Okay, so this morning I was reading my dad's NRA magazine because I was bored, and I saw yet another protest against gun registration. The argument is something we learned in high school English to avoid—the slippery slope: If guns are registered, then the government is going to start persecuting the owners of registered guns, then the government will take them away, then only criminals will have guns, and then all hell will break loose.
We register cars, boats, motorcycles, bicycles, trailers, dogs, cats, burial sites, mobile homes, hairstylists, egg handlers, drivers, voters, wild animals kept as pets, Accutane users, ADHD-medication users, marriages, births, deaths, day care centers, pesticides for your own home, Sudafed, backyard fires, kennels, pet food manufacturers, people who want to leave the country, taxis, rented rooms, garden sheds, home businesses, commercial weights and measures, ATVs, snowmobiles, food handlers, minors who want to work, professional kickboxers, and lots more crazy stuff. There is no reason why guns should not be on this list. In fact, it makes a lot more sense to register guns than it does to register cats.
In fact, that guns aren't registered, when all this other stuff is, tends to suggest that the NRA is much, much stronger than the "anti-gunners" they're so worried about. Which means that the victim position it takes is a little silly.
For example, this month the magazine said that NRA members have been defined as terrorists and may be prosecuted by "a few secret bureaucrats" (James O. E. Norell, "Are You an American[,] or Are You a Terrorist?" America's First Freedom, September 2009, 31) if Senate bill 1317 passes: "This is about freedom-loving Americans being transformed by a stealth process into felons. It involves secret lists created with secret dossiers" (32). The first thing Norell does is assume, after the first two paragraphs, that the bill has already passed, filling the average reader with terror that any day now they'll be snatched from their house in the middle of the night and accused "ex-parte and in camera" of violating "a set of police-state rules worthy of Iran, Cuba or North Korea" (33; italics original). He also waits until the very last page of his article, which is in another part of the magazine altogether, to mention that one of his key sources of gun-owner persecution—a DHS report called "Rightwing Extremism"—was actually withdrawn after veterans and gun owners complained about it (57). So it's not quite as exciting as it seems.
Another strange bit is when Norell refutes the Brady Center's charges that "the National Rifle Association [has] for years employed inflammatory extremist and anti-government rhetoric" (31; emphasis added by Norell) and then goes on for four pages about how "the feds" will "secretly . . . add you to their 'terrorist' list" (32). He even equates "gun owners, the NRA and people who disagree with their government" (33), assuming that all gun owners disagree with their government. He doesn't qualify how they disagree with their government, positing that they disagree with everything about the broadly defined government. That sounds just a little anti-government it me.
All this Us versus Them stuff is all very exciting in a nerds-who-resent-football-players way, but it's hardly constructive when you're trying to influence policy. For example, another article assumes that by the 2012 election, the NRA will definitely oppose Obama (Dave Kopel, "Will the Supreme Court Set Speech Free?" America's First Freedom, September 2009, 29). If I were Obama, that wouldn't be much incentive to do anything for the NRA. Politicians like to look good and make people like them (it's why they're politicians), and if you make it clear that you will never, ever approve of anything they ever do, they tend not to work with you. They even start to point out your flaws to protect themselves from the mudslinging you're doing. Furthermore, on the heels of the Heller decision and a Rasmussen survey which found that 75% of Americans "believe the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of a law-abiding citizen to own a firearm" (reported in America's First Freedom, September 2009, 16), it's just a little silly.
No comments:
Post a Comment