CHAPTER 5

A Heart Problem and a Criminal-Justice Problem

For years whenever I stayed the night at my grandparents’ tiny house in the Ozarks on the other side of an abandoned mine, I slept a foot away from an unlocked gun cabinet stocked with all sorts of rifles and pistols. Grandpa kept a full rack of rifles mounted on the rear glass of his truck. Everyone carried. All us kids had BB guns and spent countless summer afternoons lining up little green army men on Grandma and Grandpa’s picnic table to shoot down one by one. Yet in all of those years, with all of us grandkids running around, nothing bad ever happened. Before I was old enough to understand or fear the serious consequences of unquenched curiosity coupled with a disrespect for private property, I feared punishment by my mother. My mother’s face physically resembles that of an eagle’s when angry: pointed, beady eyes, lips pursed into a beak. It’s positively terrifying. I think even more than that, I was afraid to disappoint my grandparents. All of us felt that way. When Grandma or Grandpa told you something certain, you did it, you followed it. I couldn’t imagine disrespecting my grandparents by going through their things, opening the handmade gun cabinet that my uncle had made for Grandpa, and taking something that wasn’t mine to take. My mother kept a loaded .38 in her nightstand. I knew it was there—I’d seen it before—but I never would have imagined opening that drawer and taking it.

When I was in fifth or sixth grade I heard a story about a kid who was playing at a friend’s house and the pair had the idea to go through the parents’ drawers because the son knew his dad kept a gun somewhere. They found it, they played with it, and one of them was shot and killed. My first thought was horror, as in Why did they think it was a toy? My second thought was Where did they get the idea that it was okay to rifle through other people’s belongings? It was a tragedy, but how did my grandparents, who were armed to the teeth with guns all over the house, help raise twenty-eight grandkids, have a house crawling with children and adults, and never have a single theft or accident? Mind you, it wasn’t just my grandparents; it was the entire town in which they lived. Everyone lived like that and still does. It’s just how it is, and to this day there hasn’t been such an incident.

People on the coasts think that the Second Amendment is nothing but a codified exception for hunting meant only to apply to muskets. It’s not. As I wrote in my previous book, the founders were made aware of emerging firearms technology when John Belton wrote to the Continental Congress and informed them that he had, in fact, created the very first automatic rifle, to the enemy’s “immortal sorrow.”93 Congress considered buying Belton’s guns for the Continental Army, but all consideration ceased when they could not navigate around the immense cost of Belton’s gun. They didn’t ban Belton from manufacturing such weaponry, however; they didn’t force him to supply the Continental Army, either. Here John Belton (and others, like James Puckle) clearly demonstrated that he had weapons technology that was superior in rate of fire, and it wasn’t banned or regulated. The idea that the founders meant only muskets when drafting the Second Amendment should embarrass any historical illiterate who makes the argument. Those people should be publicly mocked, as anyone making such an argument is outing themselves as a historical illiterate. The “musket argument” is the same as arguing that speech made via a printing press is somehow less protected than that made by a quill. The innovation and technological development that brought us from the musket to where we are today didn’t come from the government; it came from the private sector, from average, everyday Americans who saw a need for firearm improvement and wanted to fill it. There exist many firearms manufacturers that are small, humble, mom-and-pop operations. Black Rain Ordnance from southern Missouri, Kel-Tec in Florida, Black Swamp Firearms in Michigan, Nemesis Arms in Kentucky, and Aklys Defense in Louisiana are all small businesses providing jobs in their communities while expanding on the current platform of firearms by improving function, modernizing form, and inventing new ways to exercise the Second Amendment. These aren’t big manufacturers, and even if they were, every big manufacturer started as a small one and blossomed into a success story. Smith & Wesson began humbly as a shop run by Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson; Samuel Colt was the son of a farmer and became an indentured worker at the age of eleven. As the needs of Americans progressed from the Civil War to the American frontier, so did their needs for arms, which these privately owned businesses fulfilled.

