Gunning for the Guns

But this is about guns, so there are different and very special rules. Guns are a synecdoche for some of the deepest fissures in our culture, something that Barack Obama recognized when he made his famous—and private—remarks about people who “cling to guns or religion.” His view was, plainly, that such people are primitives and to be pitied, as the modern world leaves them further and further behind. They are also the same folks, of course, who are among the “deplorables” of Hillary Clinton’s political universe.

On guns, Clinton is all over the place. On the one hand, she assures audiences that “I am not here to take away your guns.” Then, according to a New York Times article, at an event when she was asked about the program “under which the Australian government bought back roughly 650,000 guns and then imposed stricter standards for gun purchases,” she answered, “I think it would be worth considering doing it on the national level if that could be arranged.”She then went on to compare the Australian buyback program to the “cash for clunkers” program, where people were paid to turn in older automobiles for which they were given lavish credits toward the purchase of new, fuel-efficient cars. The “clunkers” were then destroyed, depriving a lot of people of affordable transportation but .  .  . well, that is an argument for another day.

Clinton’s offhand comparison is flawed and troubling to gun-rights people on two counts. First, when you turn over that old Remington pump to the government, there won’t be any cash credits given toward the purchase of new guns. Whatever money you get for your guns, you’ll have to spend on something else. Video games, perhaps, where the shooting is all done digitally. And then, more to the point, among people who believe in government “solutions” to every problem, the Australian example depends on compliance, which is accomplished by government’s primary go-to tool—namely, force. Someone from the government shows up at the door and tells you to hand over your guns. You may be paid something for them, but there is nothing voluntary about the arrangement. It is confiscation, pure and simple.

Interestingly, in later editions, the Times printed a correction to that article about Clinton and guns:

Oh, really?

One suspects the error was the result of a severe case of projection. The Times and its writers are as anti-gun as Clinton, who says that copying the Australian program is something “worth considering.” One further suspects she may feel considerably more strongly about it, in the same way she feels strongly favorable to hemispheric free trade and open borders but will say so only privately. Her closest and most loyal followers understand this.

So when she says, “I’m not here to take away your guns,” what many people—both supporters and detractors—hear is, “Okay, line up and hand ’em over.”

Clinton very probably loathes guns. And as for those who belong to the National Rifle Association .  .  . well, there is a special circle of Clinton’s inferno reserved for them.

According to a recent report in the Washington Free Beacon, at one of those gatherings attended only by donors and those who know the secret handshake, Clinton had this to say about the NRA: “I’m going to speak out, I’m going to do everything I can to rally people against this pernicious, corrupting influence of the NRA.” She added that the NRA has “so intimidated elected members of Congress and other legislative bodies that these people are passing the most absurd laws.”

Well, the NRA enjoys a higher approval rating than she does, so you can understand why she is irritated. But for all that it is characterized as a dark and sinister cabal, the NRA is an organization in which membership is entirely voluntary. People join and pay their dues because they choose to, believe in the organ­ization, and share its goals. There is no coercion. Just a collection of free citizens in one of those little platoons that Burke wrote about so eloquently. On the other hand, membership in, say, the National Educational Association is compulsory in many states, and the dues are taken out of teachers’ paychecks.The NRA makes no secret of what it is about. To the contrary. And it is about a lot more than “intimidating” members of Congress—which is, by the way, considered honest labor by a lot of people living in that peculiar portion of the country known as “inside the Beltway.” People who do this are known as lobbyists and, it should be said, most of them are doing very well and will be voting for Mrs. Clinton.But back to the NRA, which exists to celebrate and nourish and protect a particular culture, one that Clinton and her circle may find repellent but that enjoys favor out in the darkened landscape beyond the Beltway. The membership of the NRA takes a strict view of the Second Amendment—that it guarantees and protects the private ownership of firearms—and recognizes that this view runs contrary to elite opinion.

The widespread belief that the NRA exercises fearsome power derived from its vast wealth is laughable. Michael Bloomberg has much deeper pockets than the NRA, and he is willing to reach down into them to support anti-gun candidates and ballot initiatives.

