Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Guns

In recent history, liberal and even conservative politicians have developed an obsession with stricter gun control laws, a policy that they believe will decrease violent crime in America. Some of them honestly believe that fewer guns will lead to fewer crimes. Some are just afraid of guns. And some want a disarmed public. Sadly, they are all wrong. Every European despot in the past two hundred years has attempted to disarm the public so as to make and keep it docile. American politicians, most of whom have never been near a gun for self-defense, will not address this. In their effort to pass gun control laws, politicians have used national tragedies to exploit our fears.

President Bill Clinton, who had been a staunch supporter of gun control throughout his presidency, used the tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, to bolster his argument for more stringent gun laws. On April 20th 1999, two deranged Columbine students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, shot and killed twelve students and a teacher. They injured twenty-one students, three of whom were trying to escape from the building. Immediately after the massacre, Harris and Klebold shot and killed themselves.

President Clinton, most Democrats, and many Republicans saw this tragedy as an opportunity to resume the gun control debate in America. In 1999, the United States Senate consisted of fifty-five Republicans and forty-five Democrats. The Columbine tragedy, however, caused the Republicans, a party that typically supports gun rights, to let their guard down,5 or show their true colors. Less than a month after Columbine, with Vice President Al Gore serving as the tie-breaking vote, the Senate voted in favor of a bill requiring background checks for firearms purchasers at gun shows and pawnshops.6 (Luckily, this bill never passed the House of Representatives, and thus was never enacted into law.) In light of Columbine, Clinton also launched a national campaign advocating less violence in music, movies, and video games.7 In fact, Clinton signed an executive order mandating a study of how the entertainment industry markets music, movies, and video games.

It seems following each tragedy involving guns, the government attacks the guns and not the sick individuals who abuse them. The government paints guns as evil, and conjures up the notion that we will be safer only if criminals have less access to guns. This is completely false. Lance Kirklin, a student wounded in the Columbine shooting, put it best when he said, “You don’t see guns jumping off the table and shooting people.”8 The problem is not easy access to weapons. The problem lies in the nature of the killers who commit these horrific crimes. No law restricting individual rights will stop them from carrying out their objectives.

The government, however, continues to succumb to hysteria over guns, as well as violence in movies, video games, and music. It ignores the real source of the problem because it cannot regulate what people think. On the other hand, it can throw money around restricting the use of everything under the sun, and pretend that it is solving problems that no law can prevent.

The government should not interfere with individuals’ rights to protect themselves against murderers like the Columbine and Virginia Tech students. Brave citizens used their right to bear arms to suppress a shooting at the University of Texas, Austin, on August 1st 1966. On that date, Charles Joseph Whitman, a twenty-five-year-old Florida native and former UT engineering student, opened fire from the twenty-eighth-floor observation deck of the school’s landmark 307-foot tower.9 Whitman killed sixteen people and wounded thirty-one before he was killed by police.10 Until the Virginia Tech massacre, the Texas shooting was the country’s deadliest.11

Whitman’s shooting could have been much worse, though. Brave Texans used their guns to fight back and prevent Whitman from doing even more damage. One English professor, who stored his deer rifle and boxes of ammunition in his office, shot at Whitman from his office window.12 A man by the name of Bill Helmer, a witness to the shooting, stated that Whitman was leaning over the edge of the observation deck to shoot at people, but did not have this luxury once people started shooting at him.13 According to Helmer, the Texans’ exercise of self-defense forced Whitman “to shoot through those drain spots, or he had to pop up real fast and then dive down again. That’s why he did most of his damage in the first 20 minutes.”14 Unfortunately, the Virginia Tech campus was a gun-free zone.15 Texas Representative Joe Driver, remembering the UT shooting, stated that “[i]f Virginia Tech had not kept the campus a gun-free zone, people could have been saved.”

The government’s approach to gun control is clearly wrong and terribly misguided. We must not allow the hysteria of a post-tragedy environment to bolster the government’s ability to restrict our rights and prevent us from defending ourselves against killers. The right to defend yourself, your property, your freedom, or any known innocent is a natural right. Your right to use available technology to effectuate that defense is a natural right as well. The Supreme Court of the United States, as we have seen in previous pages, has characterized the right as fundamental. I’ll be blunt: A major reason we have these tragedies like the University of Texas, Columbine, and Virginia Tech is because there are too few of us who carry guns, not too many.

Our Rights Were Necessarily Infringed

After Pearl Harbor

In the past, attacks on our soil have also led to dangerous and unconstitutional government behavior. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the federal government hastily installed a system of rationing based on its claim that suddenly certain commodities were scarce and the fear that others would become scarce.16 The first items to be rationed were automobile and truck tires, in January 1942.17 During 1942 and 1943, the government also rationed cars, bicycles, typewriters, gasoline, fuel oil, kerosene, coal, stoves, rubber footwear, shoes, sugar, coffee, processed foods, meats, canned fish,