As I covered in my previous book, Hands Off My Gun, no part of the United States is exempt from criminal activity, but the areas where there exists a higher rate of homicide by firearm are areas where there is a breakdown of criminal penalty, increased restrictions on firearms, and an increase in gang activity. The gun homicide rate is driven by repeat offenders94 who illegally use illegally possessed firearms. It’s not driven by farmers, ranchers, stay-at-home moms, and the like in Flyover.

As a side note, be wary of any gun-death statistics waved at you, as the antigun lobby always includes justified shootings (police who take down bad guys) and suicides in the total number. The vast majority of gun deaths in America are self-inflicted. Those people are not taking their own lives with the kind of firearms coastals get worked up about. But you don’t hear them worrying instead about a suicide epidemic, as they’re too busy trying to let physicians bring the suicide numbers up nationwide.

Coastals also like to point out that Flyover has more guns, so it has more gun deaths. And that’s true, but not because we’re killing each other. Homicide is much more common in the cities.

I wrote in Hands Off My Gun about how I grew up with firearms. During the Fourth of July in Flyover Nation, when there is a momentary lull between small cannon and bottle rockets, you can hear gunfire in the distance. People in Flyover like to exercise their Second Amendment rights as part of the Independence Day festivities. My family didn’t teach just about firearms and firearm safety; they taught three other things as part of that lesson: respect for life, respect for private property, and to treat one another with love. They’re biblical lessons absent today because the ever-growing secular world has a problem with God. As a kid, before getting to the playing-with-a-gun party, I’d have had to bypass respect for private property. We have a problem with “Thou shalt not covet” in today’s society. Just because you see something doesn’t mean it’s yours to take. We also have a problem with respecting life in this country. I can’t imagine the difficulty children today have with this concept, considering that special-interest groups preach to them from infancy that they’re dispensable and that if they ever want to have a child, that child is dispensable too—just stop in to your local Planned Parenthood as your trusty source of postconception birth control. So many in Flyover scratch their heads at the contradiction posed by so many who claim to want to “save just one life” when discussing reducing crimes committed with illegally used firearms, as these are the exact same people who have no problem with a Planned Parenthood on every corner in urban America.

The sad fact of the matter is that it’s become politically incorrect, be it in foreign policy (which has affected domestic policy and the way we respond to and handle terror here) or criminal-justice policy, to state the obvious and enforce existing law. We’re told to rehabilitate instead of punish and falsely believe that grace and justice can’t exist together.

On December 2, 2015, two terrorists walked into the Inland Regional Center and opened fire, killing fourteen and wounding more. One of the terrorists, a foreigner from Pakistan named Tashfeen Malik, had a diabolical unibrow and had ranted for years in private social media messages about jihad, but Jeh Johnson’s Department of Homeland Security isn’t even allowed to take public messages into consideration when granting visas because, says a former senior department official, Johnson fears “bad public relations” and a civil-liberties backlash.95 Yes, far worse things than the backlash Johnson is facing after the deaths of fourteen Americans because Johnson was worried about his own backside. I’m sure the families of those fourteen victims found solace in Johnson’s dutiful devotion to political correctness. The terrorists had pledged allegiance to ISIS online before the attacks and meticulously mapped out their strategy, but they were as good at building bombs as Ahmed Mohamed, the clock boy, was at repurposing clock guts into a pencil case and calling it his own invented IED clock. Neighbors saw young Middle Eastern men coming to and going from Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook’s home, and the two had turned their garage into an IED factory, but no one said anything because neighbors didn’t want anyone to think that they were racially profiling.

Political correctness is killing people.