It isn’t really “about” the money. Not in the ordinary sense of using money to advance the obvious self-interest of some constituency or interest group. In the long run, the gun control fight isn’t about industry profits or sweetheart deals. And in that sense, the gun debate is pure and uncorrupted.

Bloomberg and Clinton and their supporters are opposed to the idea of guns in the hands of private citizens. They don’t like gun manufacturers, dealers, or, especially, owners. And they find the guns themselves repellent. While they will tolerate them in the hands of their own security details, they believe, with righteous conviction, that ordinary citizens don’t need guns and shouldn’t have them.

Of course, and especially while seeking votes, they will tell you otherwise. Clinton will tell the story of how her father taught her to shoot when she was a little girl and what a nice memory that is. This is just campaign talk. She says things like that in the same way she once said she believed that marriage is defined as the sacred union of one man and one woman.

But she is the favorite of anti-gun voters and employs all the usual tactics in her opposition. First, you marginalize the people who belong to the NRA as people who “cling” to their guns in fear. And then, you make the guns themselves objects of fear and contempt. The best example of this, of course, is the crusade against something called the “assault weapon.” This is meant to evoke combat operations, which are aggressive and depend on overwhelming firepower—something that has no place in the peaceful, civilian world. This is a construct meant to scare people enough that they will support a ban on such guns. The implicit question is “Why should civilian ownership of weapons be legal when they are, in fact, instruments of war?”

Clinton has no trouble answering that one. She told that audience of supporters, “I was proud when my husband took [the NRA] on, and we were able to ban assault weapons. But he had to put a sunset on, so 10 years later, of course [President George W.] Bush wouldn’t agree to reinstate [the ban].”

Someone with no special axe to grind might ask, What is it that makes something an “assault weapon” or “assault rifle”? Define your terms. This has been a matter of extensive discussion and debate. So begin with the fact that some of the most awful mass killings in the United States were done by people using a rifle that is known, more or less generically, as an AR-15. This includes the killings of the schoolchildren at Sandy Hook and the nightclubbers in Orlando. The first was an act of madness carried out by a deranged young man who killed himself. The second was an act of terrorism, and the shooter was killed by law enforcement officers. Both killers used a version of the AR-15, a weapon that goes back to the Vietnam era, when it was known, in military nomenclature, as the M-16. (The AR in the name is not, it should be pointed out, shorthand for “assault rifle.” The weapon was designed by the Armalite company and thus the AR.)

The civilian version of the weapon looks pretty much like the one used by the military. There are many knockoffs and, thus, all manner of cosmetic differences. But they all look and operate enough alike to be lumped into one catchall category. Which, if you want them banned, makes them “assault rifles.”

When a legislative ban of these guns was proposed, during the Clinton administration, it became necessary to define, in some detail, what constituted an “assault weapon.” It could not be that it is capable of automatic fire; that is, a weapon that fires continuously as long as the trigger is depressed, so that with one pull you could rapidly burn an entire magazine of 20, 30, or more rounds. Automatic fire was already effectively illegal in civilian arms. Unlike the military M-16, the AR-15s the law was meant to outlaw are semiautomatics. That is, one pull of the trigger fires one round. You release the trigger and then pull it again to fire another round.

Since it was not politically feasible to ban the AR-15 on that basis (a huge number of other firearms are semiautomatic), other requirements had to be codified. These came to include the presence of any two “assault” features, among them flash suppressors, pistol grips, bayonet lugs, and folding or telescoping stocks. None of these makes a rifle more lethal. But they make it look more like a military weapon. The law was thus ridiculed as a ban on “scary-looking guns.”

That ban, according to a 2004 study commissioned by the Department of Justice, did not decrease gun violence. This was not especially surprising since rifles—with or without bayonet lugs and folding stocks—account for only about 3 percent of criminal gun deaths. Handguns are used in most gun crimes, including in most mass shootings. And most national politicians no longer talk about banning handguns, because the popular support for such a ban just isn’t there.

If it was known, before the first ban on “assault weapons” was enacted, that the law did not really address the problem of gun violence, why was it proposed and passed? And why—after it had expired and no noticeable spike in gun violence ensued (in fact, it declined)—did people want to resurrect the ban?

