The Guns of America

Over at The American Spectator, Alex Massie rumbles and roils over the meaning of Newtown and the role of guns in America:

Yes, the pioneers were armed, but really we are descended from a nation of farmers and hunters rather than one of Indian fighters and cowboys. By other nations’ standards, the U.S. is an upside-down country—fishing and hunting are working-class rather than upper-class sports. My dad grew up in a small town, not in the Wild West but on the Chesapeake Bay—Port Deposit, Maryland, at the mouth of the Susquehanna. He was given his first shotgun on his eighth birthday. He and his schoolmates took their shotguns to elementary school with them every day. Hunting—for quail, doves, ducks, geese, or pheasants (the prize of prizes)—was an almost continuous activity.

My grandfather had a .45 revolver that he kept locked up in a box. He had a “2 gauge” shotgun—really a small cannon—that could be loaded with a half a pound of shot for use against large flocks of ducks or geese. My dad’s neighbor, an irascible veteran of the Spanish-American War, kept a 16-gauge shotgun loaded with quail shot on his front porch for use against children who ran through his yard. A favorite amusement of teenagers was to climb up on the cliff that towered above the town and wait for a geezer to make a trip to the outhouse. When the geezer emerged, they’d put a bullet in the upper left-hand corner of the door, just to scare the old fart.

Well, it’s no loss that we don’t shoot at each other as a joke any more, but you get the picture. A day without guns was like a day without sunshine—or a game bird for dinner. Liberals wonder why we can’t be like Europe when it comes to guns. We can’t be like Europe because we aren’t Europe, and never have been. In the U.S., policy comes from the ground up rather than from the top down.

Since the sixties, the gun-heavy lifestyle of rural America has been reshaped and remolded by the fear and paranoia bred by urban riots and urban crime. The boys of Port Deposit loved their shotguns, but they didn’t worry about banana clips and Magnums, which are the stuff of movie fantasy rather than real life. But, politically, separating “good guns” from bad ones has always proved an exercise in futility, with no real world payoff in terms of a reduction in violent crime. Not good politics and not good practice? If the President’s proposals for gun control vanish after a couple of months, I don’t think he’ll be upset.

Afterwords
I apologize to Alex Massie for making fun of him, but I was desperate for a hook.