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The Spectacle Blog
What
does Craig R. Whitney, New York Times career man and
self-avowed liberal, say to frustrated gun owners, users, and
enthusiats who feel that many in the ongoing debate about their
rights are speaking from ignorance? “I sympathize with them,”
Whitney told the audience at a Cato Institute book forum Wednesday.
“I often see AR-15s described as automatic, which they are
not.”
Mr. Whitney, author of the new tome Living with Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment, spent much of the event calling on gun control advocates to be less hostile and presumptuous in the heated debate over packing heat.
Cato’s host soberly opened the forum by noting it had been planned months ago and wishing that the book were not so timely. Whitney began working on it when he retired from the Times three years ago, convinced that gun regulation merited a national, coherent conversation. He grimly pointed to Newtown as the latest in a string of “inevitable” mass shootings for which he implicates an unacceptable status quo.
Whether one agrees with him to the letter — and I doubt many people in Cato’s marvelously named Hayek Auditorium did — it is self-evident that the gun regulation debate has become dysfunctional.
Alan Gura, counsel for Dick Heller in the landmark case D.C. v. Heller, emphasized the need for gun control advocates to understand why so many of their neighbors own guns and are so passionate about the Second Amendment. He said that to a large swath of Americans, gun ownership has become exotic and unusual, easy to fear and misunderstand, so that any assoicated risk, however minimal, triggers calls for sweeping restrictions. He argued that civilian gun ownership and gun culture in the United States are not primarily about self-defense; they are about freedom. And with freedom comes responsibility.
Alan Morrison, an associate dean of law at George Washington University, said that virtually everyone agrees in principle with some restrictions (perhaps background checks, bans on violent felons owning guns) that do not place an undue burden on law-abiding citizens. The rub comes in agreeing on the definition of “undue.”
Whitney, despite the subtitle of his book, appears to be on a crusade primarily for conciliatory policy. On one hand, he said that, “Making AR-15s illegal would not prevent people with no respect for the law from using them illegally to commit crimes.” On the other, he said he would entertain restrictions on high-capacity magazines to ranges combined with a buyback program, or even a complete ban. (Though as a former Navy lieutenant, he presumably knows an experienced shooter can change magazines faster than you can spell Mississippi.)
Still, at one point, he smiled recalling the fun he had shooting at a range in researching his book. One senses he is a man who sees greater value in learning about what he does not understand than in fearing it.
View all comments (8) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by Luca Gattoni-Celli
http://spectator.org/blog/2013/01/11/progressive-author-gun-control
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Pecos Pete| 1.11.13 @ 10:27AM
The 2nd Amendment guarantees freedom. If the government takes the public's guns, they will then take everything else.
Mike G| 1.11.13 @ 10:42AM
Amen to that! Outlawing semi-autos would eliminate freedom. Even with semi-autos, civilians would still be outgunned by the military. One can only hope that when the next revolution does come (and I hope to be dead of old age by then) that enough of the military join freedom loving citizens and bring their firepower with them.
JD| 1.11.13 @ 2:53PM
This is exactly the problem with the gun discussion.
The leading "conservatives" are arguing about the freedom to own guns. In today's political climate, that's a losing argument. Leftists will talk about choosing the death of children just for a stupid "freedom" that most people don't want, and start quibbling over whether the Second Amendment meant anything beyond militias.
This type of argument WILL lose in modern America. To win, we need to use better arguments.
And we have them.
Leftists presume that we agree with their assertion that gun control laws will reduce violence and death in this country. We LET them presume this when we do not call them on their mistaken presumption, and instead only prattle on about "freedom". We know from much empirical evidence that gun control laws INCREASE violence and death, and that Leftists mistake the evidence by focusing only on GUN violence and death, not OVERALL violence and death, so as to create cooked statistics that say GUN violence goes down with gun control.
Such cooked statistics preclude the entire point we on the Right are trying to make, which is that legal gun possession deters attackers. The attackers don't have to know who has guns; they just have to know that it's legal for anyone in the room to have a gun. This has been proven time and time again to reduce crime.
JD| 1.11.13 @ 3:00PM
As for the "freedom" argument, it too has value, but it needs to be stated differently. We can't let the Left claim that we just want stacks of guns in our living rooms. It's more basic than that.
It's about self-sufficiency.
At its most basic level, Leftism needs to justify its clearly disparate treatment of people. They need to be able to legitimize the taking of 100 times the taxes from some that they take from others. They need to be able to defend redistribution.
The way they defend these things was best summed up by Candidate Obama: "You didn't build that."
Reducing people's self-sufficiency allows government to increasingly claim that we depend on it, which allows it to claim that we OWE government, which allows it to justify asking ANYTHING from us in payment of this debt.
That is why government seeks to control more and more aspects of life. Nominally, it's about helping the poor; about delivering goods and services more efficiently (and equitably) than the market can (a promise never delivered upon). But the bonus for Leftists is that when government takes over the providing of a need, it increases its ability to say that we owe it.
Gun bans will make people less capable of protecting themselves and improve government's ability to extort "protection" money. Preventing this is a strong conservative argument against gun bans. Unlike my argument above, though, this argument has no hope of persuading liberals.
Pecos Pete| 1.11.13 @ 4:14PM
JD, as always, your comments are articulate and intelligent. I agree with you that liberals must be shown facts repeatedly. Even so, they may not change their minds. For example, I don't think leftists like Piers Morgan will ever agree with citizen owned guns.
JD| 1.11.13 @ 6:10PM
The Left's argument that government protection is sufficient can be attacked with scenario work.
Police to not actively prevent crime. They prosecute crime, and in doing so, deter crime through the threat of prosecution. If that deterrent fails, though, the crime WILL be committed, barring obstacles at the site of the crime that prevent commission of the crime.
Leftists will suggest that gun control laws are such an obstacle, as they make it more difficult to obtain the gun with which to commit a crime. Empirical evidence shows that this effect is more than offset by the corresponding decline in the obstacle that is "the threat of other people with guns." Functioning as a deterrent far more often than as an actual obstacle, this threat is the reason why mass shootings only seem to occur in "gun free zones".
Occam's Tool| 1.11.13 @ 8:13PM
Again, the shooter in Connecticut was mentally ill, and was turned down for a gun purchase. In the United States, being committed for mental illness to mandatory treatment SPECIFICALLY excludes involuntary antipsychotic drugs, which requires a separate hearing to enforce (there are depot formulations which can last up to 4 weeks that can be given intramuscularly). That's THE problem, not guns.
Medicate the violent psychotic mentally ill, and they cease, in the great majority of cases to be violent. Al Franken has introduced a bill expanding mental health care for dangerous mentally ill.
Quartermaster| 1.12.13 @ 1:11PM
Yet, Tool, most, if not all, those engaging in such acts are on mood altering drugs. Your advocating what you do in your last paragraph shows you are not familiar with the real problem.
You've simply become a tool for the rest of the fools. Conservatives don't do what you did with that fool Franken. You're simply a fool, not a conservative.