The Psyche Of A 'Gunocracy'

Tripe. Lifton attempts to paint gun owners with a broad brush as racist, homophobic white male neo-nazi terrorists. He uses adjectives like "troubling", zealotry, and radical to describe gun owners as some kind of homogenous group. Shame on him. If equally broad comments were used to describe homosexuals as self-absorbed, promiscuious disease carriers, he'd be pronouncing the author as "mentally distrubed".

This piece is just the first indication that the media will try to discredit and demonize gun owners. Editorials in other media outlets have said, in effect, gun owners actively help criminals obtain guns; that gun owners are responsible for crime; that they won't be responsible unless harsh laws force it on them and more. The media knows that a "daily drumbeat" of coverage will sway public opinion, whether or not there is an ounce of truth in it. They've adopted Himmler's adage about repeating a lie often enough and long enough. No doubt that as soon as new regulations are in place in Washington D.C., the media will jump on the first post-Heller decision homicide as "proof" the Supreme Court has blood on its hands.

Fortunately, statistics and research shows that Lifton and his ilk are wrong. Predictions of citizens running amok and shooting each other over fender benders or parking places have been proven false. Concealed carry licensing has been successful in every state (44 of them) and many law enforcement officials have converted from opponents to proponents.

Guns are not evil. They are inanimate objects. It is how they are perceived that makes the difference. Loftin views them as evil, but that's like saying a hammer or steak knife is evil. Nothing illustrates the point better than a 1995 DOJ-NIJ study of 20,000 households. In homes where boys owned legal guns, they had much lower rates of delinquency and drug use than homes with illegal guns and they were even slightly less delinquent than nonowners of guns." (Between 1 and 10% less than non-gun owning homes).
[Look for NCJ-143454, August 1995]

Loftin reveals his personal distaste for "American culture" by claiming there really isn't one. But what is really showing is, I think, his irrational fear of an inanimate object. While guns can be used for evil purposes by evil men, so can any object. It should be evil men he fears, not the objects they use.

All societies have a "gun culture". Central Europe had state sponsored gunmen stomping around with submachine guns 75 years ago. Eastern Europe, the Mid East, and Ireland have plenty of gunman stashing millions of "assault rifles" today. Asia and Africa are and always will be polluted with war lords, bandits, and pirates heavily armed. These "gun cultures" are far more dangerous than our "gun culture".

The racist right-wing is small and insignificant; it enjoys far less resonance among whites than, say, the Black Panthers and Black Muslim movements have among blacks.

Most members of the ideological gun lobby simply want to preserve a classless society that views policemen merely as public servants rather than as employees of our masters; they oppose discrimination against non-police civilians with respect to the kinds of weapons they are allowed to possess and use. In other words, they take Abraham Lincoln's description of America seriously as having a government OF the people and BY the people -- not merely government "for" the people. When Robert Peel promoted the creation of the Anglo-American world's first professional police force (the London "bobbies") in the 19th century, he explained that the police are the people and the people are the police -- his men merely being people paid to give full-time attention to tasks which are every citizen's moral responsibility. Though some people no longer think this way of police, this relationship between the public servants and the people has never formally been changed.

The less ideologically committed opponents of gun control, in contrast, simply want to preserve their ability to use effective deadly force against robbers and rapists -- without exchanging criminal peril for legal peril.