaimed French pacifists, grab the women and kids, and haul them away. Then try again in Texas, with 100 NRA members. Collate, or rather, have a surviving relative collate the results. Extrapolate the abductors’ rates of casualties to determine the total number of murdering swine needed. See what percentage of jackbooted thugs have a suicide wish and then determine the number of men you will need to disarm, kidnap and murder 50 million armed people.
You will need a lot of men. More than you can raise.
These trust the people freedoms are so deeply engrained in the fabric of America as to be almost hereditary, I think. I used to worry that we’d bred that out of us, and then along comes Todd Beamer and company on United Flight 93, who, first among us that day, realized they were being marched to their deaths and decided to do something about it. Not for themselves, because by taking that action they knew they were doomed. They did it for us. Not only to save the lives of those on the ground for whom their aircraft was headed, but to remind us of who we are as a people, to add to the list of ordinary Americans who can gather extraordinary courage and resolve because they have been trusted all their lives by their government and their fellow citizens.
We are a nation of unruly immigrants, self-selecting people who placed bold action above endless suffering, sold what little they had and bought passage to take a chance on a place they had never seen except in their quiet hopes, a land our 40th President, Ronald Reagan, described as “a beacon, a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.” Intellectuals have called Ronald Reagan an idiot, but that is to be expected from people incapable of being moved by anything other than the sound of their own bitter and small voices in a world too full of hope for them to grasp.
We are, and remain, the descendents of people who had had quite enough of being told what to do by inbred aristocratic fops and unelected, intellectual sadists. When Europeans call us simplisme, they show themselves incapable of recognizing the difference between intelligence, of which we are amply endowed, and intellectualism, that circle-jerk of coffee table revolution and basement politburo planning that we have never had much patience with.
To those who doubt our mental sophistication, I would remind you that our grandparents walked upon the moon. And why is it that of all we produce and all we exult, the only things that seem to have caught on in Europe are McDonald’s and Baywatch? That says much more about them than it does about us, and none of it good, I’m afraid.
We as a nation suffer an appalling number of handgun-related deaths each year — perhaps 11,000 of them. The number is not important; each is a personal tragedy and those lives can never be replaced.
If we attempt to reduce this horrible number by banning handguns, we are taking away the property of a person who has broken no laws by a government whose legitimacy is determined by a document that specifically allows that property, namely guns.
Destroy that trust by punishing the innocent, by pulling a plank from the Bill of Rights, and the contract between the government and the people falls apart. Once the Second Amendment goes, the First will soon follow, because if some unelected elite determines that the people can’t be trusted with dangerous guns then it’s just a matter of time until they decide they can’t be trusted with dangerous ideas, either. Dangerous ideas have killed many millions more people than dangerous handguns – listen to the voices from the Gulag, the death camps, and all the blood-soaked killing fields through history.
The Framers, in their wisdom, put the 2nd Amendment there to give teeth to the revolutionary, unheard-of idea that the power rests with We The People. They did not depend on good will or promises. They made sure that when push came to shove we’d be the ones doing the pushing and shoving, not the folks in Washington. And by the way, gun rights supporters are frequently mocked when they say it deters foreign invasion – after all, come on, grow up, be realistic: Who’s nuts enough to invade America? Exactly. It’s unthinkable. Good. 2nd Amendment Mission 1 accomplished.
But back to the undeniable domestic cost: When confronted with the idea of banning handguns to reduce this horrible toll, many handgun defenders are tempted to point to the numbers killed on the highways each year — perhaps four times that number — and ask why we don’t ban cars as well.
The logical response is that bans on travel – cars, airplanes, etc. – are a false analogy compared to banning guns because cars have a clear benefit while guns don’t do anything other than kill what they are aimed at.
While that is exactly true, I think it misses the point, which to me is simply this: We’d never ban car travel to avoid thousands of highway deaths. It’s clearly not worth it in both economic and personal freedom terms. We chose, reluctantly, and with many a lost loved one in mind, to keep on driving.
Here is my dry-eyed, cold-hearted, sad conclusion: I believe that the freedom, convenience and economic viability provided by the automobile is worth the 40,000 lives we lose to automotive deaths each year — a number made more horrible by the fact that perhaps 40% are related to drunk driving and therefore preventable.
By the same calculation, I accept that the freedoms entrusted to the people of the United States is worth the 11,000 lives we lose to gun violence each year.
I wish I could make both those numbers go away. I will support any reasonable campaign to make them as low as possible.
But understand this: 11,000 handgun deaths a year, over four years is very roughly 50,000 killed. In Nazi Germany, an unarmed population was unable to resist the abduction and murder of 6,000,000 people in a similar period: a number 120 times higher. Throw in the midnight murders of the Soviets, the Chinese, the various and sundry African and South American genocides and purges and political assassinations and that number grows to many hundreds, if not several thousand times more killings in unarmed populations.
Visualize this to fully appreciate the point. Imagine the Superbowl. Every player on the field is a handgun victim. All the people in the stands are the victims who were unable to resist with handguns. Those are historical facts.
I, myself, am willing to pay that price as a society – knowing full well that I or a loved one may be part of that terrible invoice. I wish it was lower. Obviously, I wish it didn’t exist at all. But any rational look into the world shows us places where the numbers of innocents murdered by their own governments in unarmed nations are far, far higher.
Of course, many societies have far lower numbers. Japan is a fine example. I’m sure if the United States had 2000 years of a culture whose prize assets are conformity and submission then our numbers would be a lot lower. Alas, we are not that society. Thank God, we are not that society.
It is abundantly clear that the rate of handgun murders in the United States is not uniform. Very large murder rates can be observed in small, exceedingly violent populations of every race in this country, and these rates seem to be more related to issues of income, education and living conditions. Certainly guns are freely available in areas where our murder rates are appallingly high. They are also found in very large numbers in communities where handgun crime is virtually nonexistent.
Doesn’t that tell us that there something deeper at work here? Could it be, perhaps, that the problem is not with the number of guns in this country but rather in the hearts of those who we allow to wield them, repeatedly? Could it really be as simple as apprehending, and punishing, those that would do harm to innocents and to civilization? Rather than banning guns, should we not attack the moral rot that infests these small, violent populations of every color who put such horrible numbers at our feet?
Assume for a moment you could vaporize every gun on the planet. Would crime go away? Or would ruthless, physically strong gangs of young men be essentially able to roam free and predate at will?
The history of civilization shows time and time again how decent, sophisticated city dwellers amass wealth through cooperation and the division of labor – only to be victimized by ruthless gangs of raping, looting cutthroats who couldn’t make a fruit basket, sweeping down on them, murdering them and carting away the loot, to return a few years later, forever, ad infinitum. Vikings, Mongols, desperadoes of every stripe – they are a cancer on humanity but there they are and there they have always been.
