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Licensing Our Dignity
By Timothy Wheeler, MD
Appeared in the February 6, 2000 edition of the Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review | Will appear in the San Diego Union-Tribune
On a crisp October night in 1995, a Southern California man was raped.
Walking home with bags of groceries in his arms he was abducted by a
violent career criminal. The criminal, whom prosecutors charged
recently as the Los Angeles Southside Rapist, took him to an automatic
teller machine and robbed him. Then at gunpoint he forced the grocery
shopper to perform sex acts.
No police were there to save the victim. Criminology research and
common sense tell us that had he carried a gun and known how to use
it, he would have been much more likely to escape injury. But he lives
in Santa Monica, a city that would deny him his right to carry a self-
protection gun even if he asserted it. And if he sues the police or
the city for allowing this terrible crime to happen, he will discover
what all other such victims have learned, to their sad amazement?the
police had no duty to protect him.
An enclave of gun-abhorring (and therefore unarmed) liberal-thinking
citizens, Santa Monica provides a target-rich environment for career
criminals. Similar stories abound in other cities where gun ownership
is limited to criminals and the police. In Washington D.C., New York,
and Chicago unarmed potential victims must rely on luck and the mercy
of violent predators.
But contrast Santa Monica with Orlando, Florida in the late 1960s.
During a rash of rapes similar to the Southside Rapist’s spree, the
Orlando Police Department trained more than 2,500 women in the use of
guns for self-defense.
In the year after the Orlando police launched the highly publicized
program, the number of rapes there plunged 88%. The rate remained
constant for the rest of Florida and the United States.
Truly, our government denied the hapless Santa Monica victim the means
of self-defense and simultaneously denied a duty to protect him from
harm. How absurdly cruel. And how Clintonesque.
President Clinton now wants to deny people like the Santa Monica
victim the right to defend themselves against rape and similar
outrages. In his final State of the Union address, Clinton pushed for
laws requiring law-abiding citizens to obtain licenses with photo ID
cards before purchasing a handgun. Presidential hopeful Al Gore
gleefully endorsed a similar plan last year.
In a grim irony, the suspected Southside Rapist would be exempt from
Clinton’s handgun license requirement. The Supreme Court ruled in its
1968 Haynes decision that a convicted criminal cannot be required to
answer the probing questions the rest of us have to answer before
buying a gun. He would thereby incriminate himself, the court
reasoned, since convicted felons are prohibited from buying guns.
One might reasonably ask President Clinton how his plan to license
law-abiding handgun owners instead of criminal handgun owners will
prevent crime. The answer is increasingly clear. The whole purpose of
licensing you and me is not to prevent us from committing crimes. It
is to prevent us, gradually and by a thousand cuts of the law, from
owning handguns. It is to deprive you and me of our only effective
defense when an aggressor offers deadly violence. It is to deprive us
of our dignity.
Until recently, gun owners were derided as paranoids for believing the
“slippery slope” argument that any so-called sensible gun laws lead us
toward confiscation. But since California Attorney General Bill
Lockyer started using gun registration lists to confiscate previously
legal guns, nobody is laughing. The gun grab has started in
California.
There are signs that America’s 80 million gun owners are beginning to
connect the dots. This month a San Francisco legislator saw his gun
registration bill die in committee, not even allowed to come up for a
vote in the Democrat-controlled state legislature, much less get
signed by the Democrat governor. California’s gun owners rallied to
the phones and let their legislators know they are not ready to be
classified as criminals yet.
Rape victims suffer exposure to AIDS, hepatitis, and other sexually
transmitted diseases. They often endure a life sentence of nightmares,
depression, and intrusive flashbacks. The Southside Rapist took his
victim’s money and sense of security. But as with all violent crimes,
he robbed the man of something far more precious?his dignity. And as
the essayist Jeffrey Snyder wrote, if our dignity is not worth
defending, it can hardly be said to exist at all.
The November elections draw near. Designing politicians used to cloak
their secret desire to disarm Americans in the rhetoric of gun safety.
No longer do they bother with this pretense. Their intentions are all
too clear. Americans must decide whether to trust themselves with the
natural right of armed self-defense, or to live on their knees.
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Amendment
Timothy Wheeler, M.D., is the Director of Doctors for Responsible Gun
Ownership, a Project of The Claremont Institute.