Do you feel badly, Mr. and Mrs. America, knowing how much you’ve let down the leaders of nation’s gun control industry in the last few weeks? Because you really should.
All of you who are buying firearms, particularly you first-timers, have really disappointed our moral and intellectual betters in the anti-gun community.
Sure, police departments are stretched so thin that they’re letting it be known they’ll only respond to the most serious situations. That’s exactly what millions of people were concerned about when the President declared a national emergency.
But that’s also what has the Shannon Watts and Peter Amblers of the world so terrified. All of those people lining up at their local gun stores, sometimes for hours, have shown in the clearest possible terms, that Americans want to own the tools to protect themselves and their families if need be.
The fact that a huge percentage of those gun buyers have never bought a gun before — people who had previously bought into the Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex’s arguments about why they shouldn’t have a firearm in their homes — absolutely horrifies the Brady Campaign, Giffords, Moms Demand Action and all the rest of them.
As a result, Brady’s panicked chief counsel and VP has had to reach back to an obscure Georgia Supreme court ruling to try to bolster his desperately pathetic argument that the Founders intended you to call the police when you’re attacked, rather than having the means to defend yourself and those you love.
As one court put it in 1874 — near the Constitutionally-relevant time of the 14th Amendment — it would be “absurd” to suppose that the framers “took it for granted that their whole scheme of law and order, and government and protection, would be a failure and that the people, instead [of] depending upon the laws and the public authorities for protection, were each man to take care of himself, and to be always ready to resist to the death, then and there, all opposers.” On the contrary, the Court went on, the Framers envisioned “a well ordered and civilized community.”
That should be our vision still, perhaps now more than ever.
We don’t know when, but we will come out of these strange, unsettling days. Coronavirus will go away. There will be a vaccine. But there is no vaccine to eliminate the very real dangers of bringing an unsecured gun in your home, and the impact on every member of that household, from unintentional injuries to domestic violence to suicide.
The heightened risk of all of those injuries that claim lives every day will be permanently increased by the actions people take today.
And when we come out of this coronavirus, we must recommit to repairing the breaches of our society and establishing a caring community in which Americans recognize we are in this together, as a nation and, indeed, a world. Stockpiling firearms is not the answer and is contradictory to the very notions of government and society upon which our nation was founded.
– Jonathan Lowy in Guns in the coronavirus age