By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, October 05, 2017
‘I have never understood the conservative fetish for the
Second Amendment,” writes Bret Stephens today. And then he proceeds to prove
that.
His column is not a rigorous one. Indeed, it is barely a
column so much as it is a brusque list of ill-considered assertions that do
nothing to grapple with the many arguments to their contrary. Stephens asserts
confidently that “more guns mean more murder,” a claim he bases on a single
flawed study that is contradicted both by numerous
others and by the recent experience
of similar
nations. He asserts that there are fewer justifiable homicides than there
are accidents with guns, and that therefore that “more guns mean less safety,”
but seems not to have considered that one does not have to commit a justifiable
homicide to deter a crime; that in fact an enormous number of Americans — at
least 100,000; possibly 2 million — deter crimes each year without firing a
shot; and that many would-be criminals will avoid even attempting a transgression out of fear the victim might be armed.
He asserts that a handful of historical rebellions illustrate the futility of
resistance to government, without stopping to note that this country was in
fact founded in successful revolution, and that the most effective resistance
to Jim Crow came, per Ida B. Wells, from the barrel of a Winchester. And then,
as his pièce de résistance, he recruits no less than James Madison to his side,
proposing that the author of the Constitution himself would conclude that the
private ownership of firearms should be prohibited in the modern world (or at
least almost prohibited, for
throughout the piece Stephens seems unsure as to quite what he would like the
result of his repeal to be). Had Stephens thought about this topic for the
first time yesterday, it is hard to see what would be different about his
essay. What a pleasure it must be to sync up with the editors.
The logical jump at the heart of his case is an
astounding one. Stephens concedes that the gun-control crowd is a hapless
bunch, unable to get even modest measures through Congress, and he concedes
that this is because voters know that the Democrats are only paying “lip
service” to the Second Amendment and thus don’t trust them around the edges.
And then he submits that these same people should switch their focus to all-out repeal. Or, put another way,
Stephens argues that the people who can’t get anything because the voters think they want everything should now move to the most extreme position available.
How this would work in practice is never explained. How a movement that can’t
get to 50 percent would win two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the
states is left to the imagination. Why, given his own concessions, the attempt
would represent anything less than widespread political suicide is left
unaddressed. Instead we get a pep talk. The NRA, Stephens concedes, is
“popular,” while the “liberals” are ignorant and dishonest and untrusted. But
all great endeavors are hard, and that’s why . . . gay marriage.
Stephens is not a stupid man, and nor is he unaware of
the reach that tyrannies have enjoyed. On the contrary, his is often a welcome
voice in the fight for the liberty of all people. This being so, it is
remarkable how blithely he elects to invoke Madison as a friend to his cause,
and how readily he subordinates the right to bear arms to expediency. In truth,
the Second Amendment was not an “amendment” at all, for, unlike some of the
subsequent changes to the charter, it represented neither a change in policy
nor a remedy for an error. Rather, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights it
was the product of a disagreement as to how to best protect freedoms that were
generally considered unalienable. For reasons outlined in The Federalist Papers, Madison believed that the power of the
federal government would be constrained by its structure; if the central state
had only a handful of carefully enumerated powers, he contended, it would not
be able to exceed them. Others, the “Anti-Federalists,” disagreed, demanding a
belt to add to the suspenders. The debate that followed was strictly structural
— not a fight over speech or due process or arms, but over how best to ensure
the maintenance of ancient liberty. Madison acknowledged this when introducing
the Bill of Rights in Congress. The rights he had included, he made clear to
his peers, were those “against which I believe no serious objection has been
made by any class of our constituents.” In encoding the right to bear arms
among the set, neither Madison nor his opponents were innovating. Instead, they
were channeling Justinian, Locke, and Blackstone, and ensuring that the people
of the new country would enjoy a robust right to self-defense, and the
auxiliary protections that enabled it.
They were also responding to the lessons of history.
Stephens seems convinced that the Second Amendment is contingent; that is, that
its meaning and relevance rely upon the continuing prevalence of redcoats.
Surely, Stephens insists, if Madison could see the modern world he would change
his mind. I must venture that the very opposite is true. Were he to pick up a
history book today, Madison would be shocked indeed. But his surprise would be
at the sheer scale and disgrace of the tyrannies that have scarred us since he
died. The American Revolution was a beautiful and necessary thing, and yet if
one were to have read the litany of complaints to a man in the Warsaw Ghetto,
or in Dachau, or in the Gulag, or in the Laogai, or, yes, in the
Reconstruction-deprived post-bellum South, he would have laughed in your face.
The colonists were that upset over .
. . that?
Well, yes. They were. And they should have been. But let
us not pretend that their anguish was equivalent to what came next — in
Germany, in Cuba, in Russia, in China, in Mississippi. And let us not pretend
that there was more need for safeguards against George III and the Declaratory
Act than against the blood-soaked 20th century. Certainly, Madison could not
have imagined the future. But that, in truth, is to say that he could not have
imagined how right he would prove to be. Power, ambition, human nature — these
are constants, not variables. And it is for that reason above all else that our
enduring Constitution must be cherished. There is rarely a good reason to kick
over Chesterton’s fence, even when it is chipped and knotted around the edges,
and the villagers are scratching their chins. Apostasy or no apostasy, Bret
Stephens has made no progress today in convincing anyone otherwise. As you
were, America. As you were.
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