Richard M. Ebeling:

The recent string of multiple-victim incidents of gun violence and police shootings of black Americans has once again resulted in renewed calls for restrictions on gun ownership. President Biden has said that executive instructions to various branches of the Federal government will attempt to reduce the frequency and possibility of such violence.

Some of his proposals, however, are merely using the gun control argument as a cover for more government redistributive intervention within the society. Thus, when the White House released a statement on April 7, 2021 detailing its plans in this direction, one of them called for a $5 billion investment over eight years to support “community violence intervention programs” with a key part of it being “to help connect individuals to job training and job opportunities.” The Department of Health and Human Services will be also directed to “educate” state governments in better using Medicaid funding to better subsidize such interventionist projects.

In other words, if only we expand notoriously wasteful and ineffective government job training programs, gun violence magically will be reduced. If only “unemployed” gun-using criminals can be taught a nonviolent job skill, they will stop robbing convenience stores and stop killing people in gang-related drive-by shootings! Plus, once the national mandated minimum wage is raised to $15 an hour, there will be long lines, obviously, of prospective employers eagerly waiting to hire former street thugs with their newly certified government-provided entry-level employment “skills.” Who knew it could be so simple?

But the meat of the Biden gun control policies all center on defining various types of firearms to categories that can rationalize greater prohibition of access and ownership. The fact is, however, that the number of Americans thinking the country needs stricter gun controls has been decreasing. According to a recent Gallup opinion survey, in 2018, 67 percent of survey respondents supported more stringent gun laws, but in 2020, that number had fallen to 57 percent, or a 15 percent decrease in those holding this opinion.

And in a survey in early 2021, Gallup reported that of those most concerned about current government gun policy, 42 percent said that current laws are sufficient, 41 percent replied they should be stricter, and 8 percent called for them to be less strict. So, 50 percent, think that gun regulations should be left as they are or actually reduced. Hardly a clamoring supermajority wanting the government to dramatically weaken a relatively wide right to bear arms. More like the same and usual vocal minority who think that “bad things” can be legislated away by political paternalists given enough governmental power over people’s lives.

Also, according to those queried by Gallup, 42 percent said that they had a gun in their home, 55 percent said they did not, and 3 percent had no opinion. It is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that many among the 3 percent who had no opinion in fact might be simply not wanting to admit that they do have one or more firearms in their home. Nor is it likely going very far out on a limb to presume that at least some of those who replied that they do not have a gun in their home probably were not being completely honest, particularly if they are suspicious of government or have a firearm that is not properly licensed in the state in which they live.

But, nonetheless, among those Americans wanting a heavier government hand over gun access and ownership, a good number probably view the Second Amendment and its guarantee of the right of the individual to bear arms as something practically anachronistic. It may seem to be a throwback to those earlier days of the Wild West, when many people, far from the law and order provided by the town sheriff and circuit judge, had to protect their families and land from cattle rustlers and outlaw bands. Such people are wrong.

Locks, bars on windows, and alarm systems are all useful devices to prevent unwanted intruders from making entrance into our homes and places of work. But what happens if an innocent victim is confronted with an invader who succeeds in entering his home, for example, and the safety of his family and possessions is now threatened? What if the invader confronts these innocent occupants and threatens some form of violence, including life-threatening force? What are the victims to do?

Critics of the Second Amendment and private gun ownership never seem to have any reasonable answer. Silent prayer might be suggested, but if this were to be a formal recommendation by the government it might be accused of violating the separation of church and state. No, better to not get the anti-religion lobby on your back, especially if it’s in an election year.

Even in an era promoting “politically correct” notions of equality among the sexes and an infinite number of self-defining genders, it nonetheless remains a fact that on average an adult male tends to be physically stronger than an adult woman, and most especially if there is more than one man confronting a single woman. A good number of years ago, economist Morgan Reynolds wrote a book on the economics of crime. The following is from one of the criminal cases he discussed. It seems that four men broke into a house in Washington, D.C., looking for a man named “Slim.” When the occupant said that he didn’t know where Slim was, they decided to kill him, instead. One of the defendants later testified,

“I got a butcher knife out of the kitchen. We tied him up and led him to the bathroom. And we all stabbed him good. Then, as we started to leave, I heard somebody at the door. Lois [the dead man’s girlfriend] came in…. We took her back to the bathroom and showed her his body. She started to beg, ‘don’t kill me, I ain’t gonna tell nobody. Just don’t kill me.’ She said we all could have sex with her if we wouldn’t kill her. After we finished with her, Jack Bumps told her, ‘I ain’t takin’ no chances. I’m gonna kill you anyway.’ He put a pillow over her head, and we stabbed her till she stopped wiggling. Then we set fire to the sheets in the bedroom and went out to buy us some liquor.”

