Gun Guys (53 page)

For an example of what drives gun-rights activists around the bend, get ahold of the conclusion of
Assault Weapons and Accessories in America
, published by the Violence Policy Center. “The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s
confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.” In other words, never mind that these weapons aren’t much of a public-safety threat; the guns are scary-looking enough to fool people into supporting a ban. And the report’s last words are positively ghoulish in their palpable desire for political victory. “Recognizing the country’s fascination for exotic weaponry and the popular images and myths associated with guns, it may require a crisis of a far greater proportion before any action is taken.”

Another useful document is
Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994–2003
, published by President George W. Bush’s Justice Department in July 2004, when Congress was considering renewing the ban. It makes the point that it wasn’t so much the weapons but the large-capacity magazines that mattered in gun crime—though not very much, since so many were grandfathered in under the ban that the ban itself did little to reduce their prevalence on the street. Overall, the report concluded, “Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

The lack of support for a handgun ban referenced on
this page
comes from “Record-Low 26% in U.S. Favor Handgun Ban,” by Gallup, published October 26, 2011. That was down from 60 percent in 1959.

The role of the American Civil Liberties Union in the gun debate has always been a puzzler. To gun guys, it has always seemed crazy that an organization that stood up for the rights of Nazis to parade through Skokie, Illinois, wouldn’t stand up for citizens’ Second Amendment rights. On March 4, 2002, the ACLU published a bulletin disagreeing with the Supreme Court’s reasoning in
Heller
, which wasn’t unexpected. “The ACLU interprets the Second Amendment as a collective right,” the online bulletin said. “As always, we welcome your comments.”

Hoo boy, did it get them. The vitriol went on for months, some of it typical bashing from the right but most from people identifying themselves as longtime ACLU members. “I don’t know why this is the only constitutional right the ACLU doesn’t defend,” wrote TexasCivilLibertarian. “The Bill of Rights protects the rights of INDIVIDUALS, so the idea that the Bill of Rights protects a ‘collective right’ is absolutely preposterous.” SuperNaut wrote, “I just took the money I had slated to re-up my lapsed ACLU membership and used it to re-up my NRA membership. Sorry ACLU you lost me.” A lot were like those of MadRocketScientist: “I’ve often found myself defending the ACLU to other conservatives and have supported many of your legal actions, but this I can not abide. You need to explain why you continue to refuse to defend the 2nd amendment as you do the others.” I
counted about thirteen hundred comments, mostly from people who claimed to be members or supporters of the ACLU, and didn’t find one of them in favor of the organization’s interpretation.

I phoned Frank Askin, the ACLU’s general counsel, who had served on the ACLU’s national board for almost thirty years, from 1969 to 2007. “There’s been almost no support in the national board that I recall for an individual right to own a gun,” he said. “The major debate has always been over whether we should assert what is not a civil liberty. The ACLU has never taken a crime-control position. You could say that freedom from crime is a civil liberty but the ACLU hasn’t gotten into that.” He called “absurd” Scalia’s reasoning that the Second Amendment protects citizens’ right to violent revolution, and said conservatives usually make the opposite argument, when fighting regulations, that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” “The other amendments say very clearly there should be no laws abridging free speech, and that we have a right to be free of unreasonable search and seizures. In the Second Amendment it’s all backwards, with the well-regulated militia coming first.” Even as we spoke, though, the South Dakota chapter of the ACLU was fighting to win Second Amendment rights for legal U.S. residents, as reported in “ACLU Challenges Citizenship Requirement for Concealed Weapons,” by Nick Penzenstadler,
Rapid City Journal
, January 3, 2011.

On the Fourth of July, the left-leaning online publication
The Daily Kos
published an impassioned argument, “Why Liberals Should Love the Second Amendment,” by Kalili Joy Gray. “This is an appeal to liberals, not merely to tolerate the Second Amendment, but to embrace it. To love it and defend it and guard it as carefully as you do all the others. Because we are liberals. And fighting for our rights—for
all
of our rights, for
all
people—is what we do. Because we are revolutionaries.”

