The American Wisdom Series

Presents
Pamphlet #239

The following article brings up some interesting thoughts and points. It's
fairly long but I hope you'll take the time to read it.

A NATION OF COWARDS

Jeffrey R. Snyder

OUR SOCIETY has reached a pinnacle of self-expression and respect for
individuality rare or unmatched in history. Our entire popular culture --
from fashion magazines to the cinema -- positively screams the matchless
worth of the individual, and glories in eccentricity, nonconformity,
independent judgment, and self-determination. This enthusiasm is reflected
in the prevalent notion that helping someone entails increasing that
person's "self-esteem"; that if a person properly values himself, he will
naturally be a happy, productive, and, in some inexplicable fashion,
responsible member of society.

And yet, while people are encouraged to revel in their individuality and
incalculable self-worth, the media and the law enforcement establishment
continually advise us that, when confronted with the threat of lethal
violence, we should not resist, but simply give the attacker what he wants.
If the crime under consideration is rape, there is some notable waffling on
this point, and the discussion quickly moves to how the woman can change
her behavior to minimize the risk of rape, and the various ridiculous,
non-lethal weapons she may acceptably carry, such as whistles, keys, mace
or, that weapon which really sends shivers down a rapist's spine, the
portable cellular phone.

Now how can this be? How can a person who values himself so highly calmly
accept the indignity of a criminal assault? How can one who believes that
the essence of his dignity lies in his self-determination passively accept
the forcible deprivation of that self-determination? How can he, quietly,
with great dignity and poise, simply hand over the goods?

The assumption, of course, is that there is no inconsistency. The advice
not to resist a criminal assault and simply hand over the goods is founded
on the notion that one's life is of incalculable value, and that no amount
of property is worth it. Put aside, for a moment, the outrageousness of the
suggestion that a criminal who proffers lethal violence should be treated
as if he has instituted a new social contract: "I will not hurt or kill you
if you give me what I want." For years, feminists have labored to educate
people that rape is not about sex, but about domination, degradation, and
control. Evidently, someone needs to inform the law enforcement
establishment and the media that kidnapping, robbery, carjacking, and
assault are not about property.

Crime is not only a complete disavowal of the social contract, but also a
commandeering of the victim's person and liberty. If the individual's
dignity lies in the fact that he is a moral agent engaging in actions of
his own will, in free exchange with others, then crime always violates the
victim's dignity. It is, in fact, an act of enslavement. Your wallet, your
purse, or your car may not be worth your life, but your dignity is; and if
it is not worth fighting for, it can hardly be said to exist.
 
 

The Gift of Life

Although difficult for modern man to fathom, it was once widely believed
that life was a gift from God, that to not defend that life when offered
violence was to hold God's gift in contempt, to be a coward and to breach
one's duty to one's community. A sermon given in Philadelphia in 1747
unequivocally equated the failure to defend oneself with suicide:
 
 

He that suffers his life to be taken from him by one that hath no authority
for that purpose, when he might preserve it by defense, incurs the Guilt of
self murder since God hath enjoined him to seek the continuance of his
life, and Nature itself teaches every creature to defend itself.

"Cowardice" and "self-respect" have largely disappeared from public
discourse. In their place we are offered "self-esteem" as the bellwether of
success and a proxy for dignity. "Self-respect" implies that one recognizes
standards, and judges oneself worthy by the degree to which one lives up to
them. "Self-esteem" simply means that one feels good about oneself.
"Dignity" used to refer to the self-mastery and fortitude with which a
person conducted himself in the face of life's vicissitudes and the boorish
behavior of others. Now, judging by campus speech codes, dignity requires
that we never encounter a discouraging word and that others be coerced into
acting respectfully, evidently on the assumption that we are powerless to
prevent our degradation if exposed to the demeaning behavior of others.
These are signposts proclaiming the insubstantiality of our character, the
hollowness of our souls.