If civilization is worth having (and I believe it is) then it has to be defended, because the restraining virtues of justice, compassion and respect for laws are products of that civilizing force and completely unknown to those who would do it harm.
Therefore, since I believe in this civilization, in its laws, science, art and medicine, I believe we must be prepared to defend it against what I feel no embarrassment for calling the Forces of Darkness. Those forces could be raiders on horseback, jackbooted Nazi murderers, faceless KGB torturers or some kid blowing away a shopkeeper.
For the gun-ban argument to be convincing, you’d have to show me a time before shopkeepers were blown away, hacked away, pelted away or whatever the case may be. You would have to show me a time in history before the invention of the firearm, when crime and raiding and looting did not exist, when murders and rapes did not exist. We may lose 11,000 people to handguns a year. How many would we lose without any handguns, if murderers and rapists roamed free of fear, ignoring reprisal from citizens or police? I don’t know. You don’t know either. Maybe it’s a lot fewer people, and maybe, in a world where strength and ruthlessness trump all, it would be a far higher one.
You may argue that only the police should be allowed to carry guns. Consider this carefully. Do we really want to create an unelected subculture that views itself as so elite and virtuous as to be the only ones worthy of such power, trust and authority? Have we not clearly seen the type of people drawn to such exclusive positions of authority, and the attitudes and arrogance it promotes?
Furthermore, I can’t see any moral distinction between a policeman and a law-abiding citizen. Policemen are drawn from the ranks of law-abiding citizens. They are not bred in hydroponics tanks. They are expected to show restraint and use their weapon as a last resort. Millions upon millions of citizens, a crowd more vast than entire armies of police, do exactly this every day.
If all of these horrors had sprung up as a result of the invention of the handgun I’d be right there beside those calling for their destruction.
But clearly, this is not the case. In our cowboy past we used to say that “God created Man, but Sam Colt made them equal.” This is simple enough to understand. It means that a villager, let’s say a schoolteacher, can defeat a human predator who may have spent his entire life practicing the art of war. Firearms are what tipped the balance toward civilization by eliminating a lifetime spent studying swordplay or spear play or pointed-stick play. The bad guys have always used weapons and they always will. The simple truth about guns is that they are damn effective and even easier to operate. They level the playing field to the point where a woman has a chance against a gang of thugs or a police officer can control a brawl.
I don’t see how vaporizing all the guns in the world would remove crime or violence – history shows these have always been with us and show no signs of responding favorably to well-reasoned arguments or harsh language. I wish it were not true. I wish the IRS did not exist either, but there it is.
Criminals, and criminal regimes ranging from The Brow-Ridged Hairy People That Live Among the Distant Mountains all the way through history to the Nazis and the Soviets, have and will conspire to take by force what they cannot produce on their own. These people must be stopped. The genius of the 2nd Amendment is that it realizes that these people could be anybody – including the U.S. Army. That is why this power, like the other powers, is vested in the people. Nowhere else in the world is this the case. You can make a solid argument that the United States is, by almost any measure, the most prosperous, successful nation in history. I’m not claiming this is because every American sleeps with a gun under the pillow – the vast majority do not. I do claim it is the result of a document that puts faith and trust in the people – trusts them with government, with freedom, and with the means of self-defense. You cannot remove that lynchpin of trust without collapsing the entire structure. Many observers of America never fully understand what we believe in our bones, namely, that the government doesn’t tell us what we can do – WE tell THOSE bastards just how far they can go.
Of course, all of this is completely whimsical, because, like nuclear weapons, guns are HERE and they are not going to go away. You cannot just vaporize them. Honest people might be compelled to turn in their weapons; criminals clearly will not. So what do you propose? Forget the moral high ground of gun ownership. Again a simple truth, often maligned but demonstrably dead-on accurate: When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.
The American Revolution surely is unique in the sense that the ringleaders – Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, etc – were men of property, wealth and prestige; in other words, men with something to lose. Compare this to any other revolution in history, where the ringleaders were outsiders; plotters staring in the windows of prosperity, powerless. The Russian Revolution, French Revolution, etc – these were joined by desperate people fighting mind-numbing poverty and severe political repression.
And yet the Founding Fathers were men who were as well-off as any men on earth at the time, and furthermore, any of them could have been (and were) political leaders under His Majesty’s government. The average colonial farmer likewise led a life far more comfortable than those of his cousins in Europe, to say nothing of Asia or Africa.
For all practical intents and purposes, these people had absolutely nothing to gain, and everything in the world to lose, by taking on the greatest military force the world had ever known. Why would they do this? What possible motivation could, well-off, comfortable people have? Militarily, they seemed certain to lose, and they knew before they started – and Patrick Henry made the point crystal clear – that they would be hanged as common criminals if they failed.
Of course, the answer is, they did it to be free. And they did it to make the rest of their nation – the poor, the disenfranchised – free as well. And it is clear as crystal from their collective writings that they took that risk to make Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore and the rest of us in their unseen posterity free, too. They could look down the dim, moonlit riverbanks of the future and see a society worthy of their sacrifice and determination. They knew that God, (or for me, chance perhaps) had put them together in a time and place where bold, courageous action followed by much suffering, doubt, blood and fear could, perhaps, unleash in mankind an energy source the likes of which they could not imagine.
So for me, a child of that bet – that guess, that commitment, that roll of the dice – for ME, I owe them the defense of that freedom, and I will do my poor mite to pass it on as best I can. These men pledged to each other their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor. They pledged that to ME. I owe them. I do not have the right to take away someone else’s freedom and property – it is offensive to me to even contemplate it. Of course, if someone breaks the freedom/responsibility covenant by committing a crime, then all bets are off. To that extent, I view handgun murderers not just as criminals but as traitors as well.
I hate seeing our kids get shot on the street, I hate it, I hate it. But that is the cost of freedom. People get horribly killed on Spring Break road trips to Florida at age 18. They’re driving drunk. We could prevent them from going. We would save lives. Enron and MCI steal like the worst characters from Dickens, taking people’s Christmas dinners so they can have gold plated faucets. We could regulate more, make things harder for the millions of honest businesses that build and trade honorably each day. The day may come when someone flies a Cessna into a stadium. We can ban the airplanes. Ditto for pleasure boats. We can ban and confiscate and regulate to our hearts content, and we will undoubtedly save many, many innocent lives by doing so. All for the price of a little freedom.
I believe we should punish the perpetrators. I will not agree to restrict the freedoms of the vast numbers of people who abide by the concomitant responsibility and live lives of honesty and decency.
And there is more than the physical restriction of freedoms: There is the slow erosion of self-reliance, self-confidence and self-determination among a nation. The more your government restricts your options, the more you psychologically look to government to keep you safe, fed, clothed, housed and sustained.
There is a word for people who are fed, clothed, housed and sustained fully by others, and that word is SLAVES.
