Straight Shooting on Gun Control - Debate, Part 2

[FWiedner]

No Room for Compromise

Don B. Kates

Abigail Kohn’s analysis is acute. Her suggestions are equally so—in the abstract. But are they practicable?

Once upon a time, compromise was practicable. In the 1920s the National Rifle Association headed off a nationwide campaign to ban handguns by proposing a set of moderate restrictions, including bans on gun possession by convicted felons and the insane. These rules were adopted in almost all states to the exclusion of laws requiring a permit to have a handgun.

But anti-gun goals have advanced, thereby eliminating any chance for compromise today. The first thing compromise would require is for the anti-gun movement to honestly admit that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution secures to all law-abiding, responsible adults freedom of choice to keep firearms for the protection of their families and homes. That is the only intellectually serious constitutional interpretation. But anti-gun advocates cannot acknowledge that, for it would foreclose their ultimate goal of banning and confiscating handguns, and eventually all guns, from the general population.

Admittedly, Handgun Control Inc., now known as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, champions the more moderate position that people may have firearms for hunting and target shooting. But these guns either must be locked up in a public armory or, if kept at home, must be unloaded and disassembled. The aim is to keep ordinary people from having firearms readily available for self-defense.

The ultimate goal of the anti-gun movement precludes any compromise. Gun control advocates disingenuously ridicule gun owners for fighting regulation of guns similar to what they readily accept for cars. But drivers too would adamantly oppose controls if they were promoted by people who believed that automobiles are evil instruments no decent person would want to have and that anyone who does desire them must be warped sexually, intellectually, educationally, and ethically. Car registration and driver licensing would be adamantly opposed if advocated on the ground that cars should be made increasingly unavailable to ordinary people and eventually denied to all but the military, police, and the influence peddlers and other “special” individuals whom the military or police select to receive permits.

Gun owners, like abortion rights supporters, know that if their opponents cannot get prohibition outright they are implacably determined to reach the same result through regulation that looks reasonable but can be manipulated by hostile administrators and courts. Long and bitter experience has taught gun owners that the only “compromise” the anti-gun movement offers them is their uncompensated agreement to ever more regulations furthering the short-term goal of multiplying red tape and administrative obstacles so as to make it progressively more difficult for ordinary people to have firearms for self-defense.

The hostility of groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People makes gun owners even more reluctant than abortion rights proponents to consider compromise. The mere threat of challenge by these groups means most Americans in most situations (abortion rights advocates in particular) can be confident that regulations will be just and fairly administered. But gun owners can have no such confidence because civil liberties groups and judges themselves ardently favor anti-gun goals and see nothing of value in the rights or interests of gun owners.

Sensible though Kohn’s suggestions for compromise are, they miss the point that the anti-gun movement’s concern is only ostensibly with crime. Its actual purpose has been declared over and over again. According to the Brady Campaign’s Sarah Brady, “The only reason for guns in civilian hands is for sporting purposes.” The Washington Post editorializes that “the need that some homeowners and shopkeepers believe they have for weapons to defend themselves [represents] the worst instincts in the human character.” Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark declares that gun ownership for personal self-defense is “anarchy, not order under law—a jungle where each relies on himself for survival.” A New Republic editorial asserts that the desire to possess arms for family defense “proceeds from premises that are profoundly wrong. In a civilized society, physical security is a collective responsibility, not an individual one.” Historian Garry Wills insists that “every civilized society must disarm its citizens against each other. Those who do not trust their own people become predators upon their own people.”

In other words, the aim is to produce a citizenry deprived of all means of self-defense so as to be abjectly dependent on a supposedly all-wise, and certainly ever more powerful, government for its security. What compromise with this can there be for people who believe in a strong and independent citizenry, as gun owners do?

http://www.reason.com/0505/fe.ak.straight.shtml

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