Another Convert

Almost everyone who experiences an epiphany on the gun-rights question, at least in my experience, comes from an opposition to the right to arms to the support of it. Those (very) few who go the other way are (also in my experience) those who discover in themselves a fear of loss of self-control. They believe they personally cannot handle the responsibility of firearm possession and - since they are obviously "normal" - therefore no one else can either (with the curious exception of those members of society who draw a government paycheck.)

One of the best examples I can reference is that of the authors of the gun-control meta-study Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime, and Violence in America. Authored by James D. Wright, a professor of Sociology at Tulane University, Peter H. Rossi, a professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), and Kathleen Daly, a Sociology professor at Yale, Under the Gun was an examination of all the gun control studies that had been performed up until 1978. I've mentioned it before. The one excerpt from the book that I like best of all is this one:

The progressive's indictment of American firearms policy is well known and is one that both the senior authors of this study once shared. This indictment includes the following particulars: (1) Guns are involved in an astonishing number of crimes in this country. (2) In other countries with stricter firearms laws and fewer guns in private hands, gun crime is rare. (3) Most of the firearms involved in crime are cheap Saturday Night Specials, for which no legitimate use or need exists. (4) Many families acquire such a gun because they feel the need to protect themselves; eventually they end up shooting one another. (5) If there were fewer guns around, there would obviously be less crime. (6) Most of the public also believes this and has favored stricter gun control laws for as long as anyone has asked the question. (7) Only the gun lobby prevents us from embarking on the road to a safer and more civilized society.

The more deeply we have explored the empirical implications of this indictment, the less plausible it has become.

That's from the last chapter, Policy Implications, but it is far from the whole chapter. Here's some more I haven't quoted before:

American progressivism has always taken a strong and justifiable pride in its cultural pluralism, its belief that minority or "deviant" cultures and values have intrinsic legitimacy and are therefore to be at least tolerated if not nourished, and certainly not be suppressed. Progressives have embraced the legitimacy of many subcultures in the past, including tolerance for a vast heterogeneity of religious beliefs, regional diversities, a belated recognition of the rights of American Indians, and tolerance for immigrant peoples. And more recently, progressives have hastened to affirm the legitimacy of black culture, Hispanic culture, youth culture, homosexuals (and, for that matter, nearly every other subculture that has pressed its claim for recognition.)

A critical issue in modern America is whether the doctrine of cultural pluralism should or should not be extended to cover the members of the gun subculture. Is this cultural pattern akin to the segregationism of the South that was broken up in the interest of the public good? Or, is it more akin to those subcultures that we have recognized as legitimate and benign forms of self-expression?

The authors don't answer that question, placed as it was in the last paragraph of their 1983 text. The following twenty-three years of the gun control movement, however, has.

This evening I ran across a post at the blog OK So I'm Not Really a Cowboy that brought all of this back up again.

How The Left Made Me A Gun Rights Advocate

People on the left talk a good game. About freedom and empowerment. About prosperity and harmony. Which is all fine and good until you realize that they intend this to happen by instituting government control of all aspects related to the above. But what really gets me about them is that they turn a blind eye to the negative (but all-too-often expected) consequences of their illogical actions. The gun control debate is a perfect illustration of both their disconnect from causality and their inherently statist outlook. Which is–perversely enough–the reason I became a gun owner.

Go read the whole thing.

And for further examples, may I suggest these earlier posts of mine?

How do you Convert a Gun-Phobe? Put One in Her Hands!

Fear, The Philosophy and Politics Thereof

How Do You Get Your Rights Back?

Awakenings IV