Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
That was a quick in and a quick out for the gun control bill Sen. Philip Baruth, D-Chittenden, filed Jan. 15 and withdrew last week. But who cares? The bill was more symbol than substance anyway.
With semi-automatic rifles easily purchased in most of the country (though not, anymore, neighboring New York), banning them in one small state wasn’t going to have a measurable impact on their possession or proliferation.
But the politics of the gun control debate in Vermont and elsewhere are quite substantial, and often misunderstood.
First, beware the widespread assumption (central to the “cover story” in Sunday’s “Burlington Free Press”) that Baruth’s decision to scuttle the bill proves that most Vermonters opposed it. Absent a statewide poll, there’s no way to know for sure, but the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. Three recent polls show that a majority of all Americans favor such a ban. The majorities are bigger in the Northeast and biggest – 76 percent according to the latest survey – among self-identified Democrats. There’s little reason to believe that most voters in this Northeastern state full of self-identified Democrats disagree with their counterparts elsewhere.
But as former President Bill Clinton said last week, majorities often do not prevail when they lack the passion of their opponents. Gun control, Clinton said, is “a voting issue” largely to those who are against it.
As Vermont just saw, proposals to ban semi-automatic weapons provoke furious philosophical debates over the Constitution. But the legislation itself presents lawmakers with a choice which is neither philosophical nor constitutional. It is limited and technical.
That’s because, though partisans on both sides try to avoid this truth, the United States already has gun control, and has had it for decades The 2008 District of Columbia vs. Heller decision established that the “right to keep and bear arms” applied to individuals, whether or not they belonged to “a well-regulated militia.”
But the right is by no means absolute. Under Heller, it can be limited to protect public safety, and it is. Convicted felons and the mentally ill retain the rights of free speech and assembly, but they may not own a gun. No one may own a grenade launcher, an artillery gun, or a fully-automatic machine gun, and the clear implication of Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in Heller is that these bans pass constitutional muster.
So there are two rather narrow questions before lawmakers considering a ban on semi-automatic weapons: 1. Are they such a threat to public safety that they should be banned? 2. Even if they are, would banning them save lives, or simply be, in the words of National Rifle Association President David Keene, a “feel-good” policy?
That’s all. Members of Congress or state legislatures need not tie themselves into philosophical knots.
But the knots keep being tied, largely because neither side approaches the debate in an entirely rational frame of mind. Many gun control advocates are not merely pro-control, but anti-gun, even anti-gun owner. This is less a rational judgment than an emotional sentiment, and a sentiment that seems to ignore both logic and experience.
Guns can be both useful and enjoyable. Some people choose to keep them for self-defense. One can debate the wisdom of that choice. But it’s hard to argue that the law should deny them the right to make it. At any rate, the Heller decision effectively ended the argument. That right to choose is protected by the Constitution.
Besides, guns are fun. They are all but indispensable for hunting, which (there are too many deer) more people ought to do more often. Assuming the shooters are considerate about how much noise they make and where they make it, target-shooting is a harmless pleasure. Guns are interesting and often beautiful mechanical objects. Some people enjoy fiddling with them the way others fiddle with cars or electronic sound equipment. For this, they need not be scorned.
But scorn seems to drip copiously from the lips of some supporter of stronger gun control laws, scorn not only of guns, but of those who enjoy them.
Who often respond in kind, and many of whom make one big logical and historical error. It is this error that forms the basis of the extraordinary passion of defenders of “gun rights:” the conviction that the individual ownership of firearms is necessary if Americans are to remain free, that only an armed citizenry can prevent government tyranny. “My gun protects your freedom,” reads the bumper sticker.
It does not. History tells us it never did and common sense that it never can.
The first armed uprising against the U.S. government was the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s, when some Pennsylvania farmers threatened to shoot federal agents collecting a tax on booze. It failed. Nor was it a rebellion against government tyranny, which explains why President George Washington himself led the troops who suppressed it. Washington knew that while taxation without representation was tyranny, taxation levied by the duly elected representatives of the people is democracy.
The biggest armed uprising, or course, occurred in 1861. It failed, too. Its purpose was to defend slavery, not freedom, and it was not individual gun-owners rising up; it was treasonous states.
Since then, hundreds of armed American citizens have used their guns to oppose federal policy. The goal of the vast majority of these pathetic uprisings was to keep the descendants of the slaves in a condition as close to slavery as possible. Presumably, one might argue that Neshoba County (Miss.) Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, Edgar Ray “The Preacher” Killen, and their allies were defending freedom when they murdered James Cheney, Mickey Schwerner and Andy Goodman in the summer of 1964.
It’s a tough sell.
Over the years, the term most commonly used to describe the armed individual rebel has been “terrorist.” Some of them had legitimate grievances. But the remedy for those grievances was in law and politics, not in armed rebellion. Never in the history of the United States have individuals with guns protected freedom. And it is all but impossible that any will do so in the future. As Gov. Earl Long of Louisiana told arch-segregationist Leander Perez back in the 1950s, “Forget it, Leander. Da Feds got da A-bomb.” They still do. And the rocket launchers, artillery systems and disabling gasses no one else may possess.
Were the government to become tyrannical, it will make no difference if the brave citizen turning out seditious screeds in his basement has a semi-automatic weapon. Well, maybe he’d be able to take out one or two of the soldiers coming to get him before they blew him away or carted him off to their gulag. But neither his nor anyone else’s freedom would be protected.
The belief that “my gun protects your freedom” is inherently Maoist. It agrees with the late, Great Helmsman that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
Not here, it doesn’t, at least not according to the system of government created by the Constitution and refined over these last 223 years. Here power grows from the people and liberty is preserved by the Constitution, an independent judiciary, the orderly processes of government and politics, an independent and inquisitive press, and an electorate determined to remain free.
Government sometimes does try to enlarge its powers in ways that threaten personal freedom. The only effective resistance to this over-reach is in the courtroom or at the polling place. The gun is irrelevant.
This seems too much to ask, but if only one side in this debate could purge itself of its snobbery and the other of its delusion, the state and the country could have a civilized discussion here. Don’t hold your breath.
