“Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically has proven to be always possible.” (Hubert H. Humphrey, Jr., 1911-1978, two-term Democratic Senator from Minnesota and 38th Vice President of the United States)

The Right of the People To Keep and Bear Arms

The dispute between those who favor gun controls and those who don’t is predicated on their respective interpretations of the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and specifically on the term, “a well regulated militia.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) argues, “We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one, intended mainly to protect the right of the states to maintain militias to assure their own freedom and security against the central government.” (Source: ACLU website), while the other side believes that the use of the word “militia” refers to the citizens of the U.S. in general.

They both attempt to bolster their respective positions with statistics about the effects of gun control laws on crime. Advocates of “gun control” believe that removing all guns from individual citizens will prevent crime. But, the evidence doesn’t support this.

Gun Control In Great Britain

A nationwide survey of British police officers in 2003 revealed that 20% wanted to be armed. Even the police, or at least most of them, are not permitted to carry firearms, and only about 6,000 of an estimated 142,000 in the country were armed.

In Britain’s Gun-Control Folly, Scott McPherson commented, “Those opposed to arming more officers present a strange counterargument. As the Post put it, ‘Opponents suggest it would just lead to more gun crime.’” How’s that? ˜Petty criminals might arm themselves in response.” This view is particularly ridiculous when we consider that the UK’s leftist government banned virtually all private firearms ownership and all handgun ownership in 1997 amidst great fanfare about ˜making Britain safer.” Since then, crime has skyrocketed. So guns were outlawed to fight crime, and now not even police should have guns lest the increasingly emboldened criminal element get upset about it. That’s some twisted logic.”

According to historian Joyce Lee Malcolm (Gun Control in England: The Tarnished Gold Standard, Journal on Firearms & Public Policy, 2004): “[Between 1997 and 2003] crimes with [banned firearms] have more than doubled.” Clearly since the ban criminals have not found it difficult to get guns and the balance has not shifted in the interest of public safety…In the four years from 1997 to 2001 the rate of violent crime more than doubled. The UK murder rate for 2002 was the highest for a century.”

“Gun Control” Defined

If you think about it, the term “gun control” is really code for abolishing all guns. Since there are already more than 20,000 gun control laws on the books at the federal, state and local levels, if controlling the ownership, sale and use of guns by the general population is really the objective, simply enforcing the existing laws should accomplish that.

The primary difference between the two opposing groups is rooted in their respective perceptions of human nature. Those who want to “control” guns (read abolish) tend to believe that this will keep them out of the hands of criminals, thus preventing or significantly reducing crime. It’s a naive and utopian view of human nature.

“Gun Free Zones”

A prime example of the consequences of such thinking is the Virginia Tech tragedy that occurred in April 2007, in which over 30 people were killed on the school’s campus. The fact that Virginia Tech’s 2,600 acre campus was a “gun free zone” merely made it easier for the killer to attack people without fear of resistance or reprisal.

Another more recent case of a “gun free zone” failing to keep anyone safe on a college campus took place at Northern Illinois University in February 2008, where a lone shooter was responsible for the deaths of seven people, including his own.

Chicago’s Gun Control Law

In a January 2004 article, Susan Jones, the CNSNews.com Morning Editor, reported that “Chicago finished off the year with more murders than New York or Los Angeles,” and that Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb, said it was ˜remarkable that Chicago, New York and Los Angeles have some of the nation’s strictest gun laws, but even so, they still lead the nation when it comes to the number of homicides.” He compared the situation in Chicago to that in Detroit, where the once-high murder rate has dropped to its lowest level in years. “Two years ago,” Gottlieb noted, “Michigan reformed its concealed carry law, and today, thousands of law-abiding citizens in Michigan are legally armed.” Gosh, do you suppose there is any correlation?

Gun Control in Australia

Gun owners in Australia were forced to surrender over 640,000 personal firearms, which were destroyed by their own government, at a cost of more than $500 million dollars.

After one year, Australia-wide, homicides were up 3.2 percent, assaults were up 8.6 percent Australia-wide, and armed robberies were up 44 percent. (Note: while the law-abiding citizens turned them in, the criminals did not, and criminals still possess their guns!) While figures over the previous 25 years showed a steady decrease in armed robbery with firearms, this has changed drastically upward in the past 12 months, since the criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed. There has also been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the ELDERLY.

“Australian politicians are at a loss to explain how public safety has decreased, after such monumental effort and expense was expended in “successfully ridding Australian society of guns.” (Source: CNSNews.com)

Washington, D.C.

“D. C. Mayor Adrian Fenty does not see guns the way our Founders did. In his view, they are not tools for defending individual liberty, they are instruments of criminality….Fenty announced that the District would appeal to the Supreme Court a March decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that ruled that a District gun law was unconstitutional. The law in question flatly bans possession of a handgun ”even in one’s own home, unless the gun was registered before 1976.” the D. C. handgun suit pits individual law-abiding D. C. residents against a Constitution-flouting D. C. government. These individuals claim the government is violating their Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms….” (Source: Terence Jeffrey, The Patriot Post, Vol. 07 No. 32, 08/06/07)

The Ban on Assault Weapons

One of the central issues in the gun control debate is the ban on assault weapons enacted by Congress in 1994, which applied to 19 specific models of semi-automatic firearms. The ban expired in 2004 and has not been renewed. For my part, although I favor the right to own a gun, I have a hard time accepting the idea that ownership of firearms should not be restricted in any way. For example, allowing individual citizens to own a weapon that has a grenade launcher or using armor piercing bullets makes little sense to me. However, it’s also important to note that since 1934 Americans have been required to obtain permission from the U.S. Treasury to legally own a fully-automatic weapon. So, if people are not talking about such firearms when they advocate gun control, what are they talking about? Abolishing all guns, that’s what, which I believe is unconstitutional.

© 2008 Harris R. Sherline, All Rights Reserved