“But in Virginia, anybody can publish a newspaper without asking permission from the government.” Imagine if the Washington Post published a statement like that — the ACLU types would be all over them. “You don’t have to ask permission to exercise your rights!” they would holler. And they’d be right.
As I predicted below, we’re now seeing the Washington-area sniper attacks blamed on guns. Nevermind that they don’t know who committed these murders (am I the only one bothered by people referring these murders as “killings,” as if they might be accidental or committed in self-defense?) Nevermind that we don’t know where the murderer(s) got their rifle(s), or if they were legally purchased. If you dislike guns, any gun-related crime is an excuse for a new round of gun laws.
What the Post actually said in a house editorial today was, “But in Virginia, anybody can go to a gun show and buy a weapon with no questions asked.” That isn’t necessarily true — if they bought a gun from a registered dealer, then the dealer would have to perform a background check. Private individuals do not have to perform the background check. Think of it this way: you’ve probably bought or sold several cars during your lifetime. Does that make you a car dealer? Should you register with the state DMV, put balloons in front of your house, dress in plaid, and take out ads that say “TREMENDOUS SALE!!!” in your local paper? Of course not. You’re just somebody who occasionally buys or sells a car for your own personal use. Likewise, someone who sells six shotguns at a gun show isn’t a gun dealer, just somebody selling a few things they don’t need.
And then there was the obligatory technical error in the editorial: a .223 caliber rifle is not particularly “high-powered,” unless you’re comparing it to a dinky little .22. A .223 rifle is a standard, mid-range rifle, used to hunt deer or smaller game, but not bear or moose or anything big. There’s usually some kind of laughable misstatement in every gun-related editorial they write, like the time they got upset because some rifles have bayonet lugs, apparently because of all the gang-related bayonet charges in the streets of Washington. Maybe they thought Civil War re-enactors were responsible for the 400+ murders that year in D.C.
Because they are a multi-billion-dollar company, I’m sure these “mistakes” weren’t inadvertent — it’s a little “find the error” game they like to play with their readers, who win fabulous prizes by identifying them in letters to the editor. (They like to play the same game with the Church — last year, they published a letter I wrote when they called the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception a “cathedral,” which is like calling a consulate an embassy.)
Doing the Post one better, Jonathan Cowan of Americans for Gun Safety explicitly makes the link between the sniper and gun control in a guest column: “A sniper has taken aim, spreading death and fear in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. Yet despite this terror campaign, there is no movement from Congress or the administration for tougher gun safety laws.” Maybe our legislators are waiting for a few facts to come to light before they start proposing new “gun safety laws.” They don’t write new laws based on extraordinary cases, or at least they shouldn’t. Does Mr. Cowan think that a mandatory trigger-lock law would have stopped this guy?
The debate over gun rights pits the Judeo-Christian view of humanity against Enlightenment rationalism. (Stay with me here.) If you support the right to bear arms, you probably believe that people commit murder because of personal sin. You know that the law is only a deterrent to the law-abiding, and for the non-law-abiding, it’s better to have a more convincing deterrent. You probably think that, with the Catholic intellectual Lord Acton, that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely,” and that governments tend to be much more polite when their citizens can shoot back.
If you don’t think private citizens should have firearms, or you think they should have them only for hunting the occasional deer, it’s probably because you believe in the perfectibility of man: evil is something imposed by society, and therefore if we can fine-tune our laws, we can regain that perfection on earth. If it weren’t for this external force (the presence of guns in society), there would be very little crime because it’s the objects that are to blame, not the darkened souls of the criminals.