If Congress were occupied by angels and Michael sat in a throne of glory in the Oval Office, I would listen to what they said for my own greater good. But no government is made of angels, not even the Canadian government in all its decency and compassion. So who determines how much freedom we trade for how much security? People do. People are not unknown to place their own interests above those of others. There is even a vanishing remote chance that Jean Cretien has at some point perhaps put personal interest above those of his constituents.
The real genius of the Founding Fathers was that these great and good men had the foresight and the courage to look into their own darker motives, and construct a system that prevents the accumulation of power.
The Constitution they created could only be torn up by force of arms. And that is why the Founders left that power in the hands of the people, who together can never be cowed by relatively small numbers of thugs holding the only guns.
As PJ O’Rourke points out, the U.S. Constitution is less than a quarter the length of the owner’s manual for a 1998 Toyota Camry, and yet it has managed to keep 300 million of the world’s most unruly, passionate people safe, prosperous and free. Smarter people than me may disagree with that document – I’m for not touching a comma.
So as a proud son of those brave men, I’ll take freedom – all of it – and because I accept the benefits of those freedoms, I’ll solemnly take the responsibilities as well. I may someday lose a child on a trip to Spring Break, but I’ll never lock them in the basement to keep them safe. And I’ll accept the fact that living in Los Angeles puts me at risk for being shot to death because I feel the freedom is worth it. I breathe that freedom every day, and hey, we all gotta go sometime. I’ll continue to fly experimental airplanes because I am careful, meticulous, precise and responsible, and yet the day may come when I am out of altitude, out of airspeed and out of ideas all at the same time. Oh well. I have seen and done things up there that you cannot imagine and I cannot describe. Freedom.
I respect and admire Canada. Although we have chosen certain diverging paths since the days of the Revolution, we have been, and always will be, the best of friends despite our differences. Canada is unquestionably as decent, modest and good a society as exists on Earth today. And yet while Canadians frequently point out that they are free of our vices, I perceive that they are free of our greatness as well. You can’t have it both ways.
Me, personally, I’ll take the spirit, ingenuity and passion that can plant the American flag on the moon over pre-paid health care. I can buy health care. Thirty three years after watching the event as a ten year old boy, I’m still trying to go to the moon. (Some of us in the Mojave desert may still have few tricks up our sleeve on this one. We’re still free to build airplanes and spacecraft from our garages and fly the goddamn things. Try and keep up with a nation that builds working spacecraft in the garage. As a hobby. Out of pocket. For FUN.)
And everyone who has taken America’s disdain for intellectualism as a lack of intelligence has woken up looking at our dust trail as we speed ever faster beyond them. We’re not just a smart country – we’re THE smart country. Behold the list of inventions and Nobel Prize winning scientists. Einstein was an American. Of course he emigrated here — we all did. Germany threw him away – he’s ours now, by his choice, not ours. Ditto Von Braun and numerous others, not to mention the legion of homegrown geniuses like the Wright Brothers and Robert Goddard, just to draw two names from the narrow field I know best. Staggeringly brilliant men and women, the best, most active minds on the planet pulling for the same team.
Canada is free of many of the foreign policy disasters and failures of vision that the United States has been correctly charged with, but they are free too of the satisfaction and pride of being history’s singular bulwark of freedom and prosperity, and the eternal, unintimidated scourge of tyrants and murderers from the Barbary pirates, through the armed might of the 20th Century’s parade of totalitarians and right up to Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and the criminal lunatics that run North Korea.
Our failures and disgraces cruelly remind us that we, like every other government, are composed of fallible men and women with no divine ability to read the future or foresee all outcomes. But these failures are failures of action, action borne of confidence and a belief in our way of life, and come all the more painful for their contrast to the everyday standards to which we hold ourselves as a people and a nation. For it is an undeniable fact that no great nation in history has held a shadow of our measure of power, and yet exercised it with such restraint, nor does any time in the bloody history of warfare reflect a people so magnanimous in victory against enemies sworn to our murder and destruction. From our first hour, we have been, and remain, the beacon of hope and freedom for a world desperate and longing for such an example, and we can measure our success in building such a place by the numbers of those who are literally dying in an attempt to come and be part of it.
So take your pick: Freedom or security? Greatness or goodness? Passion or decency?
Our respective ancestors made their choice and here we are. I respect anyone’s right to chose differently. I only speak up to defend the choice we Americans made as a deeply spiritual one, borne of reflection and danger and a spectacular triumph against all odds. I cannot stand idly by to hear people denounce our freedoms as the dimwitted macho posturing of a mob of illiterate uncultured idiots who are so vulgar and uncouth as to still believe in Hollywood myths manufactured for our simple complacent unsophisticated nature.
From the Revolution until today, the choice for full freedom with all its accompanying excesses and failures is a profoundly well-reasoned, moral and ethical choice, and the result has been national and personal success unparalleled in the history of this world.
I am deeply proud to be a member of such a magnificent group of people. I hope to God I can give back as much as I owe.
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47 Comments
1. Bill Whittle’s “Freedom” essay at Traction Control:[...] Freedom [...]
Oct 24, 2009 - 2:16 pm 2. USCitizen:Profoundly eloquent. I’m embarrassed to say that today was the first time I have read this.
Thank you for posting this again.
Oct 24, 2009 - 3:02 pm 3. Maggie:Well said!
“You are not willing to be collectively punished for the misdeeds of others.” You’ve got that right. On a more local level, I have always thought it horribly wrong for school teachers to punish an entire class because one unknown kid did something wrong and hasn’t confessed. Sets a very bad precedent.
Oct 24, 2009 - 4:29 pm 4. sunni morgan:I have felt this for years. How do we wake. the yuppies of this world and those so busy with just livin surviing everyday to wake up and see what is happenin to our great nation.
Oct 24, 2009 - 6:02 pm 5. Maggie:Obama’s National Security Force idea is alarming:
Oct 24, 2009 - 6:48 pm 6. waltj:“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” – Barack Obama
I have some basis for a comparison between an armed society (ours) and an unarmed one (the place I currently live). My current overseas home is a place where private firearms ownership is illegal for the vast majority of the population. Does that stop crime? Of course not. As Bill noted, people still get bashed and knifed and strong-armed during robberies, domestic disputes, and communal strife.
It doesn’t even prevent gun crime. Criminals still find ways to get guns, either from overseas, stolen from military or police armories or evidence lockers, or from their own workbenches (homemade firearms were common during this country’s war for independence in the late 1940s and some of the skills were passed on). So the only ones with guns around here are the cops and the crooks. Fortunately, most common criminals here don’t carry. Unfortunately, some do, and I’m not overly fond of having to rely on the erratically-trained police for my safety.