Instead of focusing on the lax vetting process for visa seekers like Malik, Democrats immediately blamed the Second Amendment. Guns, not terror, were the culprit. Upon finally admitting that it was an act of terror, the president gave an address where he intoned that we shouldn’t judge all Muslims based on these two terrorists (or the one from Oklahoma, or Garland, or Chattanooga, or Boston, or the Underwear Bomber, or the attempted Times Square bomber, or the 9/11 hijackers, or the USS Cole bombers, or the Benghazi attackers, or the Beltway snipers—I could continue at length) but should by all means judge all law-abiding gun owners based on the weapons that these two terrorists illegally used—and were in illegal possession of: The rifles were not obtained through a legal transfer and were modified to the point of criminality in California, which boasts the strictest of the “expanded background checks” that Democrats admire. Our existing laws criminalizing murder would have prevented the attack, to say nothing of our existing gun laws, if passing laws were all that fighting terrorism required.

I was on air when the terrorist attack happened, and even with the name “Syed Farook” making the rounds on scanners, it was too early to call a motive until confirmed by law enforcement, but what we have learned over the past two years is that you can’t count on the administration to name motives when the motive is Islamic terror. The administration flirted with repeating its Fort Hood travesty in calling the San Bernardino attack “workplace violence,” even as law enforcement and intelligence departments knew without a doubt that this was an act of terror. They would do this again with another terrorist attack, the first of 2016. On the evening of January 7, 2016, a man in a long white robe fired a stolen pistol into a police cruiser, seriously wounding Officer Jesse Hartnett. The terror suspect, identified as Edward Archer, had pledged his allegiance to ISIS and said that he had “tried to execute” the officer “in the name of Islam.”96 Democratic mayor Jim Kenney blamed guns and said, “There are too many guns on the street.”97 Funny thing about that: Archer used a gun he had stolen from a cop in 2013. Oops. Kenney was clearly shocked that an ISIS terrorist didn’t submit to a background check for that stolen gun. What’s more, Archer should have been in jail serving a ten-year sentence for a felony gun conviction in 2012. According to court documents, Archer’s sentence was reduced:

Archer was sentenced to nine to 13 months in prison, was allowed to count time served and was immediately paroled. Records show he was originally arrested April 14, 2013 and was released April 30, 2013 after posting partial bail. 98

This is a deadly judicial pattern.

In November 2015 Jalita Johnson was sentenced to only 180 days of house arrest and one year of probation for straw-purchasing a gun for her boyfriend, Marcus Wheeler (a convicted felon who told her what to buy and gave her the money to buy it), who shot and killed wife, new mom of three Officer Kerrie Orozco in Omaha earlier that same year as she and the gang task force tried to serve a warrant. The judge who handed down Johnson’s wrist slap was Eleanor L. Ross, nominated by President Obama to the position in December of 2013.

In the fall of 2014, St. Louis teenager VonDerrit Myers, eighteen, was shot and killed after firing an illegally possessed gun at an off-duty officer in the Shaw neighborhood, mere blocks from my old house. Myers was up on a felony gun charge from an incident months prior but was released after Associate Circuit Court Judge Theresa Burke, in an unusual move, reduced his bond from thirty thousand dollars to one thousand (it was ten thousand, but Burke allowed Myers to pay only 10 percent for freedom).99 Myers was ordered to wear a GPS ankle device, not leave his home except for work, school, or court, and abide by a curfew. Shockingly, as most criminals are wont to do, Myers didn’t abide by these and ended up getting killed after firing at a cop while running around the neighborhood illegally possessing yet another gun. After this St. Louis mayor Francis Slay bizarrely blamed the city’s violence (driven by gangs and drugs) on the Second Amendment.

“Lax gun laws in the state make it painfully easy to get a gun, carry a gun and get off on charges when someone is arrested with a gun,” Slay said.100 Yes, because VonDerrit Myers was able to legally purchase a handgun as a convicted felon under the age of twenty-one years. Please.

The problem isn’t the Second Amendment; the problem is that there is no fear of criminal penalty because ridiculous judges have made such a deterrent irrelevant by reducing it to nothing. In 2010 there were eighty thousand falsifications on 4473, the form law-abiding Americans fill out and submit to the NICS, the criminal background-check system created by the NRA (in exchange for a five-day waiting period that Clinton and his Democrats wanted in the nineties). Lying on a 4473 is a felony, yet in the year mentioned, only forty-four of those were even prosecuted. Vice President Joe Biden once addressed this on a phone call noted by the Daily Caller:101 Jim Baker, the NRA representative present at the meeting, recalled the vice president’s words during an interview with the Daily Caller: “And to your point, Mr. Baker, regarding the lack of prosecutions on lying on Form 4473s, we simply don’t have the time or manpower to prosecute everybody who lies on a form, that checks a wrong box, that answers a question inaccurately.”

