But with a second mass murder, this one of six Sikh worshippers at a temple near Milwaukee, coupled with a guilty plea by Jared Loughner regarding his recent shooting spree in Tuscon, Arizona, which left six dead and thirteen wounded, seems to have rather quieted Second Amendment aficionados all across the Internet. In fact, over at Reason, home of the Second Amendment, Jacob “Sure Shot” Sullum has even argued that federal restrictions on firearm ownership should be expanded to prohibit fanatics like accused murderer Wade Page from owning firearms. According to Sullum, people who say they want to kill people should be allowed to say that, but the federal government should keep a list of such people and prevent them from owning guns. Well, maybe.*
I think what Jake is saying is that some people just insist on ruining it for the rest of us. And just when the Second Amendments folks thought they’d won the big enchilada, first with District of Columbia v. Heller and then with McDonald v. City of Chicago, which invented a constitutional right of self-defense.† But I would be very surprised to see any serious action on gun control at the federal level. President Obama has made a few throat-clearing noises to placate the massively abused liberal base,‡ but now that his throat is clear, I think he’s going to say nothing, nothing at all.
The modern American obsession with firearms has several roots, but the greatest is the great, and terrible, race riots of the Sixties, followed by the massive increase in violent crime committed by blacks through the Seventies and Eighties, convincing millions of whites that they needed protection. Liberals tried to finesse the issue of black violent crime via gun control—disarm the criminal, and he’s harmless. But gun control never worked—something liberals were not willing to admit—and white conservatives saw liberals as trying to disarm them, leaving them helpless against an army of Glock-toting gangstas.
The dispute was bitter enough to start with, but there was an added cultural dimension. For millions of urban and suburban liberals, only a “sick” person would want to own a gun, even want to touch a gun, in the first place. If you wanted to own a gun, that proved that you shouldn’t have one. For rural Americans, who grew up in a gun culture, where owning a gun was a sign of manhood, or even adulthood—some southern ladies carried handguns in their purses to protect against uppity nigras—this itself was sickness. Sickness against sickness! No wonder things got so ugly!
Eventually, Democrats got the picture. Gun control didn’t work as either policy or politics, so they abandoned it at the national level. The striking reduction in the level of violent crime through the Nineties and into the new millennium drastically reduced the visibility of crime to begin with. Which left the NRA in a bit of a dilemma. With no villain to fight, no hero was needed. That’s why Obama’s election was such a boon to them, and to gun and ammo sales across the country. A black man in the White House! Shit, I need a 357 just to brush my teeth!
Obama, that cagy fellow, refused to play into the NRA’s hands. Then came Fast and Furious, red meat to the ravenous. But now, with all the shooting, somehow, it’s given guns a bad name. Everybody seems to be waiting for the smoke to clear.
I don’t think gun control can work in the U.S. It never has worked, and there are too far many guns available to make it work. I think Democrats are smart to let the issue lie at the national level. Gun control doesn’t stop crime, but it does lose elections.
*Actually, I would say definitely not. The federal government already spends far too much time keeping track of what people say. I sometimes feel sorry for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, which is a much-abused agency. I mean, you can’t expect much expertise from a whipped dog. But I don’t want them collecting information on “fanatics.” And, anyway, as the NRA will be glad to tell you, the law has never kept anyone from getting a gun if they really wanted one—thanks, in no small part to the NRA.
†It was, naturally, my favorite fat Italian Supreme Court Justice who discovered that the Constitution grants me the right, not only to a firearm, but to a handgun, so that I can effectively engage an assailant at close range. Thanks for the penumbra, Nino!
‡I think the President’s true position is that there’s nothing wrong with a gun, as long as you’re the one pulling the trigger. I think one could say that President Obama has murdered more people than the entire membership of the NRA put together. Wayne LaPierre may talk the talk, but he sure don’t walk the walk.