Most privately-owned guns here were confiscated following the conclusion of the war of independence. Although the local elites who took over trusted their countrymen to fight against the hated European colonial masters, they didn’t trust them enough to let them keep their guns. This helped pave the way for successive dictatorships that weren’t overthrown until the late-1990s (although lack of a 2nd Amendment equivalent was hardly the only reason; local culture, which defers to authority in a way most Americans would find difficult to imagine, and Obama could only envy, was another major contributing factor).
Oct 25, 2009 - 1:40 am 7. RigelDog:Just fantastic…thank you.
Oct 25, 2009 - 7:50 am 8. RWE:Since 9/11, my husband and I have had the surreal conversations about what we would/will do if the gestapo/terrorist moment DOES come. We give to some overseas charities and try not to despair that, as you say, after the village gets a well, a harvest, and a few herd animals, a bunch of guys hanging off a jeep carrying AK’s won’t simply descend on the town and carry it all off again. Possibly in the name of “the people,” yet.
But one line especially resonates: you consider those who commit crimes with handguns not only criminals, but traitors. Just so! The US is the shiznet because we are the most dynamic nation within the rule of law…because we are free to be dynamic and because we agree to be bound by law…because we began with a government of the people that does not repress our freedoms…because we choose to govern ourselves by trusting ourselves… a foundational trust even unto the point of the individual’s right to possess and use firearms. To abuse that trust is undermine the entire political and social compact; it is traitorous.
“Of course, many societies have far lower numbers. Japan is a fine example.”
And do you know what happens when you take some Japanese citizens and move them from neraly gun-free Japan to the gun-ridden USA? What does that do to their murder rate?
It goes down.
Let me relate here what occurred to a friend of my brother’s a few years back, a guy named Ben.
Climbing into bed with his pregnant wife one night, Ben heard a noise outside. Looking out the window he saw the doors to his van were open. Grabbing his single shot .22 rifle he ran outside to stop the burglary.
Inside the van was a man who was ripping the radio out. Ben yelled “Stop!” and in response the guy turned around and emptied a 9MM handgun at Ben, missing with all 8 rounds. The criminal then grabbed a .357 Magnum – both guns had been stolen from homes in the neighborhood.
Ben returned fire with his.single.22 round, hitting the criminal in the chest. The gun battle was over but soon the real fight began.
The criminal – who had a record of 17 prior felony convictions – was saved by virtue of $100K of free medical care provided by the taxpayers. The multiple-felon then sued Ben for having the unmitigated gaul to shoot back and actually hit him.
Ben lost his house as a result of the settlement. He did not have the money to pay what the criminal demanded but they graciously agreed to an amount equal to the equity in his house.
Ben told the judge that he had sold the .22 rifle used to defend his now-lost property – and that he had bought a 30 Ought 6 rifle. The judge said he understood completely.
Guns don’t kill people – Leftists do.
And finally in reference to Maggie #5:
They will be mere thugs with guns. We can take’em. We always do.
Oct 25, 2009 - 12:23 pm 9. Rob Ward:So Japan and Europe have lower murder/crime rates because………..
Look I actually don’t have a problem with your right to obtain firearms. Just don’t pretend that it makes your country safer.
Freedom can be a relative term and not an absolute. What is more important, the right to bear arms or the right to smoke pot? Depending on where you live the answer will be different.
Of all the nations that I have travelled to I would have to say that Holland has the greatest amount of freedom. China the least.
Oct 25, 2009 - 4:13 pm 10. waltj:“…I would have to say that Holland has the greatest amount of freedom…”
Unless you happen to be a filmmaker who dares to “insult” Islam. Relative, indeed. Plenty of freedom for Theo van Gogh’s murderer to roam the streets looking for his victim. For Theo, not so much. Oh, sure, his killer is in jail. For how long? Life sentences usually mean, what, 10, 15 years in Europe. 25 at most. Enough time to build another life. And Theo will still be dead.
Oct 25, 2009 - 5:51 pm 11. Stephen J.:Being, somewhat unusually, a Canadian myself whose opinion of American culture and policy has actually gone *up* over the past six or seven years (the almost exact correlation between this time and my life as a husband and father probably not coincidental), rereading this essay has some bittersweet overtones now. I still love my own country, but I have come to see some of its flaws too, and having them pointed out (accurately) is never fun.
If I were to make one counterpoint observation, I would comment that much as all of the above is true, there is a level on which the principles of freedom have to meet the realities of practice for gun-ownership advocates as well, which for me can be summed up simply in two words: Technology Advances.
Without disagreeing with the right of a people to maintain their own self-defense, it does bear thinking on sometimes to realize that when the 2nd Amendment was written, firearms were expensive, handmade, neither terribly accurate nor reliable on an individual basis, and required trained preparation to be used and reloaded. The notion of weapons light enough for a six-year-old to lift and fire, easy enough to prepare and reliable enough that they could be left accidentally loaded for weeks or months and still fire, cheap enough for children to buy or common enough to be stolen virtually anywhere without much risk, and deadly enough that the right kind of ammunition could pierce armour or mushroom inside the body, could never have occurred to the Founders.
I do not say that had it occurred the 2nd Amendment might never have been written; but I do say that, without getting into arguing a uselessly “living” Constitution, I think — given the ever-accelerating power and distribution of firearms — there’s room to argue for practical laws that restrict and regulate firearm availability without forbidding it altogether. But any attempt to enact such laws is usually met with such politicized protest that compromise becomes impossible — as an analogy, consider what our driving laws would be like if every road-safety regulation ever passed had to overcome the same degree of civic recalcitrance and protest, and what our rate of fatal accidents might well be did such regulations not exist.
The cold, sad calculation may be that the freedoms protected by private ownership of firearms may be worth the lives that easy access to firearms inevitably costs. But it may be worth asking if, perhaps, a cold sad calculation is the best way to weigh human lives in the balance, and that perhaps we should be less cavalier about the price of our freedom when others are more likely to pay that price than we are.
Oct 26, 2009 - 7:09 am 12. Uncle Lar:Couple of points:
Oct 26, 2009 - 7:35 am 13. Bill Byrd:In Japan where private ownership of firearms is unheard of it is expected that the police will come by on a regular basis and search your home for contraband, no warrant required. Their suicide rate is also roughly twice that of the US, they just find other means than guns to do the deed.
In 18th century America the flintlock was state of the art for personal firearms. While muskets were not terribly accurate, rifled longarms were, though both were slow to reload. Similarly, pistols were common and small enough for a child to hold and shoot. Not to mention that cannon were readily available to any citizen who could afford them. Wealthier folk would purchase them for defense of their town while ship owners equipped their craft with several for defense.
The argument that the founders never anticipated the advances in firearms holds about as much weight as the same for denying free speech to forms of electronic media as that had not been invented either.
Bravo on your essay. But I would take exception to your comparison to auto deaths where you note that automobiles have value and handguns can only kill. I refer you to information from “Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Fall 1995″ and quoted by Guy Smith, http://www.gunfacts.info, that people in the US used guns to defend themselves 2.5 million times a year. On these occassions display of the weapon or a warning shot was all that was needed 92% of the time. Even if this figure was inflated a 100 times gun ownership would confer significant value and a positive risk benefit ratio.
