Critical Mass

By Dan Gelernter

Britain is apparently dissatisfied with the results of their confiscating every privately owned handgun in the UK (in the first year after the ban, London’s gun crime rate tripled). Unable to understand why this policy has had so bizarre an effect, the British Government has finally found a solution: take away knives too.

The Brits have enacted a series of laws (dangerously similar to the Connecticut laws I lamented in this post) that make it illegal to carry folding knives longer than three inches, or any sort of non-folder. This doesn’t sound so bad until you hear MP and Home Office Undersecretary Vernon Coaker explain: “If you carry a knife out of self-defense, you run the risk of having it turned on you. Carrying a knife is illegal and will not be tolerated. It could land you four years in prison.” This was essentially the same argument they used against handguns – and look how well it’s worked!

To cement the deal, Britain launched a “knife amnesty” period during which people (supposedly, potential criminals) were supposed to hand in any knives that could turn out to be offensive weapons. The government collected 17,715 in the first week of the program, and called the results “encouraging.” Coaker gushed, “That is 17,715 fewer weapons that can be used in a crime against ordinary, law-abiding citizens.” British criminals must have an interesting mentality – evil enough to commit robbery or murder but sweet enough to turn in their weapons when the government asks them to.

This returns us to the question of gun control and self-defense. The media bias has made it tough for people to get the facts, or even get a chance to hear the arguments in favor of private gun ownership. I’d like to outline a few of them below:

The starting point is that the police cannot protect you – they have actually said so themselves. In 1978, the D.C. Superior Court ruled that "a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen." This quote comes from a decision on a case in which three women were beaten, raped, and held captive for 14 hours, even though they had called 911 twice. The police never came and yet the courts ruled that there were no grounds for legal action against the department. Even in less extreme cases, the need for self-defense is obvious – if you’re attacked by a burglar or a rapist, you won’t have time to call the police and they won’t have time to show up. Self-defense needs to be instant, not operated by remote control. It’s sort of silly (in a sad way) to examine Washington DC, more often the US murder capitol than any other town. They too have confiscated handguns and require that, if you have a rifle, you keep it disassembled and store the ammunition in a separate room. You can only hope that a criminal will allow you a five-minute timeout while you put together you shotgun and look for some shells.

Then there is, of course, our Constitution - which guarantees our right to bear arms. If you think the second amendment refers only to the militia, you should examine the pre-Revolutionary War individual State Constitutions (which of course influenced our national document). For example, Both Pennsylvania and Vermont's Constitutions state that "the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the state." Kentucky: "the right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned." Mississippi and CT: "Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state." Rhode Island: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Notice the emphasis on self-defense, not just on national-defense. Like it or not, bearing arms is a Constitutionally guaranteed right.

And while this right to gun ownership has played out successfully in the US, the Left has done all they can to hide the facts: Dr. Kellermann of Emory University released a media-trumpeted study claiming that owning a firearm made you 3 times as likely to be killed by one. His findings are didn't bother to mention that most of these dead “firearm owners” were criminals, either shot by law-abiding citizens, the police, or (in gang-war cases) other criminals. What Dr. Kellermann has actually proved is that guns are bad for a criminal's health – this happens to be true, and is not a discouraging discovery. Since the 1987 passage of Florida's concealed-carry-permit law, less than .0002% of legal gun owners have used their guns to commit a crime. This means that you are twice as likely to be attacked by an alligator in Florida as you are to be attacked by a citizen with a legal handgun. (New political movement: Ban unlicensed alligators!) On average, states that pass CCW laws allowing concealed carry of firearms lower their yearly murder rate by 8.5%, rapes by 5%, assaults by 7%, and robberies by 3%. In 1976, Georgia made it easier for people to get guns, while Wisconsin made it harder by enacting a wait-period law. Georgia's murder rate dropped by 21% while Wisconsin's rose by 33% during the same period. On average, states banning CCW have murder rates 127% higher than states allowing handgun carry.

But for the Left, their conviction that guns are evil has a pagan fanaticism to it. Back in the UK, a BBC radio program asked listeners to suggest a piece of legislation that they felt would most improve life in Britain. After 26,000 votes were cast, the winning proposal was one that would allow Brits “to use any means to defend their home from intruders.” (Believe it or not, citizens of the UK no longer have this basic human right). Stephen Pound, a liberal MP called this a “ludicrous, brutal, unworkable blood-stained piece of legislation.” He continued, “The people have spoken…the bastards.” As Pound told The Independent “Do we really want a law that says you can slaughter anyone who climbs into your window?” In other words, if it’s a question of you or the criminal who just broke into your house, Mr. Pound would rather the criminal was the one who survived. In the US, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said: “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in, I would have done it.”

As John R. Lott Jr., author of The Bias Against Guns points out, guns are used defensively four times more often than they are to commit crimes. Nevertheless, the television networks ABC, CBS, and NBC together ran 190,000 words of anti-gun coverage in 2001, and not a single story about guns being used to prevent crime. The newspapers were nearly as bad: “The New York Times ran 50,745 words on contemporaneous gun crimes, but only one short, 163-word story [on defensive gun use] on a retired police officer who used his gun to stop a robbery. For USA Today, the tally was 5,660 words on gun crimes versus zero on defensive uses.”

We have all seen the media adds that talk about the frequency with which a child is accidentally shot. The bias with these stories starts in that it defines children as “people up to 18 years old” (so you are still a child during your freshman year in college) and doesn’t exclude the cases in which the dead “children” happen to be criminals. Despite the infrequency of these occurrences (more children under the age of five drown in bathtubs or plastic water buckets than die from guns) the media has made their mind up – and they’d like to make yours up too. When there is an accidental child-death from gunshot, the individual cases have gotten up to 88 separate news stories. When children use guns defensively (which does actually happen) the cases are not covered at all in national media.

But no discussion of blatant, nauseating bias could be complete without a discussion of CNN. In 2003 they did a story to show how effective the Clinton Gun Ban was in reducing the damage that guns can cause. (In reality, the only difference between guns banned under the ‘94 gun ban and the pre-ban ones is appearance – the guns function exactly the same and use the same ammo.) CNN set up some cinderblocks and a bullet-proof vest on a shooting range, and announced that they would fire a pre-ban gun at them to show how much damage it could do. While the camera was on the targets, they fired away, and you could see the bullets smash the cinderblocks and go through the vest. Then they said they would do the same thing with a post-ban (legal) gun. With the camera still pointed downrange, the gun fired, but the targets remained undamaged. It was later revealed that during the “test” of the post-ban gun, the man on the trigger deliberately fired into the ground (CNN claimed that the gunman accidentally shot at the wrong target, but there were no other targets set up on the range and the ground is unlikely to be mistaken for a stack of cinderblocks).

A world with absolutely no guns might be safer. I doubt it; a private citizen appreciates having something better than the criminal’s got so he can defend himself. But the idea of a gunless world that the Left is so fond of is a moot point now – the gun has been invented, and criminals will always have them. The question is: will the government allow the innocent to defend themselves? Britain has already answered “no.” Let’s make sure the same thing doesn’t happen over here.