It is impossible to address the problem of rampant crime without talking
about the moral responsibility of the intended victim. Crime is rampant
because the law-abiding, each of us, condone it, excuse it, permit it,
submit to it. We permit and encourage it because we do not fight back,
immediately, then and there, where it happens. Crime is not rampant because
we do not have enough prisons, because judges and prosecutors are too soft,
because the police are hamstrung with absurd technicalities. The defect is
there, in our character. We are a nation of cowards and shirkers.
 
 

Do You Feel Lucky?

In 1991, when then-Attorney General Richard Thornburgh released the FBI's
annual crime statistics, he noted that it is now more likely that a person
will be the victim of a violent crime than that he will be in an auto
accident. Despite this, most people readily believe that the existence of
the police relieves them of the responsibility to take full measures to
protect themselves. The police, however, are not personal bodyguards.
Rather, they act as a general deterrent to crime, both by their presence
and by apprehending criminals after the fact. As numerous courts have held,
they have no legal obligation to protect anyone in particular. You cannot
sue them for failing to prevent you from being the victim of a crime.

Insofar as the police deter by their presence, they are very, very good.
Criminals take great pains not to commit a crime in front of them.
Unfortunately, the corollary is that you can pretty much bet your life (and
you are) that they won't be there at the moment you actually need them.

Should you ever be the victim of an assault, a robbery, or a rape, you will
find it very difficult to call the police while the act is in progress,
even if you are carrying a portable cellular phone. Nevertheless, you might
be interested to know how long it takes them to show up. Department of
Justice statistics for 1991 show that, for all crimes of violence, only 28
percent of calls are responded to within five minutes. The idea that
protection is a service people can call to have delivered and expect to
receive in a timely fashion is often mocked by gun owners, who love to
recite the challenge, "Call for a cop, call for an ambulance, and call for
a pizza. See who shows up first."

Many people deal with the problem of crime by convincing themselves that
they live, work, and travel only in special "crime-free" zones. Invariably,
they react with shock and hurt surprise when they discover that criminals
do not play by the rules and do not respect these imaginary boundaries. If,
however, you understand that crime can occur anywhere at anytime, and if
you understand that you can be maimed or mortally wounded in mere seconds,
you may wish to consider whether you are willing to place the
responsibility for safeguarding your life in the hands of others.
 
 

Power And Responsibility

Is your life worth protecting? If so, whose responsibility is it to protect
it? If you believe that it is the police's, not only are you wrong -- since
the courts universally rule that they have no legal obligation to do so --
but you face some difficult moral quandaries. How can you rightfully ask
another human being to risk his life to protect yours, when you will assume
no responsibility yourself? Because that is his job and we pay him to do
it? Because your life is of incalculable value, but his is only worth the
$30,000 salary we pay him? If you believe it reprehensible to possess the
means and will to use lethal force to repel a criminal assault, how can you
call upon another to do so for you?

Do you believe that you are forbidden to protect yourself because the
police are better qualified to protect you, because they know what they are
doing but you're a rank amateur? Put aside that this is equivalent to
believing that only concert pianists may play the piano and only
professional athletes may play sports. What exactly are these special
qualities possessed only by the police and beyond the rest of us mere
mortals?

One who values his life and takes seriously his responsibilities to his
family and community will possess and cultivate the means of fighting back,
and will retaliate when threatened with death or grievous injury to himself
or a loved one. He will never be content to rely solely on others for his
safety, or to think he has done all that is possible by being aware of his
surroundings and taking measures of avoidance. Let's not mince words: He
will be armed, will be trained in the use of his weapon, and will defend
himself when faced with lethal violence.

Fortunately, there is a weapon for preserving life and liberty that can be
wielded effectively by almost anyone -- the handgun. Small and light enough
to be carried habitually, lethal, but unlike the knife or sword, not
demanding great skill or strength, it truly is the "great equalizer."
Requiring only hand-eye coordination and a modicum of ability to remain
cool under pressure, it can be used effectively by the old and the weak
against the young and the strong, by the one against the many.

The handgun is the only weapon that would give a lone female jogger a
chance of prevailing against a gang of thugs intent on rape, a teacher a
chance of protecting children at recess from a madman intent on massacring
them, a family of tourists waiting at a mid-town subway station the means
to protect themselves from a gang of teens armed with razors and knives.