Would either of these two victims have been saved if the man had had a gun easily reachable by him in the house or if the woman had had a gun in her purse? There is no way of knowing. What is for certain is that neither was any match for the four men who attacked and killed them with a butcher knife. Even Lois’s begging and submitting to sexual violation did not save her. How many people might be saved from physical harm, psychological trauma, or death if they had the means to protect themselves with a firearm?

Equally important, how many people might never have to be confronted with an attack or murder if potential perpetrators were warded off from initiating violence because of the uncertainty that an intended victim might have the means to defend him- or herself from thieves, rapists, and murders? A gun can be a great equalizer for the weak and the defenseless, especially if an intended victim doesn’t have to waste precious seconds fumbling with the key to a mandatory trigger lock.

But what is an ordinary person to do when he finds out that it is the government that is the perpetrator of violence and aggression against him and his fellow citizens? How do you resist the power of the state? Tens of millions of people were murdered by governments in the 20th century. They were killed because of the language they spoke or the religion they practiced. Or because those in political control classified them as belonging to an “inferior race” or to a “social class” that marked them as an “enemy of the people.” Furthermore, the vast, vast majority of these tens of millions of victims were murdered while offering little or no resistance. Fear, terror, and a sense of complete powerlessness surely have been behind the ability of governments to treat their victims as unresisting lambs brought to the slaughter.

Part of the ability of government to commit these cruel and evil acts has been the inability of the victims to resist because they lacked arms for self-defense. However, when the intended victims have had even limited access to means of self-defense it has shocked governments and made them pay a price to continue with their brutal work.

Many have been surprised by the lack of resistance by the European Jews who were killed by the millions in the Nazi concentration and death camps during the Second World War. For the most part, with a seemingly peculiar fatalism, they calmly went to their deaths with bullets to the back of the head or in gas chambers. Yet when some of the people were able to gain access to weapons, they did resist, even when they knew the end was most likely to be the same. The following is from historian John Toland’s biography of Adolf Hitler (1992), in reference to the resistance of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943:

“Of the 380,000 Jews crowded into the Warsaw ghetto, all but 70,000 had been deported to the killing centers in an operation devoid of resistance. By this time, however, those left behind had come to the realization that deportation meant death. With this in mind, Jewish political parties within the ghetto finally resolved their differences and banded together to resist further shipments with force . . .

“At three in the morning of April 9, 1943, more than 2,000 Waffen SS infantryman – accompanied by tanks, flame throwers and dynamite squads – invaded the ghetto, expecting an easy conquest, only to be met by determined fire from 1,500 fighters armed with weapons smuggled into the ghetto over a long period: several light machine guns, hand grenades, a hundred or so rifles and carbines, several hundred pistols and revolvers, and Molotov cocktails. Himmler had expected the action to take three days but by nightfall his forces had to withdraw.

“The one-sided battle continued day after day to the bewilderment of the SS commander, General Jürgen Stroop, who could not understand why ‘this trash and sub-humanity’ refused to abandon a hopeless cause. He reported that, although his men had initially captured ‘considerable numbers of Jews, who are cowards by nature,’ it was becoming more and more difficult. ‘Over and over again new battle groups consisting of twenty or thirty Jewish men, accompanied by a corresponding number of women, kindled new resistance.’ The women, he noted, had the disconcerting habit of suddenly hurling grenades they had hidden in their bloomers . . .

“The Jews, he reported, remained in the burning buildings until the last possible moment before jumping from the upper stories to the street. ‘With their bones broken, they still tried to crawl across the street into buildings that had not yet been set on fire…. Despite the danger of being burned alive the Jews and bandits often preferred to return into the flames rather than risk being caught by us.’ … For exactly four weeks the little Jewish army had held off superior, well-armed forces until almost the last man was killed or wounded.”

In the end the Germans had to commit thousands of military personnel and in fact destroy an entire part of Warsaw to bring the Jewish ghetto resistance to an end.

What if not only the Jewish population but the majority of all the “undesirable” individuals and groups in Germany and the occupied countries of Europe had been armed, with the Nazi government unable to know who had weapons, what types, and with what quantity of ammunition? It would be an interesting study in World War II history to compare private gun ownership in various parts of Europe and the degree and intensity of resistance by the local population to German occupation.

