In the 18th century — the century at the end of which the Second Amendment was being passed in the newly-born United States — the biggest problem for the majority of the world's population was
not the right to keep and bear arms.
It was the
lack of the right to keep and bear arms.
In the 19th century, likewise, the greatest problem for most people on this planet was
not the absence of gun control.
It was the
presence of gun control.
In the 20th century, most people did
not suffer from the right to keep and bear arms.
They suffered from the
lack of the right to keep and bear arms.
As can be attested by
the victims (assuming they could talk) of the likes of Hitler, Lenin,
Stalin, Pol Pot, and Milosevic, along with the Hutus…
As an aside, one of the first measures taken by each of the aforementioned (ahem) leaders after coming to power — for the good of the people, needless to say — was to impose or to tighten arms control.
And it is no different today.
Look at
Saddam's Iraq, at Khadaffi's Libya, at the Assads' Syria…
(Would not the average Iraqi citizen, the average Libyan citizen, the average Syrian citizen over the past 30 to 40 years have been better off with the right to keep and bear arms?)
1. Has Anything Changed and, If So, What Is That Something?
Nothing has changed.
Or has it?
There
does seem to have been one major change, at least in the West — has there not?
Let's go back into history again…
What do we see? Or rather… what do we
fail to see?
Few, if any, school shootings in the 18th century — certainly not in the land of the Second Amendment.
(I originally wrote "no shootings whatsoever", but since I cannot be 100% positive — in view of the fact that it's hard to prove a negative — I changed the wording…)
Few, if any, school shootings in the 19th century.
Few, if any, school shootings in first half of the 20th century.
In arguing on French TV for Europe-like arms control in the United States, a guest on the
iTélé news show made a point of enumerating "all" the shootings that have occurred in America — among them, the 1966 University of Texas sniper shooting, the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, the 2007 Virginia Tech slaughter, the 2011 Arizona shooting spree, and the 2012 Colorado movie theater killings. [This post has been slightly updated in the wake of
the 2014 Santa Barbara massacre.]
Now — in the wake of
the 2012 Connecticut elementary school massacre — she erupted:
What is wrong with Americans?! When are they finally going to come to their senses and impose gun control?! When will the NRA finally be silenced?! When will ordinary Americans, not least ordinary members of the Republican Party, stand up to the GOP leadership and demand that gun possession be banished, or at least, curtailed — and that, sharply?!
But there is a better question to be asked:
between the past and the present, what is the difference that we see?
Why no examples from the 1950s and from prior decades and centuries?
The
deadliest gun rampages started in the 1960s and 1970…
Hm…
I wonder what happened, or started to happen, in the 1960s and 1970s…
Oh — that's right: the left's youth revolution with the "victory" of more and more of the "modern" ideas of the progressives…
Now let's see — what did, and what do, these entail?
Well, among other things, the triumph of the ideas of compassion, of tolerance, of understanding…
Of empathy for all kinds of groups, not least the mentally ill — who turn out to be nothing more than merely misunderstood and who therefore deserve
freedom from straitjackets…
And the ensuing political correctness demanded the
dismantling of mental institutions or the limiting of their use and refraining from confining mental cases (who of course turn out
not to be mental cases) thereto.
("Guffaw! You want to keep insane asylums open?! How can you be so reactionary, so backwards?! It's everybody else who should be in a nuthouse! Snort!")
We
should not judge these people, we
can not judge these people; with some compassion and understanding, if only we are willing to make an effort, we can allow such people to live amongst us.
Rather than the judgments we pass on them, which show our cluelessness and — our hatred… (Maybe
we — us "normal" people — are the mental cases! And maybe
we need to be institutionalized!)
Mental cases are even given hero status in the left's narratives
(winning several Oscars from Hollywood in the process) — as indeed are
all the usual members of the left's victimhood brigade (women,
gays, blacks, Indians, primitive peoples living close to nature, etc etc etc).
From
Forrest Gump to
John Coffey via
Raymond Babbitt,
these messiah-like beings turn out to be (far) more loving than us regular
people, superior souls who touch everybody they meet, leading to miracles by helping
"normal" (blinded) people to become better human beings and fulfill their destinies, if these saints do not healing said mortals outright,
physically or otherwise.
In other words, what artists,
and leftists, are basically helping to "prove", over and over again, is
that the average American, the average citizen, the average human being
(who is unlike themselves) is a clueless and/or bigoted moron (someone obviously in need of some sort of
betterment treatment).
As with everything else the Left touches, slowly, one brick at a time, common sense is overturned, and normal, regular law-abiding, citizens are demonized and made to be those who obviously ought to be the true outcasts of society (among other things, these bigoted oafs obviously ought to be without weapons or the rights thereto).
