Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns (3 page)

In a 1995 talk before the Woman’s National Democratic Club, Holder said that he hoped we could one day make gun owners feel as ostracized as the smokers who “cower” outside of buildings:

What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we’ve changed our attitudes about cigarettes. You know, when I was growing up, people smoked all the time. Both my parents did. But over time, we changed the way that people thought about smoking, so now we have people who cower outside of buildings and kind of smoke in private and don’t want to admit it.

And later, in the same speech: “We have to be repetitive about this. We need to do this every day of the week, and just
really brainwash people
into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.” (emphasis added)

Eric Holder may have been smart enough to not use the word
ban,
but others haven’t been so careful.

Remember the quote at the beginning of this section where CNN anchor Don Lemon claimed that “no one is saying” we should take people’s guns away? Well, just five months later, he was contradicted by someone he knows very well: Don Lemon.

“We need to get guns and bullets and automatic weapons off the streets,” Lemon said. “They should only be available to police officers and to hunt al Qaeda and the Taliban and
not hunt elementary school children.”

So we should get rid of guns and bullets but no one is saying we should take people’s guns away? Same guy. Same year. Incredible.

In case Don Lemon isn’t impressed by his own inconsistency, here are a few more concrete examples of people openly calling for gun bans:

How can we possibly have assault weapons? And frankly, why do we need guns?
We don’t need guns. We have 10,000 murders a year.

—BUZZ BISSINGER
, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and
Daily Beast
columnist

But the logic is faulty, and a close look at it leads to the conclusion that
the United States should ban private gun ownership entirely, or almost entirely.

—JEFF MCMAHAN
, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, writing in the
New York Times

And this banning mind-set isn’t just a reaction to Newtown; it’s been around for a while. The editors of the
Los Angeles Times,
in an editorial from 1993 titled “Taming the Monster: Get Rid of the Guns,” wrote:

No guns, period, except for those held by law enforcement officials and a few others . . . . Why should America adopt a policy of near-zero tolerance for private gun ownership? Because it’s the only alternative to the present insanity. Without both strict limits on access to new weapons and
aggressive efforts to reduce the supply of existing weapons, no one can be safer.

Six years later the
Washington Post
got into the act. “No presidential candidate,” the paper editorialized, “has yet come out for the most effective proposal to check the terror of gunfire: a ban on the general sale, manufacture and ownership of handguns as well as assault-style weapons.”

In other words, the “most effective” plan, according to these editors, is a ban of all handguns and assault weapons. A more recent editorial in the
Economist
seems to agree:

I personally dislike guns. I think the private ownership of guns is a tragic mistake. But a majority of Americans disagree with me, some of them very strongly. And at a certain point, when very large majorities disagree with you, a bit of deference is in order.

. . . I am pretty sure that the sort of gun control that would work—
banning all guns—is not going to happen.

Is it possible these opinions don’t count because, like corporations, progressives don’t consider editorial boards to be “people”?

Back in the present day, Piers Morgan, who claims with a straight face, “
I totally respect and admire the Constitution and the Second Amendment and an American’s right to defend themselves at home,” has also gotten in on the act. This is from his January 10, 2013, show:

PIERS MORGAN:
You’ve got to make a stand somewhere. You have to start somewhere. The logical place to start, given that automatic weapons are banned, is you go to the next level down, semiautomatic weapons. You know,
in an ideal world, I’d have all guns gone, as we have in Britain. But this is not my country. And I respect the fact that most Americans wouldn’t wear that kind of argument.

Here’s a pro tip, Piers, free of charge: when attempting to convince Americans how much you “respect” the Second Amendment, try not to reveal how you would really like to ban all guns. And if you’re going to make fun of the slippery slope argument, as you’ve done so often on your show, maybe try not to use expressions like “You have to start somewhere.”

It’s important for people to understand where most of these controllists are really coming from. Piers Morgan believes that all
guns should be banned. Not just assault weapons or large capacity magazines, but “
all guns gone.
” You must listen to everything else he says with that basic framework in mind.

Two days earlier,
Morgan had this exchange on his show with Pulitzer Prize–winning
New York Times
columnist Nicholas Kristof:

KRISTOF:
So if the only thing that legislators do is reinstitute the assault weapons ban and the high magazine, that will be great. That will be a step forward.

MORGAN:
But it won’t be enough.

KRISTOF:
But it won’t be nearly enough . . . . We have to make a move on handguns as well.

Hey, Touré, do you still think that “no serious person” proposes to take guns away? Still think we should “#StopFearmongering”?

In case you have not heard, Piers Morgan is British. He has seen firsthand how they’ve successfully been able to change public perception, using one incident at a time to push further and further down the slippery slope that allegedly does not exist.
Here’s a brief summary of how their gun ban came to be; see if you recognize any similarities to the American debate:

1689:
King William of Orange guarantees his subjects (except Catholics) the right to bear arms for self-defense in a new Bill of Rights.

1819:
In response to civil unrest, a temporary Seizure of Arms Act is passed; it allows constables to search for, and confiscate, arms from people who are “dangerous to the public peace.”
This expired after two years.

1870:
A license is needed only if you want to carry a firearm outside of your home.

