The Martialist: The Magazine For Those Who Fight Unfairly

In other words, we are hearing only one side of the story. No wonder so few
Americans are equipped to debate the issue of guns intelligently.

“Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe,”
wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1816. But when the press aligns itself with special
interests – such as the anti-gun lobby – critical information is censored, and
liberty itself hangs in the balance. “If a nation expects to be ignorant
and free … it expects what never was and never will be …” warned
Jefferson.

Ignorance about guns and gun rights has reached pandemic proportions. Children
are not taught the history or meaning of the Second Amendment in school, nor do
they learn later as adults. Most of what Americans think they know about guns is
false. The anti-gun hysteria now sweeping our nation draws on several deeply
erroneous assumptions. I call them the Seven Myths of Gun Control. They are:

Myth #1 — Guns increase violent crime.

Just the opposite is true. Experts have found that criminals tend to avoid
physical confrontation, when they fear their victims may be armed. But when
strict gun laws are imposed, criminals become bolder and more violent, confident
that their victims are defenseless.

Australians learned this lesson the hard way. When a madman slaughtered 35
people at a Tasmanian resort in 1996, the government responded by banning most
firearms. More than 640,000 guns were seized from law-abiding citizens.

The result was a sharp increase in violent crime. In the two years following the
gun ban, armed robberies rose by 73 percent, unarmed robberies by 28 percent,
kidnappings by 38 percent, assaults by 17 percent and manslaughter by 29
percent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

The same thing happened in England. The government cracked down on guns
following a 1996 massacre of schoolchildren in Scotland. A terrifying crime wave
ensued. The U.S. Department of Justice announced, in 1998, that the rate of
muggings in England had surpassed that in the U.S. by 40 percent. Assault and
burglary rates were found to be almost 100 percent higher in England than in the
United States.

In his book More Guns, Less Crime, Yale Law School economist John R. Lott points
out that most criminals, in America, choose empty houses to burglarize. They
avoid late-night break-ins, because, as many convicts have explained to
researchers, “that’s the way to get shot.” Hot burglaries – in which
the criminal enters while people are home – account for only 13 percent of all
U.S. burglaries.

But in countries with strict gun control, such as England and Canada, criminals
enter houses at will, without worrying whether anyone is home. The hot burglary
rate in those countries is nearly 50 percent.

After studying 18 years’ worth of crime statistics from around the United
States, Lott concluded that “states experiencing the greatest reductions in
crime are also the ones with the fastest growing percentages of gun
ownership.”

On average, Lott found that violent crime dropped by 4 percent for each 1
percent increase in gun ownership. The most dramatic improvement came in states
that allowed citizens to carry concealed handguns. States enacting such laws
between 1977 and 1994 experienced an average 10 percent reduction in murders and
a 4.4 percent drop in overall violent crime during that period.

Myth #2 — Pulling a gun on a criminal endangers you more than the criminal.

Gun bashers claim that if you draw a gun during a mugging, the mugger will
probably take it away from you. But the facts say otherwise. According to
surveys by Gallup, the Los Angeles Times and other national polling
organizations, Americans use guns to defend themselves between 760,000 and 3.6
million times each year. In 98 percent of those cases, simply brandishing the
gun was enough to scare off the attacker.

Myth #3 — Guns pose a special threat to children.

Gun haters argue that firearms pose a unique danger to children. But statistics
do not support this claim. Only 200 children – aged 14 and younger – died from
gun accidents in 1995. That same year, 2,900 children died in car crashes, 950
drowned and 1,000 died of burns. “More children die in bicycle accidents
each year than die from all types of firearm accidents,” Lott observes.
Yet, there is no national outcry to bar children from using bicycles.

Myth #4 — The Second Amendment applies only to militiamen.

Gun prohibitionists argue that the Second Amendment confers a right to bear arms
only on duly enrolled members of a state militia. But that is not what the
document says. It specifically grants the right to keep and bear arms to
“the people”.

