SITTING in my room at Oxford in April 2007, I watched the horrible news unfold on my little portable television. A man had walked onto the campus at Virginia Tech and murdered thirty-two people.
This was my final year of university, and by now I had changed my opinion on firearms completely. Once I had exhibited the reflexive sneer of the British establishment; now I had arrived at the uncomfortable conclusion that the profusion of guns was not only uncontrollable in the United States, but that the attempt to limit their impact with flaccid and fanciful laws was also dangerous both to liberty and to the constitutional order. My undergraduate thesis, written that year on the passage of the Second Amendment, had served only to help me along.
It will come as little surprise to you, I would imagine, that articulating this position on an English college campus didn’t win me too many friends—particularly at a time when the news was full of death and grief. So, hoping to be spared the mawkish reactions of my friends—who, I figured, would probably come up to grill me on the subject as soon as they heard about it—I went and locked my door.
It didn’t help. For as long as I live, I will never forget the look of astonishment and despair on the face of the BBC correspondent who had been sent to cover the massacre. Stopping to interview local residents, he almost immediately encountered a young man who suggested that, had more people on campus been armed, the carnage would likely have been stopped earlier. Another interlocutor urged caution, wondering aloud whether the state legislature’s recent rejection of a concealed-carry bill had deprived some of the victims of a fighting chance.
This was almost too much for my fellow countryman to bear. A few miles away lay thirty-three bodies—still warm, and riddled with bullets—and yet he was having difficulty finding anyone who would tell him that harsh reform was needed. Spluttering and blinking, and trying as hard as he could to shake off everything he thought he knew, he made a valiant effort to grasp his interviewees’ positions. But it was no good. For him, as with most Brits, the conviction that strict gun control is necessary is a standard part of the political catechism—absorbed as if by osmosis from a young age. Wrapping up his piece, he couldn’t help but snidely conclude that the Americans’ skepticism toward gun control was the product of an irrational and abstract belief system with which one simply cannot reason. I switched off the television, annoyed and worried. For those of us who believe in individual liberty, times of crisis are scary times indeed.
That America’s gun laws are destructive and demented appears now to be the prevailing view among the establishment here, too. In the wake of the abomination at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, we were told repeatedly—both by politicians in Washington and by a media whose coverage of the carnage bordered, frankly, on the pornographic—that the game was now up. “The culture of guns is beginning to go through a transformation in this country,” the McLaughlin Group’s Eleanor Clift divined a few weeks after the bloodshed. Alaska senator Mark Begich, a conservative-leaning Democrat from a state with almost no gun laws at all, concurred, predicting a “sea change” in thinking. For its part, CBS News purported to have conducted a poll that showed Americans to be more upset and angry about Sandy Hook than they had been about 9/11. Pushed in a few cases by misleading questions and in most by the raw emotion of the hour, American attitudes shifted for a few weeks. And then, predictably, they reverted to their usual position.
And more. While President Obama rushed around like a headless chicken, trying to push through new rules before reason intruded upon agitation, millions of Americans rushed out to purchase weapons, to apply for concealed-carry permits, and to take gun classes. The AR-15, a type of rifle that was immediately vilified in the media and in Congress as being in some way responsible for the actions of a mentally unstable young man, flew off shelves like never before. Across the country, ammunition ran dry. Later we learned that the ten busiest weeks in the history of the NICS, the federal background-check system, were those following the abomination in Connecticut. Counterintuitively to some, a host of states actually liberalized their laws. Certainly the Democratic strongholds of New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and California all reacted in the way the Left wanted, banning specific types of weapons and introducing new obstacles to gun ownership. Amazingly, Colorado followed suit. But these states were vastly outnumbered by the more than twenty that loosened their rules.