When presented with, say, the reality that President Obama had done nothing about guns in his first term except allow people to wear them concealed in national parks, gun-rights activists often fell back on what he, and other liberals, “really wanted” to do. They pointed to quotes like this one, from Sarah Brady in
The New York Times
, on August 13, 1993, in an article called “A Little Gun Control, a Lot of Guns,” by Erik Eckholm, on the struggle to get the Brady Law passed: “ ‘Once we get this,’ she said, ‘I think it will become easier and easier to get the laws we need passed.’ ” Gun guys argued that Mrs. Brady had tipped her hand that she wanted to put gun policy on the “slippery slope” toward a total ban.

Dennis Henigan of the Brady Center had a good answer to the slippery-slope argument: What difference does it make what gun-control advocates really want? It’s not like they’re going to get their way just because they want something; we have laws. “Not only are we not talking about outlawing guns, but guns
cannot
be outlawed” after the
Heller
decision, he writes on page 40 of his 2009 book
Lethal Logic:
Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy
. On page 99 he continues, “In the final analysis, the slippery slope argument asks policymakers to forgo the life-saving benefits of sensible gun control policies because it is possible to dream up some hypothetical scenario in which such policies may increase the likelihood of a gun ban. This is sheer folly. In no other area of policymaking would we allow such rank speculation to defeat proposals that have concrete and demonstrable benefits.”

The story on
this page
about the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency making the producers of
The Other Guys
change their poster came from “Altered Movie Poster Puts the Spotlight on a San Francisco Agency’s Gun Ban,” by Maria Wollan, in
The New York Times
, September 5, 2010. Capital One’s refusal to allow a woman to put a picture of her husband hunting on her credit card was the NRA’s “Outrage of the Week” on Friday, April 22, 2011. The story of Constitution Arms being denied the opportunity to sponsor a Maplewood, New Jersey, Little League team was reported as “N.J. Kids Baseball League Rejects Maplewood Gun Dealer’s Sponsorship,” by Philip Read, in the Newark
Star-Ledger
, March 5, 2010. Zachary Fisher’s story was on CBS 13, Sacramento. The story about Providence’s toy-gun buyback, “Disarming the Toy Box,” ran in
The Boston Globe
on December 19, 2010.

The Carville/Begala quote is from
Take It Back
, pages 49–50.

The Garry Wills quote on
this page
comes from “Murders at One Remove,” Baltimore
Sun
, September 5, 1994. “A ridiculous minority of airheads” was the work of Perry Young, in his article “We Are All to Blame” in
The Chapel Hill Herald
, April 24, 1999. The “popguns” line belongs to Eric Sharpe, from his article “Outdoorsmen Can’t Ignore Gun Control,” which ran in the Los Angeles
Daily News
, June 11, 1995. Gene Weingarten took after “bumpkins and yeehaws” in his
Washington Post
column, Get Me Rewrite, on October 14, 2010. Mark Morford’s writing about women gun owners ran as “Pistol-Packin’ Polyester,” in
SF Gate
, March 21, 2001.

Sarah Palin’s speech to the NRA was reported, among other places, on the
Huffington Post
’s Politics Daily as “Sarah Palin Tells NRA Convention Obama Would Ban Guns If He Could,” by Mary C. Curtis, May 15, 2010.

Gun owners—even those who belong to the NRA—may not be as rigid in their thinking as they are frequently portrayed. In December 2009, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz surveyed 832 gun owners—401 who belonged to the NRA and 431 who didn’t—on behalf of Mayors Against Illegal Guns and came up with some surprising results. The vast majority of both groups—85 percent of non-NRA gun owners and 69 percent of NRA members—supported closing the gun-show loophole. Support was even stronger in both groups for laws requiring gun owners to tell the police if their guns were stolen. Both groups were over 80 percent in their approval of background checks at gun stores.