2. What, for Ideological Reasons, the Left Ignores
But back to the massacres of the past half century:
Unless I am mistaken, there was not a single occasion of a shootist over the past 50 years, whether underage kids or grown-up adults, who did not previously show warning signs —
if only the fact that they were described as "remote" — warning signs that were deliberately and repeatedly ignored, by family and friends as well as by professionals and people in authority; and that, for fear of the left's PC police.
(This is true even in the military; think only of the warning signs concerning Major Nidal Hassan, universally and persistently ignored, prior to the Islamist's 2009 Fort Hood massacre.)
Indeed, writes
Dr Keith Ablow, in
Adam Lanza's case,
there is every probability that he expressed very concerning thoughts or feelings to more than one person before Friday.
After a shooting spree, as
William S. Burroughs once said,
they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it and who, (not at all) incidentally, would never do anything remotely like it.
Of course, contrary to what the
iTélé guest said or implied, the presence of guns alone does
not ensure that massacres such as that in
Sandy Hook will become more and more common or simply commonplace.
Indeed, had an armed American — had the
average
armed American — been present at the school or at the university, he
(or she) would have used his (or her) weapon to start firing back at
Adam Lanza or
Elliot Rodger, and either hit the gunman or forced him to take cover, preventing him
from continuing his deadly spree. (Could an armed teacher or an armed
firefighter from the fire station next door not have intervened much
earlier?) Besides writing (in
The Atlantic) that "We must find a way to make it more difficult for the non-adjudicated mentally ill to come into possession of weapons,"
Jeffrey Goldberg points out that
Mass shootings take many lives in part because no one is firing back at
the shooters. The shooters in recent massacres have had many minutes to
complete their evil work, while their victims cower under desks or in
closets. One response to the tragic reality that we are a gun-saturated
country is to understand that law-abiding, well-trained, non-criminal,
wholly sane citizens who are screened by the government have a role to
play in their own self-defense, and in the defense of others … it
seems fairly obvious that there was no one at or near the school who
could have tried to fight back.
(Goldberg develops this issue in
a separate, longer article, replete with examples of armed citizens putting a stop to killing sprees: "in other cases, massacres were stopped early by the intervention of
armed civilians, or off-duty or retired police officers who happened to
be nearby.")
Indeed, what the news services rarely tell you — because
the statistics, deliberately or otherwise, are simplified or skewered — is that the
gun-free zones, whether a nation like
Britain, a state like
New Jersey, a city like
Chicago, or a campus or a school like
Sandy Hook Elementary,
are oftenest (if only by comparison) the deadliest ones. Indeed, adds
Glenn Reynolds,
One of the interesting characteristics of mass shootings is that they
generally occur in places where firearms are banned: malls, schools,
etc.
For instance, the murder capital of America
turns out also to be… the capital proper of America. When foreigners
hear that unpalatable fact about Washington, they often shake their
heads: How scandalous! Shouldn't Americans at least make their own capital
secure?!
What they do not understand is that it is precisely —
precisely
— because Washington (already) has the most draconian gun laws in the
nation — and because its law-abiding citizens therefore have no weapons,
i.e., no means of defending themselves — that (law-breaking)
criminals (
scofflaws, they were referred to under
Prohibition), who also read the newspapers, choose DC as their place of predilection.
So, as
the Blogfather notes on
Instapundit,
Gun-free zones provide a false sense of security, and as
Dr Keith Ablow adds, they do not therefore provide
a solution. Adds the Tennessee law professor, it is "an insult to honest people":
Gun-free zones are premised on a lie: that murderers will follow rules,
and that [ordinary people with permits to carry guns] are a greater danger to those around
them than crazed killers.
(Incidentally, I am wondering whether
the gun laws in Connecticut, although far from the strictest in the nation, similarly seem to have been tweaked, if not broken, by the 20-year-old
gunman
("It is unlawful to sell or permanently transfer a handgun to any
person who is forbidden to possess a handgun, or to a person under
21"). Indeed, if
Drew Zahn is to be believed,
Adam Lanza broke "a half-dozen laws in his crime," including "at least three" of Connecticut's gun-control laws. "Of course, these laws were violated because Lanza did not own any of the firearms in question, but rather stole them, and he clearly had no regard for the law in committing his crime.")
3. And What If the U.S. Were to Emulate Europe?
Some readers, particularly on the East Coast and in Europe (and wholly lacking in racism, naturally), may protest that the modern-day examples given (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, etc) concern Arabs and Africans and so on, and not people in the West, a civilized place where gun control should be a given.
