IT WAS DECISIVELY ARGUED BY WAYNE LAPIERRE in a recent soul-stirring and compelling speech that the pathway to a safer America is to insure that barriers to ownership of guns — lots of guns, markedly including assault weapons — not be erected; and that we need a lot more good guys with guns to deal with the problem of bad guys with guns, which of course means a great many more guns upping the ante all around. Following that battle cry and the accompanying right-wing message about the danger of the government planning to disarm all citizens, guns are rolling off the shelves in a great torrent and into the bunkers of stalwart defenders of liberty or paranoiacs, take your pick. (As they did immediately following Sandy Hook and every horrible mass killing, by the way.)
After the January 2011 shootings in Tucson, Ariz., LaPierre protested “gun-free zones and anti-self-defense laws that protected the safety of no one except the killers,” and said that “by its lies and laws and lack of enforcement, government policies are getting us killed, and imprisoning us in a society of terrifying violence.”
Wow! With all that to spike my adrenalin, it occurred to me that if an assault rifle with a 30- or 100-round magazine is just barely enough to provide protection for the law-abiding citizen in this society, why not go for something a bit more substantial in the way of personal and home protection?
Before transferring to the infantry, I trained with the coast artillery and its weapons, including the M45 quad-mount (four-barrel) .50-caliber anti-aircraft weapon. Firing that baby sends chills! And purchase (in excellent condition) is possible! Treat yourself! Why not? Also, but possibly for some folks more practical (given size and flexibility of use), there is that old faithful, the single-mount .50-caliber Browning. That beautiful piece has been the standard heavy machine gun for the U.S. military for nearly 100 years.
Thompson, by the way, makes a semi-automatic machine gun in .45 ACP that only costs a thousand dollars! You can mount it on a sweepable tripod with a manual quick release. Just pick her up and go for broke!
Wow! Imagine breaking up the bridge game and letting the guests view any of the above in your garage or basement! And if the woman you’re courting digs machismo, wait till she gets a view of you sitting in the swing seat of that quad-mount .50-caliber baby. Katy, bar the door!
The more research I do, the more exciting this sounds. Believe me, you haven’t lived till you’ve experienced in your own hand the feel of one of those babies in full throat. You hear fellows talking about the thrill of climbing into a souped-up automobile and taking her out for a test run? That ain’t even in the same ballgame! The same planet!
Well, I do tend to get carried away thinking about old times. Good old boys and good old guns! There’s a recipe for livin’!
If you think I am taking irony into realms far removed from reality, you don’t understand one of the central psychological elements of this whole gun debate. For some of the really heated proponents of the no-limit-on-guns bit (outside of the gun industry, of course), this is really about machismo. It’s about manhood, about standing up for my right to be fully armed against both bad people and a government that is seeking to control our existence!
Or, if you really want to ramp up your paranoia, sample this enlightening bit of vintage LaPierre in full throat.
“The truth is, that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters. People that are so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons, that no sane person can ever possibly comprehend them. They walk among us every single day …” (Hey, nobody said life would be easy.)
In any case, as noted by James Downie (“How Gun Control is Another Front in the Far Right’s War on Science,” Washington Post, Jan. 16), here are some realities to give comfort to the above afflicted. In 1996, a Republican congressman from Arkansas named Jay Dickey pushed through an amendment stripping $2.6 million from the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His measure was not about the budget deficit, though; Dickey’s aim was to force the CDC to stop researching the effects of gun violence. The Centers’ annual appropriation still contains the language resulting from Dickey’s efforts 16 years ago: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
The NRA’s intimidation campaign, not surprisingly, started when scientists started producing findings that the gun lobby didn’t like. In the mid-1990s, reported the New York Times, the CDC was “becoming increasingly assertive about the importance of studying gun-related injuries and deaths as a public health phenomenon,” financing studies that found, for example, that having a gun in the house, rather than conferring protection, “significantly increased the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.”
As a result of the NRA’s and GOP’s efforts, “the amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful.” And because private organizations have had to shoulder the burden, even less of what little money there still is goes to the broad, long-term studies that can lead to better policies.
The following, from “Guns, Democracy and the Supreme Court,” by Patricia Williams, The Nation, Jan. 16, is directly relevant to the above: “As recently as 2008, Justice Scalia penned the opinion, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that upended two centuries of jurisprudence to hold that the Second Amendment grants an absolute right to individuals — rather than state militias — to keep and bear arms. If, moreover, the Centers for Disease Control or other federal agencies can’t gain access to data about guns and violence because the NRA insists that gun ownership falls within a ‘privacy’ interest, then we avoid hard questions about how access to guns inflects bullying, suicide or domestic abuse, and we are doomed forever to airy discussions about video games.”
Contra Lapierre and his sickening series of messages, Greg Mitchell offered the following (“‘The New York Times’ and ‘The Daily Show’ Expose Gun Myths,” The Nation, Feb. 1): “It was refeshing to see an editorial in The New York Times today bluntly contradict the oft-repeated claim that the assault weapons ban, now lapsed, did not do much at all to control the problem — ‘worthless,’ as Wayne LaPierre said again this week.
“Of course, the ban was allowed to lapse partly due to such propaganda. The Times provides ample evidence to the contrary. ‘The false statistics,’ they point out, ‘comfort members of Congress who fear the gun lobby or their more conservative constituents, or both, and are blocking a new and stronger ban on assault weapons proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein.’
“The information is there if Congress is interested. After the ban expired, 37 percent of police departments reported noticeable increases in criminals’ use of assault weapons, according to a 2010 report by the Police Executive Research Forum.
“In Virginia, the number of guns with high-capacity magazines seized by police dropped after they were included in the 1994 weapons ban, but then rebounded sharply after the ban expired, according to a 2011 study by the Washington Post. Maryland enacted its own more stringent ban on assault weapons in 1994, and a 55-percent drop in assault pistols from crime scenes was reported by the Baltimore police.”
For another bulletin on this riveting tale of our timorous case for lowering the level of gunfire, see next week.
Jerome Page is a Benicia resident.
Thomas Petersen says
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNZO30lPGm4