Of Guns and American Democracy

One recent morning the commentator on a Washington-D.C. area Spanish-language radio station was declaiming at unusual length against private gun ownership.  What caught my attention that morning while driving to work was his expression of wonder at the deep and widespread interest of people in the United States in owning firearms.  He could not understand or explain it.  He was lost.  The interest in private gun ownership was a foreign cultural phenomenon to him. 

No doubt it was, but he was correct to identify the passion for gun ownership as an element of the cultural life of the United States that is not only deep, but deep-rooted.  Those roots go back to the very founding of North America by the first colonists, reinforced by subsequent waves of immigrants.  The very first North American colonists had guns, as essential to survival as seeds and shovels.  As Germans joined the English, the Scots, and the Dutch in the new land, followed by Irish, Swedes, Italians and others, guns traveled with the pioneers west.

Western European society invented common firearms and spread them among the commoners.  By means of firearms the commoners won their new land.  With their firearms those commoners also won their freedom from the lords and ladies who could no longer control the armed rabble, particularly in the English colonies, and particularly in the colonies that became the United States.  Guns in the United States have been instruments of survival, physical and political.

What the kings and nobles of Europe could not know was that there is something powerfully democratizing in gun possession.  Firearms ended the reign of the mounted knight and made it hard for kings and emperors to keep their thrones.  No aristocrat in any palace was invulnerable to the meanest peasant armed with musket and ball.  Guns have been an historically powerful equalizer and defense against tyranny and pillagers. 

That democratizing process worked further and faster in America, where courage and a gun could tame a wilderness and provide freedom for the family.  Far from the reach of government,  and unanswerable for the pretended protection of the manor house, the typical American could take immediate responsibility for himself and his own security and that of his wife and children, backed up by the very real ability to assert that security.  No one seems to know the origin of the proverb, “God created men, but Sam Colt made them equal,” but the armed nation builders of the American West understood and believed it.

That is to say that, in the United States at least, people have not needed government, and especially government protection, all that much.  Gun ownership has always been at the core of American independence and democracy, essential from the founding up into modern times.  It is a symbol of American freedom, but more than that, ownership of firearms is a tangible expression of the independence and self-reliance that are at the core of American citizenship, a culture of freedom new and sometimes foreign to people hailing from other parts of the world.  It is not accidental that not only the right to keep firearms but the active right to bear them is recognized in our Constitution as fundamental, alongside freedom of expression, the protection of private property, trial by jury, and other cornerstones of our liberty.

As the dangerous frontiers of violence encroach again on families beyond the timely protection of law enforcement, that innate American self-reliance is reenergized, and well it should be.  The examples of people saved by their guns from robbery, murder, and worse, are legion if little noted by the establishment media reporting from their armed security zones. 

In the face of increased violent criminal activity—whether from terrorists or thugs—why does it make sense to weaken the defenses of law abiding citizens?  Why would the government of a free people impose regulations to expose those who live peacefully to the barbarous cruelty of those who consider a regulation no barrier to preying upon the disarmed?  I do not understand it.  As an American, I do not understand it at all. 

Of the G-20 and Running the World

When you think about it, it is ridiculous.  In fact, it would be pitiful, if they were not so serious and did not have the power to do seriously bad things.  I am referring to the leaders of the Group of 20 (G-20) nations, who recently met in Mexico, thinking that they run the world.

If the question were put to you, “Who runs the world?” there could be several correct answers, but none of them would be this group of people, or any subset of them.  Nevertheless, because they think that they do run the world, and because they act on that belief, they do a lot of things that not only do not work but that make things worse.  Then they gather again and try something else, much of which is designed to clean up the mess caused by their previous foray in hubristic action.

The world is a complex place, with billions of people each doing complex things and interacting with each other in complex ways.  Then the planet itself does a lot of complex things.  Take the weather, for instance.  With computers and a hundred years of scientific study, weather forecasters have succeeded in the ability to predict the weather with a passable degree of accuracy two or three days out.  Beyond that, the accuracy of forecasts declines to about 50-50 (flip a coin) and drops from there.  The ability to change the weather, after a lot of work and investment, remains elusive. 

You have to be very smart, or think that you are, to convince yourself that you can in any significant way control the economy of your own nation, let alone of the world together.  The Russians, who are very smart people, tried it for 70 years with less than success and with the death and misery of tens of millions of their people.  The communist Chinese gave it a go, too.  Lately they have been reluctantly recognizing that there might be a better way—though they act like they are still not so sure.

Consider how many of the most serious problems facing mankind today are caused by people like these G-20 government leaders who fancy that they run things.  A few examples:

• The economic malaise in the United States.  The U.S. economy has just passed through a very deep recession, caused by government programs that encouraged people to buy houses that they could not afford, investors to invest in the mortgages used to buy those houses, banks to take government investments in their capital that they did not need, and people who could afford to pay their mortgages to walk away and leave the keys on the counter.  To solve those problems, the U.S. government spent a trillion dollars it did not have, increased rules and regulations on businesses that could otherwise create new jobs, “created” a quarter of a million new jobs at the cost of eliminating a million jobs in the private sector, and threatened investors and small businessmen with stiff tax increases.  Economic activity remains in the doldrums.

• The second economic recession in Europe.  The European economy went into recession about the same time that the U.S. economy did, for rather similar reasons.  It then weakly recovered, briefly, and then went back into recession when the promises that the governments of southern European countries made over decades to buy votes at last became more expensive than they could borrow money for—let alone pay for.  Now, every couple of weeks Greece, Italy, or Spain goes into economic crisis, the rest of the European leaders make empty promises to solve the problem, followed a couple of weeks later by new crisis and another round of promises.  That has been going on for about a year, while economic activity heads south.