1903:
The Pistols Act is introduced and seems to be full of common sense. No guns for drunks or the mentally insane, and licenses are required for handgun purchases.

1920:
The Firearms Act ushers in the first registration system and gives police the power to deny a license to anyone “unfitted to be trusted with a firearm.” According to historian Clayton Cramer, this is the first true pivot point for the United Kingdom, as “
the ownership of firearms ceased to be a right of Englishmen, and instead became a privilege.”

1937:
An update to the Firearm Act is passed that raises the minimum age to buy a gun, gives police more power to regulate licenses, and bans most fully automatic weapons.
The home secretary also rules that self-defense is no longer a valid reason to be granted a gun certificate.

1967:
The Criminal Justice Act expands licensing to shotguns.

1968:
Existing gun laws are placed into a single statute. Applicants have to
show good reason for carrying ammunition and guns. The Home Office is also given the power to set fees for shotgun licenses.

1988:
After the Hungerford Massacre, in which a crazy person uses two semi-automatic rifles to kill fifteen people, an amendment to the Firearms Act is passed. According to the BBC, this amendment “banned semi-automatic and pump-action rifles; weapons which fire explosive ammunition; short shotguns with magazines; and elevated pump-action and self-loading rifles. Registration was also made mandatory for shotguns, which were required to be kept in secure storage.”

1997:
After the Dunblane massacre results in the deaths of sixteen children and a teacher (the killer uses two pistols and two revolvers), another Firearms Act amendment is passed, this one essentially banning all handguns.

2006:
After a series of gun-related homicides get national attention, the Violent Crime Reduction Act is passed, making it a crime to make or sell imitation guns and further restricting the use of “air weapons.”

If that does not prove how the slippery slope—from Bill of Rights to total ban actually works—then I don’t know what does. So, you’ll have to excuse us, Piers, when we get a little dodgy about your assault weapon ban proposal or when CNN anchors and major newspaper columnists advocate for “zero tolerance” on private gun ownership.

We’ve seen this movie before and we know how it ends.

“
Is there an argument for the Second Amendment to be repealed and to be clarified and be redrafted?”

—PIERS MORGAN
,
December 18, 2012

I know that Piers isn’t an American citizen, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he doesn’t quite understand how this works in the United States.

Yes, Piers, the Second Amendment could be repealed, clarified, or redrafted. And you could lead all of cable news in ratings. Both of those things are
technically
possible—but neither will ever happen.

The Constitution is, of course, not immutable. When the American people wish to change the Constitution, they can do so through the amendment process detailed in Article V. In fact, the people themselves (acting through their state legislatures) can use Article V to call a convention to propose a particular amendment, or they can call a convention to propose an entirely new constitution.

Yet, for well over two centuries, through wars and peace, mob violence, gang violence, and unthinkable public massacres, no serious attempt has ever been made to repeal or redraft the Second
Amendment. If one had been, it’s doubtful that even a single state would’ve ratified the proposal. Even today, with what the media alleges is a completely changed national attitude toward guns, it is very likely that a proposal to repeal the Second Amendment would be ratified by a grand total of zero states.

However, plenty of states have gone the other way, amending their state constitutions toward a clearer understanding of the right to keep and bear arms being an individual right. The most recent example is Louisiana, where nearly 73 percent of voters in 2012 approved an amendment to the state constitution making it much more difficult for gun control legislation to pass.

The old Louisiana constitution read:

The right of each citizen to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged, but this provision shall not prevent the passage of laws to prohibit the carrying of weapons concealed on the person.

But this was replaced with far stronger wording:

The right of each citizen to acquire, keep, possess, transport, carry, transfer, and use arms for defense of life and liberty, and for all other legitimate purposes is fundamental and shall not be denied or infringed, and any restriction on this right shall be subject to strict scrutiny.

So, yes, Piers—we could definitely clarify all of this for you—but probably not in the direction you think.

“Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Second Amendment,
said that it should be revisited every 20 years to see if it is still appropriate.”

—CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY LAWFORD
,
January 7, 2013

A small point of clarification for Mr. Lawford: Thomas Jefferson didn’t write the Second Amendment. In fact, he was not even in the country at the time it was created; he was the United States minister plenipotentiary to France. It was James Madison who took the numerous suggestions for the language of the Second Amendment and synthesized them into a proposal that Congress subsequently debated, amended, and sent to the states for ratification.

But let’s excuse for a second the fact that JFK’s nephew—
a man who is a self-described “author, activist and actor” and who routinely puts himself on television to discuss gun control—does not even know who actually wrote the Second Amendment. He’s still wrong. Jefferson never said that the Second Amendment in particular ought to be reexamined every twenty years. What he
did
say one time in a letter to Madison—and what I assume Lawford was referring to—was that
all
laws, including the U.S. Constitution, ought to automatically expire after twenty years:

On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please. But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished them, in their natural course, with those whose will gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer,
it is an act of force and not of right.

—LETTER FROM THOMAS JEFFERSON
, in Paris, to James Madison, September 6, 1789

While this letter makes Jefferson sound as though he could be a member of the Center for American Progress, there’s actually an important lesson here: Jefferson lost. His views were in the extreme minority. Most Americans, including James Madison, hoped that the new Constitution of 1787 would provide long-term stability to the United States.