By Daniel Payne
Wednesday, January 01, 2020
My friend and former colleague Tom Nichols has been going
on one of his regularly scheduled Twitter anti-gun rants over the past few
days. In his latest, he slammed the “spread of gun worship” among
conservatives. That Nichols’s opinions on the subject, which resemble a
progressive 17-year-old’s knowledge of American gun culture, get a lot of
attention from anti-gun types tells you something about the anti-gun movement:
that it, too, has very limited experience with guns and the people who own
them.
Among Nichols’s beliefs is that, as he put it this week,
conservatives now “measure freedom by how many of us walk around with guns.” He
also believes that concealed carry culture is really just “conservative
virtue-signaling” as a stand-in for real patriotism, that gun owners “measure
[their] sense of worth” by whether or not they are carrying firearms, and that
gun “worship” has become a “litmus test” for conservatives, to the detriment of
conservatism itself.
It is safe to say that none of this is true. What Nichols
advances is a grossly distorted view of American gun culture, one that suggests
he either has spoken to zero gun owners about guns or didn’t listen to them
when they did speak.
In fact, the people whom Tom is clumsily describing —
those of us who carry guns, who take a keen interest in gun policy, and who
believe that it is fine for responsible and well-trained gun owners to carry
their firearms in public places — do not actually “worship” guns. Nor do we tie
these interests and habits into our sense of self-worth and patriotism.
Here is the truth: Guns are many things, and one of the
things they are is tools. Like any
tool, guns have a good and meaningful application when used properly and
correctly, e.g. when they are carried by trained, law-abiding citizens and used
for proper defensive and life-saving measures. A good example of that is the
recent shooting at the church in White Settlement, Texas, in which an armed
parishioner shot and killed a murderous gunman before a rampage could really
begin.
Tom calls that scenario a “lucky break.” But this is
precisely the point. The vast majority of gun carriers will never have the need
to draw their weapons. Virtually none of them (a few blustery dimwits aside) wants to draw his weapon. Tom’s claim
that the Right has undergone a “pornification of gun ownership” does not
comport with the reality of those gun owners who would be happy to live out
their lives without getting in a firefight.
For these gun owners, carrying guns has nothing to do
with some base desire to get in a shootout. They carry because they want to be
able to protect themselves and other innocent people if an insane murderer
decides to start shooting. It’s not rocket science.
Statistics are not on the side of Nichols’s argument. In
the past twelve years concealed permits have increased by over 300 percent; homicides,
meanwhile, have been dropping since the early 90s, with the murder rate 5.3 percent lower
than it was in 2009, at the beginning of the concealed-carry boom.
Nichols’s persistent prognostication notwithstanding, the rise of concealed
carry has not actually led to more accidental gun deaths, either; such deaths
are at historic
lows.
There are plenty of other reasons besides self-defense
that many Americans enjoy guns: They are fascinating machines, they are fun to
shoot for sport, they are both a potent symbol and a practical example of the
unique American brand of civic and political freedom. Yes, we like guns. Yes,
many people carry firearms for self-defense. No, we do not “worship” guns.
Nichols and his friends would do well to get off their sneering Twitter feeds
and actually talk to gun enthusiasts at length, as we are not the idiotic
slack-jawed trigger-happy cowboys he so desperately wants us to be.
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