A Question of Migration and Assimilation

Americans, Europeans, and anyone else who values egalitarian multiculturalism, I would like to pose a question. If you found yourself as an immigrant, how quickly and how thoroughly would you adopt the cultural values and practices of your new country? Would you assimilate easily?
 

Let’s say, for example, that circumstances compelled you to emigrate to Saudi Arabia in pursuit of a better life for you and your family. Would you try to learn Arabic? Would you embrace Saudi cultural values? Would you encourage your sons to adopt Islam so that they might become successful in Saudi society? Would you be happy that your granddaughters would have to wear the hijab and lose the legal rights and privileges they would have enjoyed as women in the West?

Now, let’s also imaging that the Saudi kingdom were as generous to you and other immigrants as European and American governments are to their immigrants. The kingdom would pay to meet your basic needs at least modestly and would cater to the educational needs of your children. In fact, you and tens of thousands of other immigrants could subsist without ever integrating with your host nation. How eager would you be to assimilate into this alien, sometimes antithetical culture without any real economic pressure to do so?

I submit that you probably would not assimilate and neither would you try. On the contrary, you and the other immigrants would leverage whatever political power your numbers gave you to change Saudi culture to more closely match your values and practices. That’s what large groups of related people (tribes and nations) do.

Mass migration is conquest by other means, and history records such events as invasions, even when actual warfare is infrequent. Just ask the Celts or the Khoisan or the Ainu or the Australian aborigines or the Dravidians or the Maori or the first nations of the Americas. It is a political and cultural truth that none of us can escape.

As a libertarian humanist, I would celebrate the free movement of people and ideas … but as a historical realist, I also have to recognize, however grudgingly, that a borderless world is a last-order freedom. Only when other liberties and responsibilities are firmly in place or adequately protected by institutional safeguards can we safely open our borders to welcome anyone who would come. To do so now—with our massive, irresponsible welfare states—is to finance the diminution or destruction of our own egalitarian cultures.

November 13th

The barbarians have drenched another date in blood. Democratic theory aside, innocent people were again murdered for no discernible reason beyond provoking general warfare—and again I reject the genocidal military solution that is so emotionally tempting. That said, it’s time to face some hard truths.

There are philosophical and cultural ideologies that are never going to exist in peace with one another. I live, breathe, and procreate multiculturalism, but I have to admit that its limitations fall far short of my own broad philosophical horizons. For all the many failings and shortcomings of my people, we still occupy the moral high ground of human history under principles of individual rights, equality before the law, political self-determination, and scientific reason. Despite our modernly fashionable self-doubt, it is our culture that brought light and prosperity to the world.

The enemy of my culture is anti-humanism, whether it stems from dogmatic religion, totalitarian rulership, or mere bad public policy. I’ll be honest; these enemies are presently growing in strength at home and abroad. There will inevitably be conflict, some violent. I want my culture to continue to survive and prosper, and that means some of its enemies will have to be destroyed—but this must be an option exercised only in self-defense, only to the extent absolutely necessary, and only in keeping with our higher principles.

If we cannot survive and prosper under these moral principles … then we shouldn’t survive or prosper …

Of Family and Political Philosophies

I was asked how my brother and I ended up with such differing political views. It was a pointed question that deserved a considered answer. I will pour myself another drink and answer it again here.

I would describe my brother as a highly intelligent modern “liberal.” He has intentions as noble as anyone’s and may not be as ideologically inconsistent as most, but his consistency is at least soft, and I suspect that he can be swayed fairly easily by appeals to “social justice” or political utilitarianism. He studied computer science and now works in the well-paid programming field—when he can.

Our father is a self-described bleeding-heart liberal and was born to working-class parents who came of age during the labor movement. He would even consider himself a communist at times, but in practice, I find him to be a garden-variety Keynesian—which would be perfectly reasonable in a fiscally responsible regime. He studied engineering and followed his father into the trades as a machinist. He has been a modestly successful small businessman, weathering the ups and downs of the industrial economy in southern California.

Our mother has wandered more both politically and geographically, but she has trended slightly more “conservative” throughout the years. She wanted nothing more than to be a wife and mother but found herself a single parent working at low-paying clerical jobs. She eventually left the crowded, regimented world of suburban California for the open, semi-rural environment of Cache Valley in Utah.

I can be described as a libertarian or as a classical liberal, someone who advocates equality before the law and individual freedom for all. In fact, I would make a better communist than my father, but I keep my communism in storage next to my perpetual-motion machine. I studied history, wherein I discovered that humanity has not changed at all in the last 20,000 years, despite the historical chauvinism that visits every new generation. I have also worked in academia for almost two decades now, so I’ve had plenty of opportunities to see the dark side of the ivory towers.

My parents taught me to be financially responsible and to respect others. Why those qualities should be expected of an individual but not of the governments constituted by individuals at large, I cannot say. However, it is that fundamental hypocrisy that irks me so.

It took me 30 years, but I ultimately confronted and rejected utilitarianism. Until then, I was surely as self-important and chauvinistic as anyone. I made a very conscious decision on that day in September. The ends do not justify the means. My previous worldview was destroyed utterly, and my grief is still as raw and primal as ever, but I am a better and more moral man for it—shamed and humbled though I may be.

Philosophically and morally, that decision left me with only one ideologically consistent path to follow. I would like to think that, when shown the same historical facts, any intelligent person would reach the same conclusions, but that is simply not the case. Utilitarianism is an incredibly seductive philosophy, appearing to offer the collective power to do great good—though the underlying causes of various social problems are often misunderstood—and too few will look beyond that promise to see that it can also be used to justify great evil. Indeed, regimes that I would die fighting have accomplished very great things.

I could say more, namely about the moral courage required to allow others to fail, but I think that I’ve answered the question. Different political philosophies are valid and have been proven so by their historical success, but that doesn’t make them necessarily moral. I chose objective morality for its own sake—or perhaps because the alternatives too horrified me. Everything else is mere detail.

Relative Frequencies and Magnitudes of Bolide Explosions and Impact Events

In light of the destructive bolide explosion over Chelyabinsk in Russia earlier this month, I have reviewed the recent history of meteoric events. From A.D. 1908 to 2013, there have been 11 confirmed events with potential explosive equivalencies greater than or equal to 10 kilotons of TNT. These are summarized below and suggest an observed frequency of such incidents that is somewhat higher than previous conservative predictions.

Eight of the observed explosions or impact events occurred over the greater Eurasian expanse. This continental zone includes just over 10.3 percent of the planet’s surface area. Extrapolating from these data yields an estimate of about seven such intermediate incidents per decade, which is not much lower than the number allegedly observed by military satellites. During the 105-year period bracketed by the Tunguska and Chelyabinsk explosions, there were also at least four bolides that exceeded 100kt equivalencies.

1908	Tunguska Event	15 Mt
1930	Curuçá River bolide explosion	5 Mt
1932	Arroyomolinos de León bolide	190 kt
1947	Sikhote-Alin impact	10 kt
1972	Great Daylight Fireball	80 kt
1993	Lugo bolide explosion	10 kt
1994	Marshall Islands Fireball	11 kt
2002	Eastern Mediterranean Event	20 kt
2004	Antarctic bolide explosion	12 kt
2009	Sulawesi bolide explosion	50 kt
2013	Chelyabinsk bolide explosion	500 kt
2016	South Atlantic fireball	13 kt

The Great Daylight Fireball of 1972 was caused by a near-Earth asteroid that passed harmlessly through the atmosphere over North America at least 35 miles above the surface. Estimates of its potential damage vary wildly, but I have selected a number in the upper range. Given the speed and luminosity of the bolide, had it grazed the planet at a more acute angle, I expect that the results would have been spectacular and potentially devastating.

As the Chelyabinsk explosion has proven, these intermediate objects present a very real danger. They are smaller, harder to detect, and much more common than the potential doomsday asteroids we can spot now. And we still lack the infrastructure to stop either of these threats.

Updated to include the South Atlantic fireball of 2016, which exploded several hundred miles southeast of Brazil (http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/fireballs/).

Reasonable Gun Control

 
“I support the Second Amendment, but I think we should have reasonable gun controls.” This is a line frequently heard from politicians and certain special-interest groups. While it’s often disingenuous—since what the most vociferous gun-control proponents really desire is total prohibition, presumably in the noble but misguided hope of creating a non-violent society—I will nevertheless take the statement on its face for the sake of discussing reasonable gun-control measures.¹

As the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held, all civil rights, no matter how fundamental, are subject to some degree of regulation in a society structured on ordered liberty. The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is no different. Furthermore, in D.C. v. Heller, while affirming the individual right to arms for self-defense and other lawful purposes, the high court opined that many longstanding gun-control regulations are presumptively lawful.