Begich’s “sea change,” then, failed to materialize, the public coming to its senses before too much damage could be done. Indeed, even in those states that managed to pass new legislation, changes had to be made on the sly—by shutting down debate or invoking emergency measures that were designed not for standard legislation but for genuine crises. In many cases, the politicians responsible for reforms were met with sharp drops in their approval ratings—and, in a handful of instances, rewarded with early removal from office. In Colorado’s first-ever recall election, two state senators—one the incumbent state senate president—were unseated by disgruntled and previously apolitical citizens for backing legislation that in most parts of the world would be considered exceedingly mild. Thus was reaffirmed in the second decade of the twenty-first century a lesson that President Bill Clinton had learned to his great discomfort twenty years earlier: If you want to survive in American politics, leave the gun question alone.
It wasn’t always like this. When, in 1993, the Brady Act established a federal system of background checks and then the next year the Crime Bill banned the production, importation, and sale of a whole host of weapons, it looked as if the game was up for the right to keep and bear arms—that the regulations would keep on coming and that public opinion would move with them as it had in the other nations of the Anglosphere. In the 1990s, even former president Ronald Reagan—that great conservative hero—backed tough guncontrol measures, writing in favor of the Brady legislation in the New York Times and describing as “absolutely necessary” the Clinton-era restrictions on “assault” weapons. But then something remarkable happened: Americans started to rebel, questioning the assumptions that had undergirded public policy throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. No sooner had Clinton signed his measures than the reversal had begun.
Gallup’s polling team has tracked the change well. In 1991, a remarkable 40 percent of Americans signaled that they were open to a wholesale ban on handguns. By 2011, this number was just 26 percent. Similar reductions in support can be seen for a so-called assault weapons ban and for enacting “new laws.” In 1991, 78 percent of Americans wanted “more strict” gun laws. By 2011, this was just 44 percent. Support for the regulation of gun sales follows the same pattern: In 1990, Gallup records, 78 percent of Americans agreed with the contention that “the laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict than they are now.” Five years later, it was at 62 percent. A decade after, it was at 57. Today it stands at 49 percent, and it is still dropping.
In the early 1990s, pundits would have laughed openly at anybody who predicted in public that by the year 2013, all fifty of these United States would have concealed-carry regimes; that five states would have followed outlier Vermont in abolishing almost all of their gun laws; and that a unified Democratic government in Washington would in fact have expanded, rather than abridged, gun rights. Similarly mocked would have been anyone who believed that the Supreme Court would rule in the twenty-first century that the Second Amendment clearly represented an individual right and that the states were constitutionally obligated to respect it. “The natural progress of things,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in a 1788 letter, “is for liberty to yield, and government to gain.” Indeed it is. But not here. In fact, the right to keep and bear arms serves as a happy exception to the rule, representing a stunning victory for conservatives, for libertarians—and, really, for anybody who values reason over hysteria and facts over fear. The restoration and expansion of liberty that advocates have managed to achieve since 1987—at both the state and federal levels—is nothing short of remarkable, representing a salutary indication of just how effective the Right can be when it sticks to its principles, when it goes on the offensive, and when it presents a united front. Looking for the model for conservative reform? Study up on the gun-rights movement. Seriously.
When I run through this history for disinterested parties, they tend to ask, “Why?” The primary answer, I’m afraid, is a boring one: The anti-gun-control side has the facts on its side. Despite their protestations to the contrary, on a whole host of issues the self-professed members of the Left’s “reality-based community” are anything but realistic. Rather, they are emotional, hyperbolic, and dishonest—and their positions are based upon claims that do not hold up to scrutiny and on a steadfast refusal to accept the United States as it is. Nowhere is this more true than on the issue of guns.
It is nigh on impossible to examine the issue of firearms in the United States and to come out on the side of the gun controllers. Gary Kleck, a professor of criminology at Florida State University with unimpeachable progressive credentials, should know. He tried. Kleck, who boasts memberships in the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, and Common Cause—and is a lifelong registered Democrat—set out in the early 1990s to write a definitive rebuttal to the libertarian-led anti-gun-control hypotheses that were becoming increasingly popular among rightward-leaning politicians and those among the electorate who were worried about crime. He failed. Working through the evidence, Kleck became at first concerned and then enchanted by the counterarguments, which he found, to his immense surprise, flatly contradicted the conventional wisdom. So he changed tack. Instead of producing his rejoinder, he wrote a book, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, which explained why, in a country such as the United States, gun control doesn’t work. The positive and negative use of guns, Kleck concluded, cancel one another out, because “the problem of criminal gun violence is concentrated within a very small subset of gun owners.” As such, gun control “aimed at the general population faces a serious needle-in-the-haystack problem.” Translation: You can annoy the good guys with regulations as much as you like, but it won’t solve the problem.