Oct 26, 2009 - 8:39 am 14. Robert Ries:Fantastic, but you did get one part very wrong:
“The logical response is that bans on travel – cars, airplanes, etc. – are a false analogy compared to banning guns because cars have a clear benefit while guns don’t do anything other than kill what they are aimed at.
While that is exactly true, I think it misses the point…”
Guns have many more uses than killing. And even when applied to that purpose, they seem ill-suited for the task, killing only11-12,000 times per year out of many tens or hundreds of thousands of attempts. They are also used for personal defense between 750K and 2.5 million times per year, so I’d say the pure math of the situation indicates that guns are a safety tool. Can they be misused? Certainly. So can a salad fork. Freedom. ‘Nuff said.
Oct 26, 2009 - 11:07 am 15. Brother J:Bill
As one of your readers who did first read this over at Rachel’s, let me say it seems as fresh today as it did then. I’m glad you reposted.
Now, a request; how about putting “Magic” back up. I’ve linked to it a couple of times when I’ve needed an illustration of how lies can be told by selectively telling the truth.
Oct 26, 2009 - 11:26 am 16. Jason Bradley:Wow. Great post. It amazing to me that anybody can read this and then still attempt to argue, lol… did they even read it all?
I’m with you & I too pledge my Life, don’t have a Fortune (yet, but when I get it- it’s pledged too) and my sacred Honor to perserve our Freedom.
Great job.
Jason
Oct 26, 2009 - 1:38 pm 17. RWE:ExcellenceInAmerica.com
Stephen J #11:
What utter nonsense! The Founders also did not anticipate the development of advanced medical techniques to aid gunshot victims, nor ambulances and medivac helicopters, nor bulletproof vests, nor gun locks. What they did do was believe that the nation that they were founding would be one of free adults, not of children who might pick up a Glock and shoot the kid next door. And part of adulthood is protecting and educating the kids.
Guns might have been comparatively expensive and rare in colonial America but you can bet that they were a darn sight more common than in the Kingdoms of Britain, France, Russia, and the various fiefdoms that made up Germany.
The argument that the 2nd Amendment should not apply because the guns of today are too deadly brings to mind the Islamic fundamentalists that fret over whether women can drive cars given that in the Koran they are forbidden to drive camels.
Oct 26, 2009 - 4:26 pm 18. Bard:Is it just me, or were those paragraphs about Canada – and possibly a couple of other sections – not present in this essay’s last iteration? They are awesome additions, if they weren’t there to begin with, but you might want to clarify that this isn’t strictly the original.
Oct 26, 2009 - 6:04 pm 19. Bard:Yup, my copy of Silent America bears me out here.
PS: Trinity next! Trinity next!
Oct 26, 2009 - 6:08 pm 20. navtechie:POWER!
Freedom is one of my favorites, but POWER is an absolute gem.
Oct 27, 2009 - 8:25 am 21. Chris L:One of my favorite Heinlein quotes is “An armed society is a polite society”. Of course that idea only works if the society at large accepts gun ownership as a natural state of being and right, not as a heavily regulated privilege.
Oct 27, 2009 - 8:52 am 22. Rachel Lucas:I still can’t believe how much credit you give me but I think maybe I should just roll around in it wantonly anyway. I remember calling you “Mr. Whittle” in my first email to you, asking if I could put your comments on the front page. Heh.
I’m trying now to find the archived version of that post. When/if I do, I’ll send it to you or post it in comments here. God, when was that? 2002 or 2003? At the latest?
It was good to re-read this Freedom essay now. More than ever. I’ve spent almost 9 months now in the UK and I truly am profoundly disturbed by the general societal “psyche” over here about self-defense and basic inalienable human rights. I love the Brits, many of them are outstanding individuals, but overall, something is horribly wrong here.
Oct 27, 2009 - 3:43 pm 23. Rachel Lucas:(P.S. The 403 error is gone now. It was an overzealous htaccess file. Not that you need to link to me, and in fact you shouldn’t bother, as there is nothing much there, and the original post of which you speak is definitely not there but is somewhere on a thumbdrive in my home office.)
Oct 27, 2009 - 3:48 pm 24. richb313:Firearms were very common in Pre-Revolutionary times as well as after. While it might be true that most city dwellers did not see the need to own a firearm it was required if you lived outside the large cities. Militias were first formed for common defense against the warring Indian Tribes, French Invaders, and bands of criminals. Young people were taught at an early age how to load and fire a rifle or musket. Rifles were primarily used for hunting because of the accuracy and range was better. Muskets were primarily military weapons due to faster re-load times and accuracy was not as important because military tactics used volley fire.
The 2nd Amendment was written because in Europe and England only people of a certain class were ever allowed weapons with the primary exception being a time when it was English Law that every male citizen be proficient with the longbow. Swords, Pikes, and eventually firearms had always been outlawed except to titled persons. The founders did not want to repeat the European or English model because it led to TYRANNY.
The only reason Bill mentioned Automobile deaths is becuase we are willing to accept these deaths and as far as guns having no positive purpose defending your life, your families life, or a strangers life is not a positive purpose? Anything can be perverted. A car can be a weapon. A vase can be a weapon. A brick can be a weapon. A stone can be a weapon. All of these items have been used as weapons to commit murder many times.
To quote one of my favorite authors, Robert Heinlein, “An armed society is a polite society.”
Oct 28, 2009 - 4:37 am 25. O Bloody Hell:“Among other things, being disarmed causes you to be despised.”
Oct 28, 2009 - 6:41 pm 26. O Bloody Hell:– Machiavelli -
> Of all the nations that I have travelled to I would have to say that Holland has the greatest amount of freedom. China the least.
Rob:
Ask Theo Van Gogh if the rules against owning firearms protected him.
Ask Pim Fortuyn if the rules against owning firearms protected him.
And, while you’re at it, ask Ayaan Hirsi Ali is she felt “free” in the Netherlands, and if she’s more free in the Americas than she was there…
As far as not having handguns reducing “violence”, I think you need to look A LOT closer at actual statistics on violent crime — not just murder, but all crimes — in the UK, for example — per capita violent crimes of ALL TYPES except murder are notably higher there than in the USA… Further — in the USA, most(ca. 80%) burglaries occur when the owner is NOT at home (the thief might get his ass blown off), while in the UK, it’s almost the reverse — ca. 80% of all burglaries occur when the owner IS at home (you can strong-arm the helpless owner into telling you where the valuables are, rather than “hoping” to find them).
