Author: Eric Johnson

“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.

I found this article while searching for something else. Patricia Heaton, who plays the wife in “Everybody Loves Raymond” is a mother of four, pro-life, and is thinking of adopting another child. My favorite quotes: “As a Christian, it will not be Barbra Streisand I’m standing in front of when I have to make an accounting of my life.” [link]
I can’t figure out if Heaton is still Catholic — she grew up that way, and she says she had a wonderful childhood. Still, even if she isn’t, it’s refreshing to see an unabashed pro-life viewpoint from a successful actress. In the same article are the pro-life views of Kathy Ireland, who makes her point quite forcefully to the pro-abortion Alan Colmes. It must anger the pro-abortion crowd to see a pro-life supermodel, since they love to portray pro-lifers as dowdy, repressed stooges of their hypocritical, snake-handling religious leaders.

Usually, when there is an outbreak of senseless, nihilistic gun-related violence, many people start wailing about how many guns Americans have, and can’t we do something about this? Strangely enough, even though a cowardly pair of D.C.-area snipers have shot eight people, those voices aren’t being heard. Maybe the Sept. 11 attacks affected people’s views of armed self-defense; hard to say. You’ll recall that after the Columbine massacre, the air was thick with gun control schemes, but three years later, the anti-gun lobby is still trying to sneak their sad little “gun-show loophole” bill through Congress.
Nevertheless, we will start hearing calls for firearms restrictions of some kind, I’m willing to bet. I have often toyed with the idea of starting a group called “Catholics for the Second Amendment,” which would attempt to bolster support among Catholics for our civil right to bear arms. Here’s a short case for gun rights, from a Catholic perspective:
Every person has the right to defend his life, even to the point of using lethal force — i.e., an action against another person that could reasonably be expected to kill that person. Moreover, everyone has not just a right, but a duty to protect the weak from the depredations of the strong, and lethal force can again be employed. (I’m going to spare you the references in the Catechism, because I’m too lazy to read them for the eleventh time.) You don’t have to be a policeman or security officer in order to justifiably employ force — you can be a private citizen. This right to self-defense is a part of natural law, and is inalienable. You may not choose to exercise it, but that’s your choice.
We also have the right to freedom of worship under natural law (and again, the Church recognizes this as a fundamental right.) What would happen if a government told us that we have the freedom to worship, but we cannot build or use churches? Or hold religious gatherings in public spaces? We would complain that freedom of worship, while primarily spiritual, has an implied, essential material aspect. So it is with any other true freedom you can name, like freedom of speech — if the government said you couldn’t own a printing press, Web server, or any other device to publish your views, then your right is effectively nullified.
You probably see where I’m going with this. It is patently absurd, given that serious criminals use guns as their everyday tools, to tell people who wish to defend themselves that they can’t have the object that makes their right to self-defense meaningful. With her bare hands, a 110-pound mother can’t defend her kids against a drunken 200-pound man. A 78-year-old man wouldn’t have a chance against a 20-year-old thug with a knife. In either case, the victims need an equalizer: a gun. Nothing else will stop someone intent on harming the innocent, and most of the time you don’t even need to shoot the attacker — merely pointing the gun at him is an effective deterrent.
Given that, I wish I knew why the bishops persist in their support — albeit tepid and de rigeur — for gun control. It’s a question of justice: should we let the bad guys victimize the innocent, or should we arm ourselves to repel such attacks? Fewer guns won’t mean a more peaceful society, because depraved monsters like those snipers will find weapons. (We can’t keep drugs out of the country, so how could we keep guns out?) In my personal judgment, responsible gun ownership is fully consistent with the Gospel, and indeed, for people in many circumstances, I would say it is an obligation.

As a follow-up to my earlier review about unsolicited comments about incoming babies(http://catholiclight.blogspot.com/2002_09_22_catholiclight_archive.html#85500136), here’s the latest one. My wife Paige and I were at the radiology office today, looking at our latest offspring, and the radiology doctor is amazed that we have two little kids with another on the way. “You’ll have three kids under five!” she says. “Actually, three under four,” Paige corrects. “You’re crazy!” saith the doc. She repeats this assertion several times.
The doctor then tells us that she’s got an eight-month-old who doesn’t sleep through the night, and who always throws her food over the side of her high-chair. She can’t bring herself to discipline her daughter, and she won’t let the baby cry herself to sleep. Our daughter, Anna, is two years old, and has a willful streak you wouldn’t believe. However, if she does something bad, we scold her. If she does something really bad, we spank her. When she was about eight weeks old, we let her cry herself to sleep when she went to bed — and like magic, she’s slept through the night ever since. Who, ladies and gentlemen of the world, are the crazy parents?
My point isn’t to gloat about our superior parenting skills, but rather to say that making little kids behave isn’t horribly difficult. I hang with a lot of toddlers these days, and Paige hangs with many more, and in our experience there’s a stong correlation between good behavior and judicious encouragement and punishment. When they are tiny, they respond to, “If you eat your dinner, you get to eat a cookie,” or “If you draw on the wall again, you get a spanking.” I’m told it’s harder for teenagers, who have allegedly reached the age of reason.
The doctor represents many who love to over-dramatize their childrearing struggles. It really saddens me to hear parents roll their eyes and go into their sob stories about how hard it is to raise their two darlings. I think to myself: two kids? With clothes washers, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, power locks in cars, and non-rectal thermometers, two kids are kicking your parental butts? Your great-grandmother probably raised at least four or five, and she probably didn’t have any modern convenience except for indoor plumbing, maybe.
The reason it’s sad is because they’re using their exhaustion — which probably comes at least in part because they consider leisure activities like television as if they’re holy obligations — as an excuse not to have more children. Don’t misunderstand: I know how hard it is to run a family even with labor-saving devices. Some kids are worse-behaved than others; some are born with disabilities; some families aren’t materially blessed. My heart goes out to anyone bringing up children under truly difficult circumstances. Most people around here don’t fit into that category.
When I hear stories like the doctor’s, I think, at least she has to deal with the consequences and I don’t. But I’m forgetting that someday her kid will be released into the world, and we will all have to live with the brattiness.
(By the way, somebody should give me a remedial class on Blogger, and tell me how to make my dang URLs into gen-u-wine links.)

John’s earlier comment brought to mind a Jonah Goldberg column last April that said Martin Luther was, in many respects, a forerunner of the Islamic fundamentalists of today. I won’t repeat his points, because he did it so well, but it’s interesting that a man who is neither Catholic nor Protestant can see why authority is inescapable when settling religious matters. He seems to be something of a Catholic sympathizer these days (Goldberg, not Luther).
I’ve read that some non-political Islamic groups want to re-establish the caliphate, so maybe the CIA could support them. Then again, within the first few decades of Islam, there were two competing caliphates, Muslims starting warring against each other, and it was off to the races!
http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg040302.asp