Some of them would hope that, on the subject matter of gun control and others (health care etc),
Barack Obama would bypass
Congress and simply get some laws passed by diktat. As
Harry Belafonte
said (echoing
words by
Woody Allen) — i.e., some of the above-mentioned Hollywood artists — the "only thing left for Barack Obama to do is to work like a third
world dictator and just put all [his GOP opponents] in jail."
Adds
Michael Moore,
The NRA hates freedom and obviously ought to be outlawed, meaning that, there too presumably, jail time is appropriate for any of its proponents who do not give in (and who do not give in their weapons).
As I've written
before, that's a whole hell of a lot of people that need to go through jail or, failing that, some sort of
reeducation camps.
In any case, the people, from Europe or elsewhere, suggesting that mass killings inspired by the state are no longer operative in the modern West seem to be forgetting where
Dolfi,
Uncle Joe, and Slobodan hailed from.
Don't you think, for instance, that the French citizens of
Oradour-sur-Glane
(civilians all, naturally) would have been grateful to have had the right to
keep and bear arms (and the concurrent weapons training), along with the concurrent weapons that that right
entails?
Before we close this post, let us give a look at the old "violent nature of America" legend.
Take a good look at the entire globe, as well as the history of the globe, and the "violent nature" of America, as well as the "America's love affair with guns", turns out to be pretty much artificial.
Just like
the least racist place in the world seems to be America, one has to wonder if one of the least violent places in the world does not seem to be America as well…
Because of course there is violence in many other places, such as
Great Britain and
France. And how about neighboring Mexico? While we decry "America's love affair with guns", Mexico is rent with violence (and was so far before the recent development of the narco-trafficking problem). Indeed, while America's Wild West is decried for bloodshed (in fact, fewer people were killed in the West between the Civil War and the year 1900 than in one single year in New York City), people, American, Mexican, or other, downplay the innumerable 19th-century deaths in Mexico, even finding such things as the country's executions romantic (ah, señoritas, sombreros, Mariachi bands, and firing squads). Mexicans routinely put whole garrisons of captured rebels to death — not just Anglos, famously, at the Alamo and Goliad but fellow Hispanics in places like Zacatecas as well — or, when they were in a more generous mood, "only" shot one prisoner at random out of every 10.
To return to the present, it is easy for leftists, American or foreign, like the
iTélé guest, to tout the success of
the gun control laws in the rest of the Western world
when
you (or they) ignore the 1996 massacre of 16 children at a Scottish primary school;
the 2000 killing of eight kids in Japan; the 2002 deaths of eight people
in Nanterre, France; the 2002 killing of 16 kids in Erfurt, Germany;
the 2007 shootings to death of eight people in Tuusula, Finland; the killing of 10 people at a Finnish university less than a year later; the 2009 killing of
15 people in
Winnenden, Germany; and, needless to say, Anders Breivik's 2011 mass murder of 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers.
(Is it unrealistic to wonder whether the tolls would have been lower had a few of the adults in each place — as well as at Paris's Bataclan in 2015 — carried a weapon and tried to shoot back at the respective killers?)
But, of course, t'is easier to condemn gun violence in
America when you ignore, or downplay, gun violence in your own country,
including not giving a second thought to
the widespread presence of Kalashnikovs.
What criticism regarding "America's love affair with guns" amounts to is that
gun violence involving uncontrollable private citizens
is ghastly — while that initiated by the state, and by authorities,
somehow seems much less of a big deal. ("Sure it's horrible that
the communists
killed millions of people, but, y'know… at least they had good
intentions!") That indeed turns out to be the only way to support the
United Nations system, where diplomats and the media alike ignore or
downplay violence ignited by governments (unless they're Western), while
focusing on violence against a government by the West (Bush's
outrageous war against
Saddam Hussein).
Update:
Instapundit links a must-read article from
National Review's John Fund:
A few things you won’t hear about from the saturation coverage of the Newtown, Conn., school massacre:
Mass shootings are no more common than they have been in past decades, despite the impression given by the media.
In fact, the high point for mass killings in the U.S. was 1929,
according to criminologist Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of
Corrections.
Incidents of mass murder in the U.S. declined from 42 in the 1990s to 26 in the first decade of this century.
The chances of being killed in a mass shooting are about what they are for being struck by lightning.
Until the Newtown horror, the three worst K–12 school shootings ever had taken place in either Britain or Germany.
… We would be better off debating two taboo subjects — the laws that make
it difficult to control people with mental illness and the growing body
of evidence that “gun-free” zones, which ban the carrying of firearms by
law-abiding individuals, don’t work.
