Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [103]
All the noise and dust generated by the debate over the true meaning of the Second Amendment obscures a fundamental question: Who cares? I recognize: that here I am inviting the NRA to do a little joyful editing and display this sentence in one of its ads or better yet in one of its emergency Minuteman mailings. (I say now, it’s okay, boys, you have my permission.) In fact, the Second Amendment does not, and never has, prohibited robust regulation of firearms, not even the NRA-conjured bogey, national registration of firearms.
Rather than viewing federal firearms regulation as the first step toward tyranny, as the NRA propagandists propose, we should see it as a means of ensuring that we can still enjoy the liberty we do have. We live now under the increasing restrictions of a particularly pernicious kind of tyranny that has sharply proscribed the contours of our lives. We do not go out at night without first considering the risks involved in doing so. Already many of us consider vast portions of America off-limits to us because of the potential for gun violence. We run red lights at lonely intersections. We choose our gas stations with care. We park as closely as possible to the entrances of our favorite malls. We avoid certain automated teller machines. When we pull up at our neighborhood 7-Eleven store, we look carefully through the display windows to see if the place is being held up. We do not intercede when we encounter an altercation among teenage boys because one or both may have a gun. We don’t dare yell at drivers who drive too fast through our neighborhoods. When our cars are hit from behind, we keep driving until we reach the nearest police station. In happier times this was called leaving the scene of an accident; now even my insurance company advises the practice.
Today when we send our kids off to school, we experience a brand-new kind of anxiety, the fear not that some bully will rough them up and steal their lunch money, but that they will be shot dead. What are we to advise our children today when they come home complaining of harassment by the school bully? Do we teach them how to fight, as Ward Cleaver might have taught “the Beave,” or do we buy them Kevlar vests and tell them to stay low? Should we buy our kids Raven pocket semiautomatics? A 1993 survey by Louis Harris found that four out of ten students said the fear of violence had sharply altered what they did with their free time and whom they picked to be their friends. These students lived in rural, suburban, and urban neighborhoods. Fifty-five percent said they wished their schools had metal detectors. In a related survey, Harris found that 59 percent of adults saw the dangers from guns as “serious” as or “more serious” than car crashes. Even the NRA’s rank and file seem troubled. Thirty-four percent of the NRA members captured in Harris’s survey agreed “young people’s safety is endangered by there being so many guns around these days.”
I read with rueful delight a 1993 cartoon by Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Constitution, which showed an Arab terrorist squad in a bomb-packed car receiving some last-minute advice before heading for America. “Remember, carry a map. If you get lost, you may end up in a bad neighborhood. If someone rear-ends you, don’t get out. They may be armed carjackers. Keep your doors locked.…”
In 1975, a congressional subcommittee asked the NRA’s Harlon Carter if he felt it was preferable to allow felons, drug addicts, and the mentally ill to acquire guns, rather than to establish a means of checking the backgrounds of all buyers. Yes, Carter responded, it was “a price we pay for freedom.”
We are advised today by the NRA and the likes of Paxton Quigley not to fight like the devil to free ourselves from the new tyranny of the gun, but to arm ourselves. The more guns the better. To anyone raised in the Vietnam War era, surely, this position has a disconcertingly familiar ring. For what is the