Confessions of a Former Gun Controller

     Even though the logic of my former belief in control was confused at best, it still makes a certain amount of backward sense. Here’s how it went, in a nutshell:

Premise Number One

• Somebody’s going to get into an uncontrollable rage, pull out Ol’ Bessie, and kill their brother/sister/spouse/secret love child/whatever
• Baby’s going to get into daddy’s desk, think the Browning HP is a toy, and blow their own brains out
• Little Joey will think the gun is “totally cool,” take it to school with him, and kill his best friend playing Cops and Robbers
• Some punk’s going to break in, find your gun, and blow you away with it
• You’ll be cleaning it and it’ll go off (also known as “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!”), or
• Some other horrible thing that wouldn’t have happened if the gun wasn’t around.

     In this widely-accepted worldview, guns are predatory animals just waiting for their chance to kill anybody and everybody who comes within five hundred yards. Therefore, they should be gotten rid of; and the best way to get rid of anything, as everyone knows, is to make it illegal. Of course, Premise Number One doesn’t take into account that:

• The brother/sister/spouse/secret love child will be just as dead after being bludgeoned with a fireplace poker, stabbed with the carving knife, or smothered with a pillow, but there’s not much movement to have any of those outlawed
• At least baby didn’t find a bottle of Drano and drink it, push the toaster into the dishwater, or shove the car into neutral and roll down the hill into traffic; where’s the sitter, anyway?
• Why hasn’t little Joey been taught that guns are not toys long before now? For that matter, why don’t you keep better track of your guns?
• You mean this homocidal maniac didn’t have a gun of his own when he came in?
• Well, at least that’s less painful than having your head cleaved off when the dull-bladed chainsaw bounces out of the tree and into your face; maybe you should have unloaded it first, and
• That’s an emotional argument, not a rational one; therefore you can’t give it a rational response.

     One person I know who subscribes to this view put it: “guns aren’t safe to keep around the house loaded, but when you need to have one, by the time you load it, you probably won’t have a chance to use it.” This leads me to...

Premise Number Two

     Actually, in terms of self-defense, guns have two distinct purposes, of which killing things is secondary. The first purpose is to get people to back off, and at this they succeed brilliantly. According to the Lott/Mustard Gun Control Study, “private firearms may be used in self-defense up to two and a half million times each year, with 400,000 of these defenders believing that using the gun ‘almost certainly’ saved a life (Kleck and Gertz, 1995, pp. 153, 180, and 182-3).” (In response to Premise Number One, above, it’s worth noting that the researchers also found that “[allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons] appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths.”)

     If you’re concerned about the hazards of keeping a loaded gun around, then don’t. Keep an unloaded gun around! Just pointing a gun (loaded or unloaded) at someone is a surefire way to get their attention; I would suspect that the majority of people who use a gun for self defense don’t fire it even once, the same way that animals fighting for territory (for example) do a lot more bellowing and showing off their teeth and claws than they actually tear into each other. Of course, you’ll need to be a good bluffer.

     My difficulty with the “loaded guns aren’t safe around the house” assertion is that, if it were true, they also wouldn’t be safe in police stations, on military bases, or at shooting ranges. Since there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that these gun-filled places are a seething mass of shooting accidents, either the professionals who carry loaded guns at all times as a matter of course are extremely lucky, or a gun is only as dangerous as the person carrying it is ignorant.

Premise Number Three

     Police, detectives, and other people who work in dangerous professions need to have guns to defend themselves. But the ordinary citizen, the argument goes, is not very likely to be in a kill-or-be-killed situation, as long as they’re careful, stay out of the “bad part of town,”, and avoid violent situations. Therefore, they don’t need a gun.

     I used to believe that one, myself. Then I woke up and smelled the coffee. What’s the first thing somebody who’s been involved in or witnessed a crime says to the reporter? “I didn’t think this kind of thing could happen here.” In our present disarmed society, when the quiet guy from accounting produces a rifle and starts blasting his co-workers, he keeps racking up bodycount until (A) he runs out of ammo, (B) he gets tired of it, or (C) the cops show up and shoot him. In a society where more people have guns than don’t the quiet guy from accounting who goes berserk will be stopped after one shot, by the wiry old gal from editing who doesn’t take any shit from people.

     Of course, in my former inverted logic as a gun controller, my reaction was to say that stricter laws would have kept the quiet guy from having the rifle. But how realistic is that? Certain drugs are so ridiculously illegal in our society that the government spends billions of dollars on controlling them, but they can’t even keep those drugs out of their own prisons. Getting rid of guns? Forget it.

     Part of it comes from a kind of manic pacifism, an unwillingness to hurt or kill other people even in self-defense. In my personal case, I was given a kind of Clockwork Orange treatment by my parents as a child that made me incapable of even running away when confronted by a bully. I stood there and I took it, whatever it was, because I was paralyzed by neurosis and confused values. I believed that violence, all violence, was completely bad. It was better, by this belief system, to let myself be beat up (robbed, ostracized, pelted with thrown food and trash) than to inflict pain on somebody by hitting back (or shooting back, if it ever came to that).