But since we live in a society that by and large outlaws the carrying of
arms, we are brought into the fray of the Great American Gun War. Gun
control is one of the most prominent battlegrounds in our current culture
wars. Yet it is unique in the half-heartedness with which our conservative
leaders and pundits -- our "conservative elite" -- do battle, and have
conceded the moral high ground to liberal gun control proponents. It is not
a topic often written about, or written about with any great fervor, by
William F. Buckley or Patrick Buchanan. As drug czar, William Bennett
advised President Bush to ban "assault weapons." George Will is on record
as recommending the repeal of the Second Amendment, and Jack Kemp is on
record as favoring a ban on the possession of semiautomatic "assault
weapons." The battle for gun rights is one fought predominantly by the
common man. The beliefs of both our liberal and conservative elites are in
fact abetting the criminal rampage through our society.
 
 

Selling Crime Prevention

By any rational measure, nearly all gun control proposals are hokum. The
Brady Bill, for example, would not have prevented John Hinckley from
obtaining a gun to shoot President Reagan; Hinckley purchased his weapon
five months before the attack, and his medical records could not have
served as a basis to deny his purchase of a gun, since medical records are
not public documents filed with the police. Similarly, California's waiting
period and background check did not stop Patrick Purdy from purchasing the
"assault rifle" and handguns he used to massacre children during recess in
a Stockton schoolyard; the felony conviction that would have provided the
basis for stopping the sales did not exist, because Mr. Purdy's previous
weapons violations were plea-bargained down from felonies to misdemeanors.

In the mid-sixties there was a public service advertising campaign targeted
at car owners about the prevention of car theft. The purpose of the ad was
to urge car owners not to leave their keys in their cars. The message was,
"Don't help a good boy go bad." The implication was that, by leaving his
keys in his car, the normal, law-abiding car owner was contributing to the
delinquency of minors who, if they just weren't tempted beyond their
limits, would be "good." Now, in those days people still had a fair sense
of just who was responsible for whose behavior. The ad succeeded in
enraging a goodly portion of the populace, and was soon dropped.

Nearly all of the gun control measures offered by Handgun Control, Inc.
(HCI) and its ilk embody the same philosophy. They are founded on the
belief that America's law-abiding gun owners are the source of the problem.
With their unholy desire for firearms, they are creating a society awash in
a sea of guns, thereby helping good boys go bad, and helping bad boys be
badder. This laying of moral blame for violent crime at the feet of the
law-abiding, and the implicit absolution of violent criminals for their
misdeeds, naturally infuriates honest gun owners.

The files of HCI and other gun control organizations are filled with
proposals to limit the availability of semiautomatic and other firearms to
law-abiding citizens, and barren of proposals for apprehending and
punishing violent criminals. It is ludicrous to expect that the proposals
of HCI, or any gun control laws, will significantly curb crime. According
to Department of Justice and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF)
statistics, fully 90 percent of violent crimes are committed without a
handgun, and 93 percent of the guns obtained by violent criminals are not
obtained through the lawful purchase and sale transactions that are the
object of most gun control legislation. Furthermore, the number of violent
criminals is minute in comparison to the number of firearms in America --
estimated by the ATF at about 200 million, approximately one-third of which
are handguns. With so abundant a supply, there will always be enough guns
available for those who wish to use them for nefarious ends, no matter how
complete the legal prohibitions against them, or how draconian the
punishment for their acquisition or use. No, the gun control proposals of
HCI and other organizations are not seriously intended as crime control.
Something else is at work here.
 
