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12 June 2003: "Bulwarks against tyranny"

This week, my actual Permanent Resident Card arrived in the mail; it's not actually green. As I noted earlier, under the U.S. Code and the Revised Code of Washington, I can now legally own firearms. I'm not in any rush to do so, frankly, but it certainly changes one's perspective on the issue of "Second Amendment Rights" in that it's a lot less abstract. With that observation, this is as good a time as any to address something that's been knocking about in my head for some time.

In early May, Brett Cashman of Tabula Rasa posted an entry regarding the case of Silveira v. Lockyer before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In the post, Brett linked to an AP article which ran in the San Jose Mercury News (or the "Murky News" as some of its readers call it).

In the interest of disclosure, I should point out that I am a gun control advocate, or to be more accurate, I'm a gun-ownership control advocate. Almost ten years ago, I went through basic training and one of the first things that struck me after I was issued my personal weapon—an FN FAL—was how easy it was to operate compared to, say, air rifles I'd handled. Another rather vivid memory is how, one day at the firing range, one of my platoon mates accidentally discharged his weapon (fortunately downrange). Right before I was drafted, an infantry sergeant-major had been accidentally killed by a weapon which had not been properly cleared; admittedly, the weapon in question was an Oerlikon 25mm cannon (mounted on a YPR-765 PRI infantry fighting vehicle), but the infantry was being especially vigilant about firearms safety as a direct result.

I like guns, but I'm fully aware of the fact that their ultimate raison d' être is to make it remarkably easy to kill one's fellow human being, even accidentally (let's face it, with a knife, you have to make some deliberate effort to kill someone). As a result, I don't like having them pointed at me, even when I'm reasonably certain they're not loaded. During my service period, the Dutch army was switching from the Browning Hi-Power to the Glock 17, which meant a lot of retraining was going on. While my unit was being trained, a sergeant-major from the finance corps inadvertently pointed his Glock at me, and I batted his arm aside with a "watch it, you idiot... sar'nt-major." (This was regarded as acceptable behaviour.) The long and short of it is, I'd prefer to see guns only in the hands of people who are known to be familiar with proper firearms safety; as a result, I'd be in favour of, say, a mandatory firearms safety exam which a prospective gun owner would have to pass before being allowed to actually own a weapon.

That said, I don't see the point of much of the gun-control legislation that has been enacted in the United States. Magazines with a capacity of more than ten rounds may no longer be introduced onto the civilian market; swell, as if one round isn't enough to kill you. Various pieces of legislation banning the import and production of "assault weapons" (Brett provides the details of what constitutes an "assault weapon" here) are nonsensical. For example, a World War II-vintage M1 carbine meets the Californian criteria for an "assault weapon," since it has detachable magazine and (being a military weapon) a bayonet lug. The paratrooper version, the M1A1, would meet the criteria for an "assault weapon" anywhere else, since it also has a pistol grip and a folding stock. (It's also slightly cheap to make the presence of a pistol grip and a folding or telescoping stock separate criteria. The latter necessitates the former; take a look at this pic of the M1A1 and try to imagine how the weapon could be fired without a pistol grip.) But the M1 carbine was never meant to be a combat weapon; it was supposed to be issued to signallers, truck drivers, etc. as a self-defence weapon. The American infantryman's rifle of the time was the M1 Garand, which fires a much more powerful round (the .30-06) than the M1 carbine and is significantly more lethal. But because the Garand does not have a detachable magazine, it will never meet the criteria for an "assault weapon." John Allen Muhammed, the "DC sniper," turned out to have been using some kind of AR-15 variant (a Bushmaster XM15 or something), but as I pointed out at the time on various discussion boards, he might have been using a bolt-action "varmint" rifle with much the same effect. In short, I'd rather be in the presence of a responsible gun owner with a banned selective-fire M16 variant than in the presence of a mugger with a perfectly legal pump-action shotgun.

But I digress.

What caused me to start writing this entry was a quote from the article in the Mercury News and Brett's response. The quote was this:

Matt Nosanchuk, litigation director of the Violence Policy Center, said [Circuit Judge] Kozinski has got it wrong. Weapons don't keep the government in check, free speech does, he said.

"The Second Amendment is not the bulwark against tyranny. It's the First Amendment," he said.

Of course, history is not particularly kind to this way of thinking. Totalitarians have this funny habit of disarming people as a precursor to enslaving or murdering them. It's amusing that Nosanchuk believes, apparently sincerely, that he'll be permitted his First Amendment liberties when he's at the mercy of armed government thugs, and that this will keep him free; if I thought he was willing to leave the comforts of his little coccoon of leftist conformity to approach the issue with an open mind, I'd suggest that he might benefit from doing a historical review of, say, the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

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