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Peter Hitchens posing with the ‘NRA’.
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30 April 2009
3:06 PM
On being a gun
nut
Well, I said I would be misrepresented
when I voiced doubts about 'gun control', and I duly was, by a contributor who
seems keen to legalise a drug that destroys the brains of the young, but regards
it as unthinkable to allow individuals to own guns. He says I am a 'gun nut'.
Does that make him a 'dope nut'? Perhaps, though I doubt he will see it that
way. Well, I don't see it his way either. Here's why.
Presumably he imagines that my house is crammed
with firearms and ammunition, and that I salivate over gun porn in my
bullet-proof bunker. I'm sorry to disappoint him but I neither own any guns nor
wish to do so. I find proper firearms as alarming as I find powerful
motorcycles. In both cases you need to know what you're doing before you use
them. In both cases they give you more power than you might want to possess. In
both cases, they are too easily capable of inflicting pain and injury. Having
nearly killed myself (and someone else) on a motorbike when I was 17, I would
be reluctant to ride one again. I can, without any effort at all, recall in
vivid detail the screaming of metal on Tarmac as my machine tipped over, sparks
flying, and the first sight of my very badly broken ankle after I had hopped to
the roadside. I can also remember that, after a dreamlike interlude when I was
unaware of how badly I was hurt, it was very painful but (fortunately) have no
actual memory of the pain itself, which was just short of the level needed to
pass out. I hope this helps to explain why I am also not anxious to keep a
firearm.
I don't even
like being near motorbikes any more. I am more aware than most people of what
severe physical injury looks and feels like. And I suspect I should be just as
cautious with a loaded gun of any kind. Handling unloaded ones, as I did for
some posed pictures in Moscow, Idaho last October, is of course another matter.
The only
firearms I ever possessed were a couple of childhood airguns, once common but
now - I suspect - more or less banned. The righteous frenzy against toy guns
(including those which are unmistakably and obviously toys) is now so great
that toyshops often don't stock them any more. All I desire is my lawful
freedom, as guaranteed by the 1689 Bill of Rights and lawlessly whittled away
by the civil service and dim politicians, to own a gun if I choose to do so. I
suppose it's possible that, as our anarchy deepens, I might reluctantly want to
take advantage of this. But that's the point. The choice should be mine, not
that of some boot-faced politically-correct police officer anxious to maintain
his monopoly of force - and anxious to ensure that his idea of the law should
be the only one available.
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Peacemakers are not pacifists.
Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a
purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let
him sell his garment, and buy one. – Luke 22:36 (KJV)
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://www.slideshare.net/dkooyers/matthew-5-6-prayer-ss]
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As I argue in
my book 'A Brief History of Crime', it's the great gulf between police and
public over how the law should be enforced that lies behind two important
features of modern Britain. The frequent arrests of people for defending
themselves or their property are not accidents or quirks. They are the
consequence of the Criminal Justice system's abandonment of old-fashioned ideas
of punishment; also of that system's social democratic belief that crime has
'social' causes and the ownership of property isn't absolute. Most law-abiding
people don't really accept this. They think criminals do bad things because
they lack conscience or restraint, not because they were abused as children or
their dole payments are too small. And they don't see why they have to
barricade their houses or hide their worldly goods from view on the assumption
that some unrestrained low-life is otherwise bound to steal them. So they
regard it as legitimate to hurt and punish those who rob them or otherwise
attack them. If they were allowed to enforce the law as they see it, they would
quickly show the police and courts up as useless and mistaken. One of the most
important jobs of the police is to stop us looking after ourselves, in case we
do a better job than PC Plod.
Guns
simply take this to a higher level. Since we foolishly abolished the formal
death penalty, imposed after a careful trial, we have transferred the power of
capital punishment to an increasingly armed police force (though no legislation
has ever actually been passed to arm them, and the pretence is still maintained
that they are unarmed). That police force is now the arm of the liberal state -
rather than enforcers of conservative law (which is why it is nowadays called a
'service') - and so has a much wider licence to use (liberal) violence than
ordinary conservative citizens. Contrast the police force's zealous efforts to
stamp out private gun ownership with its own rather poor efforts at responsible
gun use, as a result of which quite a few people (one stark naked in a well-lit
room) have been shot by mistake or as a result of over-reaction by armed
officers. As it happens, I find these mistakes and over-reactions quite easy to
pardon. Which of us, in such situations, could be sure he would do the right
thing? I've never joined in the frenzy of criticism over the de Menezes case,
for instance. It is terribly easy to see how such an error could have been made
under the circumstances. But if we didn't have an armed police force, and left
executions to the hangman, then these things would be a lot less likely.
