I keep looking at our opponents, and I see the same ideas turned around and around again on the turntable like a skipping old 78. Calling for “common sense,” calling for “sensible legislation,” to an audience, like that of some washed up rock star that continues to tour, that increasingly just isn’t there, or isn’t listening.
Our opponents are beyond arguing for action, and they don’t even realize it. The philosophical basis for their movement was largely based on the possibility of achieving prohibition, and with prohibition off the table, rather than rebuild their movement around different philosophical assumptions, they keep pushing the same old in the hopes that a some point, maybe someday, the fans will come back and the seats will be filled. Even MAIG, which is certainly ripe with novel tactics, and new ideas, is still no more than a second rate cover band.
The reason they have not rethought their movement is that any new assumptions will be deeply dissatisfying to those who support the gun control agenda. I think being hemmed in by Brady’s post Heller contradictions is driving poor Joan Peterson nuts, because it represents the best they can do, not what she’d ideally like to advocate. I can’t believe she’s an atypical supporter either, because I’ve run into a lot of Joan Peterson’s out there. But how many will keep with the issue in the face of the ever evolving reality working against their viewpoint?
Prohibition, or a near prohibition, was a necessary goal for their movement, and it’s necessary because of the nature of gun control. Gun control only affects criminals at the margins. In a regulatory regime where law abiding people are relatively free to purchase firearms, criminals are going to fairly easily obtain them. I think that’s a fundamental truth against which the gun control proponents have no valid argument. A background check, a form, or rationing is only going to stop an idiot or someone who’s really not determined. Given that there are undetermined idiots out there who want to commit crimes, I have no doubt background checks have stopped some potential crimes, but because this happens at the margin, it doesn’t show up in overall violent crime statistics, and doesn’t really do a whole lot to make society safer.
The only way you can expand the margins is to make guns harder to get for law abiding people, and as we’ve pointed out repeatedly, even total prohibition isn’t going to stop smart, determined criminals. It’s certainly not going to stop gangs and drug dealers who are responsible for most of the violent crime in this country, and who already traffic in contraband. But one could argue with credibility that prohibition would make it harder for certain classes of potential criminals, who don’t have black market connections, to get guns. One could counter that it would also make it much harder for ordinary people to get guns and defend themselves from the criminals, and there will be many, who will still get them anyway. But my point is that when prohibition is the philosophical root, there’s a lot more room to speculate, posture, and debate. It may be an unachievable, Utopian idea, but it’s an idea that’s deeply satisfying to those who blame the gun for societies ills.
I would posit that without prohibition, the gun control movement is nothing. The ironic thing is, from my readings, a lot of the the old school members of the movement to ban handguns understood this. Everything to them was an incremental step designed to break the back of the gun culture in this country so they could get to their eventual goal. The post Heller movement has, on their face, accepted the implications of a real Second Amendment right, but in their souls I don’t believe they have. So they are stuck arguing pointless measures that have no prayer of doing a damned thing to stop people who want to commit crimes from getting guns. Their predecessors understood this stuff to be pointless, if it wasn’t getting them farther to the goal. The remaining gun control supporters cling bitterly to the remnant scraps of what once was. How long before the gig is up, and even the die hards realize it?
