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.
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The Psyche Of A 'Gunocracy'
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Besides fanatics and mentally disturbed people (Furrow appears to be both), many ordinary Americans have also become caught up in the cult of the gun. For them, it is not a jarring source of violence but as much an accepted part of the landscape as forests and rivers. Such people often resist controls over the objects they revere. But human beings are capable of modifying their own mythologies. After the tragedies in Littleton, Colo.; Atlanta, and now Los Angeles, Americans have shown signs of a change in their feelings about guns, seeing them increasingly as more dangerous than sacred. That kind of collective psychological shift is necessary if we are ever to transcend the crippling fraternity of the gun.
Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. is Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at John Jay College of the City University of New York. His new book, "Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism," will be published by Metropolitan Books in October.
© 1999
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