We read those words to that effect from an article linked to by a libertarian website we visit very regularly.

“In Zimmerman’s case, Martin was an athletic six-foot-two-inch tall football player that had him on his back pounding on him. Martin got what he deserved.”

So wrote Paul Huebl, a former Chicago cop and proud member of the Screen Actors Guild.

We’ve tried to avoid having to write anything publicly about the shooting of Trayvon Martin. It’s too obvious a move for the black anarcho-libertarian to spout off on the matter. But we feel we must let our thoughts be known…

You see, dear patron, we spent a few years of our adolescence in the Central Florida town just south of where Trayvon was killed. We have some experience with being black in that corner of the world.

Further, the public voices who dwell close to our philosophical sphere seem to be saying some questionable things in their rush to defend gun ownership and denounce sleazy race-baiters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

Like Thomas Sowell, the black conservative and intellectual who agreed with Geraldo Rivera’s advice to black and Hispanic youth to not dress to look so threatening.

First a few things about that part of Florida…

Like Caesar’s Gaul, Florida is divided into three parts…

South Florida as centered around the Miami-Dade metro area is essentially a continental Latin and Caribbean colony.

Central Florida is dominated of course by Orlando. It’s bloodless and its claim to fame is a tourist trap ruled over by a mouse created by a Nazi-sympathizer.

People often say that Florida isn’t really “The South”. And they’re right. But North Florida isn’t really part of Florida as much as it is the southernmost region of Georgia.

Once you head north of Orlando, the descendants of Castro-generated refugees and Jewish retirees become a distant spectacle. Much more immediate are the Confederate flags, monster trucks and occasional white supremacist tattoo.

Geneva, Florida, is just a few miles north of Orlando and a few miles east of Sanford, Florida, where George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin to death.

Through a series of crises and accidents your editor came to spend his early teen years as a resident of Geneva. The town is home to just a couple thousand souls or so. The downtown has a section full of older homes, a section of newer tract homes (where your editor lived), three churches, an elementary school, a couple of gas stations, one post office, one feed store and one stoplight.

The rest of the place is a smattering of multi-acre properties, dirt roads and swamp.

While Sanford lies directly east, Oviedo, FL, is just south and to the west. Oviedo is a very nice, suburb of Orlando. It made at least one “100 Best to Live in the U.S.” list one year. The road from Oviedo becomes Geneva’s First Street. There is a specific moment as you travel along that road that you sense you’ve crossed some ethereal veil. It happens within a second or two of leaving the “Welcome to Oviedo” sign behind.

The new, colorful subdivisions stop abruptly. Wide open pastures take their place. Tiny herds of cattle and the occasional horse or two alternate with lone houses in big fields as you drive along.

You notice more pickup trucks, quite a few of them on giant tires. The few other cars you see on the two-lane road move more aggressively.

Twenty years ago when your editor’s mother bought one of those newer tract homes, one of the neighbors painted “NO NIGER” in huge red letters on our mother’s garage door. We assume the vandal meant “NO NIGGER”, but we also assume it was also dark when he wrote it and he lost track of how many g’s he’d already written.

A few months later someone left a pathetic attempt at a chemical bomb on the front porch of our family’s house. Our mother called the sheriff. The deputies told her that had the bomb worked, it might have killed her.

That was all over twenty years ago. But just a few years ago the son of the other black Caribbean family in town was carrying his own young son on his shoulders when he was run over by one of our neighbors.

The brother and his son survived with only minimal injury. The neighbor went to jail for a long time. The attack was racially motivated.

Back in January, 2010 we were visiting the old homestead, we were hit by a speeding truck as we walked along the road just beyond our mother’s house. The hit was surely accidental. It was the response of everyone involved that made us mad. And reminded us what the life of a black man is worth in that town.

The driver stopped, ran over to our prone form and asked us angrily what we were doing “in the middle of the road” as we lay moaning on the lawn where we’d landed. The owner of the home also seemed mad that we had landed on his lawn and had created trouble for the driver. Once we recovered our senses and realized that we were neither dead nor crippled, a fight very nearly ensued.

To heap even more insult to our relatively minor injuries, the emergency crew who came out (at our mother’s insistence, not our own) seemed annoyed at us, too.

We never lived in neighboring Sanford itself. But we spent an awful lot of time there. On the way to the city itself from Geneva, there is a little “Chocolate Village” called appropriately enough Midway. A poor black neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. Out of the 1700 or so people who live there 1600 are black while only a few dozen are white.

Sanford itself is a much bigger town with over 50,000 residents. Over half of those are white and a little less than a third black. The black population is largely concentrated in the Goldsborough neighborhood.

Sanford’s neck isn’t quite as red as Geneva’s, but there is still that uniquely Southern flavor of black-white tension on the air. Your editor can taste it every time he lands at Orlando International Airport. It increases the farther north you go from the airport and from Orlando. You could choke on it in Geneva. It’s not as bad in Sanford, but it’s still there.

Here’s an anecdote not from personal experience, but culled from the Wikipedia page on Sanford:

“On October 23, 1945, the Brooklyn Dodgers announced that they had signed Jackie Robinson assigning him to their International League team, the Montreal Royals.