Kleck’s volte-face made immediate waves. The American Society of Criminology awarded him the Michael J. Hindelang Award. Marvin Wolfgang, a contemporary of Kleck’s who described himself as “as strong a gun control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country” and conceded that if he had his druthers he would “eliminate all guns from the civilian population and maybe even from the police,” was forced to acknowledge that his positions were simply not backed up by the data. Having established in no uncertain terms that he hated guns, which he termed “ugly, nasty instruments designed to kill people,” Wolfgang wrote that Kleck’s research “provided an almost clear cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years.”
Point Blank is a classic tale of fact outweighing fiction, of liberty trumping fear, and of the wisdom of the ages transcending the fashionable and the new. Until the late 1970s, Kleck noted, there was so little objective information on the issue of guns and violence that Americans were “free to believe whatever they liked about guns and gun control because there was no scientific evidence to interfere with the free play of personal bias.” For decades, those personal biases were allowed free reign, first to inform government policy and then to ossify in the public imagination. The 1960s and 1970s were a time during which it became fashionable to pretend that society had moved past the need for timeless principles and could merely will itself into more peaceful and prosperous times. The combination of hubris and misinformation was lethal.
“Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes submitted in 1921. And yet for a time, it was demanded. By 1980, reams of new gun-control laws had been added to the books, while age-old legal principles that were contrived to protect citizens from predators had been either abolished or diminished (among them the Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground). For the Right, it was all going disastrously wrong.
But after a short period of quiet acquiescence, Americans began to notice the damage the measures were causing. Spiking crime, brazen miscarriages of justice, and a growing sense that the representatives of the people were catastrophically disconnected from the reality on the streets led to voters coming together and shouting, “Enough!” As researchers Steven Jansen and M. Elaine Nugent-Borakove have recorded, by 2001 an electoral majority had come to believe that the “due process rights of defendants overshadow[ed] the rights of victims”; that the state could not reliably help those in need of its protection; and, after the attacks of September 11, that their “diminished sense of public safety” was falling on deaf ears. They rebelled, demanding that their right to defend themselves be protected anew and rejecting the sloppy thinking that had marked that right’s shameful dilution.
The Left, University of North Carolina professor Mike Adams argues, doesn’t “like guns for the simple reason that guns—like prisons and military bases—are reminders of human imperfection.” But, as we are reminded whenever we allow our politics to be driven by dreamers, man is imperfect. And history shows that good intentions do not inexorably lead to good results. By the time the new millennium was ushered in, Americans were fed up and hungry for new ideas. Conservatives, who never were under any illusions in the first place, pounced.
Thanks to the concerted and repeated efforts of advocates over the past three decades, Americans have grasped and internalized the truth: that gun policy is best made outside of crises, that the states are the best place for experimentation, and that the Left’s preferred prescriptions tend, in this area at least, to be irrational or ignorant or both.
If it makes them feel better, progressives can pretend that the problem with the United States is the National Rifle Association or the gun manufacturers or those recalcitrant Americans who live in rural areas and will not bend to Hollywood’s will. But the truth is rather more complex than that. Really, the NRA’s only power is communicative. It tells voters whether or not candidates for office agree with them, and voters do the rest. Likewise, the role of gun manufacturers is to satisfy the people’s demand for firearms. If people do not wish to own guns, their makers will go out of business. There is nothing in the American constitutional order that gives the firearms industry a vote. The NRA wins because it is popular.
How popular? Democrat Terry McAuliffe won the governor’s race in Virginia last year by a few points: 48 percent to 45.5 percent. The NRA, meanwhile, polled at 51 percent favorability. Elsewhere the numbers are much higher, with the NRA outpolling the president in almost every state. Invoking the NRA might be a cheap way of getting people in Manhattan and San Francisco to turn up their noses, but in most of the country the organization is viewed positively. News flash: People like their civil rights.