The president has done more to help and enable repeat offenders and gangbangers than he has victims or law-abiding Americans. Take, for instance, the fact that the “expanded background checks” for which he calls already existed in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, states where tragedies occurred in 2015. Those states had the gun restrictions that the president and anti–Second Amendment advocates wanted, yet those restrictions did nothing to prevent the criminal activity that ended up taking lives.

During the first week of January 2016, the president issued a number of executive orders, none of which would have prevented or will prevent a single tragedy from occurring because they are entirely predicated upon criminals agreeing to follow laws. The president hosted a carefully orchestrated town hall hosted by CNN, in which he rambled and monologued his way through answers to tough questions posed by Taya Kyle, Sheriff Paul Babeu, and Kimberly Corban, a rape survivor against gun control. The president even told Corban, who appeared on my radio program the following day, that she shouldn’t have guns in her house, as they might cause an accident since she’s the mother of young children. It was awkward and demonstrated the president’s completely absence of understanding or education about firearm statistics, knowledge, and current law.

When the president stated that there should be laws regulating Internet purchases and suggested that anyone could go online and buy a gun, Flyover erupted. A family member from southern Missouri who rarely posts verbiage beyond gifs and memes, penned a caps-lock rant asking, “How stupid does the President think we are?” I was deluged with e-mails, Twitter responses, Facebook comments, messages, and phone calls from hundreds of Americans detailing exactly how they purchase their firearms. Despite the president’s prime-time propaganda, no, one cannot go online and buy a gun and have it Amazon-droned to their house. All firearm purchases made online must go through an FFL, a federal firearms licensee, and a background check must be completed before the transaction is considered finished. A non-FFL may not ship a firearm to another non-FFL, anyone, anywhere, no matter what. Arrangements may be made online for a non-FFL to purchase from either an FFL or a non-FFL, so long as (1) the transaction is completed in state, and, most important, (2) the purchaser is not a prohibited possessor (prohibited from legally possessing a firearm in their state of residence; VonDerrit Myers and Marcus Wheeler are examples of prohibited possessors) and the seller is confident that the purchaser is legally allowed to purchase and carry in their state of residence. Both of these things are required by the federal law. There is no “loophole.” If you are a felon or a prohibited possessor and you purchase or carry a gun anyway, that is not a loophole. That is a criminal act. In much the same way as if you continue to drive a car on a suspended license, you are committing a criminal act. Breaking the law is not a “loophole.”

Yet time and time again the president and his acolytes try to convince you otherwise.

The problem isn’t guns. Our country has a heart problem and a criminal-justice problem. We also don’t trust the president when he tells us that he doesn’t want to grab guns. I can imagine him promising us, “If you like your gun, you can keep it.” Americans aren’t stupid. For the past several years Obama has praised Australia’s approach to gun control, which was outright confiscation (although now they’re enjoying a lowered crime rate while coincidentally private firearm ownership has risen back to preban 1996 levels). When the president praises confiscation, how can you believe him when he says he doesn’t want to replicate that here? Americans don’t believe the president on either of these matters, nor do they place confidence in him where it concerns his number one job: protection of the citizenry.

The administration assured us that ISIS was “contained.” It said people seeking amnesty, refugee status, or visas were “thoroughly vetted.” The federal government has but one all-important job: to keep us safe. They can’t do it, and a faction of them are working hard to make sure you can’t do it, either. In the immediate aftermath of the San Bernardino attack, Dianne Feinstein and Joe Manchin, Senate Democrats, introduced proposals to restrict Second Amendment rights . . . and Fifth Amendment rights too. The Senate voted both down. Via the Washington Post:

The Senate on Thursday voted down two gun control proposals put forward by Democrats in response to this week’s deadly shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., in a series of votes that highlighted the intractable party divide over how to respond to gun violence.