“Branch Rickey, Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager believing he ‘knew’ Florida, thought his team could train there ruffling as few feathers as possible. Robinson and his wife were instructed by Rickey not to try to stay at any Sanford hotels. He and his wife didn’t eat out at any restaurants not deemed ‘Negro restaurants.’ He didn’t even dress in the same locker room as his teammates.

“As soon as the citizenry became aware of Robinson’s presence, the mayor of Sanford was confronted by a ‘large group of white residents’ who ‘demanded that Robinson…be run out of town.’

“On March 5th, 1946, the Royals were informed that they would not be permitted to take the field as an integrated group. Rickey was concerned for Robinson’s life and sent him to stay in Daytona Beach. His daughter, Sharon Robinson, remembered being told, ‘The Robinsons were run out of Sanford, Florida, with threats of violence.’”

“In his 1993 book, ‘A Hard Road to Glory: A History Of The African American Athlete: Baseball’ tennis great Arthur Ashe wrote in response, Rickey ‘moved the entire Dodger pre-season camp from Sanford, Florida, to Daytona Beach due to the oppressive conditions of Sanford.’”

Source

We share these anecdotes so you understand our bias. And not so much to explain Zimmerman’s actions — he was an overzealous cop wannabe whose stereotyping got him in over his head — but to explain the police response.

Black life doesn’t hold so much value in the region Trayvon was killed. And we sadly report that it often doesn’t have much value in the eyes of people with whom we tend to agree on other things like liberty and the right to bear arms.

It saddens us to be on the side of the national healthcare types on this one. (But again, we’re neither conservative nor liberal in any modern sense, but in love with liberty and the markets they foster.) Even if Trayvon got violent with Zimmerman…even if Zimmerman was getting the worst of it in a scuffle…he was the aggressor. He gave Trayvon reason to feel the need to defend himself. Zimmerman was the one “acting suspiciously.”

(Zimmerman also strikes us the type who admired authoritarian power and made up for his inadequacies by carrying a gun. But we don’t know the man personally and could be wrong. His idea of self-defense, however, seems in line with U.S. foreign policy: antagonize and escalate after the violent response.)

Lest you get us wrong, we believe in the right to bear arms to be as essential as the right to own property and to do as you will with your own body. We also believe in the absolute right to self defense and to stop violence toward your person and property with force.

But that doesn’t mean you get to create the situation in which you have to defend yourself.

Zimmerman is not white. Not really. But he stands in for all the white “conservatives” out there whose love of freedom extends only as far their right to bear arms. It doesn’t cover the non-white elements in “their” country, nor the Ay-rab countries their “conservative” political actors attack.

So no, Zimmerman isn’t white. But he has become the avatar for a large swath of the population who will never under any circumstances be sorry to see the Second Amendment used to lay waste to a young black man who probably had it coming.

Had Trayvon or any other black man behaved as Zimmerman had toward a white person…if a white man had been beating on then been shot by a black man who had been shadowing him…That is to say, if the races of the actors had been reversed (again counting the “white Hispanic” Zimmerman as a stand in for the white Second Amendment lovers who fantasize about some black punk giving them an excuse), then the gun rights crowd would be singing the opposite tune.

They would have decried the black man for stalking the white man in the first place. They would have cheered the white man for pummeling his black stalker. They would have called for justice for the fallen white man and for the imprisonment and even death of the black shooter.

As it is many liberty and guns types see a smoking gun and big, dead, black kid and honestly don’t see a problem. They can’t believe the rush to judgment. Granted, the media is making the usual circus of this…And those charlatans Sharpton and Jackson are all over this like flies on a corpse…

And maybe therein lies the problem. Being black has become so politicized. The state is so involved in being black that blacks can’t help but live politicized lives. And have the occasional politicized death.

Economic integration — being useful in the marketplace — was resulting in social integration before WWI. Then along came the state with its wedge in the form of Jim Crow laws. So after the state prevented the natural integration of white and black, it took it upon itself to force integration at a later date. To make it a violent political matter when markets had been doing it peaceably.

After making integration as violent as possible, the state further amplified the divide between blacks and whites. It’s the state that cripples blacks with the crack cocaine of welfare. It corrals the visible mass of them in public housing and rewards them for creating one-parent homes. It traps their children in bottom-of-the-barrel public schools where they learn nothing.

After public education destroys their minds and welfare destroys their work ethic, the state creates quotas to get unqualified blacks into the job market. This only increases resentment from whites. Meanwhile blacks are kept from any meager but honest employment by means of minimum wage laws.

These laws strongly discourage employers from hiring anyone whose labor isn’t worth at least the minimum the government sets. If an employer MUST pay at least $7.25 per hour and a young black man’s skills are only worth, say, $5.00 per hour (because he is a product of public schooling, public housing and welfare), then that young black man will simply not be hired. That young black man will be further driven away from becoming a contributing member in the markets and therefore civil society.

Also the state persecutes blacks mercilessly when they engage in the most attractive trade available to the majority who won’t make it in music or sport, a trade that exists because of unreasonable prohibitions on human choice.

So the state does everything to shape dependent and resentful adults. Then the state’s wage controls keep young black people out of the labor market. Then it punishes them harshly for engaging in the black markets it creates with its senseless prohibition, often setting them on a lifelong cycle of incarceration.