Crimes are also more specifically directed against lone women and the elderly, as they are less able to resist the depredations of tough young thugs and hooligans. Think Alex and his Droogs…
As far as the USA stats goes, for murder it’s even better if you exclude certain high-risk groups from the violent crime stats — the chances of getting murdered as a white male homeowner are far, far lower than those for a latino gang banger… but the “per capita” stats hide this fact. The murder stat for a “white male homeowner” are about the same in the USA as they are in Europe.
In short, stop listening to the libtard anti-gun nuts for stats. They are going to tell you exactly what supports their positions, and nothing more — and no, that doesn’t mean you trust the NRA, either — The real fact of the matter is that you go to the NRA to get your ANTI-gun stats, and to the DOJ website to get your PRO-gun stats. Assuming they bias, the bias will be towards the center, where the answer almost certainly lies.
Most German tourists coming to America for the first time are amazed at how little one actually encounters a gun, having gotten the impression that the place is like something out of the Wild West from their leftist media.
P.S.
Subtle fact #1 – The value of a pro-gun culture: An organization called Jews for the Retention of Firearm Ownership (iirc) have reviewed Nazi concentration camp films made towards the end of the war. In at least some cases, it is clear that the guards who were directing the Jews to their deaths were threatening them with unloaded weapons. Ammunition was in such short supply that said guards were not provided ammo. Were the Jews in question even vaguely familiar with guns, they might have been able to recognize this, rush the guards whom they greatly outnumbered, and potentially escape to freedom.
Subtle fact #2 – While Steven Spielberg could not bear to bring himself to acknowledge it, when Oscar Schindler fled the advancing allies, leaving the Jews behind in his factories, he armed them, so that they could not be murdered, captured, or otherwise returned to their subjugation without a fighting chance.
And, as a final point, let’s go to the grand master of political power:
“Among other things, being disarmed causes you to be despised.”
Oct 28, 2009 - 7:22 pm 27. O Bloody Hell:– Machiavelli -
P.S. RAFTS, guys. RAFTS.
Oct 28, 2009 - 7:27 pm 28. John:Bill,
Have read most of the books listed and will read the rest. May I recommend, “Guns, Germs and Steel”, to understand the truth about the domination of the new world by the old. This is a great read and you’ll find yourself saying, “Hmm, I never thought of that.
Since we are both incapable of staying away from 800 page tomes, I must insist that you read “Freedom From Fear” by David M. Kennedy. After reading this you will have a better understanding of the years 1929-1945 and how it relates to today and more than that, what I think is a dispassionate analysis of the Roosevelt years. After reading this shortly before the election, a chill ran up my spine when I heard Obama channeling Roosevelt.
The passage that I have been quoting to people since January regards Franklin and Eleanor having dinner and he says to the effect, “I don’t understand why business won’t invest and get the economy going”, and she says,” because they are afraid of you, they don’t know what you are going to do”. A small sentence in a big book that rushed off the page never to be forgotten. Always loved Eleanor.
Those who don’t read history…….
I must also tell you that my father was a drill sergeant in WWII and he told me of his many fellow soldiers who personally told him that they wept in the holds of those ships when Japan surrendered. If you could have seen his face when he said the word “wept”.
Keep up the good work.
John Denison
Oct 29, 2009 - 12:41 pm 29. Ashland Stan:Your essay is brilliant, deeply touching and should be required reading.
I am a refugee from Holland, got out as an infant in 1939…..Aunts, uncles, cousins dragged
out of medical school and murdered.
Our guns are totally about our liberty, and you understand this.
I’m a former USNavy Lt. Commander. My wife and I were professionally trained in using our
Glock 19s and we WILL use them…..my poor aunt and uncle had no means of protection when
the SS dragged them out of their apartment in Amsterdam.
Please count me as a most loyal and grateful supporter and friend.
Oct 30, 2009 - 6:33 am 30. Chris McVey:Just wanted to let you know that your writings have been an inspiration to me for many years. So much so that I have been part of a group forming a team to attempt to win the Lunar X-Prize.
Odds are we will fail, but its worth failing in the attempt.
Thank you for words that inspired me to reach for the moon.
Oct 30, 2009 - 8:31 am 31. Nonner:Rob, try defending against an assailant with a bag of weed. See how far it gets you.
The right to self defense is more important than the right to self intoxication. End of story.
Oct 31, 2009 - 1:39 am 32. RL:Mr. Whittle,
Thanks for reposting this excellent essay – despite being a fan for years, I’ve never had the chance to read it. I hope you won’t mind if I quibble over your characterization of Canada – we are in fact a nation with one firearm for every three citizens, making us second only to the United States in ownership (1:2).
The same Americans your father knew – who grew up hunting and got BB guns as kids – are the Canadians I know now. We haven’t been blessed with such a history and constitution as yours, but I like to think some of us have learned from our good neighbours to the south – and we’re working to be better. Half the country never voted for Chretien; I certainly didn’t.
Again, I enjoyed your essay tremendously! I just think our two countries have a lot more in common with eachother than any member of the EU…
Nov 2, 2009 - 1:35 am 33. RAH:I would like to quote the best essay on the gun as civilization I ever read and I will paste it here with attribution.
Why the gun is civilization http://munchkinwrangler.blogspot.com/2007/03/why-gun-is-civilization.html
Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.
In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat–it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.
Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weightlifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and easily employable.
When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation…and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act
Nov 2, 2009 - 3:18 am 34. pst314:Bill, there really should be an amazon.com link in the sidebar for Silent America.
Nov 2, 2009 - 7:25 am 35. Stephen J.:“The Founders also did not anticipate the development of advanced medical techniques to aid gunshot victims, nor ambulances and medivac helicopters, nor bulletproof vests, nor gun locks. What they did do was believe that the nation that they were founding would be one of free adults, not of children who might pick up a Glock and shoot the kid next door. And part of adulthood is protecting and educating the kids.”
All very good points, but increased capacity to deal with accidental injury does not change the fact it’s better not to suffer that injury in the first place, nor does it change the fact that such accidental injury is now easier to inflict and more common than ever before.
I never argued that the 2nd Amendment is outmoded because the equations of firearm lethality have changed from what they were in the 18th century; all I suggested is that since those equations *have* changed (and I do not think anyone can seriously claim they have not), it might behoove some 2nd-Amendment defenders to acknowledge that there is room for some regulation in the name of safety.
And of course, as a matter of fact most firearm owners *do* acknowledge some restrictions as appropriate — age limits on purchase, licensing, waiting periods, no private ownership of fully-automatic weapons, strong restrictions on concealed-carry, etc. The only people I’m thinking of are those zealots who complain that *any* attempts to further regulate such ownership, or even the regulations already in place in most states, constitute an unacceptable violation of rights, the ones who make the reasonable firearms-owners look bad and who polarize the issue by directing hostility against people who only want what they see as an overall safer environment.
“The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weightlifter.”
