Posted on 12/16/2015 6:37:30 AM PST by Kaslin
In the wake of the San Bernardino attack, liberals are in a total panic over guns. The New York Times broke a 95-year precedent to editorialize about gun control on its front page. But the Times seems restrained compared with the full-on meltdown at the New York Daily News, which has taken to calling the head of the NRA a "terrorist."
I have no desire to rehash the all-too-familiar debate over whether such policies would have their intended effects or whether they'd pass constitutional muster. Let's just stipulate I am skeptical on both counts.
But it is worth contemplating why the gun-control movement has been such a complete failure. And it might be constructive to compare the war on guns to a regulatory war liberals actually won: the war on tobacco.
For a long time, smoking cigarettes was seen as even more American than owning a gun. Hollywood's golden age is like a celluloid smoking lounge. The opening scene of "Casablanca" is a close-up of an ashtray with a lit cigarette. The camera pans out and Humphrey Bogart takes a nice long drag.
Cigarettes, much like guns, were deeply tied to notions of masculinity -- remember the Marlboro Man? But they were also symbols of urbane sophistication, for men and women alike (Marlene Dietrich in "Morocco," Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's"). James Bond was a chain smoker. In the books, he smoked 60 a day. Sean Connery cut back, just a bit, for the movies.
Now, cigarettes are so widely reviled that the MPAA includes smoking along with violence and sex in its warning language.
There are, of course, a great many reasons why we've seen such a remarkable shift in such a short span of time, though medical science is probably the biggest. But there's another factor that doesn't get its due. Smoking was, until recently, a very bipartisan habit. City mice and country mice alike would walk a mile for a Camel.
The universality of smoking made it possible to proselytize against it without unleashing a full-blown kulturkampf. Sure, conservatives and libertarians complained -- often correctly by my lights -- about lost liberties, but an attack on smoking, backed up by solid evidence, didn't simultaneously feel like an attack on one cultural group by another.
Because nonsmokers knew smokers, the war on tobacco could be fought face-to-face in our homes, businesses, movie theaters, planes, trains and automobiles. And when nonsmokers pleaded with their friends and loved ones to give up tobacco, they at least understood the appeal of smoking. Cigarette America wasn't a foreign country. You can't say the same thing about Gun America.
My wife grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, where gun ownership was nearly as common and natural as snow shovel ownership. I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and I never knew anyone who owned a gun. When my mother was an auxiliary mounted policewoman, she was not permitted to carry one.
The absence of guns in urban liberal environments leads to a kind of Pauline Kaelism. Kael is -- apocryphally -- credited with saying she couldn't believe Richard Nixon won the election because she didn't know anyone who voted for him.
Likewise, many urban liberals only hear about guns when they're used in crimes, and simply can't imagine why anyone would want one. As a result, they're tone-deaf in their arguments.
Even worse than the tone-deafness is the arrogant condescension. In the 2008 campaign, when Barack Obama tried to explain why some rural voters were not supporting him, he infamously said that it was out of bitterness -- a bitterness that caused them to "cling" to their guns and their religion. Obama has been trying to unring that bell ever since.
To urban liberals, guns are like cigarettes -- products that when used as intended only hurt or kill people, and that are also low-class and crude. The Second Amendment, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten wrote, is "the refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches."
Such smugness doesn't help, but the real reason the war on guns has been such an abysmal failure is that guns and cigarettes aren't alike after all. You can't hunt or, more importantly, defend yourself or your family with a cigarette. That's why, in the wake of San Bernardino, millions of Americans didn't think, "We've got to get rid of guns." They thought, "Maybe I should get one." I know I did.
I suspect few owned snow shovels either. Manhattan is an existence largely removed from common interaction with the Natural Erf.
Great picture. Besides the rifles on the wall did anyone notice the red object, just to the left of center? It is a “take a number” dispenser. Great to see that business is booming!
Still, imagine a country where you can have a cigarette with your coffee, or a cigarette with your beer, in public, and no one says boo.
Thats a free country.
Imagine a country where you keep a gun in your car’s glove compartment, and its not considered remarkable because everyone has a gun in the glove compartment. A country where if a serial killer pulls out his weapon in a crowded restaurant, finds even grandmothers pointing their little grannie guns right back at him. And the cops don’t find that in any way out of the ordinary.