The state has helped craft members of the black race into objects of hate. Parasites in weird dress, speaking in alien tongues. Their natural habitat is surely the prison, where more today reside than were enslaved in the early 19th century.

By “helping” blacks, the state turns them into subhuman caricatures. By making them its wards, the state creates a concentration of hopeless, dangerous, ignorant poverty with its own subculture and dialect. The state creates a population that the white majority views with unease at best and hatred at the worst.

So black men will always “have it coming” in the eyes of many in the liberty and guns crowd (to which your dark-skinned editor belongs). As long as so many black lives are shaped by the state’s inherently destructive assistance black men will always be deserving of suspicion in the eyes of those who have no biological urge to view them as extended members of the human family.

It’s natural enough for humans to identify along lines of kinship. Ethnicity is just extended family after all. And it’s unreasonable to expect people not to favor family. But the market provides a civilizing effect by rewarding cooperation, providing mutual gain and creating tolerance for those who aren’t related to us and don’t share our exact tastes. We manage to get along with each other in the market place where we interact and are rewarded for serving each other well.

Politics will have none of this. It thrives by amplifying divisions, creating social friction within and war without. Where markets demand peace and cooperation, politics demands conflict, otherness and hatred of it.

“Look at him!” the whites with guns cry about slain Trayvon. “He looks like a thug!” Tall, athletic, wearing that black dress code. Gold teeth. He was already dealing with that plant the government doesn’t like, according to the reports.

Nowhere in all this do those who are satisfied with Trayvon’s death say what Trayvon was actually doing to warrant Zimmerman’s attentions. Besides walking at night while black.

They will often ask what Trayvon Martin was even doing in a gated community. They sniff out the marijuana possession and the more recent Facebook photos. But they seem to have keep missing the part of the story that explained that Trayvon was on his way back to his father’s house in that gated community. They mock as biased the sympathetic note in the media’s voice, then cherry pick the parts of the story that suits their practiced narrative.

Trayvon was walking back home. But he had the misfortune of looking like the state-fostered cartoon that stirs the base, clannish reaction within whites.

“Hell, if I’d seen him there,” the white ones who tend to have the guns say, “I’d have wanted to confront him, too. And I wouldn’t have lost a wink of sleep over shooting him.”

Perhaps the only acceptable behavior from black men is to avoid areas where they’d make whites nervous, especially at night. Should they be confronted by a non-white, the only correct response is apologetic submission.

Maybe it’s not enough that black men not wear hoodies. Perhaps the good ones ought to wear iron collars to let non-whites know they are not looking for trouble, are not dangerous and can be trusted.

Regards,

Gary Gibson

Did Trayvon “Have It Coming”? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

The Second, however, is in the hot seat again.

Everyone is cottoning onto the fact that Jared Loughner was just a nut. Political affiliation is questionable or just plain negligible. It’s getting too hard to blame the limited government and anti-government rhetoric. Even Obama rose above political divisiveness on this one.

So now that free speech is no longer being blamed, it’s time to turn our attention back to those damned guns. Loughner would very likely have ended up attacking people no matter which books he had read. The man had already made his psychotic break from morality…

But if only guns weren’t available, comes the cry! Then these psychopaths couldn’t do as much harm as they do…

A reader sent this:

“Gary,

“You write,

“‘Gun-ownership supporters are getting the usual flack.’

“And so they should.

“The time is ripe for the repeal of the Second Amendment.

“In Australia 10 years or so ago, we had a psycho gun down a dozen people with an automatic rifle.

“The government brought in sweeping powers to reduce the number of guns and make access to guns extremely difficult.

“We’re a safer community because of it. Lunatics can’t get access to any gun, let alone the Arnie type.

“The guns any of the people who were killed or injured the other day were not sufficient to protect them. They never were.

“We didn’t need the guns in the days of the Wild West. It just encouraged thugs, criminals, and lunatics on horses to run amok. Hollywood’s glamorization of the Wild West has jaundiced our view of this mayhem.

“We don’t need them now. It still just encourages thugs, criminals and lunatics to run amok killing and injuring innocent people.

“Do you carry a gun?”

Not right now. But I do have access to cars and knives…

Consider Japan, where no one has a gun, yet insane people occasionally kill several strangers en masse with a simple kitchen knife…or with the combination of a vehicle and a dagger.

• In 2001 in Ikeda, Japan, eight children were killed and 15 people injured in Japan’s worst school tragedy when a middle-aged man with a history of mental illness went on a stabbing rampage at an elementary school.

• In Tokyo’s Akihabara massacre Tomohiro Kato struck a crowd with a truck, which killed three people and injured two. He then leaped out the vehicle and stabbed 12 people with a dagger, killing four people and injuring eight.

So it turns that that mass or spree killings are surprisingly possible without firearms. Japanese madmen managed to kill as many or more people in each of the above sprees as Loughner managed to with a firearm.

Madmen will find something to get the job done. Guns, knives, hammers, cars…whatever they can get their hands on. In the above example, innocents managed to get themselves killed in small handfuls by maniacs with nary a gun in sight.

