Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [101]
12
SECOND AMENDMENT REMEDIES
Persecuted Gun Owners Team Up with White Christian
Conservatives; Violence and Mayhem Ensue
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
—Thomas Jefferson
WHEN GLENN BECK PLAYED a clip from a Van Jones speech and asked his audience, “Did that sound like you, Iowa?” I chuck-led a bit. Beck’s story depicts a vast blanket of Real America spreading smoothly across the continent, lacerated in places by jagged holes of progressive degeneracy in and around San Francisco, Washington, DC, and other cities of ill repute. But I grew up in Iowa, a state that votes Democratic almost as often as Beck’s native Washington State. Beck might be alarmed to learn that Tom Harkin, Iowa’s popular and long-serving Democratic senator, once wrote an article called “Why I Am a Progressive Populist” in which he stated, “The Democratic agenda remains rooted in the progressive-populist tradition that has made the party strong and the country even stronger.”1 One of the city councilwomen in my hometown of Iowa City was an abortion rights activist and a member of the Socialist Party. She broke a record for the most votes in a reelection campaign. 2 Yet despite all the Constitution-devouring progressives running amok through the prairie, the citizens of Iowa City all turn out patriotically for the city’s annual Fourth of July celebration.
Like other kids in Iowa City, I learned about the Constitution in my high school government class. Our assistant teacher for the class was a staunch libertarian. I distinctly remember a discussion with him about gun rights. He was a pudgy man with glasses, bookish and intelligent, not the kind of person I associated with gun enthusiasts. Iowa is a hunting state, full of pickup trucks with mounted gun racks and living rooms with antlers on the walls, so government protection of hunting privileges made sense to me. Gun violence was uncommon in Iowa’s mostly peaceful cities and towns, but I could also understand how people from violence-wracked big cities might want to carry a pistol for self-defense. Government protection for assault weapons, however, was incomprehensible to me. You don’t shoot deer with an AK-47, and it won’t fit in your purse. I assumed that the NRA’s opposition to assault weapons bans was based on the slippery slope argument that outlawing assault weapons would lead to a total ban on guns.
When I asked my libertarian student teacher about it after class, he presented a different argument. He believed that it was important for the citizenry to be armed in order to protect itself against government totalitarianism. This argument was novel and astounding to me. According to my Reagan-era understanding of American politics, it was the flag-burning, bleeding-heart liberals who were supposed to fear and hate the U.S. government, not the militaristic star-spangled conservatives. More than anything else I learned from that government class, this conversation stands out in my memory. To this day, when I hear people like Glenn Beck warn of totalitarianism, I imagine my nerdy, overweight student teacher valiantly fending off a fleet of black helicopters with his semiautomatic AK-47, a weathered copy of the Constitution protruding from his back pocket. Vive la résistance!
This vision is no joke to millions of NRA members. Recall that Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) told Glenn Beck that one of the things “that someone who wants to establish an authoritarian type of government needs to do” is to institute gun control. Though he is surely a clever man, Broun did not invent this notion himself. It has long been an element of NRA gospel. According to Harlon Carter, executive vice-presidentck of the NRA from 1977 to 1985:
Gun prohibition is the inevitable harbinger of oppression. It can only be pursued by “no-knock” laws under which jack-booted minions of government invade the homes of citizens; by “stop-and-frisk