This brings us to the fact that most of the reasonable gun controls commonly demanded have already been in place for many years or even decades. However, not all of these regulations have been fully or properly implemented. I will examine each of these reasonable proposals below and offer suggestions for more effective improvement. Some of these gun-control schemes are more reasonable than others and will probably pass constitutional muster in the face of ongoing legal challenges, but some will fail this test and are likely to be stricken.

Background Checks

No one wants guns in the hands of violent criminals or the dangerously insane, so background checks have been federally indicated pursuant to all commercial firearms sales since the Gun Control Act of 1968 and much earlier in many states. Though their actual effectiveness is questionable due to the durable nature of firearms² and the propensity of criminals to acquire their guns via illegal means, the process has become relatively painless with the advent of the National Instant Check System (NICS) in the 1990s, and most transactions can now be cleared or denied within a matter of minutes. Since nearly instant background checks don’t unduly burden the right to arms, they will probably be ruled constitutional if challenged.³

Nevertheless, the system does have its flaws. First, NICS depends on data gathered from a number of sources. When the various agencies responsible for collecting this information fail to input disqualifying criteria, the system may still clear someone who should have been prohibited. Second, due to the high volume of false positives, law-enforcement agencies are unable to investigate denials. While most denials are overturned on appeal, a few are undoubtedly the result of legitimately prohibited persons,⁴ who may then proceed to obtain guns illegally. Both problems can be mitigated with greater attention to accurate and thorough data collection and by improved database integration.

Furthermore, despite the largely successful implementation of NICS, various provisions of the Gun Control Act keep gun sales mired in mid-20th century practices, particularly when interstate transactions are involved. By law, a Federal Firearms License (FFL) is required to deal in firearms, but licensees are restricted to face-to-face transactions with residents of their own states, except when dealing with other licensees. This can actually compromise the security of an interstate transfer, as the firearm must pass through many more hands on its way to the legal buyer, increasing the likelihood that it may be lost or stolen along the way.

There are two possible and relatively easy solutions to this problem, though both would require that the law be amended. First, leveraging the NICS service, outdated residency requirements could be eliminated, allowing any cleared customer to take delivery of a firearm without being forced to first have it shipped to a licensed dealer in the customer’s home state. Second, an existing category of FFL could simply be expanded to include a wider variety of firearms, affording the licensed collector more convenience while exposing him and the community at large to less risk.

These reforms would also have the added benefit of further discouraging undocumented and potentially unlawful private sales, which I will discuss in more detail below.

Registration

We’ve had de facto gun registration at the federal level (as a result of the record-keeping requirements for FFL holders) and de jure registration in several states for many, many years. Though registration is of dubious utility to law enforcement, it has also done little harm to law-abiding gun owners, despite dire predictions from some quarters within the right-to-arms camp. Implementing a standardized federal registration system would work very well in conjunction with the modernized interstate-transfer procedures described above.

That said, there is some evidence from the courts that registration may be deemed unconstitutional. It certainly contradicts the Fourth Amendment right to privacy. Arguably, however, the militia clause of the Second Amendment suggests that the government may have a constitutional interest in understanding the disposition of arms suitable for militia service—and I will discuss which firearms should be considered militia weapons in detail below.

Licensing

Beyond the FFL system described above, there has long been a call to license gun owners. We license drivers after all … or so the argument usually goes. In fact, though, licensing regimes are now present in all states but Illinois—a problem being addressed in the courts right now. Unfortunately, several of the most populous states (including California and New York) still continue to discourage their citizens from becoming licensed, despite having had licensing systems in place for many decades.

Indeed, licensing reform is currently the top priority within the right-to-arms movement, where it is viewed as the gun-control measure offering the single most immediate benefit to public safety. To that end, multiple legal challenges to unconstitutional licensing practices are working their way through the federal courts and will likely reach the Supreme Court within the next two years. The high court is widely expected to rule that while states may regulate when and where their citizens may carry guns for self-defense and other lawful purposes, there must also be a legal mechanism for them to do so that is administered equitably and that doesn’t unduly burden the core right.

I have reported on liberalized or shall-issue licensing before. Whenever and wherever such licensing reforms have been adopted legislatively, there have been exaggerated claims by opponents that gun violence would explode as licensees instigated shootouts for all manner of trivial reasons. Of course, no such thing ever happens. Instead, licensees have proven to be exceptionally law-abiding, and the data suggest that right-to-carry laws contribute to an at least slight decrease in violent crime.

This decrease is due mostly to the deterrent effect of an armed populace. Even though only a tiny fraction of the eligible citizens choose to obtain licenses, would-be attackers are still dissuaded and seek out softer targets. Over time, this effect should become more pronounced as a larger percentage of the population becomes licensed and, hopefully, as other criminal-justice reforms are implemented.

However, I won’t argue that armed citizens are a perfect antidote for episodes of mass murder.⁵ Both are statistically rare, so the likelihood that a licensee will be immediately present when one of these very unusual events erupts is exceedingly small. While the chances that an armed citizen will simply be nearby are significantly higher, licensees are not police officers and are trained to avoid confrontation whenever possible. In any case, the event wouldn’t be recognizable any longer, since the headline would read: “Gunman opens fire in crowded shopping center. Dozens injured.”

Safety Training

Safety and competency training will always be valuable where firearms are concerned. In fact, voluntary safety programs formalized in the 1950s and championed by the National Rifle Association are probably responsible for reducing the rate of fatal firearms accidents to statistical insignificance. Nevertheless, states that don’t include any training as part of their licensing requirements still haven’t seen an increase in accidental shootings, which suggests that stringent training demands would provide little additional benefit to public safety.

That said, any potential training requirements that weren’t unduly burdensome would probably be deemed constitutional. Here again, the Second Amendment provides for a well-regulated militia, and in its 18th-century context, well regulated was understood to mean well trained. To this end, basic firearms safety could reasonably be included in school curricula, possibly helping to reduce accidental shootings even further.

Waiting Periods

Waiting periods have come and gone over the years, but they were sold politically to accomplish two goals. First, waiting periods allowed time to conduct the mandatory background checks, though NICS has essentially obviated this need. Second, they provided a cooling-off period for any gun buyer who might be acting on some temporary murderous impulse, though I’m aware of no correlation between waiting periods and reduced homicides.

In short, waiting periods have probably outlived any utility they may have had. Nevertheless, in California and other states where they remain, there is speculation that at least initial waiting periods for first-time gun buyers would survive constitutional challenge. If this proves to be the case, though, the state may be left in the position to delay access to firearms to those who may legitimately and suddenly develop an immediate need for effective self-defense.

Unfortunately, I see no remedy for this problem, if cooling-off periods are allowed to stand. It may simply be a matter of personal responsibility for those living within an imperfect system. It’s probably too late to buy the fire extinguisher once the fire has already started.

Private Sales

This is the so-called gun-show loophole. While gun shows enjoy no special exemptions, under federal law and in many of the several states, private sales are largely unregulated. Private parties are free to dispose of their own property as they see fit, so long as they aren’t knowingly transferring firearms to prohibited persons or dealing without a license.

For those less familiar with gun laws, you may find the dinner-party loophole somewhat easier to understand. This is the gap in health-and-safety laws that allows you to serve food and drink to your own family or to host a dinner party for friends and associates without having to obtain FDA approval or a conditional-use permit from your county of residence. Closing this loophole would require you to obtain the services of a licensed caterer before dining at home.

While there is much talk about requiring all private firearms transfers to be conducted through the agency of licensed dealers, as they currently are for the most part in California, it’s unclear whether such restrictions would be deemed constitutional. In addition to the Second Amendment, controls on private property also implicate the Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments. On top of this, such regulations are very difficult to enforce, effectively guaranteeing a low rate of compliance.

A better approach would be to encourage voluntary participation in the national background-check system. Providing private sellers with access to NICS would be well received by the vast majority of gun owners, who are generally eager to follow the law and who would appreciate the extra peace of mind while still avoiding the gross inconvenience of conducting private sales through licensed dealers. While this certainly wouldn’t eliminate all undocumented transactions, it would minimize them to a large extent, allowing law-enforcement resources focused on the illegal arms trade to be targeted more efficiently.

“Dangerous and Unusual Weapons”

In Heller, the Supreme Court explicitly ruled that weapons “in common use” by the people are protected by the Second Amendment, implying in its historical analysis that “dangerous and unusual weapons” could be subject to more stringent controls. However, these terms were left somewhat vague. The specific weapon “in common use” in this case was a personally owned handgun, but which weapons are “dangerous and usual”? And how does this decision square with the only previous Second Amendment ruling, U.S. v. Miller?

In Miller, the high court held that weapons suited for militia service were constitutionally protected. While this ruling may be regarded as partly erroneous due to the incomplete briefing process before the court, at present time, the weapon best suited for militia duty would be a select-fire assault rifle chambered for the 5.56×45mm NATO cartridge—or at the very least a semi-automatic analog thereof. However, select-fire weapons, other fully automatic firearms, and various “destructive devices” have been tightly controlled since the National Firearms Act of 1934 and essentially banned from production for the civilian market since 1986.