The Senate rejected a measure from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to expand background checks for guns purchased online and at gun shows on a 48 to 50 vote and an amendment from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to prevent individuals on the terror watch list from purchasing firearms on a 45 to 54 vote. The amendments were offered to an Obamacare repeal package currently being debated in the Senate and they needed 60 votes to be adopted.102

Two things:

1. Background checks already exist for purchases made online. Newsflash to Manchin: When you purchase guns online, they aren’t shipped to your house103 like an Amazon delivery. They must be shipped to an FFL, where you then go, fill out a 4473, and get your background check, and if you’re cleared you can take it home. Period. This law already exists.

2. If Democrats want to stop suspected terrorists placed on a watch list from buying firearms, they need to indict them. They must bring formal charges. We don’t suspend the Fifth Amendment rights of due process for American citizens based on (often faulty) suspicion. There are American citizens on this list, a sizable number of whom are innocent and are mistakenly listed. We don’t deny them the opportunity to have a fair trial, to face their accuser and defend themselves. A simple federal charge is enough to temporarily render them a prohibited possessor, at which time evidence will either exonerate or convict them. People like Teddy Kennedy, Representative John Lewis, Nelson Mandela, journalists Leland Vittert and Stephen Hayes, and author J. Christian Adams were all listed. My Vietnam-veteran uncle was temporarily placed on such a list at one time. Between the time he retired and when he passed away (in 2015), he had three hobbies: muscle cars, covered bridges (he was a member of a covered-bridge society and went about the country photographing them), and traveling the world. He raised government suspicion once because he ventured to Iceland to sightsee; a couple of weeks later he tried to fly himself and my aunt to Hawaii for a little R&R but was barred from boarding. My aunt recalled that it was some time before he was finally allowed to travel normally again. Stripping someone of a natural right based on suspicion alone is a penalty without a conviction. There is no disclosure as to how someone is included on the list. And once you’re on it? It’s next to impossible to get yourself removed. Democrats want inclusion on the list to count as a conviction because it excuses them from bringing formal charges based on evidence. If you have evidence, bring charges. This expectation that the American people should bear the burden of the state’s inability, or outright refusal, to prosecute suspected terrorists isn’t constitutional. It’s difficult to believe that Democrats are serious about barring terrorists from owning firearms when they’ve armed them and seemingly refuse to prosecute. Democrats want to sell you the emergency of barring terrorist access to firearms while ignoring the very law that would allow them to do so while avoiding infringing Second Amendment rights. They cannot combat terrorism unless they are given consent to list anyone—and considering how zealously they placed returning veterans104 and tea partiers105 on terror watch lists a few years ago, you should be concerned.

These Democrats are falling victim to the Law of Bureaucratic Reproduction. More government always leads to even more government. If you ask the people who make red tape what the solution to a problem is, they will always answer, “More red tape.” The trouble is you can’t kill ISIS with paperwork, though you’d be surprised how many small businesses you can lay to rest with it.

 • • • 

So many people on the coasts are far removed from the reality of existence as faced by many in Flyover. They don’t harvest their own meat, rely on their own effort to raise produce, or depend upon their conservation habits to keep food production sustainable, nor do they rely on themselves for their own protection. In Flyover police aren’t as many as they are in highly concentrated urban coastal areas. My family members like to say they carry a gun because it’s easier than carrying a cop. Even cops acknowledge that they can’t be present at all times, and the average 9-1-1 response time ranges between twelve and twenty minutes.106 That’s a lot of time on which to gamble the safety of you and your family.

East and West Coast denizens tend to view firearms as “tools of murder,” as they so often tell me on social media and whenever I debate them on television. Here again we see the viral vampires jumping on whatever’s trending on Twitter to stake out the moral cyberground while those of us in Flyover are thinking past page views and Facebook likes.

