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The past couple of months has produced considerable rhetoric about firearms legislation, thus inspiring some of my liberal friends to rant about the National Rifle Association.
Why are they so intransigent?
I hear.
Nobody's trying to take away any guns from law-abiding
citizens. Why can't we have some reasonable regulations?
Why does the NRA oppose everything?
I suspect the NRA opposes everything for the simple
reason that there's no such thing as reasonable
regulation
in America.
That's an overstatement. To put this more precisely, reasonable regulation appears from time to time, but the purifiers, reformers and social improvers of this Republic never stop at reasonable.
Consider the history of other regulations. In the 19th century, America was a nation of drunkards. Whiskey consumption ran well ahead of any other nation, and foreign visitors were astonished by the prodigious alcohol consumption here.
This led to all manner of social problems, ranging from
workplace accidents to impoverished families. The initial
response was the temperance movement,
which promoted
the temperate use of alcoholic beverages -- moderate
amounts of beer and wine, for example, as opposed to heavy
doses of distilled spirits.
But once they gained some political power and respectability, did the temperance reformers stop at their announced goals?
Of course not. They wanted saloons closed down permanently, instead of just on Sundays. They began to promote total prohibition, as opposed to temperance. And they didn't stop until they had amended the constitution.
The movement began as a reasonable effort to deal with a
social problem, and after some success, it didn't stop and
say We've done our job. It's time to disband.
Instead, it raised the stakes and continued to move well
past anything like reasonable regulation.
Our draconian drug laws are the results of the same extremist impulses. Our great-grandparents lived in an America where morphine injection was fashionable, cocaine was distributed at gold mines and cough syrup contained heroin.
Labeling seemed reasonable, so that people would know what they were ingesting and could make rational choices. But did the reformers stop there? Or with reasonable limitations on distribution?
No, they're still at it, spending billions every year and building ever more prisons. They're not reasonable people, even if their crusade started on a reasonable basis.
More recently, there's the anti-tobacco lobby. It started with reasonable restrictions -- no smoking on elevators, separate sections in airplanes, that sort of thing.
But did this stop at reasonable? That's like asking whether the highway lobby would ever see a freeway with enough lanes.
So it's really hard to blame the NRA for fighting even
the most reasonable
legislation. Twenty seconds
after the law was signed, the purification zealots would be
announcing that it was only a tiny first step, and that
America needed new and improved laws.
Why is this so, when the vast majority of Americans seem amenable to reasonable compromises?
Suppose I discovered some social ill that might be cured by agitation for reasonable legislation -- for example, cars that don't stop for pedestrians in crosswalks.
So I found an organization, Pedestrians Everywhere for Safe Transportation, and start using the media to hustle money for PEST. I get to travel around a lot and give TV interviews and be a celebrity and collect dues and hire lobbyists.
Our initial goals at PEST are pretty modest -- get the
police to enforce laws on the books, lobby states to put
some pedestrian awareness
in their driving-license
tests, attend municipal courts to pressure judges to hand
down strict sentences to scofflaw motorists.
In a few years, we meet those goals. Crosswalk injuries and fatalities drop as motorists and the law-enforcement system become more aware of the issue.
Would I stop then and disband PEST, saying that it had met its goals, and then go take up honest labor?
Or would it be more in my interest to find more for PEST to do -- fences lining the walkways at the edge of the Grand Canyon, surveillance cameras and automatic ticketing of errant motorists at all crosswalks, working to get some serious jail time for motorists if there was a child anywhere near the crosswalk?
Human nature being what it is, PEST would not stop at reasonable measures. Once you've established an institution, you find things for it to do, even if it's served its initial purpose.
Nobody stops at reasonable
in America, and the
NRA has figured this out, even if a lot of other people
haven't.
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