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Abstract
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In April of this year, Congress passed the Firearms Owners Protection Act. This act, the first federal gun law to pass in eighteen years, actually reduces the restrictions of gun Control Act. The often fierce debate that accompanied the passage of this legislation, though, demonstrated once again the political struggle over gun control in this country.
Most Americans think that controlling weapons is just plain sensible. Opinion polls show that most gun owners are actually of one mind with the general public in favoring it. For example, both gun owners and the public, by and large, favor such steps as the registration and licensing of guns and the banning of gun ownership to felons, juveniles, and the mentally impaired. Advocates of reasonable gun control approach guns pragmatically rather than ethically, viewing them as widely desired but nevertheless dangerous things which are sensible to control. Curtailing criminal misuse of guns is, of course, a prime concern of this pro-control thinking.
But the cause of reasonable gun control has been hampered in recent years by the presence among gun control advocates of a vocal minority motivated not by pragmatic concerns -- that gun control will reduce crime, for example -- but by a moral vision that reviles guns and their owners. This antigun lobby sees the handgun simply as an abomination, and the desire to possess one for the protection of home and family, or for any other reason, as immoral, reactionary, and paranoid. It supports the banning not just controlling of handguns and, hence, has refused to support a loosening of even the most excessive handgun regulations.
The reaction of gun owners to such opposition has been predictable. Feeling offended, and perhaps even threatened by antigun rhetoric, the gun lobby has opposed even the most moderate controls. To understand the difference this anti-gun position has made, as opposed to the reaction a merely "pro-control" view would elicit, it is useful to remember that gun owners have not always opposed gun control. Most of our present gun laws, in fact, come from the Uniform Revolver Act which the NRA drafted and promoted early in the 20th Century. As late as 1957, legislation to bar military surplus imports was sponsored in the Senate by NRA life member John F. Kennedy.
In focusing on the baleful effect of antigun rhetoric, I am not denying that gun owners are often equally intemperate. But though their intemperance is notoriously counterproductive, it hurts the gun lobby far less than antigun vituperation hurts the cause of reasonable gun control. For the strident opposition to gun ownership that characterizes the antigun lobby foredooms the cooperation that is essential if better controls are to be enacted and obeyed. A situation has developed, then, in which no matter how reasonable in the abstract a gun control proposal might seem, gun owners think it will end up being administered from an antigun perspective. |