Perhaps it is precisely because of the AR-15’s popularity. It may not be the lethality of these guns but the people who are enamored of them that accounts for their pariah status among the those who want to ban guns. Millions of AR-15s are sold to people who like to own them and shoot them. The gun has fans who like the way it looks. The “scary-looking” aspect that made it, taxonomically, an “assault rifle” makes it cool to them. They also like the way it shoots. They might say that they want the AR-15 for home protection, but they probably know a 12-gauge Remington Model 870 shotgun would be better for the job. They might say that they like it for hunting deer, when they know that there are many bolt-action rifles chambered for ammunition more suitable for that.But they decide on the AR-15, still. It is their choice, even if Hillary Clinton and others who disapprove see in this affection for the AR-15 something close to a fetish, and a dangerous one of which they disapprove. (And it may well be, too, that such disapproval has made the rifle even more popular.) So the AR-15 is demonized and made hateful even though it is a mere machine, which seems to the AR-15 owners a lot like blaming the axe and not Lizzie Borden.

In the immediate aftermath of last summer’s Orlando slaughter by an ISIS sympathizer, a New York newspaper reporter set out to familiarize himself with the AR-15 and report back to his readers from darkest Gunnistan. He described the experience this way:

The AR-15 is actually chambered for a fairly small round (5.56 mm/.223 cal), and its recoil is close to negligible owing to the buffering system. The hot brass should be ejected away from the shooter unless he is firing from the wrong shoulder. But never mind. This story, in fact, doesn’t get the essentials and basics wrong, the way so many do.

People who like and know guns have come to expect a kind of willful ignorance about guns in what they read in the newspapers or see on television. Reporters congenitally get the automatic vs. semiautomatic thing wrong. They don’t know the difference between a clip and a magazine, between bore and caliber, even rifle and shotgun. People who know guns don’t expect general assignment reporters to be experts in ballistics, but they do expect them to understand the very basic distinctions that could be mastered without much study. No newspaper or television operation would assign coverage of a fashion show to someone who didn’t understand the difference between a skirt and a dress and couldn’t identify a chemise.

To people who do know and care about guns, the indifference to the basics about guns that shows up, over and over, in media reports is just one more demonstration of contempt for the subject and for them. Another signal of the media’s disapproval of guns—and them. And then there is the unseemly impulse to ban that of which you disapprove. You can always find a reason. Gun deaths are declining and the assault weapon ban made no noticeable contribution to reducing gun deaths. But never mind. Guns are evil and loathsome and something else to be gotten rid of. For the common good.

If you are a gun person (or even a gun nut), you find seductive what Hillary Clinton sees as repellent. If you like (or even love) guns, you are beguiled by their engineering and their design. You find something ineluctably appealing in the way they perform. The way the parts fit and mesh and move. The sound of the bolt closing over a chambered round. The way the gun feels in your hand or against your shoulder as you take aim and squeeze. You like shooting guns and cleaning them and understanding how they work. You like having them on display, over the mantel or in a gun case. You like talking about them with other people who know and love guns. They are a part of your life. You don’t expect everyone to understand, and you don’t care when someone doesn’t. But you don’t get people who think you are, somehow, sick because you like guns. And you resent it when they tell you that you can’t be trusted to own guns and they intend to make sure that, eventually .  .  . you won’t be able to. You’re willing to fight them on it.

If you are a gun owner and those guns are important in the scheme of your life, there is something deeply infuriating about the notion that your guns should be taken from you for your own good. That everybody will be safer if you are disarmed. That the times have changed and the individual right to “bear arms” is obsolete. That it might have been suitable, perhaps, in an age of muzzle loaders but not in the age of assault weapons. Freedom of the press, you think, didn’t go away with the advent of the Internet. And the odds of your being killed with a knife are better than those of your being done in by an “assault rifle.” But we don’t ban knives, and we don’t honor the NRA member and instructor who took down a terrorist who was stabbing people, recently, in a shopping mall.

