Camille Paglia on Gun Control

Mister G

Inactive
The following brief excerpt is from her latest column in the internet magazine, Salon.

Go there for some interesting views on Waco, Rush Limbaugh and John McCain.

I think she makes a lot more sense on RKBA issues than most:


"Given the excesses by government agencies, followed by the massive coverup, liberal Democrats are on shaky ground when they argue that law-abiding citizens have no foreseeable need for arms in modern society. Ronald Brady adds this testimony to my warning that civil disorder can quickly follow a severe climatological disturbance:

When Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida, law and order would have collapsed, except that many people who were not in law enforcement took it upon themselves to go around packing firearms. I think of these individuals as being the militia as described in the Second Amendment. It was the actions of these people that prevented widespread looting in the aftermath of that hurricane. Of course, this did not get reported in the mainstream press.

It's a premise of all my work that civilization is a frail structure through which the forces of barbarism can break at any time. Although I'm not a gun owner, I strongly suspect that liberal hostility to guns often springs from a sentimental misinterpretation of reality. Tim Hartin, who began our long-running gun debate, writes again on this matter from Mount Horeb, Wis.:

I was delighted at the way the anti-gun responses in your last column proved the very point I was trying to make: namely that support for gun control is an emotional/cultural/class issue that has nothing to do with the facts.

There is almost no correlation between the level of gun ownership in a nation and the level of criminal violence in that nation. In the U.S., we have guns and violence, but guns were not used in nearly three out four violent crimes, and 99.8 percent of firearms will not be used to commit a crime in any given year.
In Switzerland, they have an assault rifle in every house and little violence. In England, they recently confiscated all the guns, and were rewarded with a crime wave.

In the U.S., there is a direct correlation between gun control and violent crime. Almost without exception, jurisdictions with gun control have higher crime rates than jurisdictions without gun control. The historical record shows that when gun controls are loosened, crime goes down, and when gun controls are tightened, crime goes up.

Gun controllers continue with their crusade in the face of these rational on this topic and
2) that they are not really trying to reduce crime or violence but are instead after something else.

I speculate that their motives are an unhealthy mix of the following:

1) Fear of the unknown (guns).

2) Fear of those unwashed "others" who might own guns.

3) Insecurity about their ability to protect themselves, with or without a gun.

4) Childlike desire for some big, burly father figure to protect them.

5) Childlike desire for a soft, pink, fluffy world with no sharp corners, threats or dangers.

6) Sublimated fear of penises/male power, as embodied by phallic guns.

7) Deep denial about the roots of violence in human nature and, by extension, their own capacity for violence.
8) A self-righteous belief in their own moral superiority.

When the Second Amendment was passed, a "militia" was commonly understood to be a group of armed citizens, such as those unofficial groups that resisted the British during the early days of the Revolutionary War. The old concept of a militia is best preserved today in Switzerland, where every male of military age belongs to the militia and keeps a fully automatic assault rifle in his house.

Thanks, Mr. Hartin, for yet another eloquent litany on this explosively controversial issue, which the media (with help from a whiny President Clinton)are already maneuvering front and center for the presidential race. As I've indicated in the past, I firmly agree with this view of the Second Amendment as the crucial recourse of private citizens against government tyranny, which world history shows can arise with stunning speed."
 
Back
Top