There you are:
Dear Ralph,
I see by your editorial of 25 April that you are trying to hold the middle ground in the gun control debate. As I’m sure you’re aware, attempting such a position in any sphere, whether it is issues of free speech, or automobile features, or firearms, is an attempt to balance personal freedom and responsibility against the needs of society.
Such a project truly sounds appealing: What could possibly be wrong with acting to prevent a tragedy before it happens? Why wait until someone is killed or maimed to take positive action to stop it? Why wait to only punish after a terrible crime, when it is far too late to save the victims? Why shouldn’t we act now? Isn’t it true, as some people say: “If it saves even one life, it is worth it.�
You might recall a recent movie that addressed this exact moral dilemma, Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, (2002) where in the Washington, D.C., of 2054, a technologically advanced Department of Pre-crime has been created to detect and prevent murders before they're committed. Quite a seductive idea, especially as the technology has been worked out so that no one’s freedom is infringed until just seconds before a murder is committed. But even there, we find that there is something insidiously wrong with discarding the venerable bedrock principle of the presumption of innocence.
Likewise, the present-day idea of removing death-dealing tools from the hands of the guilty seems a good idea – except that laws that criminalize innocent behavior that harms no one, in order to prevent crimes, effectively presumes guilt on the part of millions of innocent persons. “All persons who buy guns are madmen or felons, lacking only the proper tool to erupt into child-killing violence,†says such a policy, and either as such must prove their innocence in advance (in the case of handguns,) or simply cannot ever be trusted in society with such a tool, as in the case of the ban on “assault weapons.â€
Such a position involves restraining and limiting the actions of law abiding citizens who have harmed no one in the past, are harming no one now, and will harm no one in the future - an incredible supermajority of the population who will never commit a crime in their entire lives. It determines that the amount of liberty that innocent men and women may possess depends not on their own upstanding conduct at all -- but on the depraved behavior of the lawless. The law will permit the innocent to possess only those freedoms and liberties that criminals will allow.
It is horrific to allow the fear of crime, and the naked craving for safety, to turn the law into a bludgeon that oppresses the law-abiding and the innocent. But it is even worse to do so only on the basis of misinformation and ignorant fears.
If you were told that certain sinister passenger cars, by virtue of the fact that they had black paint, power brakes, and a center armrest, were to be banned from sale in the entire U.S. because “these features made it easier to drive around at night and run over pedestrians,†you would think it insane. You would think it even more bizarre if when manufacturers removed these “dangerous†features, that politicians and special interest pressure groups screamed that the carmakers were “exploiting a loophole†in the “Killer Car Ban†by continuing to make dark blue cars with standard brakes and no center armrests.
Nor would you be terribly impressed if you went to the zoo to see the Siberian Tiger only to find an animatronic tiger mannequin, and a disingenuous zoo attendant telling you “stay behind the bars†because the mannequin was “just as dangerous†as the real tiger, because it looked “really similar†to the real thing. You’d know that looking similar doesn’t make something a tiger: Only actually being a real live tiger makes something a tiger.
Likewise, many of those millions of law-abiding men and women who are forbidden by law from buying a thing called an “assault weapon,†because of the Assault Weapon Ban, know that the weapons banned by this legislation are banned on the basis of cosmetic differences. These differences make these weapons no more dangerous from any other “ordinary, household†semi-automatic guns than the functional difference between black cars, and dark blue cars. They know that no one semi-automatic gun is inherently more dangerous than any other semi-automatic gun, even if one is made up to look identical to a scary fully-automatic machine gun. That “assault weapon†isn’t a term that has any real meaning, except “those particular things on a list that we choose to call assault weapons.â€
And thus, they are told not only that they are potential, not-yet-discovered but under suspicion criminals, but that the difference between them and criminals is merely a matter of cosmetics, not substance. They are frequently reviled for attempting to point out that a cosmetic feature such as a small lug of metal that can attach a knife is no more the proper determination of whether a gun is a machine gun (German: Sturmgewehr; storm rifle; or assault rifle) than is the zoo assistant’s resolve that “real hair†whiskers make the zoo mannequin a real tiger.
You say that “the assault weapons ban is only the beginning of the attempt to rid our society of these insidious weapons,†but that “I didn't say it was the beginning of a move to get rid of all guns.†Yet, if the government banned black hatchback cars allegedly to prevent killings, you’d know that there was no logical step between banning black hatchback cars, and dark blue hatchback cars, and dark brown hatchback cars, and in fact almost any cars at all.
You’d also know that you were personally innocent of any wrongdoing, entitled to recognition that you were an upstanding, responsible, and honest member of society, and absolutely entitled to the presumption of innocence. You would know that the concept of keeping all “dangerous†objects away from people is the project of making responsibility, maturity, and lawfulness utterly irrelevant in society, because the assumption underlying these laws is that the mass of people WILL be lawless, but will be magically defeated by a lack of “suitable†tools.
Thus, we wonder, and perhaps you should wonder too: How can we possibly serve the needs of making society a safer place by treating innocent law-abiding citizens as criminals under constant suspicion, and by making self-control, honor, and responsibility irrelevant in society? How can individuals be held responsible for their harm to others, if the operant assumption of the law and the government is that personal responsibility no longer exists?
And that, my friend, is why there exists no middle ground in the gun control debate.
Sincerely,
Dexter Sinister
Chico, CA
