Michael C. Hurley has an article at the American Thinker today, entitled The Gun Control Canard. Hurley is an attorney, and in some ways his writing reminds me of another attorney and writer on the Second Amendment named Jeff Snyder, who wrote A Nation of Cowards. That book is long out of print, and I have lost my copy of it. But I remember reading it and thinking that Snyder made the best case for the Second Amendment that I could remember.
I often present arguments from a Christian and religious worldview because...well...I am a Christian. (Not a very good Christian, mind you. None of us are. I like to think of Church as being a sinners' anonymous club.) But Hurley presents the same arguments from a rational and a more neutral perspective, and it is equally compelling:
Facebook can be a place where silly people say silly things, and I have at times been one of them. But after the recent “transgender” shooting at Annunciation School in Minneapolis, in a moment of gravity I decided to post something obvious to me that seemed less obvious to others: that a boy who thinks he is a girl—or a horse or a dog or a cat or anything else that he is not—is unwell. It may be just a phase that, with time and maturity, he will outgrow. But this delusion, if it persists, does not cease to be a delusion. It becomes something evil and malign, which, if fostered and encouraged, will grow to greater evil and malignancy. For this reason, I contended, we should no more “affirm” or celebrate mental illness in the form of gender dysphoria than we would tell a young girl suffering from anorexia, “yes, you really are fat and need to lose more weight.”
You see what I mean. You wouldn't advice a girl with anorexia to lose more weight. So why do we think we should tell the delusional person that thinks they were "born in the wrong body" that they in fact were? The Left is clearly playing us, and we should acknowledge the Left's deceit and seek help for a loved one who is delusional. Going along with the gag is proving that you don't really care about that person.
Voices on the left are wont to show that America has the highest rate of gun-ownership and one of the highest rates of gun-related homicides of any country in the world. Their notion is that one is the cause of the other, which is rather much in doubt.
First, some perspective: If you have traveled anywhere overseas, you know that America has more of everything, and not just guns. We have more varieties of peanut butter than anyone, more supermarkets than anyone, and more cars full of more people at the supermarkets buying more peanut butter than anyone. That’s just unbridled capitalism, and America does capitalism better than anybody. If you’re an American company selling fishing rods, fly swatters, window treatments, or shotguns, your mission is to make more of them, and sell more of them, and do it faster and better than anybody. That’s what Henry Ford taught us. That’s the American Way. It’s why we’re (still) the biggest economy on the planet, and it’s also why we have the most TVs and the most guns. But it’s not the reason why we have more gun crime.
Just as Charlie Kirk was shot, he was answering a question about what percentage of mass shootings have involved transgender shooters, the questioner’s intended point presumably being that the percentage is rather low. To this question, Charlie was heard to ask, “counting or not counting gang violence?” Charlie’s life ended with those words, and that is the very place where we should begin the present debate about gun control.
America’s gun crime is not a problem of Cousin Jerry taking his deer rifle down to shoot up the local Piggly Wiggly. Our high rate of gun violence is greatly skewed by the rate of inner-city gang violence. These casualties arise mostly from turf-wars among gangs selling narcotics and using unregistered or stolen guns, which is to say they would be completely unaffected by any law or “good citizen” program to register or confiscate firearms. Anyone convinced of the power of gun-control laws to stop gun crime should ask whether laws against possession of narcotics have stopped the influx of illegal drugs over the last sixty years.
The best way to reduce gang-related gun crime is to imprison the gangbangers, which big-city Democrat mayors have long refused to do because of the racial optics involved, and which President Trump is now attempting to do over the howling objections of many on the left because of the racial optics involved. But as Charlie Kirk surely knew, once the rate of gun crime in America is corrected for gang-related violence, the overall incidence of mass shootings becomes less remarkable and the relative number of transgender shooters somewhat more remarkable in turn.
Putting gangbangers in prison, for the most part black and Hispanic gang members, may seem to be racially motivated, but of course it isn't. They cause most of the crime. The defense of doing so is that the gangbangers largely prey on hard working black and Hispanic communities. These people are often silent, but they deserve to live free of crime. But so long as big city mayors tolerate gangbangers in their city, the citizens who are preyed upon must be allowed to defend themselves.
We might once have thought that the need to arm oneself against the government was a relic of colonial history, but consider how different the history of the 20th century would have been had the Nazis encountered a cocked and loaded gun behind the door of every Jewish home. And no less needed today are weapons to defend ourselves when the government refuses to act, as we saw during the “Summer of Love” following the death of George Floyd, when police departments across the country were inexplicably defunded and ordered to stand down in the false name of “racial equity.”
Gentle readers are urged to go read Hurley's article. We need more writers like him on our side.
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