 

The Tyranny of the Elite

Gun control is a moral crusade against a benighted, barbaric citizenry.
This is demonstrated not only by the ineffectualness of gun control in
preventing crime, and by the fact that it focuses on restricting the
behavior of the law-abiding rather than apprehending and punishing the
guilty, but also by the execration that gun control proponents heap on gun
owners and their evil instrumentality, the NRA. Gun owners are routinely
portrayed as uneducated, paranoid rednecks fascinated by and prone to
violence, i.e., exactly the type of person who opposes the liberal agenda
and whose moral and social "re-education" is the object of liberal social
policies. Typical of such bigotry is New York Gov. Mario Cuomo's famous
characterization of gun-owners as "hunters who drink beer, don't vote, and
lie to their wives about where they were all weekend." Similar vituperation
is rained upon the NRA, characterized by Sen. Edward Kennedy as the
"pusher's best friend," lampooned in political cartoons as standing for the
right of children to carry firearms to school and, in general, portrayed as
standing for an individual's God-given right to blow people away at will.

The stereotype is, of course, false. As criminologist and constitutional
lawyer Don B. Kates, Jr. and former HCI contributor Dr. Patricia Harris
have pointed out, "[s]tudies consistently show that, on the average, gun
owners are better educated and have more prestigious jobs than
non-owners.... Later studies show that gun owners are less likely than
non-owners to approve of police brutality, violence against dissenters,
etc."

Conservatives must understand that the antipathy many liberals have for gun
owners arises in good measure from their statist utopianism. This habit of
mind has nowhere been better explored than in The Republic. There, Plato
argues that the perfectly just society is one in which an unarmed people
exhibit virtue by minding their own business in the performance of their
assigned functions, while the government of philosopher-kings, above the
law and protected by armed guardians unquestioning in their loyalty to the
state, engineers, implements, and fine-tunes the creation of that society,
aided and abetted by myths that both hide and justify their totalitarian
manipulation.
 
 

The Unarmed Life

When columnist Carl Rowan preaches gun control and uses a gun to defend his
home, when Maryland Gov. William Donald Schaefer seeks legislation year
after year to ban semiautomatic "assault weapons" whose only purpose, we
are told, is to kill people, while he is at the same time escorted by state
police armed with large-capacity 9mm semiautomatic pistols, it is not
simple hypocrisy. It is the workings of that habit of mind possessed by all
superior beings who have taken upon themselves the terrible burden of
civilizing the masses and who understand, like our Congress, that laws are
for other people.

The liberal elite know that they are philosopher-kings. They know that the
people simply cannot be trusted; that they are incapable of just and fair
self-government; that left to their own devices, their society will be
racist, sexist, homophobic, and inequitable -- and the liberal elite know
how to fix things. They are going to help us live the good and just life,
even if they have to lie to us and force us to do it. And they detest those
who stand in their way.

The private ownership of firearms is a rebuke to this utopian zeal. To own
firearms is to affirm that freedom and liberty are not gifts from the
state. It is to reserve final judgment about whether the state is
encroaching on freedom and liberty, to stand ready to defend that freedom
with more than mere words, and to stand outside the state's totalitarian
reach.
 
 

The Florida Experience

The elitist distrust of the people underlying the gun control movement is
illustrated beautifully in HCI's campaign against a new concealed-carry law
in Florida. Prior to 1987, the Florida law permitting the issuance of
concealed-carry permits was administered at the county level. The law was
vague, and, as a result, was subject to conflicting interpretation and
political manipulation. Permits were issued principally to security
personnel and the privileged few with political connections. Permits were
valid only within the county of issuance.

In 1987, however, Florida enacted a uniform concealed-carry law which
mandates that county authorities issue a permit to anyone who satisfies
certain objective criteria. The law requires that a permit be issued to any
applicant who is a resident, at least twenty-one years of age, has no
criminal record, no record of alcohol or drug abuse, no history of mental
illness, and provides evidence of having satisfactorily completed a
firearms safety course offered by the NRA or other competent instructor.
The applicant must provide a set of fingerprints, after which the
authorities make a background check. The permit must be issued or denied
within ninety days, is valid throughout the state, and must be renewed
every three years, which provides authorities a regular means of
reevaluating whether the permit holder still qualifies.

Passage of this legislation was vehemently opposed by HCI and the media.
The law, they said, would lead to citizens shooting each other over
everyday disputes involving fender benders, impolite behavior, and other
slights to their dignity. Terms like "Florida, the Gunshine State" and
"Dodge City East" were coined to suggest that the state, and those seeking
passage of the law, were encouraging individuals to act as judge, jury, and
executioner in a "Death Wish" society.