If the prohibitions on “dangerous and unusual” military weapons are constitutional, then that leaves us with semi-automatic versions of military rifles as the de facto protected militia weapons “in common use” by the people. However, despite their involvement in only a fraction of gun-related homicides, these are the very same “assault weapons” that so many gun-control proponents would like to see banned.

Now, as I’ve written before, so-called assault weapons are fictitious. The term was used to frighten the uneducated public into support for the federal ban that expired in 2004. A semi-automatic rifle is a semi-automatic rifle, regardless of whichever secondary features it may have—and like millions of other Americans, I own one myself. My modern Kel-Tec SU-16 rifle with its traditionally shaped stock is really no different than a 50-year-old Colt AR-15 with a pistol-grip stock. Both are chambered for the same intermediate 5.56mm cartridge.⁶ Both can accept the same five-, 10-, 20-, 30-, 60-, or even 100-round magazines. And both can fire only one shot for each pull of the trigger.

Therefore, per Heller, semi-automatic rifles are “in common use” and thus constitutionally protected for lawful purposes. They are also the only readily available militia weapons protected per Miller. Unless the prohibitions on more appropriate military-grade weapons are to be relaxed, any bans on semi-automatic “assault weapons” are both pointless and very likely unconstitutional.

Gun-Free Zones

Gun-free zones are a dangerous fiction and should be eliminated immediately. Vague, poorly defined zones have been ruled unconstitutional once before and doubtlessly will be again when an appropriate challenge arises. In the meantime, as we’ve learned tragically and repeatedly, the only guns these zones are free from are those held by law-abiding citizens.

Specific zones are more legally tenable, but to effectively implement truly gun-free zones would require secure perimeters, controlled access points with thorough searches of all incoming traffic, and ubiquitous surveillance.⁷ In other words, we would have to turn these “sensitive places” into prison camps. This would be both impractical in economic terms and antithetical to a free and open society.

Let’s reserve the prison-camp mentality for places where we really have no other choice … such as in actual prisons.

The foregoing gun-control proposals represent what reasonably can and cannot be achieved. Properly implemented, they can provide us with a constitutional and functional right to arms while still allowing both practical and symbolic legal tools for reducing violent crime. Most are already in place and need only minor adjustments to be made more effective.

This goal is politically possible for those who honestly wish to enhance public safety while also protecting our civil rights. The vast majority of gun owners already support these reasonable measures, and none of us expect to win a completely unfettered Second Amendment. What we do not appreciate is continually being blamed for the wrongdoing of the minority of willfully evil and dangerously insane people in this world, and we will certainly no longer tolerate being punished for their crimes.

1. The intellectually honest supporter of reasonable gun control will ultimately find himself in the right-to-arms camp. I should know, because I was that person. While my views have evolved toward libertarianism and away from the utilitarianism implicit in the unreserved support for gun control, that doesn’t change the fact that we will be living with some degree of utilitarian regulation until long after the subject has lapsed into irrelevance.


2. A well-maintained firearm will remain functional for hundreds if not thousands of years, and there are at least 800 million already in circulation worldwide. We will never run out of guns. This is one of many reasons why outright prohibition is an unacceptable proposition.


3. Of course, if background checks are acceptable for the exercise of a fundamental civil right, then arguably they should be applied to other less protected areas as well, such as voting rights, driving automobiles, or the receipt of public benefits.


4. I would argue that there should also be a way for prohibited persons to eventually restore their civil rights. Otherwise, the utilitarian argument dictates that anyone too dangerous to be trusted with a firearm is too dangerous not to be incarcerated.


5. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to allow licensees to go armed in otherwise unsecured “sensitive places.” Existing laws vary widely in this respect.


6. Military assault rifles and their semi-automatic civilian analogs are chambered for intermediate cartridges, more potent than low-powered handgun cartridges but less powerful than the high-powered rifle cartridges used for hunting and long-range precision shooting.


7. Even the strictly enforced gun-free zone only relocates the problem. Instead of a bunch of unarmed victims congregated inside the zone, we would have a bunch of unarmed victims queued up outside the zone waiting to be screened for entry. Either way, the would-be mass killer is presented with a target-rich environment.

Self-Defense, the Right to Arms, and the Concealed-Carry Revolution

The video I’ve shared is from a recent Cato Institute policy forum on self-defense and “stand your ground” laws. Though fairly long, it provides solid historical, political, and legal analysis, so I encourage everyone to watch. As you might suspect, I disagree in part with the last commentator,¹ but I still think he made valid points about the application of the law and the possible need for further guidance. After all, if “stand your ground” laws were a reaction to the misapplication of other statutes by prosecutors, are they not at risk for misapplication themselves? Absent political motives, the mere fact that relative experts disagree on the meaning of these laws suggests there is yet a degree of ambiguity, but that is a matter for legislators and judges to resolve.

As noted in the video, the adoption of such affirmative self-defense statutes has followed the proliferation of right-to-carry laws throughout the country. However, many if not most people are still largely unaware of this quiet revolution, both because the laws encourage or even require the concealed carry of firearms and because the mainstream media usually does their best to ignore the laws once they’ve been passed.² Naturally, there is a long and troubling history behind the right-to-carry movement, and I can touch on that only briefly here.

In A.D. 1986, only a handful of states would readily issue licenses to common citizens. In the rest of the country, the carrying of firearms was either broadly prohibited or the licensing authorities had almost unlimited discretion in issuance. This was the legacy of the two-pronged gun-control efforts³ of the 1920s and ’30s, which were ostensibly intended to combat the dramatic increase in violent crime that accompanied alcohol prohibition.

That began to change when Florida became the first state in recent decades to adopt a shall-issue statute, which required the licensing authority to issue licenses to all applicants who were not legally disqualified. Florida’s concealed-carry law became a model for reform, and by the mid-1990s, over half of the United States had enacted similar shall-issue statutes. The causes have not been widely explored, but I think that they will prove clear enough once this chapter of history is written.⁴

Opposition to the shall-issue movement has been and continues to be fierce, and in each case it has usually taken several years for liberalized concealed-carry legislation to make it through state legislatures and past gubernatorial vetoes. Without fail, opponents have warned of dire consequences should the reforms pass into law. Blood would run in the streets, they assured, as minor disputes and disagreements escalated into shootouts. Invariably, though, such grim outcomes have failed to materialize, and violent crime has continued to decline⁵ as right-to-carry laws have continued to expand.

Today, all but a handful of states enjoy shall-issue licensing or better. California, New York, and several other “liberal” states still maintain discretionary, may-issue regimes, while Illinois is the only state with no licensing system. Legislative reform is unlikely in these gun-control strongholds, so multiple constitutional challenges are now making their way through the federal courts.

The U.S. Supreme Court is widely expected to hear one or more of these cases within the next two years.

1. I am far, far more worried about misconduct by the police and prosecutors than I am about the potential that a criminal might “get away with it” here or there.


2. After vigorously campaigning against a right-to-carry reform, the news media seem to conveniently forget about the topic, except for occasional “investigative” pieces designed to expose or embarrass licensees. Here is a recent exception to that rule. “New Fashion Wrinkle: Stylishly Hiding the Gun.” The New York Times (2012).


3. These efforts resulted in the National Firearms Act of 1934, which sought to regulate firearms at the federal level via taxation (since the federal government was presumably bound from direct infringement on the right to keep and bear arms by the Second Amendment), and the “uniform acts,” which sought to control guns at the state level (since state governments were presumably not bound by the Second Amendment). In practice, though, the various prohibitions on concealed firearms found within the uniform acts were mostly used to disarm “undesirable” people (i.e., minorities and immigrants), and that was probably a large part of the true intent behind them. Otherwise law-abiding white citizens were generally unaffected for several decades, and the wealthy and influential could always count on getting licenses or at least special consideration in the event of any embarrassing incidents.


4. I contend that the right-to-carry revolution developed as a response both to the equalized enforcement practices reached in the 1970s and ’80s and to the political successes of the national gun-control movement from 1968 to 1994. Note that the number of shall-issue states had almost doubled within two years of the enactment of the federal ban on “assault weapons.”


5. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports show that homicides (gun related and otherwise) have continued to decline from 2006 to 2010. Firearms-related homicides specifically dropped from 10,225 to 8,775. More guns on the street simply do not correlate to—let alone cause—more violence.

Climatic Change and Human History

As we traveled through the tortured landscape of the Great Basin on our way to and from Utah, I was reminded of the long history of climatic change in this region. Millions of years ago, it was seabed. Thousands of years ago, it was largely filled with lakes and rivers fed by melting glaciers. Even after the glaciers began their abrupt but long retreat, the region remained wet and lush long enough for ancient humans to survive and prosper.


