This is almost a postscript to my last letter 2 you about Republicans' contrived rhetoric in general. But this time something specific prompted me to write. I was passing through the channels on my television a couple of days ago when I came upon the general speeches being given in The House. A congressman named Steve Russell, a Republican from the fifth district of Oklahoma, was called to the podium for thirty minutes, and before I could change the channel, he started to relate a story about a woman defending herself and her infant child from home intruders. It seems that they were in the act of breaking down her door when she barricaded it with her sofa and called the police. She told the dispatcher what was happening and that she had a double barrel shotgun. She asked the dispatcher if it was alright to shoot the intruders if they got through the door, and the dispatcher answered that she couldn't address the legalities, but that she should do what she had to do...and she did. The first of the two male intruders broke through the door, and as he was climbing over the couch, she shot him square in the chest, presumably killing him. Congressman Russell then launched into the second story, which was essentially like the first except that the woman had a hand gun, with which she dispatched her would-be attacker. In each case, an accomplice to the late predator fled, thus multiplying by two the beneficial effect of owning a gun in your home when you are being assailed. At that point, I changed the channel because I already knew what the rest of his speech was going to be.
Congressman Russell is retired military. He was a lieutenant colonel with medals for bravery and heroism, and incidentally, he owns a gun manufacturing company. I probably shouldn't admit this, but I didn't listen to the rest of Russell's speech because I assumed that I have heard his self-serving peroration before coming from the mouths of such gun rights luminaries as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and every gun toting shill in the country who has managed to garner his 15 minutes of fame on the back of this issue, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe Russell was going to say, these women owned their weapons legally, and they could have done so even if they had had to register them. Maybe he was going to say that the outcomes in their cases defied the odds in that one of them might well have fared like half of the gun owners who pull their weapons to defend themselves and then get killed by them when their assailants take them away. Maybe he was going to say that the laws requiring registration of some weapons probably made these home defenses possible because they kept the predators from arming themselves before they tried to inflict harm on their intended victims. But Russell is a gun owner and manufacturer, a Republican and a conservative from Oklahoma who used his military service to bootstrap his way into office. What are the odds?
Political discourse is such a sordid enterprise these days. If Russell, and Cruz, Rubio, the NRA and all of the rest of the 2nd amendment "advocates" were honest, they would admit that there is no connection between the proper use of guns and the improper; that there is no relationship between the efforts to curb their use and the right to own them; that universal registration will at least do not harm, and might save some lives...even one being enough to justify it. But the conflation of registration with gun confiscation is disingenuous at best, sinister more likely. There are an estimated 300 million guns in this country, located in about 55 million homes and businesses. There are about 2 million gun carrying federal government employees, including the military. That means that each gun toting federally would have to take about six guns out of 27 homes or businesses all by himself, and that fear of that prospect is an absurdity beyond mythical proportions. Guns are here to stay in this country and the fear that they will be taken away is not a credible threat. And as to the possibility that some autocrat will take over the government and institute a dictatorship, it is more likely to be someone with guns at his disposal than someone who advocates, and lives by, the creed that a gunless society is preferable to one in which guns are everywhere as they are in this country today.
So, what could I have gained by listening to Russell. How could my consciousness be expanded by hearing his ill-contemplated screed against universal registration. And was it Russell's intention that people like me listen in the first place. All rhetorical questions because we all know that Russell was speaking to his choir. Elections are all about mobilizing your constituents these days, and Russell, like all the rest of the would-be gun toters, was about one thing only: getting reelected. It's a shame, and what's worse, it isn't a defense of our democracy. It's an underhanded threat to it. When someone shoots you, it doesn't matter whether it's a cop or a criminal, a good guy or a bad guy, an assailant or your three year old who happens to have found your loaded pistol. The fact that a deranged Adam Lanza's mother had her guns legally doesn't undermine the reasoning behind more gun control. The fact that someone as irresponsible and apparently misguided as Lanza's mother was can buy a gun at all is worthy of discussion in my opinion, but requiring her to register it if she does is the least we can do...no discussion required.
Your friend,
Mike
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