• The availability of energy.  From the gasoline that we put in our cars, the electricity that lights our houses, to the natural gas that warms our offices and homes government rules affect the availability, price, distribution, and supply of energy.  The United States imports enormous amounts of oil from unstable countries that use the money we pay for it to threaten our people at home and abroad.  Meanwhile, we have more than enough supplies of coal, natural gas, and oil located in oil shale and oil sands and off our own shores to meet all of our needs now and for the foreseeable future, but government efforts to run the energy business prevent us from using them.

These are just three groups of examples of many.  Once again I call on the wisdom of William Tecumseh Sherman, the great Union general of the Civil War, who famously refused to run for President of the United States with the assertion that if nominated he would not run, if elected he would not serve.  He gave his friend and colleague, U.S. Grant, who did not make such a refusal, a piece of excellent advice:

My opinion is, the country is doctored to death, and if President and Congress would go to sleep like Rip Van Winkle, the country would go on under natural influences, and recover far faster than under their joint and several treatment.

(William T. Sherman, letter to General Ulysses S. Grant, February 14, 1868, in William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of William T. Sherman, p.922)

If someone should ask you, “Who runs the country?”, the correct answer is, “no one.”  Plenty pretend to, and many others wish to, but none do and none can, and we would all be better off if they would stop trying.  Our nation’s founders would have recoiled in horror at the question, because they intentionally created a nation that no one could run.  Why else have three branches of a federal government, one of which is divided into two separate houses, and state governments take their share of governmental authority?  They had seen Europe and knew of Asia where people for thousands of years had royally messed things up by trying to run their countries.

Instead, the American founders created a system where each person would run his own life.  The leaders in government were to run the government, that for the most part was to stay out of people’s lives and keep foreign governments at bay should they have any thoughts of trying their hand at running the lives of Americans.

That vision of the founders has been fading.  Today, make a list of the things that you can do that do not involve some sort of authority or permission from government.  It will not be a long list, and it has not been getting any longer in recent years.  Then ask yourself if life has been getting any better.  If it has, congratulate yourself on your power to overcome.

Of Occupy Zarahemla and Sharing Your Wealth with You

Only a couple dozen years before the visit of Jesus Christ, the resurrected Savior, to ancient America one of the leading civilizations of the time was in danger of a very different visitation, of impending destruction.  The society was already on the verge of cracking from years of organized crime in the cities and terrorist attacks from refuges in the nearby mountains.  Enforcement and counterattacks had either been unsuccessful or brought only temporary respite.  Too many of the people were either sympathetic to the criminals or not well organized enough to eradicate their threats.

Recent successes emboldened the main man of the terrorist network to issue an ultimatum to the chief judge of the struggling government, whose capital city was called Zarahemla:  give up or we will destroy you.  As forward as was the substance of the demand, it was surpassed by the pitch.  Until recent years I had not come across anything like it in my own experience for twisted assertions and sheer hypocrisy.  One of the great values of The Book of Mormon is how again and again the experiences of its people and societies foretell parallel developments in our time.  This was one more example.

Consider this pitch from the robber leader, Giddianhi.  It starts out merely audacious, saying surrender before we kill the lot of you, in language you might hear from any pirate:  

Therefore I write unto you, desiring that ye would yield up unto this my people, your cities, your lands, and your possessions, rather than that they should visit you with the sword and that destruction should come upon you.  (3 Nephi 3:6)

Apparently constant raiding was becoming too tiring.  They wanted it all, pronto.  What follows, though, is a rather astounding justification, but one that sounds all of a sudden very familiar to 21^st century Americans:

Or in other words, yield yourselves up unto us, and unite with us and become acquainted with our secret works, and become our brethren that ye may be like unto us—not our slaves, but our brethren and partners of all our substance.  (3 Nephi 3:7)

In short, the demand was, give us everything you have, join with us, embrace our philosophy of want-and-take, and we will share with you all of our stuff (which was once your stuff, but no need to fuss about that).  Then we will all be one big happy society, no more conflict, “partners of all our substance”, a socialist utopia.  The takers were inviting the makers to join the society of takers.  Certainly you see the flaw in the proposition.  When all are takers—including the makers—whom will the takers take from?

It feels like Giddianhi would be quite at home in the recent “Occupy” movement.  He demanded to occupy Zarahemla, and all would then be fine.  Modern occupiers’ demands for pricy downtown real estate to squat on, money to pay for food, shelter, bedding, clothing, health care, legal bills, publicity, and other wants and needs, are to be met by the prosperous whose prosperity makes all this possible.  And the occupiers will continue to occupy wherever they are until the government ends all inequities by raising taxes on the people who are already paying 70% of all taxes.  The prosperous must be still holding back from the rest.   

The occupiers claim to represent everyone (well, 99% of everyone) already, if people would just recognize that and admit that they are one with the occupiers. Y’all come. And together we will tax everyone to death and take their stuff, and share it with one another, and then all will be great, no more problems. 

Fortunately for the people of Zarahemla, they refused to buy it.  They built a wall around their land and kept all of the takers out, until the takers were faced with famine.  What if America’s makers ultimately insisted that they would not support the takers anymore?  What if the takers were forced to get jobs and work for what they ate?  They would howl, at least as long as they thought someone was listening.  Now that is utopia we can believe in.