Why NOW Gun Control?
By Donald Silberger

Few people are aware just how new "gun control" really is in these United States, at least as it applies to non-minority citizens.

As a system of measures intended to apply to our citizenry en large, gun control was born only sixty six years ago. It has grown into prominence as a movement only during the past ten or twenty years.

The National Firearms Act of 1934 was America's first gun control law at the federal level. This Act mandated a $200 tax on the sale of each short-barreled shotgun and each fully automatic firearm (aka machinegun). It specified criminal penalties for failure to pay this tax.

Arguments offered for NFA1934 were based upon the urban street violence spawned by Prohibition from 1919, when Amendment XVIII entered the USConstitution calling for a nationwide ban on alcohol, until the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 via Amendment XXI. In these arguments, "sawed-off shotguns" and "Tommyguns" were deemed to be "weapons of choice of gangsters and bootleggers".

Aficionados of the Dick Tracy comic strip of the Thirties and Forties will recall the naive racism of that era, notorious for urban massacres and drive-by shootings, in which squarejawed heroic Nordic types like Tracy battled against swarthy (usually grotesque) Untermenschen of the Mediterranean stripe.

The public mind has long associated abuses both of guns and of drugs with people whose skins are dark. Thus the Dred Scott Decision expressed the post-Civil-War Supreme Court's anxiety that the newly enacted 14th Amendment would activate, for former slaves, the 2nd Amendment's guarantee of the Right of individual citizens to Keep and Bear Arms (acronymed RKBA).

Notice that in the 19th Century nobody questioned the premise that the 2nd Amendment guarantees the right of American citizens to own and carry firearms during the course of their daily affairs -- an attitude not surprising for Americans a scant century following The Shot That Was Heard Around The World, which ignited the American Revolution. The battles at Lexington and Concord were fought against British soldiers who had marched to seize the colonists' store of arms. Thus, an individual American's right to weaponry was among the least disputed citizen rights at the time of the founding of our republic.

What was the frightening idea that resulted in the Dred Scott Decision? It was that the 14th Amendment would enable freedman Negroes to avail themselves of the constitutional right to arms -- a right that was universally accepted in America of the Nineteenth Century.

It was NFA1934 that made federal regulation of firearms thinkable. So after the rash of prominant assassinations in the 1960s we got the Gun Control Act of 1968, which sought to limit mail-order purchases of guns across state borders. The threat to the Right to Keep and Bear Arms was not obvious to most gun owners even then. Indeed, Charlton Heston, currently President of the National Rifle Association, is sometimes criticized by RKBA activists for his role in helping to draft GCA1968.

Racism's early role was obvious in other RKBA infringements: As early as 1915 efforts were made to ban "Saturday night specials". This nickname, derived from the expression "Nigger Saturday night", refers to handguns which may be within the budget of a citizen close to the poverty line.

The anti-war protests of the Sixties and early Seventies, during which a few armed college students occupied administration buildings, gave further impetus to bans on firearm presence where there had been no such bans earlier. The fact, that the protesters were often drug users too, engendered increased propaganda and prosecutions for drug-law violations as well, inducing under Nixon a War on Drugs which recreated the urban gang violence of the alcohol prohibition period, and thus provided additional ammunition for people wishing to disarm American citizens.

By the 1990s a vigorous media campaign against firearms and firearms owners had arisen -- launched with a vengeance after the massacres by federal police at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, and near Waco, Texas, in 1993, and after the insane reprisal in 1995 by Timothy McVeigh et al in Oklahoma City.

The shift in the public view towards guns and the shooting sports that occurred over the past thirty five years is remarkable.

In the Sixties there were rifle teams on college and high-school campuses. At the age of fourteen, yours truly gained in 1944 a Boy Scout Merit Badge in Marksmanship; it was one of the awards which finally earned me the rank of Eagle Scout.

Of late, every serious accident or tragedy involving civilian misuse of firearms comes to national attention in the media. One could of course expect many such incidents in any nation with a population of nearly 290 million.

A Midwestern six-year-old shoots a classmate, and this event is bruited in headlines from Coast to Coast, with a cover picture on Newsweek.

A thoughtful individual will ask herself: How many unreported fatalities occur each day -- never mind making it to a cover of Newsweek -- when those events (drownings, falls, etc.) do not serve the agenda of the gun controllers?

A gun massacre in a train or in a restaurant is treated invariably as yet another "reason" why citizens should not own firearms; never mind the fact that many such massacres could be stopped cold by just one responsible human being with ready access to his or her gun.

The occasions when firearms are used by civilians against human criminal predators number at least 2.5 million per year, according to the scholarship of criminologist Gary Kleck. But few of these are reported even in local newspapers, and almost none are read about or heard nationwide.