This is true, but it overlooks a key reality — that the weaker defender has to be *ready and willing* to use the gun. Any police department can cite all too many cases of an armed victim thinking they could simply brandish a weapon and scare off an attacker, only to wind up disarmed and often injured or dead if the attacker turns out to be quicker, or crazier, or more ruthless or desperate.
There’s also the fact that among untrained or criminal users, escalation is seldom rational. In theory, equally armed sides who know each other equally armed should mutually deter each other and prevent violence. In practice, all too often, equally armed sides simply aggravate the damage they do to each other, and thanks to being armed run a great risk of injuring or killing bystanders as well, because they are not behaving rationally or responsibly in the first place.
None of the points I raise means the 2nd Amendment should be overturned. But if the fundamental argument is that the individual freedom which the Amendment protects is worth the cost in lives and injuries it necessarily entails, then I think it is better to be honest about one’s responsibility to do whatever can be done to mitigate that cost, and to be fair to people who have personally paid the cost for that freedom and are understandably reluctant to see others pay yet more of it.
It’s telling that the people who are the best example of responsible firearm ownership are the people whose entire lives and vocations make up training in their use: rural farmers, professional hunters, cops, soldiers, etc. — the people whom the Founders assumed would always constitute the majority of citizens in their imaginable future. Perhaps the problem is not the forwards march of technology but the backwards march of responsibility.
Nov 2, 2009 - 10:04 am 36. Robert Pilcher:I’m an ex-pat Englishman living in Tennessee. I’ve lived in the States for about three years. I enjoy living here and have many American friends. While I agree with much of this heart-felt essay, some of its contents I find lacking in introspective analysis and a small portion showing a fervor too close to nationalism to be considered objective.
So many points I’d like to address, but I’ll follow suit with the previous points.
US Vs UK Gun Laws
Even today, the US has enormous areas of low population density, which by their very nature are extremely difficult to police. Response times of law enforcement are compromised well beyond what is acceptable to feel a sense of adequate protection. That frontier mentality is alive and well and quite prudent for many living in remote areas. Many of the populace who enjoy expediency of localised police still feel the need to have firearms. America is a flawed by high gun crime but gun ownership by many is prudent for one’s last bastion of defense.
If all firearms were controlled to an extent mirroring the UK laws, then, assuming sufficient guns were taken out of circulation then you would still have the problem of policing remote areas. Tennessee, has a population of just 6.2 million and it is half the size of the UK. If I lived in one of the more remote areas, I would be a fool not to own a rifle, a hand gun and a well-stocked first-aid kit, just as BASIC equipment for my safety and well being.
Sadly, the UK model will just not work in the US. Since moving to the States, I’ve embraced gun ownership with enthusiasm and I enjoy the camaraderie, but I would not enjoy it if it was an overwhelming sense of need driving my ownership of handguns.
I never felt at risk living in the UK without a gun. There are victims of gun crime in the UK but it’s so small that I never gave it a second thought. For general protection I had access to a strategically-placed baseball bat when I lived in England. I guess if I had a family to protect and I was concerned I would consider other measures, but to be honest, I never considered NEEDING a firearm for protection in the UK.
I prefer to own a gun because there are so many guns in circulation that there is a chance I will need a firearm to combat a situation where the ante is raised. I see the inherent problem with this, but I am powerless to avoid contributing to the dilemma.
Nov 2, 2009 - 2:15 pm 37. O Bloody Hell:All very good points, but increased capacity to deal with accidental injury does not change the fact it’s better not to suffer that injury in the first place, nor does it change the fact that such accidental injury is now easier to inflict and more common than ever before.
“Easier and more common than ever before”? That’s a patently stupid claim. If it is easier and more common than ever before, it’s not because of the prevalence of guns, which have always been MORE prevalent than now, nor is it because of deadlier guns — a bullet is a bullet.
Until about 1965, it was not at all uncommon for a 12yo to ride to school on a bicycle with a gun on his handlebars which was used as a part of an after-school shooting club. Yet no one ever heard about “gun sprees” in school. No one heard about some kid getting shot by accident when in a class by an inadvertent discharge. Why? Media silence? I don’t think so.
Kids used to go out squirrel hunting, alone, with .22 rifles at the age of ten 150 years ago, and if you allowed a 10yo to take a gun out in the woods and shoot cans nowadays you’d probably get your child taken away from you under “reckless endangerment”. What has changed? The kids? Or the attitude?
We used to teach children respect for firearms from a very early age, and we also used to teach kids about obedience and discipline — so when we told a small child not to touch something — like a gun — they knew they weren’t supposed to touch it, and didn’t.
And a 10yo knew a gun was not a toy, it was something that could cause harm to someone — so they didn’t “play” with it and damned sure didn’t point it at friends going “bang bang ha ha!!”
I feel sad and sorry for anyone whose child dies as a result of poor gun handling, training, and attitudes. But the number of deaths in question is a tiny fraction of the population(several dozens a year or less, out of more than 300 MILLION), and cannot possibly be used to justify disarming a large portion of the populace — the danger to the entire populace from an out of control government is VASTLY greater than anything even vaguely associable to citizen ownership of guns.
Can’t happen here? Why not? Germany was, by all accounts, a very civilized and sensible place. France? All the French were disarmed, thanks to their Sullivan-type laws, as soon as the Nazis took over. That’s one of the problems with gun registration programs. They make it markedly easy for any organization to quickly seize guns. That’s what happened in Australia, too. They registered the guns, claiming all the while, “no, no, we won’t outlaw guns, we swear!” — then about five years later, after all the guns were registered, in a moment of legislative hysteria thanks to a single incident, passed sweeping legislation to seize all the guns. And did so. Crocodile Dundee is dead. Literally. So Australians are no longer a free, proud, and sovereign people, but a load of vassal peasants waiting for their masters to grant them whatever they choose to grant.
Sorry — the purpose of a gun in the hands of the citizenry is one thing above all others, one thing which trumps all excuses for taking it away — to restrain the acts of an out-of-control government — to remind them that the power is, and hopefully always will, remain in the hands of the people, where it justly belongs.
There is no threat — to the people, to the children, which does not get trumped by that requirement — for the simple and obvious reason that an out of control government represents a far greater threat to those people, to those children, than a single armed man, or group of men, could possibly represent by any stretch of the imagination.
Nov 3, 2009 - 12:21 pm 38. O Bloody Hell:Any police department can cite all too many cases of an armed victim thinking they could simply brandish a weapon and scare off an attacker, only to wind up disarmed and often injured or dead if the attacker turns out to be quicker, or crazier, or more ruthless or desperate.
Yes, and what they CANNOT cite are the vastly greater number of times a miscreant has decided it is in his best interests to be somewhere else, to find some other victim, upon the sound of a gun cocking or the sight of it in a formerly prospective victim’s hand. These stats are known to be much higher, though they cannot be reliably verified. They can be generally identified by anecdote from both prospective victims and thieves captured in other miscreantic activities who will happily tell you that they wouldn’t bother someone with a gun.
