Writing for the Foundation for Economic Education, Patrick Carroll may have just cracked a code, and he leans on one of the founders of the modern Second Amendment movement—the late Don Kates—to conclude the gun control crusade began and is perpetuated by a privileged class disconnected from the realities of living in communities where crime is a real problem.
Carroll points to a couple of paragraphs from a 1977 Kates article appearing in the Cato Institute’s Inquiry magazine in which Kates observed, “Gun prohibition is the brainchild of white middle-class liberals who are oblivious to the situation of poor and minority people living in areas where the police have given up on crime control. Such liberals weren’t upset about marijuana laws, either, in the fifties when the busts were confined to the ghettos. Secure in well-policed suburbs or high-security apartments guarded by Pinkertons (whom no one proposes to disarm), the oblivious liberal derides gun ownership as ‘an anachronism from the Old West.’”
Yet a Gallup survey released in November showed that “88 percent of gun owners cite crime protection as a reason they own a gun.”
This appears especially true in minority communities, where crime is a far more pressing problem then it is in a gated community.
Fox News has been exploring the rise in gun sales in Beverly Hills in recent months. Early Monday, Fox News interviewed Russell Stuart, owner of Beverly Hills Guns, who explained, “Although that is a part of my living, I get no pleasure whatsoever by having a 60-, 70-year-old woman walk into my store … who looks terrified, and say, ‘I have never liked guns. In fact, I’ve even hated guns. I would have never considered buying one. But I’m so afraid for my life.”
Carroll, who is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and has a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Waterloo, observed this about gun control proponents, “(D)on’t assume you know what’s best for someone if you haven’t walked a mile in their shoes.”
Which brings us around to an Op-Ed in the Wisconsin State Journal by Jon Donohue, a law professor at Stanford University, who raises concerns about a potential ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that, he says, “may create a federal constitutional right to carry guns outside the home.”
Gun rights advocates and Second Amendment scholars might argue the high court wouldn’t “create” a right because it already exists and is protected by the amendment, which recognizes the right “to bear arms” as well as keep them.
Donohue is worried about a decision that would expand “the Second Amendment beyond its current scope of a right to possess a gun in the home…”
As Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and founder of the Second Amendment Foundation has frequently observed, a right limited to the confines of one’s home is no right at all. Rights go with you through the front door and into the public space.
A report from the Post Millennial about a recent Trafalgar Group survey shows 76.8 percent of Americans “regardless of political party affiliation, believe that ‘American society and culture is in a state of decay.’”
“When viewed by political party affiliation,” the Post Millennial reported, “all parties had a majority that said the country is in a state of decline. 61 percent of Democrats, 85.9 percent of Republicans, and 81.8 percent of those identifying as no party or ‘other’ said American society and culture are in decline.”
Perhaps part of that decline involves not knowing the difference between a right and a regulated privilege. Carroll’s article appears to address this dilemma.