The naive therefore gain the impression that accidents with guns, and that criminal misuse of firearms, are epidemic. However, this impression is belied by the facts:

Violent predation has been declining for years -- especially (according to the study by Lott and Mustard) in the 31 states which have enacted "shall issue" laws requiring the issuance of pistol carry permits to mentally stable law-abiding permit applicants.

Firearms accidents are at a 97-year-low since the date, 1903, when the collection of relevant data was initiated -- despite the steady increase in the number of legal civilian-owned firearms.

It is noteworthy that a local high-school student this year faced quite a different situation from the one I faced when I won my Marksmanship Merit Badge in 1944:

On Page 18 of of the Times Herald Record of 13 January, a headline announces:

"Marksman's photo to run in yearbook"

The accompanying four-inch story says,

    
     "Jennifer Bono, 17, who has won national 
    women's titles [in rifle marksmanship] 
    in each class for the past four years, 
    submitted an informal photograph of 
    herself wielding an AR15, the civilian 
    version of the military M16, to the 
    yearbook.
     "Yearbook advisor Joyce Steflik said 
    she approved the photograph because she 
    knew Bono is an avid marksman.  But School 
    Superintendent [Hutchinson] didn't go along.
     "[He] informed Bono of his decision to 
    pull the picture on Jan. 3.
     "'He called me on Monday and said that 
    the photo with an assault rifle promoted 
    violence and with all the violence in 
    school, it couldn't go in.'"

But was it a score for the "gun lobby" after all? One would think that this story, concerning a photograph, would have printed at least *that* photograph. But no! Could the editor of the THR, like Superintendent Hutchinson, also choose in this way to avoid "promoting violence" among his readership?

Besides, Bono's AR15 hadn't been involved in a murder or an accident. Only in official hands, or confiscated and displayed after BATF raids, are "assault rifles" deemed worthy of photographing for today's public eye.

Gun control propaganda, and the nonreporting of laudable civilian gun use, has become as commonplace as the hissing of a steam radiator in an old building in deep winter:

Eventually one forgets to take notice of it.

The situation is quite remarkable, however. It seems prudent for each citizen to awaken to the certain questions, and to seek answers:

What is this extremely recent cry for gun control all about?

How have gun accidents and civilian firearms assaults come to be such attractive fodder for media coverage?

Our country is the gulag champion of the world. On 15 February our prison population passed two million. The USA jails both a larger number, and a larger percentage, of its citizens than does any other nation on Earth.

The majority of our prison inmates are both nonviolent and nonpredatory. They have broken arbitrary and draconian laws against consensual sins -- drugs, prostitution, gambling, sexual "deviance", and pornography -- some of which "crimes" require unbelievably long *mandatory* sentences (e.g., 93 years in jail for a middle aged arthritic citizen who grew for himself medical marijuana in his own home!) And an increasing percentage of jailed citizens are Black or Latino.

In a land which has 1/20 of the world's population, but 1/5 of the world's prison inmates; in a land whose prison-building has become a growth business; in a land whose police forces, ever larger and more heavily armed, operate with diminishing restraint:-- in such a land, today's United States, any movement to disarm its civilian population should strike alert citizens as ominous.

Who started the recent demand for the disarmament of law-abiding citizens? The Nixon Administration had something to do with it, but subsequent Administrations of both major political parties have added their support to the furor.

Gun control laws will not strongly affect street criminals, whose professions depend upon their access to weaponry. After all, drug laws do not deprive heroin addicts of the substance they seek.

Those who do not respect laws, and who have little to lose and much to gain from breaking those laws, will be largely immune from the direct effects of the laws.

Street criminals are in fact benefited, albeit indirectly, from laws which disarm their intended victims.

Gun control laws threaten, and disempower, only those citizens who have something to lose if they are apprehended as lawbreakers: their homes, families, stable lawful employments, and status and respect in their communities.

These laws -- and there are 22,000 of them already in our country -- are worse than the merely useless "feel-good" legislation their milder critics sometimes consider them. For, bad laws put decent people at risk, while doing nothing to inhibit the actions of thugs -- both those wearing uniforms and those who wear instead the more usual garb of rapists, robbers, and murderers.

Who funds the media barrage for gun control, the barrage which prepares our populace to accept such legislation as if it were good or even necessary? Whom do the laws serve?

In reality gun control is people control.

Those who have the guns, while others are helpless to resist those guns, are in control.

If the government does not trust me with my guns, then why should I trust the government with theirs?

Does the government perhaps plan some action against which decent citizens could be expected finally to rise in armed revolt?

Maybe allowing ourselves to be passively and trustingly disarmed is a bad idea.

BIOGRAPHY: Donald Silberger, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at SUNY in New Paltz, and has published more than thirty research papers in combinatorial algebra, as well as dozens of poems, stories, and essays on political philosophy. In 1998 he was the Libertarian Party's candidate for Lieutenant Governor of New York.