That prosperity didn’t last. The climate continued to change. Lakes and rivers shrank, and some disappeared altogether. Rainfall also declined. The Great Basin dried out. Crops failed. People died. The first inhabitants had all but vanished by the time more adaptable tribes arrived from the east to dig wells, divert rivers, and build cities.

Despite all the recent concern over climatic change, it is simply not a new phenomenon. In the broadest sense, human history has been defined by our response to this ongoing process. Legendary civilizations arose and thrived on the low-lying temperate plains, only to be washed away by the rising seas that heralded the beginning of a warmer, interglacial period. As the ice retreated, the survivors of the great floods migrated into the new lands, where they planted the seeds that grew into the nations we know today.

Humans have always adapted to such change or paid the price for failing to do so. Now, though, we talk of controlling the climate by our own hand and of spending the wealth of nations to do so. Assuming this ability is within our grasp and not another fiction of our own arrogance, how will we select the ideal global climate?

That is the question that still remains unanswered and, for that matter, largely unasked. Why should the predominant climate of the 20th century A.D. be our ideal? It was but one point on the climatic spectrum—and perhaps an unstable one at that. Should we forgo adaptation in our pursuit of control? Our civilization will pay a high price if our quest for control fails—or perhaps even if it succeeds.

Letter Published

I recently had a letter on the history of the gun-control movement published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Van Norman, M. D. (2006). “Gun Control: a ‘Simplistic’ Answer to a Complex Problem.” Chronicle Of Higher Education, 53(16), B17.

Death of a Bad “Law”

On September 13, A.D. 2004, the 10-year-old federal ban on “assault weapons” expired. The “law,” which banned semi-automatic firearms with certain cosmetic and ergonomic features, had done nothing to reduce violent crime. This was not surprising for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that semi-automatic rifles were rarely used in crimes even before the ban.

Nevertheless, in the days and weeks before the ban expired, many gun-control advocates and “impartial” news reports warned that “deadly assault weapons” would soon “flood the streets” and lead to a new “epidemic of gun violence.” Senior law-enforcement officials (such as Sheriff Lee Baca and Chief William Bratton) publicly worried about the safety of their subordinates. On a similar note, CSU Fullerton’s Daily Titan ran the following editorial.

Weapons of destruction

Daily Titan Editorial Board
September 13, 2004

Thanks to the National Rifle Association’s indefatigable lobbying, the federal assault weapon ban
expires today.

For the first time in 10 years, Americans can legally purchase 19 ludicrously lethal weapons, with high-capacity ammunition clips to match.

This is a pernicious development for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that the policy was an overwhelming success.

Federal statistics reveal that crimes perpetrated with the aid of the banned weapons—which included Tec-9s and Uzis—were down by more than 60 percent since former President Clinton signed it into law.

What we find most contemptible is the mendacity by which the assault weapons ban was attacked. The bill’s now-victorious opponents speciously wrap themselves in the Second Amendment. Corporate interests, ranging from gun-manufacturers to dealers have, with the help of the NRA, painted their profit-hungry cause as one of freedom-loving patriots and hunters.

The Bill of Rights authors would be aghast to see the molestation of their hallowed document.

Over subsequent generations, American legislators have learned the bill’s ultimate virtue: the flexibility and breadth which allows contemporary wisdom the autonomy to work with, not just within, the Bill of Rights.

Literal interpretations are dangerous, as former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously articulated with his admonishment of First Amendment freedoms.

The First Amendment does not, Holmes said, grant citizens the right to “shout fire in a crowded
theater;” some speech may be restricted if it presents imminent danger.

The same theory applies to the Second Amendment, which grants citizens “the right to bear
arms,” and makes no further distinction.

Taken literally, the Second Amendment would permit citizens to stockpile bazookas and warheads. Of course, no one finds that sensible.

We don’t find the idea of anyone being able to purchase AK-47s to be sensible either.

Proliferation of profusely deadly weapons is only good for manufacturers’ pockets.

Given the amount of weapons being used in America’s foreign military engagements, haven’t
those who produce killing machines gotten rich enough?

Amused but somewhat bothered by the hysteria, misinformation, and outright bigotry presented in this editorial, I decided to send an e-mail to the Daily Titan’s opinion editor, Robert Rogers. Following the newspaper’s editorial guidelines, I kept my comments very brief.

Re.: Weapons of destruction …

Dear Mr. Rogers:

Though California still has its own permanent, more stringent ban on “assault weapons,” I’m compelled to respond to the Daily Titan’s histrionic editorial … on the expiration of the federal version.

As the editorial board demonstrates, the ban itself was widely misunderstood. The Violent Crime Control Act of 1994 prohibited the sale to private citizens of semi-automatic rifles with certain ergonomic features. These features (such as pistol grips and flash suppressors) had nothing to do with how powerful or dangerous the weapons were. In fact, the banned rifles were no more “ludicrously lethal” or “profusely deadly” than many other similar firearms.

According to the FBI, crime with semi-automatic rifles was minuscule before the ban, so even a 60-percent drop is statistically insignificant, but this debate isn’t about statistics or even criminology. As the Daily Titan suggests, the real question is one of rights. Why should a law-abiding citizen be prohibited from owning anything so long as he doesn’t misuse it?

The editorial board answers by misapplying Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous remark about shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. The corollary to Holmes statement, however, is that if the theater really is on fire, the responsible citizen has the right to warn fellow theatergoers. Likewise, if violently attacked, the responsible citizen has the right to defend herself with a firearm. In a free society, we would punish the abuse of rights but would not prohibit their exercise.

My letter was published in the Daily Titan’s Sept. 20th issue. However, this process instigated and interesting and amusing e-mail exchange between Mr. Rogers and myself. I have reproduced verbatim his first response below.

Mr. Van Norman,

Thank you for reading and responding to the Titan. I hope that you continue to read not only the editorials, of which I am the author, but the paper as a whole. Needless to say, I disagree steadfastly with your position, but appreciate it nonetheless.

Please check upcoming issues of the Titan for the printing of this letter. I entreat you to respond in the future.

Thank you,
Robert Rogers

P.S. Was a “responsible citizen’s” right to defend him/herself with a firearm truncated by the expired law? If so, at what point are “firearms” too deadly to be legal?

Two more points: The editorial board has no misunderstanding of the ban, as you haughtily suggest. The fact that some legal weapons may have been arguably as deadly in no way precludes the banned weapons from being accurately labeled “profusely deadly.”

As for this phrase: “Why should a law-abiding citizen be prohibited from owning ANYTHING so long as he doesn’t misuse it?” I will let the silliness of this speak for itself

Now free of the newspaper’s page limits, I responded to Mr. Rogers at greater length.

Dear Mr. Rogers:

Thank you for your reply. Even as a university staff member, I enjoy reading the Daily Titan when I have the chance. I have enough experience with journalism to know that one must take the good with the bad. Like any newspaper, the Titan serves a bit of both. To be fair, I probably shouldn’t have called your editorial histrionic. It spoke for itself in that respect.

From the tone of your e-mail, I now see that you would prefer to prohibit most, if not all firearms and other dangerous weapons. I didn’t address that idea in my first e-mail, because I didn’t have the space, and it was only indirectly germane to your editorial. I’ll do so here, as it’s more relevant to the broader debate.

First, though, I’ll explain my perspective. I believe in a free society, wherein people can do as they please so long as they don’t harm others. (The right to keep and bear arms is a small but important portion of this freedom.) Naturally, I take note and am distressed when anyone advocates limiting freedom or curtailing rights. In discussing the point, I prefer to argue from principle rather than utility, even when the utilitarian argument supports my point of view (as it often does in the gun-control debate).

Now, the basic argument for banning guns is that if there were fewer guns available, fewer people would be murdered with them, and this is true on its face. However, the “with them” portion is often omitted, incorrectly implying that there would be fewer murders overall. As an educated person, Mr. Rogers, you know that many people were murdered before firearms were invented and many more will probably be murdered after firearms are replaced by some superior form of weaponry. Even if we could somehow eliminate all guns, violence would still be a sad reality in our world.

So I’ll ask this question again. Why should you or I or any other responsible person be prohibited from owning or doing anything so long as we don’t harm anyone else? You called this a silly question, but you didn’t explain why. As you are the one calling for suppression of others’ liberties, I believe you are the one who must justify himself.

On average, in the United States, about 15,000 people are killed in firearms-related homicides each year. By contrast, about 40,000 people are killed in automobile crashes. If guns are so dangerous that they should be banned, then cars are even more so. That is the inescapable utilitarian argument, but prohibiting either would be wrong in a free society.