Cops don’t want to have to differentiate between a bad guy with a gun and a good guy with a gun. It’s a hell of a lot easier to equate gun==bad guy, and makes the job, for them, much, much easier. It’s irrelevant what they want or prefer. That’s not the purpose of guns, to make cops lives easier.
The vast majority of thugs and thieves are cowards, by necessity. They seek the easy mark. Knowing that someone has a gun is far, far more likely to make them go out and pick some mark which does not have a gun, not to attempt to challenge the mark and assume they don’t have the will to use it. If guns are taken away it’s more often because the thug didn’t know the mark had it until it was too late — that is, the mark was too hesitant to show its presence.
Are there some types who will pull out a bigger gun? Sure. But these types are far rarer than you grasp, if only because a bigger gun just means you both get to die more assuredly. Even with gang bangers, it’s more a matter of respect than pure testosterone. They are out to make you take them seriously instead of look past them. But if someone’s goal is to beat and rob you, your best bet is to make it expensive enough a risk that they go find someone less trouble.
There was the case of Kip Kinkel, some years ago, who killed his parents, then brought a whole mess of guns to school and shot other students. What wasn’t noted by the media, oh so conveniently, was that the student, who had already been shot, who stopped Kinkel’s rampage was able to do so by his familiarity with guns. Kinkel had fired off the contents of his magazine, and the student, with a cool head and recognizing the sound, knew that he had a brief instant before Kinkel could swap out a new magazine — he charged Kinkel at that moment and rendered him helpless until others could come to his aid.
The organization Jews for the Promotion of Firearms (I think that’s the name) has done studies of Nazi concentration camp films, and noted that, towards the end of the war, the German military was so strapped for ammunition that the guards at some of the camps had no bullets in their weapons. Weak as they were, the Jews so outnumbered the guards that they could certainly have overwhelmed them and fled… possibly to be hunted down and killed anyway, but at least then given far more of a chance at life than shuffling into a gas chamber. The jews in question were so unfamiliar with guns that they could not recognize what was readily obvious to anyone with a knowledge of them.
So how many people die from lack of knowledge of guns? Who knows? Given the fairly small number of people who actually die from guns — one in 25,000 citizens a year — that’s not hard to overwhelm, though. That figure is further skewed when you remove the high-risk statistical elements — gang bangers, and the like. Suddenly the US murder rate from guns drops to European levels.
Lesson: it ain’t the guns
Nov 3, 2009 - 12:53 pm 39. O Bloody Hell:Perhaps the problem is not the forwards march of technology but the backwards march of responsibility.
Essentially correct, but you don’t fix that problem by treating everyone who might be irresponsible like little children. You don’t develop responsibility without being given a chance to do so. Taking away the guns isn’t the answer.
The telling statistic is this — For every misused and/or mishandled gun in America, each year, there are hundreds of thousands of them which are not misused, and not mishandled.
Nov 3, 2009 - 1:05 pm 40. Svinrod:Stephen J. @ #34 states:
And of course, as a matter of fact most firearm owners *do* acknowledge some restrictions as appropriate — age limits on purchase, licensing, waiting periods, no private ownership of fully-automatic weapons, strong restrictions on concealed-carry, etc.
As a matter of fact, I can not name one gun owner who would support a majority of these restrictions. We do not believe in strong restrictions regarding concealed carry. Many of us would love to own fully automatic weapons without the current onerous restrictions. Waiting periods? We have the NICS system. There essentially are NO federal waiting periods. Licensing? No gun owner that I could ever imagine would want to be licensed.
I can tell that you do not spend alot of time with shooters.
Most of your arguments speak to the percieved societal benefit of concealed carry in deterring crime. It is indeed a benefit, but that is not why we have a second amendment. That amendments primary purpose is to serve as “Liberty’s Teeth” in defending the citizenry against tyranny.
As far as safety goes, let me repeat the tale of the Russian firearms instructor. He was demonstrating a certain technique when one of his students asked him if it was safe. He looked at the student, horrified, and proclaimed “Eez Gon! Eez NO Safe!”
Get Thee to a range, friend. All will become clear.
Svin
Nov 3, 2009 - 1:30 pm 41. Maxsmodels:As a former police officer and soldier I can tell you point blank (pardon the pun) that if you rely on the police/government to protect you, then you will get all of the protection you deserve. You can be sure of one think, you will be there when you need to be protected. Maybe there will be someone with you, maybe not. There will almost cetainly not be a convenient cop. If you are able to summon help and if it can arrive in a short time and find you they may be able to do some good.
But if on the other hand you are armed and ready, you may avoid victimization. Even being armed is no guarentee, but I’d rather shoot an attacker than fist fight with him.
In so far as the government is concerned….I don’t give a rat’s ass what they think, what they want. They work FOR ME! An armed citizenry makes sure it will stay that way!
Nov 4, 2009 - 8:29 am 42. Hangtown Bob:Well Bill,
This is the third time I have read this essay, first in your blog years ago, then in your book, and now in your PJM blog. As always, it is awe-inspiring and it continues to bring tears to my eyes. Thank you. Your love of America shines brightly.
Nov 4, 2009 - 3:02 pm 43. WayneB:Maxsmodels – Since you’re a former police officer, you can validate (or disagree with) this statement with some authority: It is NOT the police’s job to PROTECT the people. It is their job to catch criminals AFTER they have committed a crime.
Also, there is no disparagement meant to the police by the observation, “When seconds count, the police are minutes away.” That’s just the nature of things, and ties in with the previous statement. If you can’t protect yourself, then you’ll have to pray the criminal doesn’t kill you, and that the police can catch him.
Nov 6, 2009 - 6:05 am 44. Sven Svenson:Great essay. I wouldn’t expect less from Bill.
However, please don’t use “drunk driving” (which numbers are inflated) with the statistics on “alcohol related automobile accidents” (which is what is used in compiling the statistics).
If a perfectly sober driver hits a pedestrian who is carrying a bottle of beer, for statistical purposes it is considered an “alcohol related automobile accident.” Although the problem is real the statistics are false and inflated.
Nov 7, 2009 - 6:55 am 45. Chase:Bill,
I miss the essays. Please write more.
Thanks,
Nov 7, 2009 - 7:21 pm 46. poshcat:Chase
This NEVER gets tired. First read it in your book years ago and it’s as fresh as ever. This ought to be required reading for school kids. Thanks again for the refreshing clarity and conviction~
Nov 9, 2009 - 5:51 am 47. Jethro:http://www.guncite.com/journals/okslip.html
Nov 14, 2009 - 5:07 pmRead this history of gun prohibition in England. This explains why they don’t understand the second amendment. I especially like the section that describes the thousands of guns sent by American CITIZENS to England to help protect the English SUBJECTS during early WWII.