… Gun-free zones have been the most popular response to previous mass
killings. But many law-enforcement officials say they are actually
counterproductive. “Guns are already banned in schools. That is why the
shootings happen in schools. A school is a ‘helpless-victim zone,’” says
Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff. “Preventing any adult at a
school from having access to a firearm eliminates any chance the killer
can be stopped in time to prevent a rampage,” Jim Kouri, the public-information officer of the National
Association of Chiefs of Police, told me earlier this year at the time
of the Aurora, Colo., Batman-movie shooting. Indeed, there have been
many instances — from the high-school shooting by Luke Woodham in
Mississippi, to the New Life Church shooting in Colorado Springs, Colo. —
where a killer has been stopped after someone got a gun from a parked
car or elsewhere and confronted the shooter.
Economists John Lott and William Landes conducted a
groundbreaking study in 1999, and found that a common theme of mass
shootings is that they occur in places where guns are banned and killers
know everyone will be unarmed, such as shopping malls and schools.
… Lott offers a final damning statistic: “With just one
single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in
Tucson in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in
which more than three people have been killed has taken place where
citizens are not allowed to carry guns.”
Update 2 — by
Ann Coulter:
All these shootings are united by one clear thread: They all were
committed by visibly crazy people, known to be nuts but not
institutionalized.
Mental illness was blindingly clear in the cases of Seung-Hui Cho
(Virginia Tech), Maj. Nidal Hasan (Fort Hood), Jared Loughner (Arizona
shopping mall), James Holmes (Colorado movie theater), and a dozen other
mass shootings in the past few decades.
But in every instance, Democrats’ response was: Let’s ban
high-capacity magazines! Let’s limit private gun sales! Let’s publish
the names of everyone who owns a registered gun!
Mass shootings don’t correlate with any of these things. They
correlate with not locking up crazy people. We’re not worried about
school kids being systematically gunned down by angry husbands, gang
members or antique gun collectors. We’re worried about a psychotic
showing up in a public place and shooting everyone in sight.
… In every one of these mass shootings, there was someone in a position
to say before the attack, “Trust me, this person is a psycho.” Try
getting Jared Loughner or James Holmes through any mental illness
hearing in which they’re required to speak. (Though both might end up
being offered their own shows on MSNBC.)
If someone was brought back from the 1950s to today, he’d tell us: “I
couldn’t help but notice that all the people who committed mass
shootings were batsh*t crazy. Why were they not locked up or forced to
take medication?”
We’d have to say, “Because some people — we call them ‘liberals’ —
get a warm feeling of self-righteousness by defending the right of the
deranged to crap in a shoebox, carefully label it and put it in a
closet.”
Democrats absolutely will not address the one thing that was
screaming out from all of the mass shootings: a crazy person committing
the crime. We can’t medicate them and we can’t lock them up because the
ACLU has handcuffed society’s ability to deal rationally with the
mentally disturbed.
Not only will Democrats refuse to address the problem of the mentally
ill on their own, but they will fight to the last ditch to protect any
crazy person’s right not to take his medication.
At some point in the 1980s, not being “judgmental” became the highest
form of virtue — although the left is plenty judgmental about things
they don’t like, such as white males, smokers, Christianity, Wal-Mart,
Fox News, talk radio and NASCAR.
Liberals are so determined not to stigmatize anybody that their solution is always to make all of society suffer instead:
– To avoid hurting Muslims’ feelings, everyone has to strip to his underwear at the airport.
– So no one feels excluded, we’re not allowed to say “Merry Christmas!”
– To avoid singling out gays, the government and media lied to
Americans for a decade about the coming explosion of heterosexual AIDS.
(We’re still waiting.)
– To stop people from noticing patterns, the media bend over backward
to avoid telling us the race of dangerous criminals on the loose.
– To prevent hurt feelings, everybody gets an “A.”
– And to avoid “stigmatizing” the mentally ill, society has to live with the occasional mass murder.
These anti-stigmatization rules don’t even help the people they claim
to be protecting. But defending ridiculous rules that ruin things for
everyone else makes liberals feel heroic.
Update 3: Everytown for Gun Safety's
list was compiled to give the public an exaggerated impression of how many school shootings have taken place. Notes
Glenn Reynolds:
IT’S FUNNY THAT THE GUN-CONTROL FOLKS CAN’T SELL THEIR PROGRAM WITHOUT, YOU KNOW, LYING
Update 4: In 2015 alone,
France suffered more casualties from gun violence than the U.S. has suffered during Obama's entire presidency
Update 5: a brief outtake from this post was published three years later
in the New York Times in response to their front-page editorial on the "Gun Epidemic"
Update 6: Re the BBC's statistics behind gun violence —
Mass shootings in the U.S. have fallen so much in the past century
that
the political left has had to redefine what a mass shooting is