As you imply, the responsible citizen’s right to defend himself was not significantly restricted by the expired “law.” That’s why I didn’t argue that point per se. What the federal “assault-weapons” ban represented (and our California ban still does) was one more small step toward total prohibition of private firearms, one intended to make the next step that much easier. We saw proof of this last week, when Governor Schwarzenegger signed a bill that will ban single-shot .50-caliber rifles beginning next year. These rifles have never been used in a crime in California.

Yes, all firearms are dangerous. That’s why they were invented and why we still need them. A simple handgun can make a 90-pound woman the physical equal of a 250-pound man. To forbid firearms is to leave the weak perpetually at the mercy of the strong. I invite you to study history for examples of how unpleasant that arrangement has so often been.

We could trade statistics, if you like. I could cite studies and data showing the benefits of private gun ownership, and with a little effort you could cite opposing numbers, which I could probably refute, but that would get us nowhere. The simple truth is that we can’t eliminate violence through legislation. After all, criminals don’t obey laws.

I realize my words probably won’t sway your opinion. Nevertheless, I’ve spent the better part of my Sunday evening writing this e-mail, because I once felt much the same way you appear to. I thought that sometimes people had to be forced to do the right thing, but then I realized the logical conclusion to this utilitarian line of thought. Utilitarianism can be and has been used to justify the extremes of human greed and cruelty. Freedom is the only acceptable alternative.

Freedom is often frightening and dangerous, which is why so few people really desire it. Freedom comes with responsibility, and abuse of freedom can and should be met with appropriate punishment. Freedom also means accepting others and their beliefs and behaviors, even if you dislike them. Ironically, the same people who advocate gun control usually advocate this kind of tolerance as well.

Finally, as fear and ignorance are the foundations of bigotry, I would like to offer you the opportunity to learn a bit more about firearms and possibly dispel any unnecessary apprehension you may feel about them. They are just inanimate objects, after all. If you’ve never fired a gun before, please consider this an open invitation for a safety lesson and an afternoon of target practice at a local shooting range.

Mr. Rogers’ reply was filled with somewhat juvenile but perhaps good-natured posturing. Unfortunately, he continued to demonstrate a lack of understanding of gun-control legislation and of individual rights and freedom. Notice, how he proudly walked into my guns-vs.-cars trap. Here is his reply verbatim.

Mr. Van Norman,

Thank you for contributing your valuable time and expertise to our discourse. As for our previous correspondence, I hope you have the opportunity to peruse today’s Titan -- your letter is enclosed as promised. Reader response is steadily growing.

As for the loquacious response to which I reply, I brush it aside as little more than interesting reading. Your writing is steady and smooth, though far from mellifluous. Some of your points, such as your discovery that people were murdered before the invention of firearms, were at best belabored; at worst, they smacked of pontification. As you are an educated university employee, and I a student, I’ll forgive your proclivity for superciliously pandering to students from whom you expect servile deference.

I am not one of those students. Please read on, as I will methodically dissect each of your points. I trust that, as a sportsmen, you will enjoy the contest. I expect that, as a competitor, you'll be pained by crushing defeat.

First, allow me to clarify so as to avoid allowing you to tangle yourself in additional erroneous conclusions: I do not espouse the prohibition of all firearms and other “dangerous weapons;” I have in fact never alluded to such a position. I merely condemned lifting a federal law that outlawed the sale of a particular batch of weapons and ammunition cases. Your use of slippery-slope rhetoric is, though tiresome and easily confuted, employed with laughable regularity by gun enthusiasts and anti-government freedom fanatics alike. My editorial clearly made germane the point that the right to possess firearms, like many other rights, is not absolute. Your supposition was incorrect.

I too believe in a free society (who doesn’t? That was a loaded, banal statement). I believe that citizens should be endowed with the right to bear arms. However, the 20th century has brought with it technological innovations that have forced us to examine what men and nations may and may not do. To believe that certain rights should be immutable over time is to not accept reality. Imagine, if you will, that a stream runs through a village, and it is decided that all may share indiscriminately in the water. Over time, the village grows big and the stream grows small. If people did not ration their intake -- by re-examining their ethos and PRODUCTIVELY LIMITING their rights -- all would die. Or, as is likely in a world in which unfettered weapon stockpiling was possible, all but a few would perish. I find it admirable that you engage me so energetically.

Contrary to what you assert, both principle and utility are firmly in my ammunition holsters.

Granted, people were murdered before firearms -- I will not dignify that piece of historical research with any further mention.

You ask the question: Why should you or I or any other responsible person be prohibited from owning or doing anything so long as we don’t harm anyone else?

Allow me to retort … Please descend for a moment from your skyward, philosophical ideals, Mr. Van Norman. You must accept that the epoch in which we live is fraught with the dangers of our own ingenuity. On a global scale, life on this planet could be annihilated by man-made weapons, should one disgruntled leader choose to “harm anyone else.” As a response, nations have negotiated non-proliferation treaties to curtail the potentiality of freedom to own weapons leading capable of bringing about total devastation.

On a parochial level, one disgruntled person, be it a 90-pound woman or 250-pound man, is empowered as never before. With the right weaponry, the person can lay waste to a multitude of people, a whole community if you will, in an absurdly short period of time.

The past is gone; the new reality is one of heightened stakes. Just as warfare between nation-states and its corollary probability, global devastation, has required new rules with the advent of new weapons, the profusely deadly weapons available to individual actors requires new ways of thinking about individual rights.

Also, the notion of a militia protecting itself against the tyranny of U.S. government has grown moot with time and technology. In short, the catastrophic capabilities of modern weaponry, which includes the awesome power of U.S. military power, makes the right to own ANY and/or ALL types of firearms unjustifiably dangerous and of no utility.

Take a long look at your next paragraph: On average, in the United States, about 15,000 people are killed in firearms-related homicides each year. By contrast, about 40,000 people are killed in automobile crashes. If guns are so dangerous that they should be banned, then cars are even more so. That is the inescapable utilitarian argument, but prohibiting either would be wrong in a free society.

Is this argument really inescapable? If so, call me Houdini. You are right that more people die in car crashes than by firearm. Cars, like many wondrous technological innovations of the 20th century, are capable of destroying human life. Therefore, everything concerning automobiles are subject to state regulation. What you can own (no tanks, many not “street legal”), how you can operate, taxes, roadways, speed limits, etc., are all stipulated by the state, in large part for safety purposes. Guns too should be heavily regulated, beginning with what you can own (no bazookas, M-60s), and including with what they may be operated. With cars, you can’t burn alcohol; with guns, you shouldn’t be able to have high-capacity ammunition magazines.

After such a thorough denunciation of your unequivocal statement, I bet you wish you had that one back!

You call this one small step toward total prohibition of private firearms. Well, the ban has been lifted. After 10 years on the books, the ban envisaged no such next step. This is more slippery slope stuff, and it is all the more ineffective given that the slide appears to be progressing in the other direction, that is, less gun control.

I have, and do, study history. I need no invitation. At some point, however, one has to realize that many of the foundations upon which history was forged have eroded, at least in cases that feature rapid technological advancement. In 1800, a man had a difficult time killing more than one person with a gun. There is no history that can easily establish a paradigm with which we can study the consequences of not regulating modern weapons. Weapons today are not equalizers, as you suggest. Modern weapons endow men with powers they were never meant to have; ultimately corruptible power. With the right weapon, a 90-pound woman can kill thousands.

As for trading statistics, I am doing well enough without them. As I am demonstrating before your probably awestruck eyes, your arguments are sufficiently pulverized by my logic alone. Your argument went nowhere; my argument seeks to mold our individual rights into practical constructs applicable to the world in which we live. No reasonable person would find full freedom of arms possession to be applicable. I am not naive enough to believe that violence can be ended through legislation. The naivete rests on your side of the argument (again, that people should be able to own any weapon). Do you fatalistically suggest that since problems can’t be “solved” through legislation, legislation is itself futile? With assault weapons illegal, there will nevertheless still be people who possess them and kill with them. With cocaine illegal, people will still use it, sell it and even kill for it. Should society capitulate in the face of these challenges? Should things be made legal just because their illegality fails to curtail them to a certain level.

You oversimplify when you posit that I think “people must be forced” to do the right thing. The utilitarian argument is firmly on my side, not yours. The logical conclusion is that with the advancement of weapons, the laws of nature and freedom must be refreshed. We cannot axiomatically remain rooted in certain lines of thought when the material conditions (ie weapons) have progressed in their deadliness to levels we could not have foreseen. This is the struggle of our time: How to prevent the proliferation of ever-advancing weapons that carry with them the potential of widespread destruction.

Freedom has always been frightening and dangerous, as you said. However, freedom of arms has never carried with it the capacity for freedom-crushing death that it does today. Seriously, to imply that accepting beliefs and behaviors somehow encompasses the freedom to own ANY weapon in 2004 is myopic. The abuse of freedom (like mowing down hundreds with a machine gun) carries with it much graver consequences than it did in a different era.