The paternalism is galling. You know that the “important” and celebrated people who want to disarm you are protected by security people who are packing. You know that, even if it is a hackneyed line, the phrase “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns” strikes pretty close to the truth of it. You aren’t surprised when you read a newspaper story with the following lead paragraph:

In Chicago, guns are outlawed, or close to it. And the outlaws have plenty of guns. These guns are used to settle scores in a city that seems, to outsiders, to be returning to a state of nature, where gangs play the role of ­primeval tribes. And since gun control has failed in Chicago and Illinois, those who believe it is the answer now argue that the problem is neighboring Indiana, where the gun laws are not so strict. Stricter gun laws in Indiana, then, will reduce the weekly body count in Chicago. It doesn’t take much imagination to see where this leads. Gun control laws must be made national in order to work.

I live in Vermont, where the gun control laws are among the most relaxed in the nation. Bernie Sanders represents Vermont in the Senate and Mrs. Clinton used his votes on gun issues against him when they were competing for the Democratic nomination for president in various state primaries. Sanders’s votes reflected (often) the feelings of his constituents. The older, more traditional elements of Vermont’s population are pro-gun. They could not, in fact, imagine being anything else. People hunt. People own guns. It is a way of life. It may be hard to imagine Bernie Sanders taking a week off in November and going out to the deer camp with a bunch of his buddies to play cards, drink whiskey, tell lies, and maybe even shoot a deer. But if he isn’t a hunter or a gun owner, Sanders understands and respects his constituents and does not dump them into a basket of “deplorables” because they own guns and care about guns, as their people have for a couple of centuries.

The long tradition of gun ownership in Vermont means that there are a lot of guns in the state. But there are very few gun crimes and almost no killings. These have, however, been on the rise lately. But not because there are suddenly more guns or because AR-15s are flooding the state. The rise in Vermont gun crimes can be traced to an epidemic of heroin addiction and trafficking. In Vermont, more people are dying from heroin overdoses than from gunshots. But, of course, the people who are bringing drugs into the state—from places far away—are armed. Some of them may even be armed with AR-15s, the dreaded “assault rifles” of anti-gun imagination. Most, however, settle for a more easily concealed handgun.

They are armed, and their intentions are not pure. As there is more heroin, there is more need for ready cash and more robberies and break-ins. For years and years, we did not lock our doors at night. We might go for months unable to locate the front door key. That has changed.

Not long ago, a man was arrested a couple of hundred feet from the front door of the local elementary school. He was a heroin trafficker and engaged in the biggest deal the state had yet seen. The people who used his product—many of them—needed to find a way to pay for it, and this means stealing.

So there are more break-ins. Because Vermont is an essentially rural state, people cannot expect the response time for a 911 call to be prompt. It might take half an hour or more in the early hours of the morning. So if you hear someone downstairs, looking for goods that can be easily pawned, you can lock the bedroom door, make the call, pull the covers over your head and wait, passively, to see what happens. Will you hear the siren before you hear the sound of footsteps on the stairs?

Or, if you have a shotgun near the bed, and it is a pump action, like the Remington 870, you could work the slide and chamber a round and hope that this ominous sound will make the right impression on the junkie downstairs. If your weapon of choice is an AR-15, you can jack a round into the chamber, and this should have the same effect.

But, then again, maybe not. Maybe your visitor has the wrong address and thinks he has come to the home of a rival or a customer with whom he has some business dispute. He has come to settle it, one way or another.

Nobody invited heroin dealers into the state. And they don’t seem inclined to leave. There are new busts reported every few days. When one is taken out, it seems another moves in. And if you want protection, you need to be prepared to provide it yourself, even if buying that gun and contributing to those record sales makes you .  .  . “deplorable.”

So as Hillary Clinton runs well ahead in the polls, those record gun sales will most likely continue, as will the trend toward more and more women buyers and increased NRA membership. They will continue, as well, if and when Clinton moves into the White House. Even if the Democrats gain seats on Capitol Hill, the stalemate over guns will almost certainly continue. The issue, in the minds of too many, is neither negotiable nor partisan. (Something the NRA has long understood and appreciated.)

Gun control—even “common sense” gun control—isn’t one of those ordinary Washington “issues” that can be manipulated, obfuscated, and trimmed. You can’t say “If you like your guns, you can keep your guns” and be believed. The issue goes to fundamental things—among them, the right to self-defense—that make people in Washington exceedingly uncomfortable. But the people who do own guns and keep buying them in record numbers understand. Perfectly.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.