The gun prohibitionists have been preparing for this since their disappointment at the reaction to Aurora. They carefully organized in advance in anticipation of the next mass murder in order to sway American public opinion against gun owners. This is the equivalent of their Tet Offensive.
Well, what a surprise: liberal academics are capitalizing on the Newtown tragedy to advance their arguments against civilian gun ownership.
Wasting no time to capitalize on the massacre, Firmin DeBrabander published an opinion piece in Saturday's New York Times. DeBrabander is Chair of Humanistic Studies (what?) at the Maryland Institute College of Art (where?), where he teaches such helpful courses as Capitalism and its Critics, Modern Political Theory, and History of Psychoanalysis. Nice idea having a European Marxist tell Americans why they should surrender their guns, huh?
In his essay, DeBrabander argues that "an armed society. . .is the opposite of a civil society," taking a stance against the oft-repeated mantra that "An armed society is a polite society." "As ever more people are armed in public," DeBrabander writes, "even brandishing weapons on the street - this is no longer recognizable as a civil society. Freedom is vanished at that point."
Perhaps DeBrabander would do well to step outside the Ivory Tower (and the state of Maryland) to places like New Hampshire, Vermont, or Pennsylvania. In these Northeastern "Blue States," law-abiding citizens have the right to bear arms in public, and often do. That's a big part of their freedom. You see, in those states (as in Colorado, Nevada, Washington, and a few other places), the government does not seek to oppress its citizens by imposing its own view of what is proper and acceptable. People have the freedom to live and love as they choose, and the public carrying of guns in no way detracts from that; rather, it allows them to protect their freedoms should threats arrive in the public sphere.
DeBrabander completely misinterprets what the saying "an armed society is a polite society" actually means. For DeBrabander, "the suggestion is that guns liberally interspersed throughout society would cause us all to walk gingerly - not make any sudden, unexpected moves - and watch what we say, how we act, whom we might offend." This is completely inaccurate. All "an armed society is a polite society" means is that people will be more respectful of one another in public if they suspect that the other person might be armed. This does not mean that free speech will be curtailed, or that no one would want to risk offending the political or religious views of another for fear of being shot. Instead, it means that anti-social behavior would be kept in check.
When you suspect that the other person might be armed, you are less likely to try to rob, threaten, assault, or sexually harass her in public. Firearms in public do not lead to a proliferation of "Wild West" shootouts; if they did, we would expect to see such occurrences on a daily basis all over the U.S., where most states allow citizens to bear arms in public.
But DeBrabander does not acknowledge this because, in all likelihood, he has never met a law-abiding gun owner. Like many gun prohibitionists, DeBrabander consistently demonstrates his lack of familiarity with law-abiding gun owners, and instead engages in a fantastic rendering of what anti-gun liberals imagine gun owners to be like. For him, "guns by their nature. . .don't mix with taking offense. They are combustible ingredients in assembly and speech." Again, how many incidents have their been in places like Washington, Colorado, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere--states whose populations hail from a variety of religious, ethnic, and racial backgrounds, and where the people possess widely divergent views on such controversial issues as abortion and gay marriage? Contrary to what DeBrabander imagines in his fantasy world, in the real world, law-abiding gun owners do not whip out their weapons and start shooting when confronted with debate or argument.
As a collectivist, DeBrabander also imagines gun owners to be "extreme individualists" : "Private gun ownership invites retreat into extreme individualism. . .and nourishes the illusion that I can be my own police, or military, as the case may be." Obviously, DeBrabander has never been to a target range or shooting club, but instead imagines millions of lonely isolationists shooting at targets in the woods. Target shooting and hunting are fundamentally SOCIAL activities that bring together people from all different backgrounds to share in a mutual pastime. But, like most gun prohibitionists, DeBrabander is so terrified of guns that he can't even conceive that they could be used in a non-violent, social manner.
As a counter-example to the violent, anti-social individualism of gun owners, DeBrabander points to the "power of the Occupy Wall Street movement, as well as the Arab Spring protests," which "stemmed precisely from their non-violent nature." If the Occupy Wall Street movement had any power or accomplished anything whatsoever, I'm unaware of it. As for the Arab Spring protests, how's that working for you now? Now that Islamist regimes have proliferated in the region, further increasing its instability. Those uprisings only occurred because the military was ready for a regime change in Egypt and Tunisia. In Libya and Syria, the military chose to remain loyal to the dictator, making armed rebellion the only viable option.
DeBrabander goes on to make some contradictory statements regarding government power. With regards to the Occupy Movement, he writes that the power of free speech "was made evident by the ferocity of government response to the Occupy movement. Occupy protestors across the country were increasingly confronted by police in military style garb and affect." While I share DeBrabander's uneasiness with paramilitary police forces, the militarization of law enforcement seems to me an even stronger argument in favor of an armed populace. The dispersal and disappearance of the Occupy movement under the threat of force also seems to demonstrate the WEAKNESS of protest when not supported by the threat of violence: the government gives you free speech to say whatever you want because it knows that YOUR WORDS DO NOT MATTER and are powerless to change the status quo.
Continuing with his fantastic musings, DeBrabander goes on to imagine what would have happened if the Occupy protesters had been armed: "Imagine what this would have looked like had the protestors been armed: in the face of the New York Police Department assault on Zuccotti Park, there might have been armed insurrection in the streets." Or, perhaps, the NYPD would have simply let them stay there and continue their peaceful protest. For DeBrabander, "the non-violent nature of protest in this country ensures that it can occur." In reality, the absence of the mere possibility of violence ensures that the forces in power will be able to quash protests whenever they decide the time has come, so that protests will remain pointless exercises rather than mechanisms for meaningful change.
At the same time that he criticizes the militarization of law enforcement, however, DeBrabander thoroughly rejects the notion "that guns provide the ultimate insurance of our freedom, in so far as they are the final deterrent against encroaching centralized government, and an executive branch run amok with power." Instead, in DeBrabander's view, "it goes without saying that individually armed citizens are no match for government force." It's tough to respond to such a conclusory statement, but world history seems to show that armed populations succeed in resisting tyranny, while unarmed populations have no choice but to succumb to state terror.
However, in DeBrabander's fantasyland, armed citizens remain as isolated individualists, and would never band together to resist oppression. Which is why he reiterates that "guns undermine…community. Their pervasive, open presence would sow apprehension, suspicion, mistrust and fear, all emotions that are corrosive of community and civic cooperation. To that extent, then, guns give license to autocratic government." Why DeBrabander uses the conditional tense here is beyond me, as guns are already pervasively present in many states, with little effect on community or civic cooperation. Of course, in reality, the open presence of guns makes DeBrabander apprehensive, suspicious, mistrustful, and fearful, which is why he doesn't want anyone to have guns. Individual gun owners do not feel these things, WHICH IS WHY WE GET TOGETHER WITH OTHER GUN OWNERS AND GO SHOOTING. Nothing says "trust" so much as standing next to someone who is shooting a "high caliber weapon."
(For the record, DeBrabander further shows his ignorance when he says that "high caliber weapons" were the "weapon of choice" in Newtown, apparently unaware that the .223 Remington is on the lower end as far as calibers go.)
An armed populace forms the bedrock of our freedom as Americans. It is the final assurance that our government will not turn against us; our guns are our last line of defense against tyranny. As a community, American gun owners know this: we are trustful of each other, but distrustful of our government, for the precise reason that the tendency of government is toward despotism.
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