But certainly, a gun usually makes slaughter more efficient. As a rule, psychotic killers kill a lot more people with guns than they can manage to with speeding cars and knives. Given the choice, killers take the ease of the gun over the effort-intensive knife and cumbersome car every time, for much the same reasons most of us would use a buzz saw to fell a tree instead of an ax.

You’ll notice that knives and vehicles are still legal in Japan. “Damn you! It’s not the same!” goes the argument; Guns are blatantly and outrageously designed for killing. Knives and cars are tools that can be misused. The gun is a tool, too, but when used properly, it kills. This becomes very clear as one reads the accounts of spree killings involving firearms.

What also stands out more to anyone not automatically biased against guns is that no one is able to stop the spree killer because everyone else is insufficiently armed. Everyone simply flees in terror when the maniac starts shooting. The victims-to-be can’t shoot back because as polite, progressive people, they think the right to self-defense is barbaric.

Carrying a firearm for self-protection is as atavistic as keeping a safe with some gold and silver. It’s hip, modern…civilized!…to let the government handle the weapons and the money.

Some people just have a deep-down fear of guns, the way some people have a fear of other people putting whatever they want into their own bodies…or of other people doing whatever they want in private with other consenting adults.

They’re all symptoms of the same busybody disease. They also pretend that it’s a good idea to make sure that only criminals and the government — but here I repeat myself — have guns.

They don’t want the burden of self-protection…even though places that allow regular folks to conceal and carry tend to have lower crime rates. This is just pure economics at work: The chance that any given target could be armed makes crime a much riskier proposition with no increase in reward. Criminals take this risk-reward ratio into consideration. It’s part of the reason the cities with the most stringent gun control laws are among the worst in terms of crime.

Can’t we just get rid of all the guns among the populace, the busybodies wonder.

No. Criminals and madmen will always find a way to get those guns while the rest of us voluntarily disarm ourselves.

And even if we could remove every gun from the civilian population, is that really a good idea?

Your garden-variety statist will say yes. After all, the government is supposed to have our best interest at heart; it’s not like an armed populace is something the government would fear or should have to fear…right?

These people need to take the warnings of history a little more seriously.

And they ought to read these books:

Guns, Crime, and Freedom

The Global War on Your Guns

You should read them too.

Regards,
Gary Gibson
Managing Editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder

January 15, 2011

Spree Killers, the Second Amendment, and Those Damned Guns was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

And in the wake of the deadliest shooting spree ever on U.S. soil, it must seem jarring to read an essay on the necessity of guns. But it’s perhaps most appropriate to broach this subject now, because this tragedy underscores yet again the need for policy changes with regard to firearms — specifically, the liberalization (or rather, the restoration) of citizens’ rights to the concealed carry of firearms.

Monday, Bloody Monday

As the second of a two-part series about the ongoing battle over our right to guns in America, this essay was originally going to address some reader comments on the first installment and delve into greater detail about the bias against guns in the media. I was also going to explore obvious interpretations of the Second Amendment that seem perennially to elude the pundits and courts — wrapping up with some observations about the modern “balance sheet” mentality when it comes to liberty…

But these things seem less urgent now that 32 innocents lay dead and numerous others wounded after a 23-year-old resident alien brought two guns onto the Virginia Tech campus and murdered his way into history. What seems a more important point to make right now is that this massacre happened as much because of the LACK of firearms among the sane and law-abiding as it did because guns found their way into the hands of a lawless madman.

True to form, the media have been quick to target what they perceive as flaws in the system that allowed an unstable man to obtain guns — yet in no mainstream venues have I heard anyone asking why this same system has stripped his helpless victims from the right to defend themselves! If this isn’t stark evidence of a tremendous bias in the mainstream media against Second Amendment rights, I don’t know what is.

And of course, the talking heads were also ignorantly talking up the guns themselves. I read at least one early report that added a shamelessly agenda-driven mention along the lines of “It is not known at this time whether the guns were standard or high-capacity models” — as though this has any bearing at all on the scope of this crime. What difference does it make whether a psychopath executes trapped, defenseless victims with 15-round magazines or 30-rounders?

As it turns out, the spree was committed with run-of-the-mill, 100% legal guns anyone without a major criminal record could buy for a few hundred bucks in any gun shop in America. And the shooter (some are reporting his name as Seung Hui Cho, others as Cho Seung-hui) sailed right through the entire litany of gun control measures Congress has been heaping onto us for years — the myriad state and federal background checks, waiting periods, etc.

Much good they did, huh?

What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men…

Naturally, as more details come out about these killings, much of the discussion is now focused on prevention. And as we always do after a mass shooting in short attention span America, people are asking and commentators are speculating, “How can we avoid this in the future?”

The brutal truth is that while we CAN make kooks think twice about opening fire — and limit the body counts when they do, by giving people back their right to self-defense — we can’t prevent the urge to mass murder in those who are so inclined. Humanity hasn’t the ability to distinguish those capable of such heinous acts from the innocents among us, nor should we trust any technology or psychology that purports to be able to do so. One of the timeless human truths is that we simply cannot know whether heroism, cowardice, or murderousness lurks in the hearts of our fellow men and women until it bubbles to the surface or is forced there by circumstances.

