Struck by a number of troubling implications and outright distortions in the editorial on “The Power of the Gun Lobby” in today’s New York Times, I googled the phrase “gun lobby” to find other examples of treating millions of people defending one of their civil rights as though they were invisible, existing only in the nefarious influence peddling of the evil, multi-tentacled organization that represents them.
Sure enough, I found a brilliant discussion of that very problem, here. Great minds work alike, I guess — especially when they’re the same mind. Too bad that mind is incapable of remembering what it’s already done. (“What? You think I have a bad memory? Why, I can’t recall the last time I forgot anything….”)
Anyway, returning to the topic at hand (what was it again?), back then I began my post by observing:
If all you read were the New York Times, you’d think that the only support for protecting the right to own firearms comes from “the gun lobby.” No actual people, aside from the robots who write letters at the command of the NRA, just the “gun lobby.”
Today’s edit reveals that, on this score, the Raines-less NYT hasn’t changed a bit. On one side are actual, worthy people, “gun control advocates,” and on the other only “the gun lobby.”
“However one interprets the right to own and bear arms,” I wrote in my former post,
it is a civil right (even if it is a narrow and restricted one) since the Second Amendment is a part of the Bill of Rights. Alone among civil rights, however, the NYT sees this right as of interest only to a lobby, a large, rich interest group.
If this seems overstated, consider the following results from a Nexis search of the New York Times for “gun lobby” and comparable phrases:
gun lobby 545 hits civil rights lobby 13 peace lobby 12 gay rights lobby 8 feminist lobby 4 privacy lobby 2
I haven’t re-run the search, but I’m sure the results would be the same now.
The NYT is in a snit because the ten year old ban on “military-style” assault weapons is about to expire and may not be renewed. “The ban, a landmark law,” says the edit, “is criticized as less than perfect. But it has saved lives….”
Well, not exactly. The ban is criticized on constitutional grounds, but also because it is concerned only with appearances — of “military-style” weapons, of appearing to do something — when in fact it doesn’t do anything. Would someone who would like to use an assault weapon give up in despair if the only weapon he could find is a functionally identical semi-automatic weapon differing only in that its appearance is not of the “military style”? I don’t think so. If the NYT has evidence that the ban has “saved lives,” I’d like to see it.
The edit also contains the remarkable claim that the lives of Americans “are sacrificed in the tens of thousands each year to the nation’s freewheeling gun culture….”
It’s hard to know what to make of this assertion. In 2000, 28,663 persons died from firearm injuries in the United States. Of that total, 57.5% were suicides. Perhaps some form of gun control could prevent some of those suicides and some of the homicides, but many of each would be carried out by other means. As for crime, “9 percent of violent crimes involved firearms in 2001.”
I’m thus skeptical that we have a “freewheeling gun culture” that needlessly sacrifices “tens of thousands” of lives each year, but I do think the passion for gun control, like the earlier and similar passion for prohibition, is itself an interesting cultural phenomenon.
