Can Extreme Gun Control Coexist with Equality Under the Law?

Most people have no conception of how corrupt and unequal gun control extremists are. So while good and decent people everywhere (including me) want steps taken to prevent more mass shootings, we should all be aware of the thinking of gun control leadership.

This is a snippet from an open letter I wrote to Obama when he was running the first time:
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A monstrous principle animates gun control. Unspoken and unspeakable, it alone fits the facts. Simply put, The people’s servants have judged their masters and found them wanting—not in skill or knowledge, but in basic human worth. Gun control’s self-evident truth is that all people are not created equal.

Once you accept its premise, gun control makes sense. Special people—the Elite—are entitled to special treatment, along with those who serve them.

Take Dick Heller, of the Heller case, for example. He carried a gun daily as a security guard for the Supreme Court Annex. Those who imagine the purpose of gun control to be keeping guns from the unfit will have difficulty explaining the rapid deterioration of his skills on his commute. By the time he arrived home each evening he could not possess a functional gun—lest he shoot himself.{*}

When we recall his servant role, however, Heller’s limitation made sense. With no inherent right to self defense, his fitness to bear arms was rooted in his job. Off duty, he no longer served the Judicial Elite.

Rosie O'Donnell, a champion of gun control, said in 1999 that anyone who owned a gun should be imprisoned.{55} To those who see gun control as an effort to keep guns from civilians, it is hard to justify her allowing a would-be “criminal”—a man applying to carry a gun—to protect her son in 2000.{56}

The initiated, however, see no hypocrisy. Rosie and her children are Socially Elite—perfectly entitled to the protection of arms.{57}

Bloomberg's confusion about carrying guns also makes sense. His armed detail protects the Political Elite; the retired police officer he was talking about had no higher purpose than self-defense. Why would he, with so meager an excuse, carry a gun? After all, “guns kill people.”

Katrina momentarily peeled back the veil on Financial Elitism. In the horrific circumstances following the storm, police deserted their posts. Some were filmed apparently looting in uniform.{58} The government took decisive action:




Under color of law, officials took personal property at gunpoint—a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. Louisiana’s Constitution received similar contempt:



From the gun control perspective, ordinary people should be disarmed in emergencies. So Mayor Nagin— who, “incoherent and weeping,” “fled to Baton Rouge”—courageously defied the highest legal authority.{62} He was not so bold, however, as to defy his fellow Elite:



If you are rich and fear for your property, your employees may carry fully automatic (true) assault weapons;--your property rights will be respected. If you are “average” and you fear that roving gangs may want to entertain themselves with your wife and children, you are out of luck. The Constitutions, federal and state, are impotent. This is an emergency!

In response to these outrages, Congress, prodded by the “gun lobby”, passed the Vitter amendment



Yet modest as it was, the amendment drew opposition from anti-gun senators Clinton, Schumer, Boxer, and
Feinstein.{65}

Their votes illustrate gun control’s contempt for the Bill of Rights—all of it. After all, why worry about leaving boot prints on the Fourth Amendment on your way to trample the Second?

New Orleans may have been an extreme case, but Financial Elitism is widespread. Recall that even the District permits defense of one’s business. Financial Elitism is institutionalized In New York as well:


Like all Americans, New Yorkers have a right to “keep and carry arms wherever they {go}” "{as the Supreme Court said in its first case mentioning the Second Amendment}. Yet in fifteen years, the lieutenant met no applicant who dared hope she could carry a gun to protect her life, her children, or her physical integrity.

And no wonder. New York doesn’t allow carry for “everyday” problems—death threats, assaults, and one would imagine rapes, kidnappings, and torture. Danger-based justifications must come from “a higher source” or “other agency.” Now who would “a higher source” or “other agency” pull strings for?

Gun control’s non-equality principle strikes at America’s core value—the political equality of all people—returning us to primitive, pre-Enlightenment thinking. It tells the single woman who dares oppose drugs, the father protecting his family in disaster, the old lady who lives alone—in short, the non-Elite—that they have no right to the means of self-defense.

Technically, it doesn’t say that they have no right to life, liberty, or physical integrity, but the difference is academic. Faced with harsh realities, they have a civic duty to be killed, raped, kidnapped, or have their families abused in front of them. This is preferable, in the eyes of the Elite, to having the rabble armed.

People who have such “civic duties” cannot be said to live in a free country. Remember the Second Amendment’s “free State”? UCLA Professor Eugene Volokh’s research shows it was a term of art.{67} “Free State” meant “free country”— not the freedom of Vermont or Nebraska from federal encroachment.

{Extremist} Gun control destroys the free State from the inside, too.

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* As discussed earlier in the open letter, DC Mayor Mayor Anthony's spokesman, Tony Bullock, explained why the plaintiffs in the recent
Parker suit should not even be allowed functional guns in their homes:

"I think it's a real myth that people would be able to arm themselves and avoid being
shot,‟ he said. "Chances are very good that they would accidentally shoot themselves or
that the gun would find its way into the hands of a child, which is not what we want.‟

55 “I saw Rosie make this statements on TV. Rosie's conversion
would be more convincing had it resulted from another mother’s security concerns.

56 Stephen M. Silverman, A Bodyguard for Rosie's Kid, Friday September 11, 1998.
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,26334,617858,00.html .

57 Because of its timing, I believe O’Donnell’s retreat (see note 55) was tactical and not principled.

58 I witnessed the apparent looting on CNN.

59 David B. Kopel, “Defenseless On the Bayou: New Orleans gun confiscation is foolish and illegal,”
September 10, 2005. http://www.reason.com/news/show/32966.html .

60 Alex Berenson and John M. Broder, “Police Begin Seizing Guns of Civilians,” New York Times,
September 9, 2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09storm.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

61 David B. Kopel, “Defenseless On the Bayou…” September 10, 2005.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/32966.html .

62 Ibid.

63 Alex Berenson and John M. Broder, “Police Begin Seizing Guns of Civilians”
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09storm.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

64http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=2&vote=00202

65 Ibid.

66 Susan Novak, “Why the New York State System for Obtaining a License to Carry a Concealed Weapon
is Unconstitutional,” Fordham Urban Law Journal, November 1998.
http://www.nysrpa.org/files/novak.pdf and http://www.saf.org/LawReviews/Novak1.html .

67 “There is ample evidence about the original meaning of the term “free state.” …
…In eighteenth-century political discourse „free state‟ was a commonly used political term of art, meaning
„free country,‟ which is to say the opposite of a despotism. …
„State‟ simply meant country; and „free‟ almost always meant free from despotism, rather than from some
other country, and never from some larger entity in a federal structure. That is how the phrase was used in
the sources that the Framers read. And there is no reason to think that the Framers departed from this wellestablished
meaning, and used the phrase to mean something different from what it meant to Blackstone,
Montesquieu, the Continental Congress, Madison, Adams, or others.” Eugene Volokh, “Necessary to the
Security of a Free State” Notre Dame Law Review, 2007, 104-5.
http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/freestate.pdf .