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A month ago, a man approached a school playground in Stockton, Calif., with an assault rifle and killed children. There was an immediate demand to ban assault rifles, followed by an orchestrated campaign from the National Rifle Association to protect Americans' right to bear arms.
I don't belong to the NRA, so I don't know exactly what
it told its loyal members to do, but I can guess. In many
newspapers you saw letters to the editor, all to the effect
that If some madman drove a '57 Chevy (or '74 Chevy
Nova, or some other vehicle, but always a Chevy) into a
crowd of people, would there be a call for a ban on '57
Chevies? Of course not. So why should assault rifles be
banned just become some people misuse them
sometimes?
I got the idea that there was a suggested fill-in-the-blanks form letter for NRA members to use when writing their local newspapers.
That's an argument which sounds convincing at first, but doesn't stand up to much thought.
Cars killed 45,901 Americans in 1985, and firearms dispatched only 28,381 of us. Of those deaths, though, 17,363 were suicides, where presumably the means isn't as important as the end. So we're really talking about a mere 11,369 murder victims and another 1,649 accidental deaths.
Further, cars trash the only atmosphere we have, causing unaccounted disease and death, and automobiles cause the export of our national wealth to countries that take hostages and put out murder contracts on novelists.
So the NRA could argue that if we want a healthy, safe, free society, the place to start banning things is the auto dealer's showroom, not the gun shop. But that hasn't appeared in the NRA's latest propaganda campaign.
After all, cars have other uses besides pollution and mayhem. That beleaguered '57 Chevy can get you to work, it can take you to a doctor's office, it can haul in groceries and so forth.
Just what is an assault rifle good for besides killing?
Nothing. The military refers to such devices as
anti-personnel weapons,
a euphemism for machines
designed to kill people.
An assault rifle sprays a lot
of bullets fast with little accuracy. It's not what you use
when you've been stalking an eight-point buck all day and
finally get a 50-yard shot. It's not really much good for
defending your home, either, unless you want to risk
maiming or killing bystanders, such as the family you were
supposedly trying to protect.
In that respect, the assault rifle is like the pistol --
slaying is its sole use. As Bat Masterson, who should know,
put it, Always remember that a six-shooter is made to
kill the other fellow with and for no other reason on
earth.
The NRA's analogy between cars and certain guns just doesn't hold up. That distresses me, because I really do oppose gun-control laws. I just wish the people who say they're trying to protect my rights could be more sensible about it.
How? Put it this way. None of the freedoms that we Americans enjoy comes without a price. Freedom of religion leads to Jonestown massacres and Jim and Tammy on the tube. Freedom of expression means disgusting magazines, scurrilous political attacks and offensive bumper stickers. But the alternatives seem worse -- a state religion results in pogroms and inquisitions, and fettered speech leads to concentration camps and the gulag.
Easy gun ownership means we'll have those sporadic
massacres. But what's the alternative? In my father's view,
it's that when guns are outlawed, only the police will
have guns.
We certainly see enough evidence of
high-handed and abusive police behavior as it is; how much
worse might it be if armed police could prey on unarmed
citizens at will, if there were no private guns that
occasionally answered no-knock searches and similar
violations of our civil rights?
That's an argument that the NRA should be making. Then we'd have to think about costs and benefits and what kind of society we want to have. But instead, the NRA spouts silly slogans and stupid analogies. Eventually the public will rebel, and politicians will no longer fear the clout of the NRA. Gun-owners will lose the rights that they wanted the NRA to help them protect -- and it will be largely the NRA's fault for reacting so predictably and thoughtlessly whenever the private ownership of firearms is under attack.
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