99 lines
6.9 KiB
Plaintext
99 lines
6.9 KiB
Plaintext
Firearms and the dominant media culture
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<p>A recent flurry of <a href="http://juangato.blogspot.com/?/2002_05_05_juangato_archive.html#76413238"><br />
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nearly identical editorials</a> in American newspapers conveys the<br />
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degree of fluttering endemic in dovecotes everywhere in the wake of<br />
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the Justice Department’s new statement of position on the Second<br />
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Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The <cite>New York Times</cite><br />
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and <cite>Washington Post</cite> have viewed with alarm, displaying an<br />
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almost pathetic degree of panic at the thought that lawmakers might<br />
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once again have to start taking that pesky “shall not be infringed”<br />
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language seriously.</p>
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<p>The dominant culture of the American national media knows what it<br />
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believes about guns. Firearms are evil juju that have the power to<br />
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induce murderous violence in otherwise normal human beings. Firearms<br />
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owners are all either ghetto drug dealers whose idea of the good life<br />
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is a drive-by a day, or else tractor-cap-wearing rural sociopaths jes’<br />
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itchin’ to shoot up a schoolyard. Firearms-rights advocates are a<br />
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tiny nut-fringe of reactionary wackos barely one step from blowing up<br />
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a federal building. Gun-control boosters are virtuous crusaders<br />
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animated by selfless love of children and small fuzzy things. There<br />
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will come a day when all guns are banned, hallelujah, violent crime<br />
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will plummet, and we can stop being embarrassed for being<br />
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Americans.</p>
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<p>Over the last thirty years this mythology has grown so thick, so<br />
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armored with smugness, that the dominant media culture is normally<br />
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incapable of noticing mere facts that happen to contradict it. Gary<br />
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Kleck’s <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/guns/point-blank-summary.html"> Point<br />
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Blank: Guns and Violence In America</a> should have put paid the<br />
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demonization of gun owners back in 1993. John Lott’s 1998 book<br />
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<cite>More Guns, Less Crime</cite> demonstrated that civilian firearms<br />
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dramatically reduce crime and violence. And Sanford Levinson’s 1989<br />
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study <a href="http://www.shadeslanding.com/firearms/embar.html">The<br />
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Embarrassing Second Amendment</a> began a wave of legal scholarship<br />
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that established what is now called the `Standard Model’, that the<br />
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Second Amendment does indeed protect an individual citizen’s right to<br />
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bear arms.</p>
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<p>That smugness has been shook, badly, by three different<br />
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events of which the Justice Department’s finding is only the most recent.<br />
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The media panic we’re seeing is a cumulative result of all three.</p>
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<p>First there was Michael Bellesiles’s exposure as a fraud. His book<br />
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<cite>Arming America</cite> won the Bancroft prize and gushing encomiums<br />
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from the dominant media culture when it purported to show that the<br />
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armed and self-reliant American frontiersman was a myth — that the<br />
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gun culture of the U.S. postdates the American Civil War and was alien<br />
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to the framers of the Constitution.</p>
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<p>Alas for the <em>bien pensants</em> of the world that the book<br />
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turned out to be a tissue of lies, invented but nonexistent evidence,<br />
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and willful misquotation of existing evidence. A fabrication, in<br />
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fact, so egregious that it has induced the National Endowment for the<br />
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Humanities to open its first official fraud investigation in thirty-seven<br />
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years. Suddenly the fraud claims gun-rights activists had been making<br />
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for years about other anti-gun scholarship (such as the infamous<br />
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Kellerman <a href="http://i2i.org/SuptDocs/Crime/43_to_1_fallacy.htm">“43:1″</a>)<br />
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study) were no longer so easily dismissible as paranoid ranting.</p>
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<p>But worse was to come, on September 9th 2001. Because Al-Qaeda’s<br />
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ability to turns airliners into weapons of mass destruction using<br />
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nothing but carpet knives illustrated in the most dramatic possible<br />
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way the folly of believing that a disarmed world is a safe one. All<br />
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the “security” that kept civilian firearms off airplanes did was make<br />
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terrorism easier for the determined few who could smuggle weapons on<br />
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board.</p>
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<p>Many tides turned after 9/11, and not the least result of it was<br />
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a huge groundswell in popular support for civilian self-defense and<br />
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firearms rights. The <a href="http://www.pinkpistols.org/"><br />
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Pink Pistols</a> and chapters of the <a href="http://www.sas-aim.org/"><br />
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Second Amendment Sisters</a> on college campuses previously known<br />
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as strongholds of anti-firearms politics became impossible to ignore.<br />
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The new wave of popular pro-gun agitation could not be forced into the<br />
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“right-wing kooks” box so beloved of the dominant media culture.</p>
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<p>It’s no wonder the Justice Department’s endorsement of a<br />
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pro-gun-rights brief in “Emerson vs. U.S.” has the mavens of the<br />
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dominant media culture feeling faint and panicky. One of the pillars<br />
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of their world-view (up there with the unquestionable sanctity of<br />
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environmentalists, say, or the importance of `diversity’, or the<br />
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superior virtue of the putatively oppressed) is creaking. Those loony<br />
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gun nuts night turn out to be (a) right on the facts, (b)<br />
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overwhelmingly popular, and (c) backed up by the Bill of Rights, the<br />
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Justice Department, and the Supreme Court, after all!</p>
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<p>If the Supreme Court grants certiorati on the Emerson case, we can<br />
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expect the dominant media culture to get its knickers in a knot so<br />
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complicated it would baffle an algebraic topologist. Because given<br />
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the composition of the Court and the tenor of the times, the result<br />
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might well be a dramatic rollback in the reach of firearms regulation.<br />
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Gun-rights advocates can hope that laws touching the Second Amendment<br />
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may in the future have to pass the same strictest level of scrutiny<br />
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as laws touching the First. A wave of lawsuits successfully striking<br />
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down state and local gun laws under the doctrine of incorporation<br />
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could well follow.</p>
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<p>The closest historical precedent for what may be about to happen is<br />
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the rediscovery of the First Amendment in the early 20th century.<br />
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Before 1919 speech advocating unpopular ideas could be made a<br />
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punishable offense. Oliver Wendell Holmes created the doctrine,<br />
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since become sacred to the dominant media culture, that unpopular<br />
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ideas demand the <em>most</em> constitutional protection, and that<br />
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the press has a broadly privileged role under that shield.</p>
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<p>There is irony in the fact that, having benefited from the<br />
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reassertion of the first article of the Bill of Rights, the dominant<br />
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media culture should so be resisting the second.</p>
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<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&commentid=76531063">Blogspot comments</a></p>
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