But what
concerns me is that members of the public in the same situation are judged so
much more harshly if they make such mistakes. And, perhaps more important, how
police shootings are widely accepted, though they are summary, often erroneous
and inadequately investigated. Whereas a society which finds this summary
execution acceptable gets into a pseudo-moral lather about the idea of lawful
execution after due process, jury trial, the possibility of appeal and
reprieve.
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Christian
case for gun rights
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This brings
me back to the USA. Americans are not so infantilised as we are. For many
reasons, mainly the fact that it is still possible to live genuinely rural
lives in large parts of the country, Americans are less likely to rely on
others to protect them or their homes from danger.
This used to
be true of us too (again I must urge those who are interested to read the
relevant chapter in 'Brief History'). It's evident from a lot of English
fiction, written not for propaganda but by people who simply recorded life as
they understood it, that until quite recently we had a more American view of
things. In fact until 1920 English Gun Law made Texas look effeminate. Read, as
nobody now does, Captain Marryat's 'Children of the New Forest' set in the days
of Cromwell, and observe the wholly different attitudes towards self-defence
against crime that are casually described there.
Read,
as fewer and fewer people now do, alas, the 'Sherlock Holmes' stories, and see
how often Holmes and Dr Watson venture out carrying firearms. This was
perfectly legal, and unsurprising, in the late Victorian and Edwardian era in
which the stories are set. And pre-1914 attempts to control guns were resisted
by MPs much as the US Congress resists them now.
My suspicion
is that the guts were knocked out of us British by the First World War, in
which the best people of all classes died by their thousands in the great volunteer
armies which marched off to Loos, Passchendaele and the Somme. Those who
survived lacked something of the spirit that a free country needs, and we never
fully recovered, just as Russia has yet to recover from the fourfold blow of
the First World War, Civil War, Great Purge and Second World War, each of which
destroyed the best and brightest of their generations. The USA - a society, for
the most part, of volunteers and pioneers, has never had a comparable
experience. Let us hope it never does.
May I endorse
the kind things said about Canada by some correspondents? British people are
often given to making lofty and scornful remarks about various countries which
they decry as 'boring' - Canada, Belgium and Switzerland usually being the
chief victims. Canada is anything but boring. On the contrary it is a
fascinating and intensely civilised society, made all the more so by the
survival of a French-speaking province (and I admit to having been too
diffident about the monarchism of the Quebecois, who were sensibly allowed by
Protestant Hanoverian Britain to maintain their Roman Catholic faith without
restriction - though I was sorry, on my last visit to Quebec City, to find the
handsome Anglican Cathedral there closed and locked. Still, I was pleased to see
that - like the Anglican church in Sark - it offered services in French as well
as English. How I wish the 1662 Prayer Book could be translated, and I mean
properly translated, with all the poetry, into every major language of the
world).
Belgophobes
also need to travel a bit more. Among the many delights of that country are a
comprehensive railway system that puts ours to shame, several treasure houses
of some of the best paintings in the world and a rather better record in
resisting German invasion than they are generally given credit for. As for
Switzerland, the determination of its people to remain free is very far from
boring, and continues to this day.
One
contributor asks why I don't go to live in the USA, since I like it so much.
Why should I? This is my country, where my ancestors are buried and where I
hope and intend to be buried myself, where I grew up, whose landscape, climate,
music, poetry and architecture are in my bones, whose battle-honours are my
battle-honours and whose history is my history. Nowhere else is like it. It is
precisely because I know and like so many other countries that I know and love
my own best of all. Given the way things are going, I don't completely rule out
the possibility of becoming an exile, but that will not be because I want to
be. It never is.
Oh, and by
the way, those who object to being called 'dimwitted' by me have a simple
remedy. Don't say dimwitted things, and especially spare me any repetitions of
the 'what about alcohol and tobacco, then, eh?' attempted defence of cannabis.
If I urged the unrestricted sale of alcohol and tobacco, they might just have a
small point. Since I support legal restrictions on both (both for reasons
repeatedly given on this site - I do not believe that legally banning their possession
would work, whereas it would with cannabis), they have no point at all. This
argument annoys me especially because it is so dishonest, given that those who
use it have no actual interest in curbing the use of any poison, merely in
preventing serious action against the poison they favour. It also annoys me
because its proponents did not even think of it themselves, but bought it
retail, ready made in easy-to-swallow capsules.
I suspect
(because it is so common) that this non-argument is being widely taught it in
school in 'PSHE' indoctrination sessions, and that those who advance it have
never thought about it all, because it suited their own interests to swallow it
whole. I think it is good for such people to realise that others regard them as
dimwitted - for parroting weak and wicked arguments foisted on them by
irresponsible teachers. They and these teachers ought to be forced to do
weekend shifts in the cannabis wards in our mental hospitals. Meanwhile, the
jibe that they are 'dimwitted', a mild one under the circumstances, might make
them think about the subject, perhaps for the first time in their sheltered
lives.
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