Brass Knuckles

I grew up in West Texas, and got my first gun, a Winchester .22 caliber semi-auto when I was thirteen.  My parents were absolutely resolute that I would be safe, and I spent a lot of time learning how to shoot and hunt from family friends and relatives.  The Chiuhuahuan desert that spanned Northern Chihuahua and West Texas backed right up to our back fence – I could literally open the back gate and walk across the dirt alley into the desert, where I could hunt cottontail, jackrabbit, dove and quail and other small game with rifle, pistol and shotgun.   This is and was my culture.

How deeply is my culture valued by the Democratic party? Should the desires and mores of urban dwellers in left-leaning cities like NYC, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. to ban fully functional firearms trump the desires and needs of law-abiding citizens?  This is more than a practical matter of banning large caliber handguns for defense in small, tightly packed apartment units; we’re talking laws that ban the wholesale ban of firearms as is now being argued in a case coming up before the Supreme Court.  Ken Blackwell in Townhall.com talks about the case, the philosophies and what is at stake.

The facts of District of Columbia v. Heller make this a perfect test case. In the District of Columbia, it’s a crime to have any sort of readily-usable firearm. It’s illegal to have any sort of handgun – even a broken handgun – in your home. Having a long gun (rifle or shotgun) in your home is a crime unless the gun is unloaded and either disassembled or disabled by a trigger lock, with ammunition stored in a separate container. If someone breaks into your home, you have no time to have a functional firearm that is ready to defend your life or your family. The D.C. gun ban is considered the most severe gun control law in America.

Several citizens and lawyers brought the suit Parker v. District of Columbia to U.S. District Court to challenge this law. The federal trial court dismissed the case, stating that there is no right to own a gun. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed the decision, holding that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, and therefore holding the D.C. gun ban unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has taken the case, renamed District of Columbia v. Heller because Dick Heller was the only plaintiff found to have the standing to sue.

Notice in my commentary, I only talk about my experience as a young man growing up in rural West Texas.  Guys like me tend to be the presumed epicenter of opposition to gun control, and generally provide the counter-arguments, but that’s just because people tend to see the world through out own lens.  The gun-control advocates tend to think of the urban landscape in terms of their world-view, where only macho Charles Bronson wannabes want the guns, and only the only people who have or need them are drug dealers.  Talk about gun-owning inner-city dwellers, and chances are the image that comes into mind is either Tony Montana or Nino Brown.  Are the law-abiding inner city citizens even considered in this argument?  Ken Blackwell speaks from his experience.

Growing up in the Blackwell household in the central city neighborhoods of Cincinnati informed my public policy work as mayor of the Queen City and as an undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Families like mine – low income, civically engaged, and responsible – expected access to firearms for safety. Then, as now, criminals were not inclined to break into a house where the owner was armed.

Things were tougher in the South where the Deacons of Defense, most of whom were veterans like my father, chased away KKK riders and thugs. These groups of armed men patrolled their neighborhoods to keep them safe at night. Whether it’s an individual or a family who has to fight against random criminals or organized threats, our lives are evidence that Americans, particularly women and minorities in today’s urban areas, need our Second Amendment rights.

My view is that those who seek to ban guns, ostensibly for our own protection, are coming from a very narrow, limited cultural perspective.  They most likely grew up where their safety was a given, never had the opportunity or inclination to hunt or otherwise fire a weapon for sport, and see only evil arising from a man or woman possessing or using an object that has to potential for harm without any utilitarian purpose that they could perceive.  The see no more utility in a gun than they would in a Hummer, and they loath and would love to rid the world of both.

I grew up in an unincorporated town with no organic police department, and that went for years with no permanent sherriff’s or sub-station or Highway Patrol barracks.  We depended on the El Paso County Sherriff’s department and the Texas Highway patrol for protection, and could expect up to a half hour response time.   For me, the need, utility and recreational use for guns is obvious, but not so for a great many politically active names.  It’s is astounding to me that they would want to ban guns, and that they ascribe evil to these inanimate objects; I’m sure it’s astounding to them that that I plan to teach my son how to shoot and safely handle firearms when he gets of age.  Ken Blackwell talks about the philosophical and cultural questions at play.

The reason people come to opposite conclusions for this simple question stems from different approaches to interpreting the Constitution, the issues that are implicated in this case, and different philosophies about government – self-reliance versus reliance upon government.

There are two different ways of reading the Constitution – sometimes described as “strict constructionism” versus the “Living Constitution.” Strict constructionism (the actual legal terms are “originalism” or “textualism”) requires judges to adhere to the words of the Constitution. A “Living Constitution” means that judges are free to interpret the meaning of the Constitution to make it conform to modern social trends.

The obvious question here is “which social trends”?  There is a deeper question here – to what degree does the liberal left and their compadres in the media seek to disenfranchise great numbers of those who fall on the wrong side of the cultural divide?   It’s an election year, and there’s a great production going on to convince us of each candidate’s great desire to give voice to the disenfranchised, but which disenfranchised are we talking about here? I see a growing group that they seem to think it’s okay to step over and exclude from the “big tent”; the anonymous inner-city dwellers working to make their way out on the straight and narrow and on their own, the hard-working middle class in the “fly-over” states and the entrepeneurs, small businessmen and professionals that drive the economic engine of this country.   Oh, they profess love and kisses;  as they strip away our rights to express our religious freedom as we see fit and roll their eyes when we talk about God, they seek to protect us from our ignorant life-style choices, seek to protect our grown “children” from the committments of the military that they freely and courageously chose, and through taxation protect us from the dangers of carrying excess change in our pockets.  

And they lose us and lose elections time and time again.