No HCI campaign more clearly demonstrates the elitist beliefs underlying
the campaign to eradicate gun ownership. Given the qualifications required
of permit holders, HCI and the media can only believe that common,
law-abiding citizens are seething cauldrons of homicidal rage, ready to
kill to avenge any slight to their dignity, eager to seek out and summarily
execute the lawless. Only lack of immediate access to a gun restrains them
and prevents the blood from flowing in the streets. They are so mentally
and morally deficient that they would mistake a permit to carry a weapon in
self-defense as a state-sanctioned license to kill at will.

Did the dire predictions come true? Despite the fact that Miami and Dade
County have severe problems with the drug trade, the homicide rate fell in
Florida following enactment of this law, as it did in Oregon following
enactment of similar legislation there. There are, in addition, several
documented cases of new permit holders successfully using their weapons to
defend themselves. Information from the Florida Department of State shows
that, from the beginning of the program in 1987 through June 1993, 160,823
permits have been issued, and only 530, or about 0.33 percent of the
applicants, have been denied a permit for failure to satisfy the criteria,
indicating that the law is benefitting those whom it was intended to
benefit -- the law-abiding. Only 16 permits, less than 1/100th of 1
percent, have been revoked due to the post-issuance commission of a crime
involving a firearm.

The Florida legislation has been used as a model for legislation adopted by
Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Mississippi. There are, in addition, seven
other states (Maine, North and South Dakota, Utah, Washington, West
Virginia, and, with the exception of cities with a population in excess of
1 million, Pennsylvania) which provide that concealed-carry permits must be
issued to law-abiding citizens who satisfy various objective criteria.
Finally, no permit is required at all in Vermont. Altogether, then, there
are thirteen states in which law-abiding citizens who wish to carry arms to
defend themselves may do so. While no one appears to have compiled the
statistics from all of these jurisdictions, there is certainly an ample
data base for those seeking the truth about the trustworthiness of
law-abiding citizens who carry firearms.

Other evidence also suggests that armed citizens are very responsible in
using guns to defend themselves. Florida State University criminologist
Gary Kleck, using surveys and other data, has determined that armed
citizens defend their lives or property with firearms against criminals
approximately 1 million times a year. In 98 percent of these instances, the
citizen merely brandishes the weapon or fires a warning shot. Only in 2
percent of the cases do citizens actually shoot their assailants. In
defending themselves with their firearms, armed citizens kill 2,000 to
3,000 criminals each year, three times the number killed by the police. A
nationwide study by Kates, the constitutional lawyer and criminologist,
found that only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person
mistakenly identified as a criminal. The "error rate" for the police,
however, was 11 percent, over five times as high.

It is simply not possible to square the numbers above and the experience of
Florida with the notions that honest, law-abiding gun owners are borderline
psychopaths itching for an excuse to shoot someone, vigilantes eager to
seek out and summarily execute the lawless, or incompetent fools incapable
of determining when it is proper to use lethal force in defense of their
lives. Nor upon reflection should these results seem surprising. Rape,
robbery, and attempted murder are not typically actions rife with ambiguity
or subtlety, requiring special powers of observation and great
book-learning to discern. When a man pulls a knife on a woman and says,
"You're coming with me," her judgment that a crime is being committed is
not likely to be in error. There is little chance that she is going to
shoot the wrong person. It is the police, because they are rarely at the
scene of the crime when it occurs, who are more likely to find themselves
in circumstances where guilt and innocence are not so clear-cut, and in
which the probability for mistakes is higher.
 