The Right should be extremely pleased with its progress in this area, not least because the gun issue is a powerful totem—an example that can be used to illustrate the integrity of a philosophy. Both conservatives and libertarians like to talk of fidelity to the Constitution, of a powerful and self-reliant citizenry, of local control, of the people knowing better what they need than does the state, of harsh reality trumping emotion and ideology, and of the vital importance of reformers electing to start from where they are and not where they would like to be. There are few better ways of illustrating a commitment to these ideals than to back the rights of the people on questions relating to deadly force.
Nevertheless, celebrants ought to be careful not to fall prey to complacency. The past two decades have yielded one of the few substantial policy reversals in American history, yes. But the nature of the American government is such that one knee-jerk reaction from an overzealous crop of Washington elites could wipe out decades’ worth of gains at the stroke of a pen. It is no good slowly liberalizing gun laws at the state level if the feds can overrule your gains on a whim. The expired “assault weapons” ban of 1994 has been posthumously deemed a failure in major studies conducted by both the University of Pennsylvania and the Department of Justice. And yet it is favored still in blue states across the country, at the federal level by the likes of President Obama and Dianne Feinstein, and by a good number of Americans who have fallen prey to the propaganda. Concealed carry has failed to yield any of the dangerous results that naysayers predicted it would. And yet we still hear know-nothings such as Illinois governor Pat Quinn risibly claiming that if we “allow private citizens to carry loaded, concealed handguns in public places,” and “you bump into somebody accidentally, well they can pull out a loaded, concealed handgun to assuage their anger.” Nobody in the history of the United States has been killed with a .50-caliber rifle, and yet they are still banned in many states and are high on the gun controllers’ hit list. Real threats remain.
Advocates should set themselves five main goals for the future. First, and always most important, is to hold the line on recent victories. Public opinion is certainly on the Right’s side in this area, but tragedies invariably lead to short-lived fluctuations, and all it would take for years of painstaking work to be undone is a bad law passed hastily in anger. It should be recognized that the majority of the victories that we have enjoyed over the past few decades have been the product of the states changing their laws and not of judges upholding the federal Constitution. Those states could always change the laws back. We must ensure that they do not.
Second, conservatives should attempt to build on the remarkable jurisprudential successes of the last decade. It is a great blessing that the Supreme Court has recognized that the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects an individual right, but there is still a great deal of work to be done to ensure that that right is practically and meaningfully protected. The 2008 Heller decision affirmed that private gun ownership was protected by the Constitution, and the 2010 McDonald decision applied that principle to the states. Nevertheless, the scope of the right, the weapons to which it pertains, and the manner in which lower courts must examine the underlying questions have never been established. Until the Supreme Court fleshes out its order, the right to keep and bear arms will be applied differently depending on where a citizen lives. Some of those who have found themselves stuck in states with hostile governments (California, Hawaii, Illinois) have managed to convince the courts that they are entitled to their rights, but others have been afforded no relief (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut). There is no doubt whatsoever that these issues will be taken up by the justices in the next few years. Conservatives must be ready.
Third, we must continue to educate the public against the misinformation on which our opponents have come to rely. The claim that America is in the midst of a gun-violence “epidemic” needs to be regularly debunked—and hard. Two reports, both released in May 2013, revealed a striking drop in gun crime over the past twenty years. The first, from the Department of Justice, confirmed that firearm-related homicides declined 39 percent between 1993 and 2011; that non-fatal firearm crimes declined 69 percent over the same time period; and that school shootings, too, were down 33 percent since 1993. The gains, the study showed, had been in every region of the country, and held true for all races and both sexes. The second, a Pew analysis of the same data, characterized gun-violence rates as being “strikingly lower” than they were in 1993, and recorded that “national rates of gun homicide, non-fatal gun crime and all non-fatal violent crimes have fallen since the mid-1990s.”