And sad as it is, violent rampages and mass murders are nothing new. They didn’t begin with the advent of firearms — and they don’t solely happen in “gun culture” America. History points to many examples of insane folks going berserk and racking up high body counts by a variety of means: spears, swords, knives, Kool-Aid, biotoxins, chemicals, passenger jets, etc…

However, it is undeniable that firearms grant far more immediate and far-reaching power to the murderous than most of these other things. Something else that’s undeniable is that almost all of the shooting sprees in modern American history have one thing in common aside from a lunatic with a gun:

They happened in places where there was little likelihood that anyone could shoot back.

Psychos aren’t stupid. They’re cowards, but they aren’t dumb. They don’t often stage their rampages at police stations, gun shows, National Guard armories, honky-tonk bars, biker rallies, or even bad neighborhoods. They pick schools and malls and post offices and restaurants and quaint Amish communities to murder their way to their sick 15 minutes of fame. That’s because they KNOW no one is there who can fight back effectively…

Tragically, it was the same way at Virginia Tech. Although Virginia is one of the most liberal concealed-carry states in the country, schools and universities in the Old Dominion state (like many others) are mandated as “gun-free zones.”

And like it or not, it’s because of this that one esteemed university became a terror zone on a bloody Monday in the spring of 2007.

Two Solutions — but Only One Right Way

I know in my heart that every law-abiding gun owner in America desires the prevention of these tragedies as passionately as those who’d ban all guns, Constitution be damned. This is the common ground that any reasoned debate should spring from.

And since there’s nothing anyone can do to make the 200 million or so guns in this country disappear — or get the 80 million or so lawful gun owners to voluntarily give up their firearms — there are only two ways I see that we could prevent these kinds of massacres from occurring again. Neither of these solutions is pleasant for many to think about, but only one is identifiably American. They are:

1) Become a Police State (think the USSR circa 1987) — Murder-wise, Russia was one of the safest places on the planet in the 1980s. That’s because the USSR was a police state. Everyone was afraid of a government that had gotten so pervasively menacing to the individual specifically because the citizenry had no access to any weapons with which to overthrow it. That’s the Marxist doctrine at work: Unite, revolt, then submit. A fringe benefit of this type of society is low violent crime rates.

In this kind of state, schools would look and feel like prisons. Imagine high fences of razor wire, dogs, gates with metal detectors, and everyone filing through them every day with shoes in one hand and papers in the other while guards with machine guns verify that you’re not a threat to the status quo. This would surely keep weapons out. But it would also keep out the freethinkers, the dissenters, the diverse, and the nonconformists — everything that makes higher education the great engine of democracy that it is.

2) Restore a Free State (think the USA circa 1787) — Since the US of A was not envisioned as a police state, a place where troops are housed in every home, or even as a country with a very strong government, the success and viability of this nation depended on citizens themselves to uphold order and the integrity of the rule of law. Until relatively recently, the natural system of “checks and balances” that comes with having an armed populace is what kept people safe from the murderous impulses of psychopaths. And foreign invaders. Oh, and the tyranny of overreaching government.

Warped minds have undoubtedly always existed under the Stars and Stripes, yet the presence of firearms in the hands of people free to use them in defense of good has historically proved a powerful disincentive toward acting on premeditated mass-homicidal impulses. Such is not the case in firearm-phobic America today. Were we to restore our country to something closer to this ideal, schools, malls, city parks, and sport venues would remain the idyllic places we all want them to be, yet still be quite secure…

Now, I know that neither of these realities seems very appetizing to the new literati of the genteel, soulless, “Starbucks Nation” we’ve become in the last 20 years or so. It seems most Americans nowadays, like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, would rather live in blissful denial and take their chances with the Morlocks than grapple with the unpleasant notion that they might actually one day have to fight for their lives, the lives of those they love…

Or heaven forbid, their rights.

“Be Prepared.” (The Boy Scout’s Motto)

In much of modern America, ONLY those with murder or malice in their hearts now have the “right” to bear arms in public — seized by virtue of the fact that they aren’t bound by the rule of law like those of us who leave our guns home because some bloated bureaucrat who lives a risk-free life of chauffeurs, guarded offices, and gated communities decides we can’t be trusted with our own Constitution…

This is the most evil, twisted irony on the American landscape today!

Imagine what life would be like under an untrammeled Bill of Rights — a world where you and I and every other American of sound mind (and yes, I agree that there have to be controls in place to ensure this) would be free to carry a concealed firearm. Not everyone would HAVE to pack heat to make things a whole lot safer. If only a few in every crowd were carrying, that would be enough to make the next psycho who’s pondering shooting up a school or post office or Luby’s restaurant think twice about it. Or maybe not do it.

Think about it for a minute. In any imperiled crowd, some will cower — but some will fight. They will rise to lead and protect and defend those around them. Look at United Flight 93. They knew what they were up against, they fought with what weapons they could, and they undoubtedly saved God knows how many American lives. The most tragic irony of all is that these heroic souls were only forced to fight and die because no one on the plane was allowed to have a gun. With a firearm in every cockpit, Sept. 11 doesn’t even happen!