 

Arms and Liberty

Classical republican philosophy has long recognized the critical
relationship between personal liberty and the possession of arms by a
people ready and willing to use them. Political theorists as dissimilar as
Niccolo Machiavelli, Sir Thomas More, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney,
John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all shared the view that the
possession of arms is vital for resisting tyranny, and that to be disarmed
by one's government is tantamount to being enslaved by it. The possession
of arms by the people is the ultimate warrant that government governs only
with the consent of the governed. As Kates has shown, the Second Amendment
is as much a product of this political philosophy as it is of the American
experience in the Revolutionary War. Yet our conservative elite has
abandoned this aspect of republican theory. Although our conservative
pundits recognize and embrace gun owners as allies in other arenas, their
battle for gun rights is desultory. The problem here is not a statist
utopianism, although goodness knows that liberals are not alone in the
confidence they have in the state's ability to solve society's problems.
Rather, the problem seems to lie in certain cultural traits shared by our
conservative and liberal elites.

One such trait is an abounding faith in the power of the word. The failure
of our conservative elite to defend the Second Amendment stems in great
measure from an overestimation of the power of the rights set forth in the
First Amendment, and a general undervaluation of action. Implicit in calls
for the repeal of the Second Amendment is the assumption that our First
Amendment rights are sufficient to preserve our liberty. The belief is that
liberty can be preserved as long as men freely speak their minds; that
there is no tyranny or abuse that can survive being exposed in the press;
and that the truth need only be disclosed for the culprits to be shamed.
The people will act, and the truth shall set us, and keep us, free.

History is not kind to this belief, tending rather to support the view of
Hobbes, Machiavelli, and other republican theorists that only people
willing and able to defend themselves can preserve their liberties. While
it may be tempting and comforting to believe that the existence of mass
electronic communication has forever altered the balance of power between
the state and its subjects, the belief has certainly not been tested by
time, and what little history there is in the age of mass communication is
not especially encouraging. The camera, radio, and press are mere tools
and, like guns, can be used for good or ill. Hitler, after all, was a
masterful orator, used radio to very good effect, and is well known to have
pioneered and exploited the propaganda opportunities afforded by film. And
then, of course, there were the Brownshirts, who knew very well how to
quell dissent among intellectuals.
 
 

Polite Society

In addition to being enamored of the power of words, our conservative elite
shares with liberals the notion that an armed society is just not civilized
or progressive, that massive gun ownership is a blot on our civilization.
This association of personal disarmament with civilized behavior is one of
the great unexamined beliefs of our time.

Should you read English literature from the sixteenth through nineteenth
centuries, you will discover numerous references to the fact that a
gentleman, especially when out at night or traveling, armed himself with a
sword or a pistol against the chance of encountering a highwayman or other
such predator. This does not appear to have shocked the ladies accompanying
him. True, for the most part there were no police in those days, but we
have already addressed the notion that the presence of the police absolves
people of the responsibility to look after their safety, and in any event
the existence of the police cannot be said to have reduced crime to
negligible levels.

It is by no means obvious why it is "civilized" to permit oneself to fall
easy prey to criminal violence, and to permit criminals to continue
unobstructed in their evil ways. While it may be that a society in which
crime is so rare that no one ever needs to carry a weapon is "civilized," a
society that stigmatizes the carrying of weapons by the law-abiding --
because it distrusts its citizens more than it fears rapists, robbers, and
murderers -- certainly cannot claim this distinction. Perhaps the notion
that defending oneself with lethal force is not "civilized" arises from the
view that violence is always wrong, or the view that each human being is of
such intrinsic worth that it is wrong to kill anyone under any
circumstances. The necessary implication of these propositions, however, is
that life is not worth defending. Far from being "civilized," the beliefs
that counterviolence and killing are always wrong are an invitation to the
spread of barbarism. Such beliefs announce loudly and clearly that those
who do not respect the lives and property of others will rule over those
who do.

In truth, one who believes it wrong to arm himself against criminal
violence shows contempt of God's gift of life (or, in modern parlance, does
not properly value himself), does not live up to his responsibilities to
his family and community, and proclaims himself mentally and morally
deficient, because he does not trust himself to behave responsibly. In
truth, a state that deprives its law-abiding citizens of the means to
effectively defend themselves is not civilized but barbarous, becoming an
accomplice of murderers, rapists, and thugs and revealing its totalitarian
nature by its tacit admission that the disorganized, random havoc created
by criminals is far less a threat than are men and women who believe
themselves free and independent, and act accordingly.