Finally, I must thank you for the hearty chuckle I got out of your suggestion that I go shoot some guns. While firing off some rounds may be fun, to think that it will aid my understanding of this issue is, well, predictable advice from an obvious gun aficionado like yourself. Fear and ignorance do not drive my beliefs, dispassionate analysis does. Like a reasonable person, I think American’s should be able to legally own hunting rifles and pistols. As for the exact line between legal and illegal, that is debatable. However, I maintain my opinion that those weapons devoid of practical use (hunting, defending one’s body and property) should be vigorously sought and seized by the Federal government. Fully automatic should not be an option. Magazines carrying any more than 10 rounds should be cracked down upon. These propositions, however vague, are still diametrically opposed to your “any weapon” mantra.

People kill people, but technology greatly enhances a killer’s prolificness.

Thank you,
Robert Rogers

p.s. Some of my posturing and aggressive tactics above might appear crude or pejorative. I apologize. In the end, I am just having fun and learning. The next time I go to the library, hopefully we can meet, shake hands and talk, time permitting.

Ignoring Mr. Rogers’ posturing, I returned with facts and reason, though this e-mail was actually the most emotional for me. I also provided a brief primer on the history of gun control in the United States. Of course, I couldn’t resist destroying his let’s-treat-guns-like-cars argument.

Dear Mr. Rogers,

Thank you for your long but well-reasoned reply. You at least took the time to think about the issue, which is more than a lot of people would do. If nothing else, this exchange of rhetorical barbs has been an amusing exercise for both of us. However, I hope you don’t really believe that I expect “servile deference” from students. On the contrary, I want students to investigate this issue for themselves and draw their own conclusions, rather than merely accepting the propaganda put out by lobbyists on both sides.

With that out of the way, let me address each of your points. First, what is a weapon that is too dangerous? In your first reply, you acknowledged that there was little difference between the banned “assault weapons” and other semi-automatic rifles, suggesting that these other firearms should also be prohibited. Now, you say that only certain weapons should be banned.

I’m sorry to belabor the point, but a semi-automatic firearm will discharge only one round of ammunition each time its trigger is pulled. Standard magazine capacity for these weapons usually ranges from 10 to 30 rounds. (If it matters, machine guns and other automatic firearms have been tightly regulated since 1934 and were not subject to the 1994 ban.) So how is a banned semi-automatic “combat” rifle firing an intermediate cartridge more dangerous than a non-banned semi-automatic “hunting” rifle firing a high-powered cartridge, if the only other difference between them is a pistol grip?

How is any firearm more dangerous than a box of matches, which can be used to kill hundreds at a time with much less effort? Anything can and will be used as a deadly weapon by someone intent on murder or mayhem. A “disgruntled person” can kill more people more quickly behind the wheel of a perfectly legal four-ton SUV than he can with a banned semi-automatic rifle. In this respect, the will to do harm is the most dangerous weapon we know.

In June 2001, a man armed only with a kitchen knife killed eight children and wounded 21 other students and teachers at an elementary school in gun-free Japan. You know what happened that September on four gun-free American airliners. Nearly 3,000 people were murdered by men armed only with flimsy box cutters. These murderers succeeded because they had the determination to kill and because their victims had been disarmed and trained not to resist. I will return to this last point a little later.

You say you also believe in a free society, but obviously yours would not be as free as mine. I think some rights are immutable, or inalienable, as the Founders would have said. Your example of limiting rights doesn’t hold water, if I may be permitted a little banal humor. Riparian rights have often been a point of conflict, with some people enjoying them at the expense of others. For example, when L.A. ran short of water, rather than rationing its use, the city simply appropriated more from other communities.

Let’s compare this idea to weapons. You believe that unfettered access to firearms would lead to many deaths, but the opposite proves true. When guns are prohibited or even just tightly restricted, then only the criminals will have easy access to them, and these are the people most likely to misuse them.

In the U.S., 37 states now permit their citizens to carry concealed handguns after doing little more than passing a standard criminal-background check. Most of these states adopted such shall-issue permit laws within the last 15 years. Invariably, in each state, the opposition claimed that legal concealed handguns would lead to “blood in the streets.” Minor traffic accidents, casual disagreements, and petty disputes would all escalate into shootouts, they warned. These dire predictions never came to pass. In fact, permit holders have proven to be more law-abiding than the population at large and are even less likely to commit crimes than police officers.

Returning to the guns-vs.-cars comparison, you point out the amount of regulation placed on automobiles and suggest that firearms should be similarly regulated. Many other gun-control advocates also make this argument, and many right-to-arms advocates would happily accept this paradigm! Let’s examine your idea in more detail.

In California, all I need to buy a car is enough money. I may purchase the car from either a licensed dealer or a private individual. I may even buy one in another state. If I want to drive my new vehicle on public roads, however, I must get a driver license, register the car with the Department of Motor Vehicles, and purchase insurance. Once I’ve done these things, I’m free to drive throughout the United States and, for the most part, throughout Canada and Mexico as well.

Getting the driver license is easy. I must pass simple written and practical tests and must be at least 16 years old. Without exception, the DMV will issue a license to any eligible driver who meets these requirements. A California Driver License is valid for four years and may be renewed routinely through the mail.

To buy a handgun in California, I may purchase only through a dealer licensed both by the California Department of Justice and by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. The federal Gun Control Act of 1968 prohibits me from buying a handgun outside of my home state. However, before I can buy the gun, I must be 21 years old and have a Handgun Safety Certificate.

Getting the HSC is also relatively easy. I must take a gun-safety course and then pass a simple written test. The HSC is valid for four years but requires retesting for renewal. As an historical aside, the HSC replaced another safety-certification program that was originally sold as “valid for life,” so we can probably expect even stricter “safety” legislation in the future.

Once I have my HSC, I can finally purchase a handgun from a licensed dealer. However, I may only buy models that have passed a safety inspection by the California DOJ and are not designated as “assault weapons,” and I’m restricted to one handgun per month. In addition to my HSC, I must also provide some additional documentation before I can buy the gun.

To prove my citizenship and residence in California, I must provide the licensed firearms dealer with my CDL (or California ID) and a copy of a utility bill or other legal document showing my California address. Once the dealer has my HSC, CDL, and proof of residence, we can begin the process of legally transferring the handgun to me. First, I must pass a criminal-background check by the California DOJ and the FBI. (Illegal aliens, former felons, drug addicts, alcoholics, subjects of restraining orders, the mentally ill, and those convicted of certain misdemeanors are prohibited from owning firearms.) Though this background check can often be completed within minutes thanks to computerized databases, I must also wait through a 10-day “cooling-off” period required by California law.

At this time, my prospective handgun purchase is also registered with the California DOJ and the BATFE. This legally transfers the gun from the dealer’s inventory to my ownership. Registration allows police to conduct ownership traces for guns recovered from crime scenes and in other situations, but unlike what you see on CSI or Law & Order every week, it is rarely useful in solving crimes.

Once my 10 days are up, I can return to the gun shop, but I had better not wait longer than 30 days, or I must start the whole process over again. Before I can actually take delivery of my new handgun, I must still perform a safe-handling demonstration, provide a thumbprint, and either buy a certified gun lock or prove ownership of an approved gun safe. With that accomplished, I can finally take my gun home, but it must be locked in the trunk of my car separate from any ammunition during the trip.

By law, I may only have my gun at my own residence, on other private property where authorized by the owner, or certain other designated places (shooting ranges, hunting areas, etc.). When transporting it to one of these places, I must keep the gun secured as above. At home, I must also keep my gun stored in such a way that a child or unauthorized adult may not get access to it. If I fail to do so, and an injury or death results, I will also go to prison.

In general, if I want to carry my handgun on my person for defense of myself and my family, I must apply to my local police chief or sheriff for a California concealed-weapons permit. In addition to the application form and fee, I must submit a full set of fingerprints, certification of advanced training, and a statement of cause for issuance of the permit. The sheriff or police chief may then issue or deny the permit at his discretion, even if I meet all the requirements. As you can imagine, very few permits are issued, but when they are, they usually go to the wealthy, famous, or politically connected. Even those with unquestionable need (death threats, protective orders, etc.) are routinely denied permits, and women and minorities are also grossly underrepresented among permit holders.

If I somehow do manage to get a California concealed weapons permit, it is valid only in California. It is also valid for only two years, and renewal involves repeating the entire application process. Unlike my driver license, the permit doesn’t allow me to carry in any other states, let alone Canada and Mexico. There’s something in the U.S. Constitution about “full faith and credit” between states, but nobody cares about that dusty old thing anymore.