Where I come from, we view firearms as tools of defense. We’re not just hopping on a headline about someone far from us. No, our perspective was shaped by knowing people who’ve had to rely on a gun in an emergency. In a 2013 report commissioned by President Obama, the CDC and National Research Council concluded that the “use of firearms for self-defense is an important deterrent” and noted that defensive gun use outweighs criminal usage, with DGU occurring “500,000 to more than 3 million [times] per year.”107 The study corroborated a Pew study released in October 2015 that found gun homicides are in a steady decline and have been since the nineties, that we’re safer now than we’ve ever been, but that fewer than 12 percent of Americans realize this.108 I would add that this is because neither the media nor the administration finds that such a reality serves their antigun agenda. This partially contributes to coastals’ abhorrence of firearms. They’re literally told day after day the complete opposite of the truth: that a legally well-armed society is a polite and safer society.

Contrary to the abstraction of coastal anti–Second Amendment advocates and their like-minded plants attempting to infiltrate Flyover, guns aren’t murder objects; they’re inanimate objects for prochoice defense. They’re things that are given to us by our grandpas to signal our coming of age and used to harvest our own protein from nature. They’re what our moms and dads teach us to use to defend ourselves against someone who wishes to do us evil. To us women, they’re the difference between being a victim and being a survivor. I sometimes wonder if living dependent upon the company of others and in proximity to others for so long degrades and devolves our innate instinct for individualism and survival. We know that it serves to make us greater targets for terrorists who hope to inflict mass casualties. In an interview a few years ago, Ben Carson told Glenn Beck that he felt guns should be regulated according to geography, that people in urban areas might not need them as people in rural areas did. He defended that statement to me once on my radio program, saying it was “inartfully put.” It’s a line of reasoning I’ve heard before: that the fact that people live close to one another somehow makes inanimate objects more dangerous. The abolishment of reduced criminal sentences would contribute to a reduction in recidivism rates for repeat offenders, yet that solves only a portion of the problem plaguing Chicago, Baltimore, DC, and other areas with high crime rates. The other problem is a breakdown of society. A dissolution of morality, of law and order, of respect for life and property, things most of us were taught from a young age. We glorify violence in film while punishing children on the playground if they reimagine the epic battle of good versus evil in a game of cops and robbers. We lecture people about valuing life after a gangbanger shoots a kid in Chicago while others defend Planned Parenthood harvesting infant body parts and selling them for profit.

Every time I appear on television some faceless male progressive troll or female free-birth-control advocate refers to me as a “gun humper” or “NRA prostitute.” Their pejoratives betray their “equality” shtick as they seek to sexually degrade and demean any woman who disagrees with them on the issue of firearms—and the manner in which they always equate firearms and phalluses also serves as an insight into their psyche. (I’d say it’s those men and women who have an unhealthy view of firearms and sex, not truly empowered, Second Amendment–supporting women.) Women comprise the fastest-growing demographic in the firearms industry, and more and more women are participating in shooting sports and hunting. Entire organizations (the Well Armed Woman, for instance) are springing up around the country to accommodate the growing demand for female fellowship. As I’ve said before, women had the right to bear arms before we had the right to vote, and there isn’t an anti–Second Amendment advocate who’s going to persuade an empowered, knowledgeable, Second Amendment–supporting woman to give up one of her natural rights to satisfy the emotionally based, non-fact-based propaganda they peddle. Definitely not in Flyover Nation.

We need a reformation, but not where it concerns gun rights. It’s easy to spark criminal-justice reform but not so much to spark a reformation of the nation’s heart. That requires people leaving their comfort zones and effecting change themselves. It requires the sacrifice of personal time, expense, and even comfort. Not many are willing to do so, and the current economy makes it even harder. Yet in spite of these obstacles, we must try. This is where the coasts would be wise to pattern themselves after Flyover, where the values that built America still exist.

When we don’t do it right, a whole city can go up in flames, as one did a year and a half ago.