Antigun Book Part II:"Guns Democracy and Insurrection" Kopel Review
To Henigan’s credit (PartI), he does stay focused about 90 percent of the time in arguing against ideas that really are propounded by lots of mainstream gun rights advocates.
Guns, Democracy and the Insurrectionist Idea
The same cannot be said of Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea by Horwitz and Anderson. The Horwitz/Anderson thesis is that the National Rifle Association is an “insurrectionist” organization; that scholars such as Nelson Lund, Don Kates and myself--who generally agree with the NRA on many issues-- are “insurrectionists,” and that “insurrectionism” is a mortal threat to democracy.
Truth is, the “insurrectionist idea” that Horwitz and Anderson purport to rebut is their very own invention, which they carefully concoct using libels, quarter-truths and invented facts.
For example, they blame pro-gun “extremists” for the fact that Smith & Wesson went bankrupt. (It didn’t.)
They reveal that Peder Lund, a controversial book publisher in Boulder, Colo., is on the NRA Board of Directors. (He isn’t.)
They rejoice that Presidents “Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter publicly renounced their NRA memberships.” (Carter and Ford never belonged to the NRA, and Reagan retained his NRA membership all of his life.)
Horowitz and Anderson also warn that George Mason University Law Professor Nelson Lund “believes that the government, state and federal, is prohibited from limiting civilian access to almost any kind of weapons, including ‘grenades and bazookas.’”
Not really. The “grenades and bazookas” quote comes from a 1996 Georgia Law Review article in which Lund argued that Second Amendment legal scholarship still had a long way to go. As an example, Lund contended that the theories of other Second Amendment scholars about why such weapons are outside the Second Amendment were not very well reasoned.
Recently, Lund authored an amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Heller. That brief propounded Lund’s own theory of why weapons such as “fully automatic rifles” as well as “shoulder-fired rockets and grenades” can be regulated despite the Second Amendment. That brief was filed in February 2008, well over a year before the publication of the Horwitz and Anderson book. Given Horwitz’s own deep involvement in the Heller case as an amicus brief author, it is difficult to believe that he never read Lund’s brief.
Thus, Horwitz and Anderson mislead readers with the false assertion that Lund believes that the government cannot regulate “grenades and bazookas.” In fact, Lund does believe they can be regulated, and simply argues with his fellow Second Amendment scholars about the best rationale for that conclusion.
They (Horwitz and Anderson) rejoice that Presidents “Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter publicly renounced their NRA memberships.” (Carter and Ford never belonged to the NRA, and Reagan retained his NRA membership all of his life.) insurectionist
Horwitz and Anderson also quote from a Cato Institute monograph I wrote in 1988, in which I asserted that “constitutionally protected objects” such as typewriters, newspapers and firearms should not be registered by the government. After pointing to a Supreme Court case that used the First Amendment to prohibit government registration of books and magazines I continued, “The same principle should apply to the Second Amendment: the tools of political dissent should be privately owned and unregistered.”
Just because you don’t want the government to keep lists of the books you check out from the library or the guns you own does not mean that you want an “insurrection.” Throughout history, guns have obviously been useful political tools for dissidents who were threatened by violence--such as the civil rights workers in the South in the 1960s who used guns to defend themselves from Ku Klux Klan attacks.
Yet Horwitz and Anderson write: “When Charlton Heston famously warns that gun control advocates will have to pry his guns out of his ‘cold dead hands,’ when David Kopel describes guns as ‘the tools of political dissent’ they mean that whenever they strongly disagree with a decision produced by democratic means, they feel no obligation to respect or abide by it.”
Horowitz and Anderson supply absolutely no citation to support this bold claim about what Mr. Heston and I really “mean.” Indeed, I have never said nor written anything like the idea that Horowitz ascribes to me, nor did Mr. Heston ever say such a thing.
The middle portion of the book argues against something that the NRA and many pro-Second Amendment writers actually believe: that the importance of an armed citizenry in defending civil liberty can be seen in the examples of the American Revolution, in the post-Civil War depredations of the Ku Klux Klan against the freedmen who had been disarmed, and in the Nazi genocide against the Jews, whom the Nazis had been careful to disarm.
The books ends with Horowitz railing about several current issues: Castle Doctrine; laws that protect employees who store firearms in locked cars on company parking lots; and bans on junk lawsuits against gun companies. In contrast to Henigan, who addresses these issues with policy arguments, Horwitz and Anderson insist that each of these topics amount to no more than democracy threatened by “insurrectionism.”
Yet when democracy itself is really endangered, the NRA is usually the group defending it.
For example, the anti-gun lawsuits were carefully structured so that the dozens of cases could not be consolidated, and thus the lawsuits would exhaust the ability of handgun manufacturers to pay for defense attorneys--even if the plaintiffs could never win a single case on the merits. The expected gun-ban endgame was that, to avoid bankruptcy, the manufacturers would submit to a regulatory regime run by the anti-gun lobbies, although the same regulations had been repeatedly rejected by legislatures as well as by voters in ballot initiatives.
In the end, democratically elected legislatures in most states banned the abusive lawsuits. Then the democratically elected Congress of the United States of America enacted a national ban, and the democratically elected president of the United States signed it. All of this was done in accordance with poll after poll that showed a very large majority of U.S. citizens opposed the junk lawsuits.