Alas, as Pew noted:
Despite national attention to the issue of firearm violence, most Americans are unaware that gun crime is lower today than it was two decades ago. According to a new Pew Research Center survey, today 56% of Americans believe gun crime is higher than 20 years ago and only 12% think it is lower.
This is to say that Americans are unaware that, during the very period that gun laws have been dramatically liberalized across the whole country, gun crime has dropped substantially. For those who made asinine claims that reform would lead to Americans shooting one another in supermarket aisles, this has been deeply embarrassing. “Whenever a state legislature first considers a concealed-carry bill,” Dave Kopel of the Independence Institute observed in 1996,
opponents typically warn of horrible consequences. But within a year of passage, the issue usually drops off the news media’s radar screen, while gun-control advocates in the legislature conclude that the law wasn’t so bad after all.
Almost twenty years later, these words are as true as ever. But there is no great virtue in the harbingers of doom being proved wrong if nobody is there to see it. Conservatives must ensure that Americans know that the predictions of the naysayers did not come to pass, and that gun-related crime has been almost cut in half while the laws have been liberalized.
Likewise, we must ensure that our critics do not get away with their slippery and selective use of crime statistics. Progressives like to tell the public that 30 thousand people are “killed with guns every year.” Overall, this is true. But those wielding the number routinely fail to acknowledge that they are counting suicides and homicides in the same breath, thereby leaving an impression that is not quite right. A startling two-thirds of all fatal gunshot wounds are self-inflicted—a horrifically high number, of course, but one that changes the debate considerably. It is simply dishonest to conflate citizens making an awful personal choice with citizens being murdered, and it is patently absurd, too, to pretend that the problems have the same solution. Japan, which has probably the strictest gun-control laws in the world, has double the suicide rate as does the United States.
Conservatives should also make a point of insisting that emotional and meaningless terms such as “assault weapon” are called out whenever they are deployed. As anybody even vaguely familiar with firearms knows, there is no such thing as an “assault weapon.” It is nothing more than an invented political term—a clever means by which cynical politicians might arbitrarily place any firearm that they wish to ban into a category that sounds troubling to the uninformed. “Assault weapon” does not mean “automatic weapon”—these are heavily regulated under federal law and are so rarely used in crimes as to represent a red herring—and it does not mean “more lethal.” It means nothing at all, beyond “scary-looking gun that I don’t like for reasons I can’t quite explain.”
Not only is the focus on “assault weapons” misleading, it is also a spectacular waste of everyone’s time. When someone is killed with a gun in America, it is almost certain that a garden-variety handgun was used. Rifles of all sorts—not just so-called assault rifles—are used in around 3 percent of all killings. To put this into context, shotguns, which almost nobody is attempting to ban, are used in around 3.5 percent. Even if we use a maximalist definition of both “rifle” and “shotgun,” it is the case that fewer people are shot annually in America with guns that are not handguns than are killed by hands and fists. As for those “assault” variants? They are utilized in so few murders each year that the federal government doesn’t even bother to keep statistics.
Fourth, we should work to establish stronger reciprocal links between the states. Each of the fifty states is expected to respect my Connecticut driver’s license. Why not my Connecticut concealed-carry permit? There are, it seems, three ways of achieving guaranteed reciprocity: It can be done on a bilateral “compact” basis between willing states, which is always preferable. It can be achieved via federal legislation that preempts those states and forces them to recognize one another’s documents. Or it can be challenged in court under the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution. Personally, the latter two options make me uncomfortable: If we are to advocate for the power of the states, we must recognize that those states will be able to make decisions that we dislike. A better course, I think, is to work on reciprocity at the state level.
