jayincville
Plinker
Are gun rights advocates seditious?
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Many Americans are upset at our government. Approval of the job performance of Congress is about 20%, which means four out of five folks don't like it. Gun owners tend to be among the political right, and Second Amendment support is a common thread among Tea Party demonstrators. All of us who bitterly cling to our guns are painted by the mass media as a violent bomb, just waiting to go off. From ex-president Clinton on down, there have been comments to the effect that the political right is urging any crazies who might be willing to act out, to commit violent acts against the government. We have been called seditious. We are told that sedition is rising up against the authority of the state, and as practitioners we probably ought be muzzled or incarcerated to calm down the country.
I reject the charge. The number of folks who own guns (estimated at about 122 million) and the number licensed to carry weapons (estimated at 3-5 million) is a very large pool. Indeed, if you count the populations of Vermont, Alaska and now Arizona which allow concealed carry by virtue of being a 21 year old citizen of those states, the pool allowed to carry becomes 7.9 million, but I digress. How many examples of "violence against the authority of the state" have the media been able to pull together that were instigated by rhetoric from the right? The most recent was the Hutterite militia in Michigan that was planning to kill police officers for some weird reason. Even they had not actually done anything violent before they were arrested, and their ultimate goal was to war against the anti-christ. That puts them well beyond the purview of our current discussion. The man who flew a stolen aircraft into the IRS building hated the government because he thought they financially broke him. Nobody has said he was a gun nut. The pundits have to go all the way back to Timothy McVeigh in 1995 to get a good example of a violent criminal who blamed the US for attacks against American citizens at Waco and Ruby Ridge, and by extension, hated the authority of the state. He was ex-military and liked guns, so there you go. My problem is that you can't make policy based on anecdote. Where is the trend? Where are the aggregated statistics? Individual criminals do not a trend make, and chilling speech against the government's actions is a high price to pay "just in case" somebody might be pushed by rhetoric into overt violence. Assertions of personally hurtful words shouted to congressmen don't merit rounding us all up.
The gun crowd likes to wax eloquent about protecting our natural rights with our weapons, but only when the government becomes unconstitutional, and all other avenues have failed. Dennis Henigan of the Brady Campaign can't see the distinction. In his piece "Gun Rights and Political Violence" he says "In the NRA’s world, we are only free to the extent that our guns allow us to impose our will on others." He willfully doesn't see that free, armed men ensure that the government can't stray too far toward tyranny. All he sees is that armed men impose their will on those who are not armed. He doesn't see that we freely place ourselves under the rule of our Constitution and the will of the people. Our current complaint is that our leaders have stopped listening to the will of the people. That is a far cry from calling for insurrection.
There is no need for violence. We know how self government works and we have confidence in the ballot box. Americans spontaneously self organize for a purpose. We gather together to sandbag a riverbank against flooding. We muster tons of supplies to ship to Haiti for disaster relief. We demonstrate for or against a Wal-Mart coming to our neighborhood. Free speech and the freedom to assemble allow like minded people to gather together to tell the government we are upset. Every two years we have the privilege of replacing every member of the House of Representatives and one/third of the US Senate. We can replace our state governors and the US President every four years, and turn over the members of our state legislatures as well. Elections are the actual battleground, and the fight is with words and ideas, not guns. We like our constitution, and we like the values of the men and women who forged it. We grow concerned when we see the current practitioners of government making up the rules as they go. Come November, we will vote the bums out.
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I reject the charge. The number of folks who own guns (estimated at about 122 million) and the number licensed to carry weapons (estimated at 3-5 million) is a very large pool. Indeed, if you count the populations of Vermont, Alaska and now Arizona which allow concealed carry by virtue of being a 21 year old citizen of those states, the pool allowed to carry becomes 7.9 million, but I digress. How many examples of "violence against the authority of the state" have the media been able to pull together that were instigated by rhetoric from the right? The most recent was the Hutterite militia in Michigan that was planning to kill police officers for some weird reason. Even they had not actually done anything violent before they were arrested, and their ultimate goal was to war against the anti-christ. That puts them well beyond the purview of our current discussion. The man who flew a stolen aircraft into the IRS building hated the government because he thought they financially broke him. Nobody has said he was a gun nut. The pundits have to go all the way back to Timothy McVeigh in 1995 to get a good example of a violent criminal who blamed the US for attacks against American citizens at Waco and Ruby Ridge, and by extension, hated the authority of the state. He was ex-military and liked guns, so there you go. My problem is that you can't make policy based on anecdote. Where is the trend? Where are the aggregated statistics? Individual criminals do not a trend make, and chilling speech against the government's actions is a high price to pay "just in case" somebody might be pushed by rhetoric into overt violence. Assertions of personally hurtful words shouted to congressmen don't merit rounding us all up.
The gun crowd likes to wax eloquent about protecting our natural rights with our weapons, but only when the government becomes unconstitutional, and all other avenues have failed. Dennis Henigan of the Brady Campaign can't see the distinction. In his piece "Gun Rights and Political Violence" he says "In the NRA’s world, we are only free to the extent that our guns allow us to impose our will on others." He willfully doesn't see that free, armed men ensure that the government can't stray too far toward tyranny. All he sees is that armed men impose their will on those who are not armed. He doesn't see that we freely place ourselves under the rule of our Constitution and the will of the people. Our current complaint is that our leaders have stopped listening to the will of the people. That is a far cry from calling for insurrection.
There is no need for violence. We know how self government works and we have confidence in the ballot box. Americans spontaneously self organize for a purpose. We gather together to sandbag a riverbank against flooding. We muster tons of supplies to ship to Haiti for disaster relief. We demonstrate for or against a Wal-Mart coming to our neighborhood. Free speech and the freedom to assemble allow like minded people to gather together to tell the government we are upset. Every two years we have the privilege of replacing every member of the House of Representatives and one/third of the US Senate. We can replace our state governors and the US President every four years, and turn over the members of our state legislatures as well. Elections are the actual battleground, and the fight is with words and ideas, not guns. We like our constitution, and we like the values of the men and women who forged it. We grow concerned when we see the current practitioners of government making up the rules as they go. Come November, we will vote the bums out.