My point is this: Give THESE kinds of people — the ones on United 93 who sacrificed themselves to save those on the ground — back their right to carry guns and the Cho Seung-hui of the world will be cowering over journals in their dorms, committing their crimes in ink, instead of in blood. Or in the worst-case scenario, they’ll find themselves eating as much hot lead as they’re slinging. Either way, fewer innocents die.

Seriously, do you really think that if just a few professors, resident assistants, janitors, ROTC seniors, or even freakin’ cheerleaders had been armed in that building at Virginia Tech this coward Cho would’ve been able to wreak such carnage? Could YOU have stood there and watched some psychopath murder your friends, students, teachers, or even total strangers if you had the means to stop it?

Another way to look at it is this: If you found yourself staring down the barrel of some madman’s Glock yourself, would you be thinking about how this country needs more gun control laws — or would you be thinking…

“If only I could shoot back!”

Let me drive this point home with a scenario that actually happened recently. Sometime before closing, two would-be robbers entered a large strip joint/bar in south Baltimore. They both pulled guns, and one of the men fired to get everyone’s attention to announce the stickup. Within seconds, one of the assailants lay dead and the other wounded by the guns of two off-duty cops in street clothes who were there relaxing in their off hours.

Now, do you think the bandits would have pulled their guns and tried to rob the place if the officers had been in uniform? Of course they wouldn’t have. Uniforms means guns, and guns mean resistance and possibly death. But in Baltimore, where concealed carry permits are harder for lawful folks to get than fake Social Security numbers are for illegals (and where penalties for permitless carry are harsh), a bar full of average Joes virtually guarantees an unarmed group of victims.

However, Baltimore City cops are required to carry their guns at ALL TIMES while inside the city’s limits, whether on duty or not (and even when they’re out drinking and carousing, apparently). That night, these two cops were indistinguishable from ordinary citizens in the eyes of the robbers — and because they were innocuous looking, yet were still armed, multiple crimes were thwarted, possible injury or death to the innocent was averted, and justice was swiftly meted out…

The lesson: In an environment in which criminals are forced to contend with the presence of concealed weapons, crime doesn’t end up paying so well. And even though you aren’t hearing this from the mainstream media, the statistics on concealed carry’s effects on crime from both inside and outside of the U.S. are so lopsidedly illustrative of this fact that it’s absurd we aren’t all issued carry permits with our driver’s licenses.

Seriously, the numbers are that compelling (if you want a quick snapshot of this, read John Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime).

The thickest irony here is that although I don’t think it’s proper or fair that American freedoms must stand up to any kind of “balance sheet” test in order to remain in place, no liberty we’re (supposedly) guaranteed is so demonstrably bottom-line beneficial than the concealed carry of firearms. And yet it’s a “right” that relatively few Americans actually even have, so oppressive have gun control laws become in most states…

My most solemn and sincere hope is that this latest tragedy at Virginia Tech will finally spur some reasoned, sustained dialogue about whether gun control laws, specifically those relating to the concealed carry of firearms, really do what they were passed to do. In my view — and as demonstrated time and again by both statistics AND the actions of maniacs — these restrictions simply make it easier for criminals to make a living, and for the deranged to kill as many as they can without fear of their slaughter being cut short by a bullet from any gun other than their own. Already, it looks like the Virginia Tech massacre is shaping up to fuel massive debate about guns in America. Battle lines are being drawn, and the polarization of viewpoints is already beginning…

My hopes aren’t high, though. I wished for meaningful dialogue and change after the Columbine killings — but nothing happened except more gun restrictions (like trigger locks), more debate about firearm availability (instead of accessibility), and the emergence of a powerful anti-gun propagandist (Michael Moore)…

“Se vis pacem, para bellum.”

“If you want peace, be ready for war,” is what Roman militarist Vegetius wrote in his Summary of Military Matters (Epitoma rei Militaris) around A.D. 400. This exact same sentiment is found earlier in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, later in Machiavelli’s writings, and in countless other works through the ages. It was echoed in recent history in the Cold War’s “Mutual Assured Destruction” or “Peace Through Strength” doctrine…

But this is not just an immutable tenet of international relations — it’s the law of the jungle, and of the schoolyard, too. As much as we like to think that in a civilized society, we must certainly be above all that “claw and fang” nonsense, clearly, we are not. What’s so mind-boggling to me is that this isn’t obvious to everyone.

Why don’t people intuitively, instinctually, understand that the only deterrent to crime or aggression of any type is the imminent threat (or even possibility) of retaliation in kind? Criminals and murderers, whether genetically aberrant or monsters of our own making, will only think twice about victimizing us — especially in large groups — if they suspect there’s a better-than-average chance they’ll end up on a slab.

No one relishes the notion that random violence might invade their everyday life, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to do my best to be prepared for it to the fullest extent the law allows. But right now, in most places, that’s virtually unprepared — and if folks make themselves properly prepared, they become the criminals! Is that fair? What rationale against guns could be more important than the inherent (and constitutional, let’s not forget) right to defend one’s own life?

For the sake of those who’ve died in all of history’s killing sprees, I hope we’ll finally learn something from their deaths, and from those 32 helpless souls who lost their lives at Virginia Tech this past Monday. May their sacrifice at last grant some measure of protection to tomorrow’s would-be victims.

