REGULATION: Same old song
If the current debate on gun control sounds vaguely familiar, it is because all of the arguments for it
are wrinkled with age.
Gun banners were at their posts when "Silent Cal" Coolidge was president. A liberal magazine
called the Nation was seeking to prohibit the interstate traffic in revolvers.
"Crime statistics show that 90 percent of the murders that take place are committed by the use of the
pistol, and every year there are hundreds of cases of accidental homicide because someone did not
know that his revolver was loaded," Nation said.
H.L. Mencken, one of the most influential newspapermen of the time, reacted in the Baltimore Sun,
Nov. 30, 1925.
Not one to mince words, he said Nation had packed into one paragraph "as much maudlin and
nonsensical blather, as much idiotic reasoning and banal moralizing, as Dr. Coolidge gets into a
speech of two hours' length."
Such "jackass legislation," Mencken said, "would not take the pistols out of the hands of rogues
and fools; it would simply take them out of the hands of honest men."
Citing New York's Sullivan Law, which prohibits anyone from having a pistol, he noted that New
York "is the heaven of footpads, hijackers, gunmen and all other such armed thugs."
Mencken's column, written during Prohibition, argued that restricting guns would raise their prices,
exactly as it did with liquor.
Mencken has been proved right on that point. After the ban on "assault weapons," their value
tripled.
The proposed gun law "would deprive the reputable citizen of the arms he needs for protection, and
hand them over to the rogues that he needs protection against," Mencken said.
Mencken was one of the leading intellectuals of his time and, like many of today's intellectuals, had
contempt for middle-class Americans, labeling them the "booboisie."
Yet, when the National Rifle Association makes that same argument today, intellectuals hoot at what
they consider to be a Neanderthal mentality. Maybe those who do so have neglected their studies in
literary history.
http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/101100/opi_4301564.html
If the current debate on gun control sounds vaguely familiar, it is because all of the arguments for it
are wrinkled with age.
Gun banners were at their posts when "Silent Cal" Coolidge was president. A liberal magazine
called the Nation was seeking to prohibit the interstate traffic in revolvers.
"Crime statistics show that 90 percent of the murders that take place are committed by the use of the
pistol, and every year there are hundreds of cases of accidental homicide because someone did not
know that his revolver was loaded," Nation said.
H.L. Mencken, one of the most influential newspapermen of the time, reacted in the Baltimore Sun,
Nov. 30, 1925.
Not one to mince words, he said Nation had packed into one paragraph "as much maudlin and
nonsensical blather, as much idiotic reasoning and banal moralizing, as Dr. Coolidge gets into a
speech of two hours' length."
Such "jackass legislation," Mencken said, "would not take the pistols out of the hands of rogues
and fools; it would simply take them out of the hands of honest men."
Citing New York's Sullivan Law, which prohibits anyone from having a pistol, he noted that New
York "is the heaven of footpads, hijackers, gunmen and all other such armed thugs."
Mencken's column, written during Prohibition, argued that restricting guns would raise their prices,
exactly as it did with liquor.
Mencken has been proved right on that point. After the ban on "assault weapons," their value
tripled.
The proposed gun law "would deprive the reputable citizen of the arms he needs for protection, and
hand them over to the rogues that he needs protection against," Mencken said.
Mencken was one of the leading intellectuals of his time and, like many of today's intellectuals, had
contempt for middle-class Americans, labeling them the "booboisie."
Yet, when the National Rifle Association makes that same argument today, intellectuals hoot at what
they consider to be a Neanderthal mentality. Maybe those who do so have neglected their studies in
literary history.
http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/101100/opi_4301564.html