While gun control proponents and other advocates of a kinder, gentler
society incessantly decry our "armed society," in truth we do not live in
an armed society. We live in a society in which violent criminals and
agents of the state habitually carry weapons, and in which many law-abiding
citizens own firearms but do not go about armed. Department of Justice
statistics indicate that 87 percent of all violent crimes occur outside the
home. Essentially, although tens of millions own firearms, we are an
unarmed society.
 
 

Take Back the Night

Clearly the police and the courts are not providing a significant brake on
criminal activity. While liberals call for more poverty, education, and
drug treatment programs, conservatives take a more direct tack. George Will
advocates a massive increase in the number of police and a shift toward
"community-based policing." Meanwhile, the NRA and many conservative
leaders call for laws that would require violent criminals serve at least
85 percent of their sentences and would place repeat offenders permanently
behind bars.

Our society suffers greatly from the beliefs that only official action is
legitimate and that the state is the source of our earthly salvation. Both
liberal and conservative prescriptions for violent crime suffer from the
"not in my job description" school of thought regarding the
responsibilities of the law-abiding citizen, and from an overestimation of
the ability of the state to provide society's moral moorings. As long as
law-abiding citizens assume no personal responsibility for combatting
crime, liberal and conservative programs will fail to contain it.

Judging by the numerous articles about concealed-carry in gun magazines,
the growing number of products advertised for such purpose, and the
increase in the number of concealed-carry applications in states with
mandatory-issuance laws, more and more people, including growing numbers of
women, are carrying firearms for self-defense. Since there are still many
states in which the issuance of permits is discretionary and in which law
enforcement officials routinely deny applications, many people have been
put to the hard choice between protecting their lives or respecting the
law. Some of these people have learned the hard way, by being the victim of
a crime, or by seeing a friend or loved one raped, robbed, or murdered,
that violent crime can happen to anyone, anywhere at anytime, and that
crime is not about sex or property but life, liberty, and dignity.

The laws proscribing concealed-carry of firearms by honest, law-abiding
citizens breed nothing but disrespect for the law. As the Founding Fathers
knew well, a government that does not trust its honest, law-abiding,
taxpaying citizens with the means of self-defense is not itself worthy of
trust. Laws disarming honest citizens proclaim that the government is the
master, not the servant, of the people. A federal law along the lines of
the Florida statute -- overriding all contradictory state and local laws
and acknowledging that the carrying of firearms by law-abiding citizens is
a privilege and immunity of citizenship -- is needed to correct the
outrageous conduct of state and local officials operating under
discretionary licensing systems.

What we certainly do not need is more gun control. Those who call for the
repeal of the Second Amendment so that we can really begin controlling
firearms betray a serious misunderstanding of the Bill of Rights. The Bill
of Rights does not grant rights to the people, such that its repeal would
legitimately confer upon government the powers otherwise proscribed. The
Bill of Rights is the list of the fundamental, inalienable rights, endowed
in man by his Creator, that define what it means to be a free and
independent people, the rights which must exist to ensure that government
governs only with the consent of the people.

At one time this was even understood by the Supreme Court. In United States
v. Cruikshank (1876), the first case in which the Court had an opportunity
to interpret the Second Amendment, it stated that the right confirmed by
the Second Amendment "is not a right granted by the constitution. Neither
is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence." The
repeal of the Second Amendment would no more render the outlawing of
firearms legitimate than the repeal of the due process clause of the Fifth
Amendment would authorize the government to imprison and kill people at
will. A government that abrogates any of the Bill of Rights, with or
without majoritarian approval, forever acts illegitimately, becomes
tyrannical, and loses the moral right to govern.

This is the uncompromising understanding reflected in the warning that
America's gun owners will not go gently into that good, utopian night: "You
can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." While liberals
take this statement as evidence of the retrograde, violent nature of gun
owners, we gun owners hope that liberals hold equally strong sentiments
about their printing presses, word processors, and television cameras. The
republic depends upon fervent devotion to all our fundamental rights.
 

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