Finally, conservatives should continue to normalize guns and gun ownership. Outside of its obsession with “universal background checks,” the gun-control brigade’s latest trick is to lobby businesses and local governments to make gun bearers unwelcome in their stores and to put pressure on social media outlets to remove photographs of firearms from their users’ pages. The intention here is obvious: to take firearms out of the cultural mainstream and to win in the private sector what they cannot achieve through government. We have already lost a lot of ground. As George Mason University’s Walter E. Williams has noted, before the 1968 Gun Control Act was passed, “private transfers of guns to juveniles were unrestricted. Often a youngster’s 12th or 14th birthday present was a shiny new .22-caliber rifle, given to him by his father.” In the 1960s, school gun clubs were so common that, even in New York City, it was typical to see children walking to school with rifles slung over their backs. Nowadays students are suspended from school for making pistol shapes with their fingers or for simply saying “Bang!” in the schoolyard. Progressives widely mock “abstinence-only” sex education on the eminently reasonable grounds that sex is a fact of life and that children should therefore be taught about it. Why should abstinence-only gun education be immune from their derision?
On guns, as on so much else, the Left tends to discuss public policy in the abstract, insinuating at each point that the United States is little more than a sandbox game such as SimCity, with variables that can be tweaked and outcomes that can be painlessly altered by an omnipotent force possessed of good intentions and an infinite number of lives. It is no such thing. It is a living, breathing nation full of flawed people and imperfect institutions. In consequence, the material question before us is not “Should we live in a society with 350 million guns and an entrenched constitutional right to gun ownership?” but “Given that we live in a country with 350 million guns and a constitutional right to gun ownership, what can we do to limit the violence?”
Here is the crux of the issue: There are simply far too many firearms here for minor laws to make a difference, while major laws are prohibited theoretically by the Constitution and practically by the culture. If there was ever a time in which the United States could follow the example of a country such as Australia or Britain and collect up a significant portion of the nation’s guns, it has long passed. To institute anything approaching a ban would be to invite a civil war and the breaking apart of the American experiment. To do anything less is merely to irritate the law-abiding and to hand the advantage to the criminal element. America is full of guns. It is always going to be full of guns. Now that it is possible to 3D-print a gun, there is no way of preventing private ownership even if we wished to. On firearms, the ship has sailed.
Conservatives, meanwhile, might stop pretending that there is no problem about which to be concerned. The blogger Andrew Sullivan told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in 2013 that he was happy to acknowledge that the gun question was intractable if advocates of the right to bear arms would concede that this is not wholly positive. He was right. The United States has more gun deaths than every other country in the civilized world. This, obviously, is related to its citizenry’s having almost half of the world’s guns in their possession. Defenders of the Second Amendment gain nothing by denying this.
On the contrary. Whatever the provocations in the media or the demands of our mawkish political climate, conservatives must continue to ensure that they exhibit the same intellectual and moral honesty as did Professor Kleck. On the one hand, this requires us to steadfastly refuse to give in to fantasies and misconceptions that cost lives and strip people of their basic liberties. On the other, it means being precise with our language. Almost all legal gun owners are peaceful people, and the temptation to push against the hysterics is an understandable one. After all, if you are never going to hurt anybody, the suggestion that you are one wrong Starbucks order away from going postal will be inordinately frustrating to you. We should, however, avoid weakening our position by pretending that guns aren’t deadly weapons that are designed deliberately and exclusively to kill and to maim. They are. Indeed, even if they are not fired, the preventive value of firearms is a function of their lethality. As George Orwell went to great pains to insist, a firearm in the hands of a good man does not cease to be a firearm; it just becomes a firearm used in a manner of which we approve.
The key question before us is not whether guns are dangerous—they really, really are—but who gets them in a free society. It makes little philosophical sense for the politicians whom the citizens of this free country have hired to represent them to be permitted to turn around and disarm their employers—especially when one remembers that the people’s maintaining their right to bear arms was one of the preconditions of the social contract. The question of gun ownership is one of the most important and fundamental political questions of all, relating as it does to the allocation of the means of violence, the direction in which power is to flow, and the maintenance of the rule of law. Here, as elsewhere, conservatives should answer the question of who is to be privileged in the only way that is consistent with a free society: We, the People.
Which is ultimately to say that conservatives should recognize that this is not merely a question of economics. Along with the beautiful First Amendment, the Second Amendment is the most important philosophical statement in the whole of the United States Constitution. It must be jealously protected.