Bottom line: Concealed carry of firearms isn’t for everyone. But it doesn’t have to be. Enough people would carry that all would be safer. It’s the possibility of armed response that would have a measurable effect on crime. In only rare occasions would that force need to be unholstered…

I, for one, would carry if I were allowed (or, rather, if lawmakers would grant me the rights I already have). I’d rather deal with a few uncomfortable pounds of cold blue steel gnawing at my armpit under my jacket every day than perpetually wonder is this the day the Morlocks get me, someone I love, or some innocent Americans because I’m too lazy or deep in denial to fight back?

I’m betting that if a mall-shooting madman ever comes for you, you’ll wish someone like me were beside you with a big, ugly gun. And I’m certain that no matter WHAT your political bent, right now you’re wishing someone besides Cho Seung-hui had been carrying a gun in Virginia Tech’s Norris Hall this past Monday…

Armed and alarmed,

Jim Amrhein
Freedoms Editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder

April 23, 2007

The Second Amendment’s Second Coming, Part 2 was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

“Today we need a nation of minute men; citizens who are not only prepared to take up arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as a basic purpose of their daily life…”
– John F. Kennedy, Roosevelt Day commemoration, Jan. 29, 1961

“If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.”
– The Dalai Lama, in The Seattle Times, May 15, 2001

Even the least political among us realize that, overwhelmingly, pressure to regulate firearms in America comes from the left side of the aisle. And naturally, the Democrat sweep of Congress in 2006 has given many firearms enthusiasts, hunters, sport shooters, militia members, gun collectors, constitutionalists, weapons dealers and responsible gun owners who live in transitional neighborhoods (they’re often the driving force behind positive transitions) a moment of unease.

But surrealistically enough, so far in 2007, you’d never know that the country’s political pendulum had swung far to the left from some of the developments on the Second Amendment front. And I – along with the Dalai Lama – am very glad of it. …

D.C. = Disarmed Capital No Longer?

Most notably, Washington, D.C.’s ban on home handgun possession fell on March 9 to a 2-1 vote in a five-year-old case brought by six plaintiffs before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Their finding in a nutshell: That the restriction represents a violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of the individual’s right to keep and bear arms. This utterly reverses a lower court’s 2004 finding in the same case that gun possession rights under the Second Amendment apply only to organized militias, not to individuals.

The decision, which still doesn’t prohibit states from regulating guns, is considered by many to be the most significant firearms-related court decision in seven decades, and it marks the first time in federal appeals court history that an existing gun control law was struck down as unconstitutional on Second Amendment grounds. Many feel that the ruling could become the touchstone case that finally forces a Supreme Court clarification on the wording of the Second Amendment – phraseology that many who are ignorant or in denial of the historical context and intent of the Constitution like to portray as open to wide interpretation.

Personally, I think it’s high time we got some clarification on this. The anti-gun crowd has made political hay out of this constitutional ambiguity for far too long. But whether the recent D.C. Circuit Court decision is enough, or whether the Supreme Court needs to echo it before the gun haters get their comeuppance, remains to be seen.

Either way, the utterly ridiculous notion (regardless of any activist court’s finding) that the Second Amendment somehow only refers to a collective right of organized, state-sanctioned militias is unfathomable. EVERY OTHER AMENDMENT in the Bill of Rights is written to protect individuals against an overreaching government. Do these leftist bozos – the same folks who will champion the individual import of every other Amendment, specifically the First, Fourth and Eighth – really believe that the Second is some exception to this irrevocable pillar of Americanism?

If this latest D.C. decision stands (there are no guarantees when it comes to federal courts), the Brady people and all the bleeding-heart soccer moms that view guns as ugly and archaic, rather than necessary, will be forced to deal with the fact that just because they don’t find certain fundamental American freedoms warm and fuzzy doesn’t mean they’re unconstitutional. …

And this recent constitutional smackdown in our nation’s capital isn’t the only good news for freedom lovers of late. In ultraliberal Maryland – where newly elected Democrat Gov. Martin O’Malley passes the time occupying what many analysts consider a steppingstone post in preparation for a future presidential run – a proposed ban on 45 kinds of “assault” weapons was voted down in the state’s largely Democrat legislature. This happened despite O’Malley’s aggressive support.

Of course, this may not be the end of the matter. Bans on semiautomatic weapons of a militaristic configuration are introduced with regularity in the Old Line State – and others, as well. It may only be a matter of time before young lion O’Malley’s sway over the legislature is fully realized and the measure passes. But for at least another year or so, the rights of safety-, defense-, and recreation-minded Marylanders are safe.

Inaccurate Perceptions

To many non-gun owners – or those not up to speed on their firearms esoterica – bans on “assault weapons” seem reasonable.

That’s because they perceive these “black rifles” as being somehow materially different than the hunting and sporting guns they’re used to seeing. Maybe it’s from seeing them in full auto mode in the movies, or maybe it’s just that they look super-menacing. This isn’t really true, however. The vast bulk of long guns with military configurations commonly available to civilians are identical in caliber (.223 and .308, mostly) and performance to their hunting counterparts.

