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.
And the reason for the 2nd Amendment is NOT about hunting.
“And the reason for the 2nd Amendment is NOT about hunting.”
Never said it was.
We lived on Long Island in the late 50’s.
My Brother took his .22 Rifle to School since he was in the Shooting Club. They had a Gun Range in the Basement.
Nobody batted an eye when he was walking down the Street with his Rifle Case.
Heck, back in the 70’s in CA I always had two Rifles in the Gun Rack of my Big A$$ Burnt Orange Ford 4x4 with big fat tires and everything.
Today, I would be a Felon doing the exact same thing.
I agree, but I felt it added to what you said.
Much like the argument that all pot smokers must be worthless losers, because all the pot smokers I know are worthless losers.
Our local Cabela’s has had one for the last two years.
L
She is a also a journalistic whore, pimped out to anyone on the Left who wants to use her.
I went to two large gun stores here in Jacksonville a couple of weeks ago. They were both packed and both had number dispensers in use.
I have recently become aware of GK Chesterton. I was interested in the author of Father Brown mystery series.
My mother mentioned that she was unable to watch the BBC series as she had read the books as a child.
I looked Chesterton on the web, very interesting man, with very interesting life.
my tag line:
Men are ruled...by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern - Chesterton
I need to find a book of Chesterton quotes- since I suffer from CRS
I need to find a book of Chesterton quotes- since I suffer from CRS
The complete Father Brown books are available free on the Gutenberg.org in html and almost all the e-book formats.
The real difference between this case and that of tobacco is that pesky Second Amendment. Here the opponents of the Bill of Rights such as Hamilton were wrong: the government absolutely will encroach where those rights are not spelled out even where there is no specific enumerated power allowing them to do so. God may well have given those rights but the Constitution keeps Godless men from stealing them.
It appears to boil down to a contest of power: those for whom possession of a firearm represents personal freedom and protection, and those for whom the ability to take it away represents the same. The latter are not easily convinced otherwise in the absence of an immediate threat and often even that isn't enough.
A middlebrow book appeared a few years ago about the insularity and narrowness of the cosmopolitan Byzantine Greeks.
The excellences of their own city made them incurious about the wider world, and their cossetted existence shielded them, in the short term, from the price of their intellectual shortcomings.
In the longer run, they missed critical opportunities to befriend rising powers who could have pulled Constantinople's bacon out of the fire.
Thats a free country.
Amen! (Or a joint with your coffee.)
“I love the smell of cigarette smoke, but some people hate it.”
I smoked for approximately eleven years, quitting when I was 29 and exceeding three packs a day. I cannot stand the smell of cigarette smoke now. I can burn leaves or brush and while it is not a pleasant smell I can handle it but stale cigarette smoke makes me cringe. I used to really love the smell of cigar or pipe tobacco but I don’t even like that any more.
I can’t remember stuff either.
being mentally defective, they are afraid that if there was a gun nearby, they would uncontrollably follow their emotions and use the firearm to shoot everyone that does not agree with them.
In fact, that is probably closer to the truth than some would imagine.
Anyway, then they project their weakness onto others, assuming everyone thinks like them, and is thus irresponsible when in the vicinity of a firearm.
Therefore, in their eyes, all must be abolished.
Their masters, on the other hand, know what is coming, and wish the "rebels' to be disarmed.
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