MY VIEW
Gun control advocates engage in wishful thinking
By JAMES OSTROWSKI

1/18/2003

http://www.buffalonews.com/editoria…118/1029466.asp

Something happened in Buffalo recently that contradicts the propaganda of those who support gun control, which is the control of law-abiding people who wish to own a gun for protection against the nefarious elements in this world.
A citizen used a shotgun to defend his home and his family against armed intruders. His gun was not taken from him and used against him. His gun was not stolen. He did not have time to wait for the police, though they did arrive moments later. He was able to get to his gun. He shot the intruder.

Gun control is one of those notions that seems to make sense on the surface, that reasonable people are initially inclined to accept. But that is the problem with gun control. It is wishful thinking: simplistic and naive. It is typical liberal thinking: Social problems can be solved by putting words on paper in state and federal statute books.

But that doesn’t change human nature. There are bad people out there who will prey on good people. These bad people will not be deterred by gun control legislation. Good people, however, wishing to obey the law, will be deterred. That is why muggers, rapists and murderers know that in gun control havens like New York City and Washington, D.C., citizens are virtually helpless against them.

Fortunately, the gun control lobby is losing its war. The general public always believed what the Constitution said, that the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed. The liberal legal establishment said the opposite, that not all citizens had the right to bear arms. But an increasing number of judges and legal scholars – including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and liberal legal scholars such as Harvard law professors Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe – now acknowledge what should have been obvious: Americans have an individual right to bear arms.

A book highly touted by gun control advocates, “Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture,” by Emory University professor Michael A. Bellesiles, has been thoroughly discredited as based on shoddy, if not fraudulent, scholarship, and the author has been forced to resign.

Bellesiles tried to contest conventional wisdom and argue that in colonial times, Americans had few guns. He didn’t seem to be aware that the American Revolution was sparked by an attempt by British gun control proponents to seize American guns at Concord. At Lexington and Concord, these allegedly poorly armed Americans somehow managed to inflict 273 casualties on the best-trained army on earth.

“Guns and Violence,” by Bentley College history professor Joyce Lee Malcolm, argues that, in England, the rate of violent crime had been declining for centuries as more guns became available, and only started to increase with the passage of stricter gun control laws.

We found out on Sept. 11, 2001, that the entire $400 billion security apparatus of the federal government cannot protect us from catastrophic terrorism, but a few handguns in the cockpits might have saved the day.

The primary purpose of the Second Amendment is to provide the citizenry with the means for resisting governmental tyranny. In the 20th century, many governments around the world murdered millions of their own unarmed citizens. This occurred in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Communist China, Nationalist China and elsewhere. It did not happen, and could not happen, here because 70 million Americans own firearms.

Fortunately, the Second Amendment is here to stay.

JAMES OSTROWSKI is an attorney in Buffalo.

FAIR use===============