And just for the information of those who don’t know, a lot of popular North American hunting rounds – like the venerable .30-06, 7mm Remington Magnum, .300 Winchester Magnum, .338 Win. Mag and numerous others are harder hitting and longer range than any round commonly chambered in an assault weapon. …

Aside from this, numerous hunting weapons are sold in semiautomatic configurations, and have been for decades. The Remington 740, 742 and 7400 series; the Browning BARs; the new Benelli R1; various Rugers and others remain popular choices of hunters in the field. They fire EXACTLY like assault weapons – one discharge per squeeze of the trigger, with recoil (or firing gas) cycling a bolt that flings the spent shell out and rams a new round into the chamber from the clip. …

Then why all the hubbub about assault weapons, you’re asking?

Two things play into it, one of them a minor mechanical distinction inherent to the guns’ designs, the other a perceived difference that has taken hold in the nonshooting public’s (as well as in ignorant legislators’) collective consciousness. First thing: The only substantive difference between semiautomatic weapons of sporting and assault configurations is their magazine capacities. Not accuracy, not power, not rate of fire — only how many rounds they can hold. This is a distinction that many gun control laws have based their restrictions around, with dubious, if any, effect other than to decrease freedom and retard commerce, that is.

Second, what many people think of when they hear “assault guns” is “machine guns.” These are fully automatic versions of the same weapons currently legal for sale (in most states) to the public in semiautomatic trim. “Fully automatic” means these guns fire continuously or in bursts with a single depression of the trigger. They are designed for military and law enforcement use. Civilians can only obtain machine guns from BATF Class III dealers — and only a minute fraction of gun dealers hold Class 3 certifications. Actually, buying a machine gun is an expensive, time-consuming, and ridiculously involved process. Few do it.

Nevertheless, the perception among rank-and-file John Q. Publics is that without laws and regulations banning assault guns, there’d be a full auto machine gun under every long coat, in every house and corner store – and that any loose screw with an axe to grind could simply stroll into the local gun shop and walk out with the means to spray hundreds of rounds into whatever he (or she) wants to.

This simply isn’t the case, yet it’s one the media and politicians perpetuate intentionally. Assault guns in general, and machine guns in particular, are so absurdly expensive (and rightly so – they’re high quality and extremely heavy-duty) that those who can afford them don’t NEED to commit crimes with them. The vast bulk of U.S. gun crimes are committed with cheap, simple, small, stolen, often aged firearms – whatever can be obtained on the street for as little money as possible. This rules out assault guns.

Here’s what I’m getting at with all of this: Despite what a lot of anti-gun factions would have you believe, there’s very little difference between the “assault guns” a lot of states (end even the feds) have tried to prohibit you from owning and the hunting rifles most any lawful American citizen can walk into a corner sporting goods store and buy right now. Further, legally owned assault-style weapons are used in only a micro-fraction of the crimes committed with guns, while legally-owned machine guns are hardly ever used to commit crimes.

Seriously, look it up, and you’ll rightly conclude that banning lawful citizens’ ownership of machine guns or weapons of “assault” configurations would have a negligible, if even measurable (and perhaps even a NEGATIVE), effect on crime. Beyond this, statistics show time and again, from every corner of this country and in nations far from our own, that the more guns there are in the hands of law-abiding citizens, the LESS violent crime there is. That’s a fact.

Politicians of both parties damn well know this, too. But they won’t tell YOU, because they don’t want to lose the all-emotion soccer mom vote (guns of any type don’t sit well with most of this demographic), and they want more power to expand the reach of government – specifically, police and law enforcement. They couldn’t do this if there were LESS crime, which is exactly what would happen if more guns were allowed or if concealed carry laws were liberalized.

But now, in the wake of this latest D.C. Circuit Court decision and other occurrences, it appears likely that the U.S. Supreme Court may soon get the chance to reaffirm your constitutional right to more guns – no matter what they look like – and less crime. …

Whether they WOULD or not is far from fait accompli, but it’s looking more likely now.

Coming Down from the Political Hills

I have always thought that the Second Amendment’s position was becoming increasingly precarious. I’ve believed this because of two things: One, the modern shift away from the long-prevailing American ethos of “rugged individualism” and toward the Media Age’s more urbane and genteel sensibilities – especially in metropolitan areas (although this makes no sense, since higher-crime urban zones are where lawfully owned guns are needed most).

And two, because the amendment’s wording (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…”) opens the door for freedom haters to pervert its obvious individual intent into an endorsement of more invasive government among millions of Americans whose PC public-school grasp of the Constitution’s historical context gets fuzzier by the generation.

When you add to this the natural, yet tragically ironic, tendency of firearm advocates to “head for the political hills” when attacked, instead of sticking and fighting for their rights (mostly because they feel they shouldn’t have to), you’ve got a recipe for the slow erosion and ultimate extinction of one of our most important freedoms – one that ensures our continued freedom perhaps more so than any other.

But yet again, the “gun karma” in the good old U.S. of A. has surprised me in 2007.

I’ll tell you all about what I mean in Part 2 of this series – plus, offer you some perspectives on the Second Amendment, the guns it safeguards, and the freedom you may not have pondered before. Stay tuned.

Feeling great and shooting you straight,

Jim Amrhein,
Contributing editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder

April 6, 2007

The Second Amendment’s Second Coming, Part 1 was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.