Brett Bellmore
New member
On the Right
by William F. Buckley Jr.
GUNS FOR MA AND PA?
The whirlwind tossing the GOP about reasserts the need to define a position on guns that has inherent credibility. But right away one runs into the implications of the Second Amendment. If the Bill of Rights was saying that all Americans had the right to own weapons without any qualification, we need to ask -- why? The National Rifle Association, acknowledged as the spokesman of what is called the gun lobby, reads that article in the Bill of Rights as guaranteeing the right to gun ownership. Again, why?
NRA President Charlton Heston has named that right to be pre-eminent. To believe that, one has to accept a reductionism: Man's possessions, property and freedom must be defended. If institutional defenses -- an army, a national guard, the local police -- fail you, then you are left alone with only your rifle by your side.
To aim at whom? If the aggressor is an army of occupation, a rifle is useful only as an instrument in a resistance movement. And that, probably, is what the authors of the Second Amendment had in mind, having only a dozen years earlier fought their way to freedom. They conceived of the man with his rifle as a member of a militia, a citizen-soldier. A subsidiary point here is that the right "to keep and bear arms" didn't have anything to do with hunting deer or pheasant. The right to bear arms had to do with the right to shoot people.
The threat of a foreign army taking over the United States is so remote as to be nugatory. Devotees of the right to bear arms have in mind self-protection as a contingent necessity. Not because our Army, Navy and Air Force have let us down, but because there are people all around the country who kill and maim. An essay published some years ago in The Public Interest spoke of a couple in their 80s living in the Bronx who had been tormented by muggers and pillagers, and found it possible to sleep only after acquiring a shotgun and posting a note on their door calling attention to it.
The major conceptual experiment of the day has to do with the question of handguns carried by individual citizens. The question before the house is: Does this practice in fact reduce crime by intimidating potential criminals? In Texas the idea is being tested. There you can get a permit to carry a handgun if you have no criminal record or detectable criminal propensity. Are we to believe that a mugger in the streets of Dallas will stay his hand because of a probability that the lady with the fur coat and diamond watch is carrying a handgun? And is fast on the draw?
Last year the University of Chicago Press published a book by faculty law professor John R. Lott Jr. with the provocative title, "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws." Its thesis is precisely as given in the book's title: The more guns there are around, the less crime committed. Professor Lott specifically stressed the usefulness of guns for teachers and for minorities, both insufficiently protected against criminal behavior.
The postulate in Professor Lott's book is simple and dominant. In the summary of the book by Professor John O. McGinnis of Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University, "Gun control does not decrease gun ownership by criminals but instead reduces their incentives to refrain from violence because it decreases the supply of armed law-abiding citizens who might resist them."
Well, the GOP is not about to endorse guns-for-everybody. The attritions the NRA objects to are in fact welcome, or should be. Checks against impulsive buys are a good idea, as also a record of guns sold and to whom. There is no need for assault weapons to protect against random individual aggressors. The proposition that you need to protect the right of citizens to own machine guns in case the modern Indians come charging in should be laid to rest as yesterday's reasonable demand, unreasonable in current circumstances.
But the orderly way for the GOP to proceed is by deferring to the rights of states to experiment with gun control in their own way. Some state policies can be opposed by appeal to the Second Amendment, and these necessarily go for adjudication to Washington. But the states should write their own laws governing traffic in arms, and the Republicans would be wise to acknowledge traditional apportionment of responsibilities.
COPYRIGHT 1999 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
With friends like this, et cetera...
by William F. Buckley Jr.
GUNS FOR MA AND PA?
The whirlwind tossing the GOP about reasserts the need to define a position on guns that has inherent credibility. But right away one runs into the implications of the Second Amendment. If the Bill of Rights was saying that all Americans had the right to own weapons without any qualification, we need to ask -- why? The National Rifle Association, acknowledged as the spokesman of what is called the gun lobby, reads that article in the Bill of Rights as guaranteeing the right to gun ownership. Again, why?
NRA President Charlton Heston has named that right to be pre-eminent. To believe that, one has to accept a reductionism: Man's possessions, property and freedom must be defended. If institutional defenses -- an army, a national guard, the local police -- fail you, then you are left alone with only your rifle by your side.
To aim at whom? If the aggressor is an army of occupation, a rifle is useful only as an instrument in a resistance movement. And that, probably, is what the authors of the Second Amendment had in mind, having only a dozen years earlier fought their way to freedom. They conceived of the man with his rifle as a member of a militia, a citizen-soldier. A subsidiary point here is that the right "to keep and bear arms" didn't have anything to do with hunting deer or pheasant. The right to bear arms had to do with the right to shoot people.
The threat of a foreign army taking over the United States is so remote as to be nugatory. Devotees of the right to bear arms have in mind self-protection as a contingent necessity. Not because our Army, Navy and Air Force have let us down, but because there are people all around the country who kill and maim. An essay published some years ago in The Public Interest spoke of a couple in their 80s living in the Bronx who had been tormented by muggers and pillagers, and found it possible to sleep only after acquiring a shotgun and posting a note on their door calling attention to it.
The major conceptual experiment of the day has to do with the question of handguns carried by individual citizens. The question before the house is: Does this practice in fact reduce crime by intimidating potential criminals? In Texas the idea is being tested. There you can get a permit to carry a handgun if you have no criminal record or detectable criminal propensity. Are we to believe that a mugger in the streets of Dallas will stay his hand because of a probability that the lady with the fur coat and diamond watch is carrying a handgun? And is fast on the draw?
Last year the University of Chicago Press published a book by faculty law professor John R. Lott Jr. with the provocative title, "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws." Its thesis is precisely as given in the book's title: The more guns there are around, the less crime committed. Professor Lott specifically stressed the usefulness of guns for teachers and for minorities, both insufficiently protected against criminal behavior.
The postulate in Professor Lott's book is simple and dominant. In the summary of the book by Professor John O. McGinnis of Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University, "Gun control does not decrease gun ownership by criminals but instead reduces their incentives to refrain from violence because it decreases the supply of armed law-abiding citizens who might resist them."
Well, the GOP is not about to endorse guns-for-everybody. The attritions the NRA objects to are in fact welcome, or should be. Checks against impulsive buys are a good idea, as also a record of guns sold and to whom. There is no need for assault weapons to protect against random individual aggressors. The proposition that you need to protect the right of citizens to own machine guns in case the modern Indians come charging in should be laid to rest as yesterday's reasonable demand, unreasonable in current circumstances.
But the orderly way for the GOP to proceed is by deferring to the rights of states to experiment with gun control in their own way. Some state policies can be opposed by appeal to the Second Amendment, and these necessarily go for adjudication to Washington. But the states should write their own laws governing traffic in arms, and the Republicans would be wise to acknowledge traditional apportionment of responsibilities.
COPYRIGHT 1999 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
With friends like this, et cetera...
