Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns (9 page)

The people who mock this idea usually rely on a few standard tricks to make the whole concept seem ludicrous. One of those tricks is to paint a battle scene in which a lone person is trying to fight against the
entire government.

You want an assault rifle so that YOU can take on the entire United States military? That is ridiculous!

I completely agree, that is ridiculous. I would definitely not be able to defeat the United States military in battle. In fact, if disaster strikes and Rachel, Jon, and Joe evacuate Manhattan and come take refuge on my ranch, I probably won’t even be able to protect them from roving bands of gangs looking for food. But
the best part about the Second Amendment is that, as long as it exists, I will probably never have to try. Any government would be certifiably insane to attempt to overrun a country composed of 80 million people owning 300 million firearms.

If a government is someday dumb enough to attempt it, at least citizens stand a fighting chance. To head off the usual retort, yes, the U.S. military does have tanks and jets and bombs—so what? The odds that an armed citizenry is ever taking on the armed forces as we know them today are Powerball-winning small. If things were ever to get to the point where armed conflict became necessary—especially if the underlying issue was an abandonment of the Constitution by our leaders—we’d likely see most soldiers refuse to fight or even flip sides and join the masses.

Of course, those are hypotheticals that do nothing to make the case anyway. People who believe that to be a laughable scenario (and I agree that, right now, it is) will never be convinced, because they don’t want to be. For the rest of us, the Second Amendment is the ultimate deterrent, a German shepherd sitting on the front porch, frothing at the mouth and barking like mad.

If we continue to stand for our rights, none of us alive today will ever have to pick up a weapon against our government. The bad news is that if those rights are watered down or taken away, the risk of tyranny will increase with each passing generation.

In the meantime, there are plenty of other reasons why a law-abiding American household may choose to have a semi-automatic gun like an AR-15 in their home. During the 1992 Los Angeles race riots, hundreds of violent looters targeted average citizens and businesses. According to the History Channel:

Traffic was blocked, and rioters beat dozens of motorists, including Reginald Denny, a white truck driver who was dragged out of his truck and nearly beaten to death by three African-American
men . . . . Los Angeles police were slow to respond, and the violence radiated to areas throughout the city. California Governor Pete Wilson deployed the National Guard at the request of Mayor Tom Bradley, and a curfew was declared. By the morning, hundreds of fires were burning across the city, more than a dozen people had been killed, and hundreds were injured.

Rioting and violence continued during the next 24 hours, and Korean shop owners in African-American neighborhoods defended their businesses with rifles. On May 1, President George [H. W.] Bush ordered military troops and riot-trained federal officers to Los Angeles and by the end of the next day the city was under control. The three days of disorder
killed 55 people, injured almost 2,000, led to 7,000 arrests, and caused nearly $1 billion in property damage, including the burnings of nearly 4,000 buildings.

Sounds like fun. How would you like to have been a business owner in that area armed with nothing more than a baseball bat or a single-shot pistol? Think you’d stand much of a chance against a violent mob? And what about those who were trapped in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when armed looters ruled streets that had been virtually abandoned by police?

“
It’s downtown Baghdad,” tourist Denise Bollinger said about New Orleans. “It’s insane.”

“
The looting is out of control. The French Quarter has been attacked,” Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson said. “We’re using exhausted, scarce police to control looting when they should be used for search and rescue while we still have people on rooftops.”

If you’re caught in the middle of that, what do you do—just dead-bolt your door and hope for the best? Maybe pull out that antique six-shooter against a violent gang of looters?

In the New York City area, Hurricane Sandy proved to many who had previously scoffed at the so-called survivalists just how
fast civilization and the rule of law can break down. After just a few days of no electricity, gas lines began to stretch for miles. In New Jersey, state troopers were deployed to all stations along the major interstates to calm nerves. In New York City
a man had a gun stuck in his face at a Queens gas station after complaining that another customer had cut him off in line. A Lowe’s store manager in New York said, “
You see the worst in people at a time like this. We’re trying to be there for them, but they get angry when they can’t get batteries or flashlights.”

That was less than a week without electricity—what happens in a real, long-term disaster? What happens when food supply lines get cut off, or an epic storm cuts a large swath of people off from the outside world? Would you rather be hunkered
down with a handgun holding a maximum of seven rounds (which is now the limit in New York), or an AR-15 with a magazine large enough to ensure that your entire family is protected?

I could go on—but here’s the thing: I don’t have to. As of now this is still a free country and I have a right to defend myself and my family as I see fit. I do not need to come up with a list of justifications to make New York media elitists like Piers Morgan, Rachel Maddow, and Jon Stewart happy.

All I need is the Second Amendment—just the way it is.

“I don’t think the Founding Fathers had the idea that every man, woman, and child
could carry an assault weapon.”

—MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG
,
December 16, 2012

“When they passed the 2nd Amendment, they had muskets. It took 20 minutes to load one, and half the time, you missed, OK?
The 2nd Amendment didn’t take into account assault weapons . . . . ”

—DEEPAK CHOPRA
,
December 21, 2012

“[T]hey always hide behind the Second Amendment. They’re fabulous at doing that. But
the Second Amendment does not give you the right to bear any kind of arm. And technology has changed. And, of course, the design has changed. The proficiency of the manufacturing has changed.”

—ED SCHULTZ
,
December 19, 2012

This is a pretty popular argument that’s made all the time by those who really want to click their heels together three times and pretend that the Founders were imbeciles who had no clue that technology would ever advance. Fortunately, it’s also an argument that’s been roundly rejected by a little group called the United States Supreme Court.