“The phrase `the people’ meant the same thing in the Second Amendment as it
did in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments — that is, each and every
free person,” writes constitutional scholar Stephen Halbrook in his book
That Every Man Be Armed.

Even Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe – a gun-control advocate known for his
liberal views – admitted, in the 1999 edition of his book American
Constitutional Law, that the Second Amendment confers an individual right on
U.S. citizens to “possess and use firearms in the defense of themselves and
their homes.”

Myth #5 — The Second Amendment is an obsolete relic of the frontier era.

Gun bashers say that the Second Amendment has outlived its usefulness. They
argue that pioneers needed guns to fight Indians, redcoats and grizzly bears.
But we don’t face such threats today. So why do we need guns?

In fact, the framers of the Constitution were not greatly concerned about
Indians, redcoats and grizzly bears. But they worried deeply about the
possibility that some future government might strip the people of their rights.
The best insurance against this, they believed, was to make sure that the people
were armed.

“The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the
sword,” said Noah Webster, “because the whole body of the people are
armed…”

Guns will become superfluous to Americans only when our lives and liberty no
longer need defending. That time does not appear to be coming soon.

Myth #6 — We should treat guns the same way we treat cars, requiring
licenses for all users.

When you apply for a firearms license, the government may or may not grant it.
And, having granted it, the government may later choose to revoke it. What that
means is that you never really had a right to bear arms, in the first place. A
right, by definition, cannot be withheld or denied. As Thomas Jefferson put it,
“I have a right to nothing, which another has a right to take away.”

Consider the right to freedom of religion. Like all freedoms, religious liberty
creates problems. It allows murderous fanatics such as Jim Jones and Marshall
Applewhite to create killer cults like the Peoples’ Temple and Heaven’s Gate.

A government licensing program might prevent such tragedies. Anyone starting a
church could be subjected to psychiatric screening, his beliefs and doctrines
vetted by a board of experts. Cult killings would likely diminish. But freedom
of worship would be dead.

How about freedom of speech? Think of all the pornography, hate speech and
conspiracy theories that could be eliminated by denying “speech
licenses” to undesirable web geeks. Hillary Clinton has actually proposed
something along these lines. Arguing that cyberspace is too free, she suggests
that the Internet needs an “editing or gate keeping function” to
control its content.

But, aside from Hillary, most Americans understand that requiring licenses for
the exercise of basic constitutional liberties is a bad idea.

There is no doubt that life is more orderly in a police state. But our country
was founded on the principle that freedom takes precedence over order. As Thomas
Jefferson put it, “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences
attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.”

Myth #7 — Reasonable gun-control measures are no threat to law-abiding gun
owners.

Anti-gun activists argue that reasonable gun-control measures, such as waiting
periods, one-gun-a-month limits, trigger locks, “smart” technology and
so on, do not threaten the rights of legitimate gun owners.

But this argument presumes that guns will only be used for sport. And, indeed,
most gun-control activists recognize no other legitimate use for firearms.
“To me, the only reason for guns in civilian hands is for sporting
purposes,” says Sarah Brady, chairman and founder of Handgun Control Inc.

Perhaps for that reason, many gun-control measures now on the table seriously
impede the use of firearms for self-defense.

Take “smart” guns. They only work when the user wears a special ring
or wristband with a magnetic actuator or radio transponder. Let’s say you wake
up in the dead of night. Your husband is on a business trip, and there’s a
serial rapist standing in your bedroom. This is not the time to be fumbling
around in the dark, undoing the trigger lock and trying to remember where your
husband put the transponder.

Waiting periods can also be deadly. News reports show that many women have been
killed, because the Brady Law prevented them from obtaining guns immediately,
when they were threatened by stalkers.

As for one-gun-a-month rules, these prevent people from stocking up quickly on
arms during times of emergency. When riots or natural disasters strike, looting
and brigandage present a real danger. People have a right, in such situations,
to stockpile arms for their families, neighbors and employees.

None of these arguments will persuade the gun haters, of course. Their crusade
is driven by ideology, not reason.