     It was as cruel a thing for my parents to do to me as it would be for someone to buy a cat, have it declawed, then set it loose in the wild to forage for itself. And it’s exactly the same thing that I, when I was a gun controller, wanted to do to everybody else. I was sick of always being at a disadvantage, and of never being able to fight back. But even though I could have empowered myself to the same level as the bully, my belief that violence in self-defense was just as bad as violence inflicted on innocent people forced me instead to want to water the bully down to my own level of weakness.

     As if such a thing were possible.

     What my parents wanted me to do, when confronted by a bully, was to come running to them, or to their surrogates, my teachers and school administrators. The same way, what gun controllers want people to do when confronted with criminals (what I used to want) is to go running to mommy and daddy police and government.

     Based on my own personal experiences, I should have known better. Every time (and I mean every time) I tried to go to parents, teachers, or anyone else in authority for help, I ended up worse off than if I’d just let my accosters have their wicked way with me. Reactions from authority figures ranged from indifference (“It’s just a few scratches, what are you whining about?”) to punishing me (because obviously, those boys wouldn’t have ganged up on me if I hadn’t done anything to provoke them). Occasionally, my persecutors would be brought to task, and as anyone who knows kids might expect, they denied everything. Since something must have happened, and fighting was against the rules, we were all thrown into detention together.

     It’s backwards and completely insane. But the mindset was drilled into me so hard as I was growing up, that I was ready as an adult to turn around and inflict the same misery I’d suffered in childhood on everyone else.

It’s a Guy Thing—NOT!

     Crime rates against women skyrocket over those against men. Women are stalked, assaulted, kidnapped, raped, and murdered in shocking numbers. But instead of demanding to have guns to defend themselves with, women are very often at the forefront of the gun controllers. What’s up with that? Is it the same Righteous Victim mentality I was taught? Is it some kind of maternal desire to make the world “play nice?”

     Most of the women who I’ve seen advocating gun control claim they want to “protect the children” (which gun control doesn’t do), or to “protect women” (which gun control utterly and abysmally fails to do). Many of them, however, have had the honesty to come right out and say that they want to make guns illegal because, “I don’t like them.”

     While I admire their candor, I loathe their politics. I myself have a great hatred for Microsoft Powerpoint, any movie with John Travolta, and fried okra, but it would be a tremendous injustice and a detriment to society to make legislation based on that!

     Similarly, the howling about kids with guns at school seems just as backwards to me. Kids more than anybody need to know how to defend themselves, as soon as possible. Not only are there all sorts of predatory people out there who like to victimize kids precisely for their helplessness, but even other kids are less likely to try to slam each other into lockers knowing that their chosen victim has teeth, too. Instead of screaming for metal detectors and armed guards patrolling the school halls, parents should be demanding that their kids get self-defense as a basic course! The study of martial arts is great as far as it goes, but when some deranged loser decides he wants to mow down the Second Period Algebra Class (as seems to be happening an awful lot lately), it will probably take more than a flying kick to put him down.

How Big a Gun Do You “Need?”

     The last gasp of gun-control desire is to call for “reasonable restraints.” “Okay,” the gun controller says. “You can have your Walther PPK or your .38 Special in your pocket to defend against muggers. That makes a certain amount of sense. But you don’t need a Magnum. Or an Uzi. Or a hand grenade. Or...”

     For everyday self defense, it’s true that pulling out an anti-tank weapon to ward off an assault is a strange idea. But does it follow from that, that since people generally don’t need one particular type of weapon or another, they should be forbidden to have it? On what grounds? If gun control doesn’t prevent violence, and in fact may actually encourage it, then what is the restriction of larger weapons supposed to prevent?

     Besides, there is a reason that the Constitution says that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed: if the country should be invaded, or if the government should be taken over in a coup, for example, who will be left to fight back when the army’s overrun?

     We the people.

     I can hear some of you sniggering at the idea that America might be invaded, or that there might be an insurrection. After all, America’s one of the most powerful nations in the world, if not the most.

     So was Rome once. So was England. Laughing at the idea of invasion is just as head-in-the-groundish as thinking that nobody at your office could ever go postal. It may never happen. It may happen tomorrow. But regardless of whether it does or not, does it really make sense to bet your life on it?

     For that matter, given the way certain branches of both the federal and several local governments have been behaving lately, does it really make sense to leave yourself defenseless against the sudden presence of a hostile government coming to get you?

     The Second Amendment is very clear on this subject. Despite gun controllers’ smoke-blowing about whether or not “militia” refers to the Coast Guard, the Amendment says: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” (Emphasis mine.)

     Shall not be infringed doesn’t mean “shall not be infringed except for requiring a license.” Shall not be infringed doesn’t mean “shall not be infringed except for assault weapons.” Shall not be infriged doesn’t mean “shall not be infringed except for a five-day waiting period.” Shall not be infringed means that the government cannot legally have any say in whether or not you have weapons, of any kind. Every federal gun control law—every one—is unConstitutional. Just because the Supreme Court doesn’t have the guts to say so, doesn’t make it any less true.

Forgive Me, Founding Fathers, For I Have Sinned :)

     I could point to my parents, teachers, and society at large for impressing that set of attitudes on me when I was young, but when I became an adult, all bets were off. When I started making my own decisions, I should have put more thought into what I was doing, rather than just cruising along on autopilot the way I have been. I have been just plain wrong on this subject, for a long time.

     There. I said it. And I feel better. Now I can turn my attention to fixing some of the damage I did.

     Thank you for your time.

     —John “The Gneech” Robey