In the landmark 2008 ruling
District of Columbia v. Heller,
the Court observed:

Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment. We do not interpret constitutional rights that way. Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications, e.g., Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U. S. 844, 849 (1997), and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, e.g., Kyllo v. United States, 533 U. S. 27, 35–36 (2001),
the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.
(emphasis added)

That is such a clear and resounding quote that it’s probably counterproductive to even attempt to add to it, but there are a few other things that the mayor, Deepak, and Ed would be wise to understand.

It is true that the people who wrote and ratified the Second
Amendment did not specifically intend to protect the AR-15 or other modern-day weapons. It’s also true that there was no specific intent in the First Amendment to protect the right to say whatever you want on the Internet or to broadcast ridiculous opinions on MSNBC. And when our Founders wrote the Fourth Amendment they had no idea that they’d someday be protecting the right to talk privately on a cell phone (although whether or not the government is actually respecting that right is for another book).

Anyone who claims that weapons like semi-automatics are so modern and unique that the Second Amendment does not apply to them would also have to believe that the First Amendment protects only writing done with quill pens on parchment paper, since those were the norm back then. How could we expect the Founders to have ever imagined the world we live in today?

We couldn’t—but there is a good reason why the Second Amendment was not written to say “the right of the people to keep and bear muskets, flintlock pistols, and swords”—the types of weapons that were common in 1791. The Founders, far from being the idiots the media paints them to be, knew that technology would evolve. That’s why they wrote the amendment to protect “arms” as a class and it’s why the Constitution as a whole defines a relationship between individuals and the government that is applied across time—no matter what technology eventually brings us.

Let’s go back to the First Amendment to illustrate what might happen if we were to take the Bloomberg/Chopra/Schultz view. At the time this amendment was written,
a skilled printer could produce 250 sheets in two hours. Today, a modern newspaper printing press can
produce 70,000 copies of an entire newspaper in an hour. And, with digital publishing, a newspaper article can be read globally within minutes after it is written.

One consequence of this technological evolution is that an irresponsible media can cause far more harm today than it could in 1791. For example, in 2005,
Newsweek
published a story claiming that American personnel at Guantánamo Bay had desecrated Korans belonging to prisoners there. The magazine eventually retracted the story, but it had already spread worldwide, setting off riots in six countries
and resulting in the deaths of at least seventeen people.

Had
Newsweek
been using eighteenth-century printing presses, the false story would have been read by several thousand people confined to a small geographic area. It would have been months—if ever—before the
Newsweek
issue with the false story was read by anyone in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

This is the same basis upon which the Bloomberg/Chopra/Schultzes of the world argue that we should ban innovations in the firearm industry, like semi-automatic rifles and large-capacity magazines.
Look at the damage they can inflict!
these people argue. But that point of view is held only by people who have no respect for the Second Amendment and its key role in preserving freedom. After all, if you believe in the Second Amendment as strongly as you believe in the First, then these kind of innovations aren’t dangerous—they’re necessary. A mass printing press or a racist Internet blog in the hands of a madman can inflict serious harm on society; but banning either of those things inflicts much more.

Those who believe that freedom of the press is a basic tenet of a free society look at things differently. Instead of opposing any change that makes the press more “lethal,” they embrace it.
More speech, not less.
That is common sense to most progressives—yet they can’t seem to bring themselves to apply that same standard to the very next amendment.

Aside from theoretical debates about the application of freedoms
across time, the assumption about what our Founders knew about guns at that time is totally wrong. While weapons that could fire multiple shots without reloading were crude, they were not unheard-of and it would not take someone of the intelligence of James Madison to realize that they were the future. As professors Clayton Cramer and Joseph Olson pointed out in their paper “Pistols, Crime, and Public Safety in Early America,” “Repeating, magazine-fed firearms date back to at least the 1600s; concealable ‘pepperbox’
handguns firing five to seven shots without reloading were in use by the end of the eighteenth century.”

There was still plenty of room for improvement in multi-shot guns, and those improvements were eagerly anticipated. As Cramer and Olson wrote, “In 1791, it is clear that the goal of multi-shot firearms was on the mind of gunsmiths, inventors, and shooters . . . .
Guns were in hand and getting better with every generation. Inventors knew where they wanted to be . . . . ”

It was only a few years after the Bill of Rights was ratified that a big change came to American firearms. In 1798, Eli Whitney became the first American industrialist to secure a government contract
for mass production of firearms (ten thousand units) using interchangeable parts. Suddenly, gun making was no longer a one-at-a-time business of craft production.

By the early nineteenth century, interchangeable parts were used routinely and Whitney’s “American system of Manufacture” was soon being copied around the globe. The United States, whose main exports up to that point had been crops and other raw materials, entered the industrial revolution with guns blazing—literally.
Firearms quickly became America’s first mass-production export.

The nineteenth century saw enormous improvements in firearms technology—much faster loading, more reliable ignition, more and better multi-shot firearms. Before the twentieth century
dawned, semi-automatics were well developed and ammunition had taken the modern form that we still see today.

As far as we can tell from the historical record, nobody ever asserted that these improvements in firearms technology somehow meant that the Second Amendment would no longer apply. And that’s because nobody was dumb enough to believe that to be true.

“For a hundred years, the Constitution was interpreted to mean that state militias, essentially state police, had a right to bear arms, because that’s what the first half of [the] Second Amendment says. But, as of 2008, as a result of years of lobbying and years of Republican appointees to the court, in 2008, the Supreme Court
said individuals have a right to bear arms under the Second Amendment.”