So, yes, let’s regulate guns just like we do cars. My handgun license would allow me to buy whatever gun I wanted, even ones that had features I couldn’t legally use on the street. It would also allow me to carry my pistol wherever I go, with very few exceptions. The license would be issued as a matter of course to qualified applicants and could only be revoked in cases of gross negligence or criminal misconduct. Sounds like a great idea!

I’ll leave your anti-government comments aside. Suffice it to say that tyrannical governments murdered something like 170 million mostly unarmed people in the 20th century, far more than all other criminals combined. However, I do want to comment on the slippery slope.

Though the slippery-slope argument if often cited as a logical fallacy, it is an all too accurate description of the history of gun control. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were very few federal restrictions on arms in the U.S. Private citizens could and did own everything from pistols and rifles to machine guns and artillery. That changed with the National Firearms Act of 1934, which strictly regulated machine guns and a few other odds and ends by taxing their transfer. At that time, the Congress still recognized that it didn’t have the Constitutional authority to actually prohibit weapons, but it was able to impose taxes that had much the same effect.

The Federal Firearms Act of 1938 imposed the licensing system for firearms dealers that continues to this day. This system also serves as a de facto gun-registration program. Dealers must retain sales records for at least 20 years. If a gun dealership goes out of business or changes ownership within this period, all records must be turned over to the BATFE.

The Gun Control Act of 1968 was the next big infringement on the right to keep and bear arms. It prohibited interstate and mail-order sales, required the registration of ammunition purchases, and prohibited the importation of “non-sporting” firearms. Except for the import ban, most of these things were merely inconvenient, but they set the stage for the more egregious gun-control legislation that was to follow.

The so-called Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 eliminated ammunition registration, which had proven completely useless in solving crimes, but prohibited the sale of new machine guns to private citizens. Market forces quickly moved these weapons out of reach for all but the wealthiest people (in states where ownership was still legal). Incidentally, there have only been two crimes committed with legally owned machine guns in the last 70 years, and both of those were perpetrated by police officers.

In 1994, both the Violent Crime Control Act, which attempted to ban a variety of semi-automatic rifles, and the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which imposed background checks and waiting periods, were passed by the Congress. After 10 years, both of these “laws” have proven largely ineffective at reducing crime. To be fair, thousands of transactions have been denied by the National Instant Check System, but few of the presumably prohibited persons have been prosecuted, in part because NICS generates too many erroneous rejections.

After 70 years of federal gun-control legislation, the slippery slope is clearly in effect. Where Congress once had to use backdoor means to regulate firearms, it can now brazenly pass obviously unconstitutional laws. Every single year, new gun-control bills are proposed, while laws that have proven ineffective at reducing crime linger on the books for decades. In unguarded moments, gun-control advocates such as Diane Feinstein and Josh Sugarmann have readily admitted that total prohibition is the long-term goal behind their legislative agendas.

The expiration of the federal “assault-weapons” ban is the first significant change in this pattern. Of course, like California, many individual states have enacted their own bans. As far as that goes, our state has already slid much further down the slippery slope, and almost every year some new bit of gun control becomes “law” here. We’re after semi-automatic handguns and bolt-action rifles right now.

Most state gun-control laws began to appear after the Civil War and were intended to prevent former slaves from arming themselves. These “laws” routinely went unenforced against whites. However, this had changed by the 1960s and ‘70s as overt racist law-enforcement practices had been largely weeded out. Thus began the wave of concealed-carry reform in the 1980s and ‘90s, which has been about the only trend away from more gun control in the last 140 years. Of course, concealed-carry laws are still a form of gun control.

But maybe my history lesson is a wasted effort, as you declare that “the foundations upon which history was forged have eroded,” implying as gun-control advocates often do that firearms have little relevance in our modern, civilized state. Setting the historical chauvinism aside completely, I would still argue that the right to keep and bear arms is more relevant than ever. This brings me back to that horrible morning in September.

A few men armed with only the most meager of weapons were able to murder thousands. Why? Because we have decided that criminals are the lowest common denominator of society, so now we treat everyone as a possible criminal. We disarmed the people on those airplanes, told them not to resist, and condemned them and thousands more to death.

Now, we are spending billions of dollars on a dangerously misguided Department of Homeland Security and a comically misnamed Transportation Security Administration more intent on treating airline passengers like prison inmates than on implementing meaningful security measures. Meanwhile, the politicians run around pointing fingers of blame at everyone but themselves. It’s all nonsense, because we’ve had a homeland-security measure written into our Constitution for over 200 years. It says “being necessary for the security of a free State,” but we have neither freedom nor security.

For 30 years, if not longer, the “authorities” have taught us that the best way to survive a violent crime is to comply with the attacker’s wishes. I bought into this until September 11th, when we all saw the appalling consequences of that advice. Then I looked at FBI crime data for myself and found out that it had been a lie all along. According to our own government, the best way to survive a violent crime is to resist with a gun.

And so we return to my question. Why should something be prohibited if it harms no one? Why should we treat people like criminals only because of what they might do? If we ban guns, why stop there? Why not ban cars, matches, cigarettes, baseball bats, swimming pools, kitchen knives, stairs, and household poisons, all of which are involved in many, many injuries and deaths, both intentional and unintentional?

You ask if things should “be made legal just because their illegality fails to curtail them to a certain level?” My answer is yes, in some cases. With gun control, for example, additional laws can only affect the law-abiding. Criminals have long been prohibited from owning and using firearms, so additional laws can do nothing to further curtail their misuse of guns.

The so-called war on drugs is another example of a colossal failure in crime reduction. We prohibited certain drugs “for the public good,” but at the same time, we created a hugely profitable black market that generated ancillary crime that has proven even worse than the original problem. Decriminalizing drugs would drastically reduce the violence and theft associated with the drug trade without substantially increasing drug abuse. This is exactly the lesson we were taught but failed to learn during the years of alcohol prohibition.

Ironically, the advance of gun control is inextricably connected to both alcohol prohibition and the “war on drugs.” The crime wave that resulted from alcohol bootlegging led to the National Firearms Act of 1934. The escalation of the drug war in the 1980s helped bring on the machine-gun and “assault-weapons” bans. Throw in the civil-rights movement and the political assassinations of the 1960s, and you get the Gun Control Act of 1968. In all cases, the law-abiding citizens have paid the price for the behavior of career criminals and a few social misfits.

Finally, I offered to teach you how to shoot because a little education can never hurt. I don’t know if you’ve ever shot or even handled a firearm before, but most people who haven’t done so have learned all their firearms “knowledge” from movies and television. I can assure you, though, that guns are not nearly as easy to operate and not nearly as powerful as they usually appear in these entertainment media. Anyway, the invitation still stands.

In the end, I hope you can see that guns (even semi-automatic rifles) have a legitimate place alongside fire extinguishers, seat belts, first-aid kits, and other emergency equipment. Guns aren’t for everyone, but they shouldn’t be forbidden to anyone who hasn’t proven irresponsible. That’s all I’m asking here.

To date, Mr. Rogers has yet to reply again. I know my position is right and think my arguments were superior, so I’ll take that as a “victory” in this debate. It’s unfortunate, though, that he wouldn’t take the opportunity to learn even a little about a subject he was ready to pass judgment on. It’s even more unfortunate that most people are like Mr. Rogers, regardless of what natural right or civil liberty is under discussion.

Debunking “Grandma”

We all get them: those endlessly forwarded e-mail messages warning about the latest computer virus, propagating yet another helpful/profitable e-mail forwarding scheme, or simply sharing some kernel of happy wisdom. While the former categories are usually urban legends and often obviously false, the latter type can be more subtly deceptive. These paeans to better times are often just as untrue as Microsoft/Intel/AOL/whoever opening itself to catastrophic financial obligations through some ill-advised mass e-mail forwarding scheme, but they are often disguised as folksy wisdom or make appeals to “common sense.”

For example, take this tale about a boy’s conversation with his “grandmother.” To me, it looks like the story was written perhaps a few years ago by someone a bit older than my own mother. (After all, 58 is hardly “old.”) He or she wrote this story about how “things were better back then” based on “common knowledge” that wasn’t quite so accurate. The moment I read it, I knew several points were wrong (TV, radar, marijuana use, etc.), and a few minutes of research not only proved that but showed “grandma” would have to be over 100 years old for most of it to be accurate, setting aside the parochial value judgments.

Here is the original story in its entirety. My response follows. When I see this silly stuff, I just can’t help myself from taking it apart.

How old is GRANDMA?

Stay with this—the answer is at the end—it will blow you away.

One evening a grandson was talking to his grandmother about current events.

The grandson asked his grandmother what she thought about the shootings at schools, the computer age, and just things in general.

The Grandma replied, “Well, let me think a minute[.] I was born, before television, penicillin, polio shots, frozen foods, Xerox, contact lenses, Frisbees and the pill. There was no radar, credit cards, laser beams or ball-point pens.

