I like to think of myself as consistent. I like to think that my beliefs on various subjects (at least those related to public policy) are based on reasoned study of the questions at hand, an impartial review of the evidence, and a fearless but objective determination of what the right course should be.
Which is why, when I find my opinion on something changing, it’s a bit disturbing. I sort of hold off on leaping into a new ideological position, waiting to see if I’m just disgruntled about something in particular or feeling cranky or influenced by a single news article or event.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve been wrong all these years about gun control.
(See, that’s the problem. It’s less that I’m excited or proud that I might be, with my change of mind, right about something. It’s that I’ve been wrong up until now. But I digress.)
As a kid, gun-owning was not a big thing in our lives, but I saw it as Just Something People Did. Or most people. It wasn’t discussed over cocktails. I got the impression as much on TV as anywhere else.
The turning point came when I was in high school, and was on the debate team. One of the annual NFL (that National Forensics League, natch) topics had to do with changes to the criminal justice system, and, at the time (we’re talking (ahem) late 70s here), gun violence and Saturday Night Specials and all that sort of thing were hot subjects.
I read the little 4×6 evidence cards avidly. Statistics on gun violence in the US vs. other civilized realms with harsher gun control. The proportion of gun deaths that came from crimes of passion, where, in the heat of an argument, someone grabs a pistol from the bureau and plugs their spouse or neighbor or parent or child. The kids hurt or killed when they stumbled across doofus Dad’s loaded pistol in the night stand drawer.
And I looked at the other side of the argument. The “black helicopter” types who demanded to hold onto their rifles and pistols to protect against an Evil US Government. Or the NRA fanatics, who cared less about how many cops or kids or innocents were killed than in how much political clout they could hold.
It was clear to me that some sort of gun control was needed. Registration, certainly. Probably a ban on pistols (except for sporting pistols, which would need to be kept locked up at firing ranges), maybe on rifles of various sorts as well (this was before all the “assault weapon” part of the debate). Guns don’t kill people, true, but people with easy access to guns can kill people a lot more easily than people with easy access to knives.
So, that particular ideological decision made, I could spend the next two decades rolling my eyes at the NRA, shaking my head at the carnage on the streets, and clucking sadly over the statistics and the cowardly politicians.
Then something began to change. Maybe it was the Bellesiles scandal — I’d welcomed gleefully the publication of a book that iconoclastically demolished the idea that the US had always been a gun-saturated culture, but the revelations that much of the book’s history was made up out of whole cloth (and the silence from the anti-gun side of the debate as those revelations took place) shook me.
Then there were all the “assault weapon” shenanigans, as weapons were banned or restricted, not based on what they could actually do, but based on what they looked like.
The DC Sniper coverage, too, irked me, as anti-gun forces in the media drew all sorts of goofy and unsupported conclusions about how the gun culture had clearly driven yet another white boy loner over the edge.
And I started reading more international statistics, including how, even as Britain has tried to crack down on guns (to a far greater degree than anyone is yet proposing here in the US), criminal gun violence and armed robbery has, over decades, grown and grown — and how, more damningly, it’s been clear that the police have been both unable and unwilling to do anything about it, besides suggesting that, well, maybe you shouldn’t wear flashy wristwatches and flashy cell phones out in public.
Shift gear here a moment. Colorado wrestles with the gun issue as much as anyone. And with the Columbine killings still fresh in everyone’s memory, the question of how easily folks can get hold of guns remains a hot button.
The current battleground has been over concealed-carry permits. Until recently, this was a local (city, county) matter — each municipal government could decide what they wanted to do. In rural districts, it was usually pretty easy — you simply went to the local sheriff, applied for a permit, and were issued one.
Other locations, though, made it much more difficult — even impossible — to get one. You had to prove to an unwilling police chief that you had a compelling enough imminent danger to you that you deserved to carry a gun for your own protection. And even then, it often didn’t happen. Folks with death threats (or fear of a violent ex, etc.) were simply told to be careful, get a restraining order, call 911 if there’s a problem, and so forth. And, yes, people died that way, too.
The state legislature recently passed a law that said, hey, this is a constitutional issue (see here and here on the Colorado Constitution on the matter, and here, of course, for the US Constitution). So we’re going to set uniform standards on the matter, and municipalities may not override them.
Those standards are basically that, subject to a criminal background check and appropriate training, people should be able to get a concealed-carry permit.
The philosophy behind this is one that, as a civil libertarian, I find appealing — the state should show a compelling reason why a particular liberty should be restricted from a person. As opposed to the previous system, where some munipalities asked folks to prove, to their satisfaction, that they should be allowed to exercise a particular liberty.
As one state legislator noted, looking at other constitutional rights, “Which one, other than the right to bear arms, would anyone every contemplate municpalities having supremacy over the state — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to assemble, the right to counsel?”
The article in the Rocky, though, contained just that one bit of justification, aside from the law also trying to make uniform and visible the local restrictions on where individuals can carry firearms. Most of the space was taken up with apocalyptic fears of blood in the streets, outrage over the state imposing its will on the city of Denver, and loud denunciations of how the state GOP had cowtowed to the “powerful gun lobby.”
Feh.
It’s not just a matter of being annoyed beyond measure with the rhetoric of the anti-gun side. That’s an emotional response, not an intellectual one. It’s just that I find so many of the factual and logical assertions they make to be so dubious, and that, as I’ve become more of a civil libertarian over time, less in keeping with my own political philosophy, which is that it’s better to punish abuse of rights than restrict the right in the first place — which is, as noted above, the approach we take with so many of the other civil liberties we enjoy and cherish. Freedom of speech, for example, can do great harm, but we shy away from censorship.
I’m not a nut about this, I hope. I think there is room for a certainly degree of regulation of firearms, both as to class (I have no problems with the restrictions on fully automatic weapons) and to access; I remain mixed on how freely guns ought to be obtainable, with what sort of registration or background checks or records kept, but I’d rather start from the position that the citizenry ought to be able to obtain firearms if they wish, than from the position that we must prohibit the wrong people from getting them. I’m not sure I go with the idea that “an armed society is a polite society” (my love of Heinlein notwithstanding), but I’m pretty certain that the proposition that “a disarmed society is a safe society” also doesn’t bear much scrutiny (see “Britain”).
I’m also new enough to being on this side of the fence — and close enough to straddling said barrier — that I don’t expect I’ll be writing about it often here. I’m still feeling my way around some of those practical applications of the ideological shift. But I thought it worth noting at least that the shift had taken place.