Gun Non-Violence

As one who loves our Constitution, I have strong feelings in favor of the 2^nd Amendment. I don’t write about that issue very often, because there are many others who are more clearly laying out the issue than I can. But the onslaught since last month, along with the president’s unprecedented 23 executive order yesterday, merit some comment.

Here are the two main points:

·       The main purpose of the 2^nd Amendment is to guarantee the God-given right for individuals to protect themselves against attack—from any (Spherical Model) southern hemisphere attacker, either from the chaos side, as criminals are, or from the state tyranny side, either foreign or domestic.

·       The only purpose of an executive order is to direct federal employees in the manner in which they will enforce duly legislated laws; the executive branch does not have power to make laws for individual or all Americans.

One of the best things I’ve read in the past month is a 13-part essay by my Facebook friend Shawn Rogers. He does have a blog, with a small part there: www.sbrogerstx.blogspot.com. But to get the full essay, you’ll need to “friend” him and start reading in the last half of December 2012. One article he recommends a piece by Larry Correia, from December 20, 2012, called “An Opinion on Gun Control.” It’s a very long but worthwhile piece (18 pages, about 10,000 words). This part comes after you’ve scrolled down a ways (links are from original):

It doesn’t really make sense to ban guns, because in reality what that means is that you are actually banning effective self-defense. Despite the constant hammering by a news media with an agenda, guns are used in America far more to stop crime than to cause crime.

I’ve seen several different sets of numbers about how many times guns are used in self-defense every year. The problem with keeping track of this stat is that the vast majority of the time when a gun is produced in a legal self-defense situation no shots are fired. The mere presence of the gun is enough to cause the criminal to stop….

So how often are guns actually used in self-defense in America? http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

On the high side the estimate runs around 2.5 million defensive gun uses a year, which dwarfs our approximately 16,000 homicides in any recent year, only 10k of which are with guns. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm Of those with guns, only a couple hundred are with rifles. So basically, the guns that the anti-gunners are the most spun up about only account for a tiny fraction of all our murders.

But let’s not go with the high estimate. Let’s go with some smaller ones instead. Let’s use the far more conservative 800,000 number which is arrived at in multiple studies. That still dwarfs the number of illegal shootings. Heck, let’s even run with the number once put out by the people who want to ban guns, the Brady Center, which was still around 108,000, which still is an awesome ratio of good vs. bad.

So even if you use the worst number provided by people who are just as biased as me but in the opposite direction, gun use is a huge net positive. Or to put it another way, the Brady Center hates guns so much that they are totally cool with the population of a decent sized city getting raped and murdered every year as collateral damage in order to get what they want.

Unlike the DOJ (I’m referring to the Fast and Furious debacle), I am in favor of keeping guns—of any kind that will shoot even a single bullet—out of the hands of violent criminals. That is already the law. So it’s puzzling why it would take four full years before this president finally mentions to his employees that they should enforce that law.

I am also in favor of keeping guns out of the hands of the criminally insane, even if they haven’t yet committed a violent crime. But doctors are not employees or agents of the federal government, and any directive to them is an overreach. And, as with all power overreaching, the unintended consequences bring about almost exactly the opposite of the stated intended result. If people thank that simply going for treatment for a mental illness, either for themselves or for a family member, could result in forfeiting their 2^nd Amendment rights, that discourages people from seeking treatment, resulting in more untreated mentally ill.

While I appreciate having a criminal data base, so that background checks can be quick and thorough, I am against any federal database identifying law-abiding citizens who own guns. There is no Constitutional reason for such a database, but it does hold the potential of laying the groundwork for the federal government to move ahead with an incremental encroachment on our civil liberties.

I appreciate the Texas response to the president’s overreach, pointing out the hypocrisy. I also appreciated the Wyoming response, to arrest any federal agent who attempts to enforce federal gun laws in that state. A growing number of states have responded that they will nullify any attempt by the federal government to infringe on the 2^nd Amendment rights of citizens within their states. In addition, various US Congressmen, such as Rand Paul, are putting forth legislation to nullify those 23 executive orders, defund them, and press the Senate to file a court challenge to them.

Standing up against tyranny is exactly what the 2^nd Amendment is about, so that’s what I like to see.

That being said, one of the interesting things I came across this week was Glenn Beck’s suggestion on Monday that there is a better way of standing up against tyranny than shooting any federal agent that shows up to take your guns. Resist, but don’t attack. (The full video clip is below.) I’m reminded that Ghandi spent a number of years in prison, when the government was in the wrong to put him there. It may be that, before Americans have a moral right to violently respond, a number must first be willing to say no, stand firm, and suffer even wrongful incarceration, to prove the wrongfulness of the tyranny—which is something best thought of in the calmness of theory before any of us must face it in reality.