“Man had not invented pantyhose, air conditioners, dishwashers, clothes dryers, and the clothes were hung out to dry in the fresh air and man hadn’t yet walked on the moon.

“Your Grandfather and I got married first—and then lived together.

“Every family had a father and a mother. Until I was 25, I called every man older than I, ‘Sir’—and after I turned 25, I still called policemen and every man with a title, ‘Sir.’ We were before gay-rights, computer-dating, dual careers, day-care centers, and group therapy. Our lives were governed by the Ten Commandments, good judgment, and common sense. We were taught to know the difference between right and wrong and to stand up and take responsibility for our actions.

“Serving your country was a privilege; living in this country was a bigger privilege.

“We thought fast food was what people ate during Lent. Having a meaningful relationship meant getting along with your cousins. Draft dodgers were people who closed their front doors when the evening breeze started.

“Time-sharing meant time the family spent together in the evenings and weekends—not purchasing condominiums.

“We never heard of FM radios, tape decks, CDs, electric typewriters, yogurt, or guys wearing earrings.

“We listened to the Big Bands, Jack Benny, and the President’s speeches on our radios. And I don’t ever remember any kid blowing his brains out listening to Tommy Dorsey.

“If you saw anything with ‘Made in Japan’ on it, it was junk. The term ‘making out’ referred to how you did on your school exam.

“Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, and instant coffee were unheard of. We had 5 &10-cent stores where you could actually buy things for 5 and 10 cents.

“Ice-cream cones, phone calls, rides on a streetcar, and a Pepsi were all a nickel. And if you didn’t want to splurge, you could spend your nickel on enough stamps to mail 1 letter and 2 postcards.

“You could buy a new Chevy Coupe for $600, but who could afford one?

“Too bad, because gas was 11 cents a gallon.

“In my day, ‘grass’ was mowed, ‘coke’ was a cold drink, ‘pot’ was something your mother cooked in, and ‘rock music’ was your grandmother’s lullaby.

“ ‘Aids’ were helpers in the Principal’s office, ‘chip’ meant a piece of wood, ‘hardware’ was found in a hardware store, and ‘software’ wasn’t even a word.

“And we were the last generation to actually believe that a lady needed a husband to have a baby. No wonder people call us ‘old and confused’ and say there is a generation gap.....

“[A]nd how old do you think I am???.....”

Read on to see—pretty scary if you think about it and pretty sad at the same time. This [w]oman would be only 58 years old!

So “grandma” is only 58 years old. Well, 58 years ago, it was A.D. 1945 …

Television had been invented over a decade earlier, though TV sets were still very rare. Alexander Fleming had discovered penicillin in 1922 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945. The polio vaccine, developed by Jonas Salk, went into use a few years later in 1955. Frozen foods, however, had been on the market since the 1930s. The photocopier had also been invented in that decade. Patented by Chester F. Carlson in 1939, the new invention was widely available by 1950, thanks to the Xerox Corporation. Contact lenses, on the other hand, had been conceived all the way back in the 16th century by none other than Leonardo da Vinci! The first glass lenses hadn’t appeared until 1887, however, and plastic lenses didn’t arrive until 1939. As for the Frisbee, Yale University claims that one of its students had “invented” the flying disc as early as 1820. More than likely, though, it was simply developed by bored college students tossing empty Frisbie Baking Company pie tins back and forth for amusement sometime after 1871.

It’s true that the birth-control pill didn’t become widely available until 1960, but its development owed a lot to the pioneering family-planning efforts of Margaret Sanger in the early 20th century, and the science behind it had been established in the 1930s. The first practical radar systems had also been developed in the 1930s, and radar became an important technology for the Allied forces during the Second World War. The first credit cards weren’t introduced until 1950, but more limited retail credit systems had been in use since the 1920s, and the concept of “credit” dates back at least 3,000 years. While laser technology wasn’t invented until the late 1950s, the modern ball-point pen was developed in the early 1940s and introduced to the U.S. market in—you guessed it—1945, the year the Second World War ended.

During the war, nylon stockings were hard to come by, but they had first gone on sale in 1940. Perhaps “grandma” was talking about spandex pantyhose, which didn’t appear until 1959. Maybe it was just too hot back then for her to remember clearly, which is too bad, because the modern air conditioner had already been invented back in 1902 by Willis Haviland Carrier. As for other household appliances, the first mechanical dishwasher had appeared in 1893, but they didn’t really take off until the 1920s. Clothes washers and dryers were both invented in the 19th century. At least “grandma” remembered that the first manned moon landing took place in 1969.

“Grandma” may have married “grandfather” before living with him, but marriage has never been so legally clear cut as she implied. In centuries past, a couple could be considered married simply by publicly declaring it so. As another example, the Celtic cultures of western Europe followed the practice of “handfasting,” a kind of non-permanent trial marriage, for thousands of years before Christian concepts of matrimony came to dominate. These are the origins of modern common-law marriage, where actual fact outweighs the lack of civil or religious ceremonies. And computer dating is just the latest iteration in the ancient tradition of professional matchmaking.

Family cohesion was also a myth. Divorces were simply harder to come by. “Illegitimate” births and absent parents were just as rampant then as they are today, if not more so. Maybe people had more respect for authority, but there was also a lot less authority to respect. I can’t understand why “grandma” was so eager to call a policeman “sir.” Police officers are public employees who serve at the behest and sufferance of the people and as such are no more worthy of respect than the common taxpayer. Indeed, it is the police who should always be ready with a “sir” or “ma’am.”

There may have been no gay rights in “grandma’s” early youth, but there were also few women’s rights. Women were still legal chattel, in many respects, and homosexuals could be beaten and murdered almost with impunity, which was all just fine according the Bible “grandma” so loved. I would much rather people governed their lives by the ten articles of the Bill of Rights than the Ten Commandments of a frequently mistranslated old religious tract.

In “grandma’s” youth, serving your country was more an obligation than a privilege. The draft was ended in 1973, giving the U.S. an all-volunteer military for the first time in its history. Until then, many people dodged the draft and even rioted against it, because they didn’t like the idea of being conscripted to fight and possibly die for causes they didn’t support. And living in the U.S. is certainly good luck but not a privilege, unless you are a foreign immigrant, of course.

The first commercial FM radio broadcast was in 1941, before “grandma” was born, but AM radio had already been around for two decades. Phillips introduced the cassette tape in 1962, but recording on magnetic tape had been in practice since the 1930s. Laser discs were developed in the 1970s, and compact discs became commercially available in the U.S. in 1983. The first electric typewriter was actually introduced in 1902! Yogurt or yogurt-like foods have been around for thousands of years, and earrings on men have gone in and out of fashion throughout recorded history.

No one has ever killed himself because of a song, a movie, or a book, though any one of these can provide terminal inspiration for a suicidal person. Today, recorded suicide rates for children are higher than in “grandma’s” youth, but fewer adults kill themselves now than then. Apparently, in “grandma’s” day, people just waited longer to off themselves. Of course, I also have to wonder how many childhood suicides were reported as “accidents” and how many adult murders were passed off as “suicides” back then.

At the beginning of 1945, the Pacific War was still raging. In 1933, the Japanese had introduced the “Long Lance” torpedo, with a maximum range three times that of American torpedoes. I doubt the American sailors who faced this weapon considered it “junk.”

The first instant coffee was invented by a Japanese-American chemist in 1901, but the stuff wasn’t mass-produced until 1906. (Incidentally, the first coffee house was opened in Italy around 1645, nearly 500 years before Starbucks!) The first McDonald’s franchise opened in 1955, but the McDonald brothers had been selling hamburgers in California since the 1940s. The Carney brothers opened the first Pizza Hut three years later in 1958.

Most things cost less back when “grandma” was born, but everyone also earned less. Unfortunately, prices have indeed gone up faster than most salaries. However, there are exceptions. In 1946, an RCA black-and-white TV set sold for $435. In 2003, an RCA color TV can be had for as little as $75. Furthermore, in 1945, the average car cost $1,250, and a gallon of gasoline was 21¢.

Cannabis (or marijuana) was legal throughout much of the U.S. until federal prohibitions were enacted in the 1950s. Back then, it was often called “reefer.” Of course, Coca-Cola was named after one of its original ingredients: cocaine. That narcotic was ultimately banned in 1914. The “war on drugs” launched against these and other substances has been the greatest cause of erosion to our civil liberties since Prohibition and until the current “war on terror.”

The AIDS virus (HIV) most likely infected humans for the first time in the 1930s. With the development of integrated circuits, microchips were essentially invented in 1959, though the term didn’t appear until the 1970s. Hardware can still be bought in hardware stores, but software is all around us.

Finally, women have never needed husbands to have babies. All a woman needs for that is a willing man and a few minutes of his time.

“Grandma” may well be “old and confused,” but I think she is just ignorant.