In the early years of the Bolshevik takeover in Russia there were numerous revolts by the peasantry against Communist policies to collectivize the land or seize their crops as in-kind taxes. What made this resistance possible for several years was the fact that in the countryside the vast majority of the rural population owned and knew how to use hunting rifles and other weapons of various kinds. At the end of the day, in the face of armed resistance, Lenin had to reverse his 1918 policy of “war communism,” with its near total collectivization of the Russian economy and introduce his “New Economic Policy” (NEP), in 1922, restoring small- and medium-sized enterprises to private hands, and return nationalized land to the peasantry. In no other way could the countryside revolts be stopped that threatened the overthrow of the Marxist regime and to reestablish some kind of economic rationality to Russian society.

Acquisition of firearms during the Second World War as part of the partisan movement against the German invasion of the Soviet Union enabled active, armed resistance by Lithuanian and Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas against Soviet reoccupation of their countries to continue in the forests of Lithuania and western Ukraine well into the early 1950s. The Soviets also discovered what a determined and armed population could do when they invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and had to ignominiously withdraw ten years later in 1989 in de facto defeat at the hands of the mujahideen. About 15,000 Soviet military forces were killed in the conflict, along with an estimated 2 million Afghanis.

It is hard to imagine how the people of the 13 American colonies could have ever obtained their independence from Great Britain at the end of the 18th century if the local population had not been “armed and dangerous.” It is worth recalling Patrick Henry’s words in arguing for resistance against British control before the king’s armed forces could disarm the colonists:

“They tell us . . . that we are weak – unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? . . . Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? … Three million people, armed in the holy cause of liberty . . . are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us.”

The taking up of arms is a last resort, not a first, against the intrusions and oppressions of government. Once started, revolutions and rebellions can have consequences no one can foretell, and final outcomes are sometimes worse than the grievance against which resistance was first offered. However, there are times, “in the course of human events,” when men must risk the final measure to preserve or restore the liberty that government threatens or has taken away. The likelihood that government will feel secure in undertaking infringements on the freedoms of Americans would be diminished if it knew that any systematic invasion of people’s life, liberty, and property might meet armed resistance by both the victim and those in the surrounding areas who came to his aid because of the concern that their own liberty might be the next to be violated.

Though it may seem harsh and insensitive, when I read the advocates of gun control pointing to incidents of private acts of violence against groups of innocent others, I think to myself:

How many more tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children were killed around the world in the last century by governments? And how many of those men, women and children, victims of government-armed violence, might have been saved if their families and neighbors had possessed the right to bear arms against political aggressors? How many men, women and children have been saved because their families have had weapons for self-defense against private violators of life and property? And how many could have been saved from private aggressors if more families had owned guns?

Nor should the argument that virtually all other “civilized” countries either prohibit or severely restrict the ownership and the use of firearms in general and handguns, in particular, intimidate Americans. America has been a free and prosperous land precisely because of the fact that as a nation we have chosen, for far longer, to follow political and economic avenues different from those followed by other countries around the world.

As a people, we have swum against the tide of collectivism, socialism, and welfare statism to a greater degree, for the most part, than have our Western European cousins. As a result, in many areas of life we have remained freer, especially in our market activities, than they. The fact that other peoples in other lands chose to follow foolish paths leading to disastrous outcomes does not mean that we should follow in their footsteps.

America was born in revolt against the ideas of the “Old World:” the politics of monarchy, the economics of mercantilism, and the culture of hereditary class and caste. America heralded the politics of representative, constitutional government, the economics of the free market, and the culture of individualism under equality before the law. It made America great.

If in more recent times there has been an “American disease,” it has been our all-too-willing receptivity to the European virus of political paternalism, welfare redistribution, economic regulation and planning, and the passive acceptance of government control over social affairs.

We need not and indeed should not fall victim to one more of the collectivist ailments practiced more intensely in other parts of the world: the disarming of the people under the dangerous notion that the private citizenry cannot be trusted and should not be allowed to have the means of self-defense against potential private and political aggressors in society.

Let us continue to stand apart and not fall prey to the false idea that somehow our European cousins are more enlightened or advanced than we on the matters of gun ownership and control. They are not. Terrorist attacks in a number of European countries over the last few years demonstrate that merely banning or restricting gun ownership does not deter those who are determined to undertake such violent acts by acquiring the needed firearms or finding ways to carry out mass murder with knives, axes, homemade bombs, or motor vehicles that run down dozens of people on crowded city streets.

Instead let us remember and stay loyal to the sentiment of James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution, who praised his fellow countrymen when he said, “Americans [have] the right and advantage of being armed – unlike citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”

Let us remain worthy of Madison’s confidence in the American people and defend the Second Amendment of the Constitution upon which part of that confidence was based.