Yes, just that ridiculous. Think about it. In movies and TV shows, who has firearms and how are they used? Typically only police and criminals have firearms. If/when a civilian is armed it is the reluctant hero driven to extremes to set things right, or the plucky comic relief that makes you cringe wondering what idiocy he/she will commit with the firearm. So for far too many people - who really should know better but apparently choose not to - if you're armed and don't have a badge, you're some kind of bad guy.
From the office of the (p)resident and the official spokesperson josh earnest:
“We’re totally perplexed as to why so many people are buying guns. I doesn’t make sense, what with all these hourly mass shootings and all. It’s almost like people are somehow concluding that we can’t/won’t be there all the time. Very confusing and tragic and ironic.” Thank you Mr. Second Amendment.
As for you ferners buttin’ in, if you had a 2nd amendment, or even understood why we have one, maybe then you’d understand our “wild west” mind set. So, butt out.
Funny. I grew up in Brooklyn and most of my friends parents, when November rolled around were in the country deer hunting.
I recall a thread on FR, about an interview done by some intrepid Leftist reporterette who braved the urban kraals and "talked to the people".
She spoke with a black yute, who had just been on a college orientation or some such and left the hood. He was utterly mystified to learn that blacks were a minority - all he ever saw was black folk, and honestly thought they were the majority.
>>The New York Times broke a 95-year precedent to editorialize about gun control on its front page.
The idea that the NY Times had never before editorialized on the front page is laughable. They may not have identified it as such, but they have certainly done it numerous times.
I think the UWS of Manhattan is a far different place people-wise from Brooklyn. Especially a few decades ago.
Why the War on Guns has Failed:
It failed for the same reason that the ‘War on Drugs’ failed, and the ‘War on Alcohol’ before that:
People like them.....................
>>To urban liberals, guns are like cigarettes — products that when used as intended only hurt or kill people, and that are also low-class and crude. The Second Amendment, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten wrote, is “the refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.”
I know a lot of upper middle class, very well off, very well educated professionals who have gun safes that would make Gene Weingarten freak out. And their home furnishings are likely considerably nicer than his.
It would be easier to identify the one time they did not editorialize on any of their “news” pages.
The Old Gray Lady is a cantankerous, cold, self-serving liar.
I think he actually gets this one wrong.
Goldberg is arguing that the “war on tobacco” won because it was a personal debate between people on the street, in short a grassroots movement.
It wasn’t.
The war on tobacco was enacted through the legislators who used the same incremental tactic that the firearmphobes use.
They banned smoking in government buildings.
Then in public spaces.
The in private-public spaces (offices etc.).
Then in privately owned businesses (such as restaurants).
And the finally, city-wide, which is essentially where NYC is.
Most didn’t protect too much about smoking in the more public areas, because smoking produces smoke and, even if it doesn’t actually harm someone’s physical health, it does make the place smell. I love the smell of cigarette smoke, but some people hate it. Most people never even know when someone around them is carrying a concealed weapon, yet many of those nanny-staters want to ban it anyway even though a concealed weapon is more likely to help their health (by saving their lives) than harm it.
But the protests against forcing private bars and restaurants to adopt a no-smoking policy were loud and passionate and enduring.
They passed the laws anyway.
This is EXACTLY how they are attempting to restrict not only the carrying but the very attainment and ownership of firearms.
We are still in the protest phase.
We must never stop protesting. We must never stop fighting the tyrants. They must learn to fear bringing the topic up because we will so passionately “get in their faces” in support of our 2nd Amendment.
We must NEVER give up our firearms, even if it becomes an act of civil disobedience.
G.K. Chesterton
The tobacco companies made the supreme mistake of thinking that they could compromise with their critics and put the issue to rest. Once they smelled weakness though their opponents repeated drove to the hoop.
Gun owners and the NRA watched and learned.
His high school sportsmen's club would take their rifles into school, and then carry them on the subway to a range in Queens after classes were dismissed.
cold, dead, fingers
Interestingly, it seems like many of the places with the strongest anti-tobacco laws were the ones where hardly anyone smoked anyway. I remember when the Metrodome in Minneapolis was first considering a smoking ban back in the early 1990s -- before the city or state had ever regulated smoking in public places. They spent a lot of timing agonizing over this "controversial" measure, until someone suggested they do a survey of the fans of the sports teams that played there. It turns out that the smoking ban wasn't just non-controversial, it was also pointless ... because you could walk around Minneapolis, St. Paul and the surrounding suburbs for days and never see a single person smoking a cigarette.
Bump!
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