It’s hard to believe that anyone will ever outdo Horwitz and Anderson in dredging Internet comment boards for “insurrectionist” quotes to use in their book. Yet one quote is oddly omitted. It cannot be that Horowitz and Anderson missed it, because the quote is used repeatedly in many of the articles they cite.
It’s the quote that gives the lie to the Horwitz/Anderson pretense that everyone who believes that resistance to tyranny is an inalienable right must also believe that “Government is the enemy.” The quote comes from the great man who, from the 1940s to the 1970s, personified big-government liberalism. His heartfelt faith in the positive power of a large and active federal government was at its best in his tireless, relentless, triumphant work for federal civil rights legislation to banish Jim Crow forever.
Mayor of Minneapolis, United States senator and then vice president of the United States, Hubert H. Humphrey wrote: “Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.”
An “insurrectionist”?
No. Hubert Humphrey was simply a patriot who revered our Constitution, who walked forthrightly in the bright sunshine of human rights, who loved democracy and the rule of law, and who wanted our government to be the best in the world.
As do all of us who believe in the principles of the National Rifle Association of America.
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Guns, Democracy and the Insurrectionist Idea
The same cannot be said of Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea by Horwitz and Anderson. The Horwitz/Anderson thesis is that the National Rifle Association is an “insurrectionist” organization; that scholars such as Nelson Lund, Don Kates and myself--who generally agree with the NRA on many issues-- are “insurrectionists,” and that “insurrectionism” is a mortal threat to democracy.
Truth is, the “insurrectionist idea” that Horwitz and Anderson purport to rebut is their very own invention, which they carefully concoct using libels, quarter-truths and invented facts.
For example, they blame pro-gun “extremists” for the fact that Smith & Wesson went bankrupt. (It didn’t.)
They reveal that Peder Lund, a controversial book publisher in Boulder, Colo., is on the NRA Board of Directors. (He isn’t.)
They rejoice that Presidents “Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter publicly renounced their NRA memberships.” (Carter and Ford never belonged to the NRA, and Reagan retained his NRA membership all of his life.)
Horowitz and Anderson also warn that George Mason University Law Professor Nelson Lund “believes that the government, state and federal, is prohibited from limiting civilian access to almost any kind of weapons, including ‘grenades and bazookas.’”
Not really. The “grenades and bazookas” quote comes from a 1996 Georgia Law Review article in which Lund argued that Second Amendment legal scholarship still had a long way to go. As an example, Lund contended that the theories of other Second Amendment scholars about why such weapons are outside the Second Amendment were not very well reasoned.
Recently, Lund authored an amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Heller. That brief propounded Lund’s own theory of why weapons such as “fully automatic rifles” as well as “shoulder-fired rockets and grenades” can be regulated despite the Second Amendment. That brief was filed in February 2008, well over a year before the publication of the Horwitz and Anderson book. Given Horwitz’s own deep involvement in the Heller case as an amicus brief author, it is difficult to believe that he never read Lund’s brief.
Thus, Horwitz and Anderson mislead readers with the false assertion that Lund believes that the government cannot regulate “grenades and bazookas.” In fact, Lund does believe they can be regulated, and simply argues with his fellow Second Amendment scholars about the best rationale for that conclusion.
They (Horwitz and Anderson) rejoice that Presidents “Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter publicly renounced their NRA memberships.” (Carter and Ford never belonged to the NRA, and Reagan retained his NRA membership all of his life.) insurectionist
Horwitz and Anderson also quote from a Cato Institute monograph I wrote in 1988, in which I asserted that “constitutionally protected objects” such as typewriters, newspapers and firearms should not be registered by the government. After pointing to a Supreme Court case that used the First Amendment to prohibit government registration of books and magazines I continued, “The same principle should apply to the Second Amendment: the tools of political dissent should be privately owned and unregistered.”
Just because you don’t want the government to keep lists of the books you check out from the library or the guns you own does not mean that you want an “insurrection.” Throughout history, guns have obviously been useful political tools for dissidents who were threatened by violence--such as the civil rights workers in the South in the 1960s who used guns to defend themselves from Ku Klux Klan attacks.
Yet Horwitz and Anderson write: “When Charlton Heston famously warns that gun control advocates will have to pry his guns out of his ‘cold dead hands,’ when David Kopel describes guns as ‘the tools of political dissent’ they mean that whenever they strongly disagree with a decision produced by democratic means, they feel no obligation to respect or abide by it.”
Horowitz and Anderson supply absolutely no citation to support this bold claim about what Mr. Heston and I really “mean.” Indeed, I have never said nor written anything like the idea that Horowitz ascribes to me, nor did Mr. Heston ever say such a thing.
The middle portion of the book argues against something that the NRA and many pro-Second Amendment writers actually believe: that the importance of an armed citizenry in defending civil liberty can be seen in the examples of the American Revolution, in the post-Civil War depredations of the Ku Klux Klan against the freedmen who had been disarmed, and in the Nazi genocide against the Jews, whom the Nazis had been careful to disarm.
The books ends with Horowitz railing about several current issues: Castle Doctrine; laws that protect employees who store firearms in locked cars on company parking lots; and bans on junk lawsuits against gun companies. In contrast to Henigan, who addresses these issues with policy arguments, Horwitz and Anderson insist that each of these topics amount to no more than democracy threatened by “insurrectionism.”
Yet when democracy itself is really endangered, the NRA is usually the group defending it.
For example, the anti-gun lawsuits were carefully structured so that the dozens of cases could not be consolidated, and thus the lawsuits would exhaust the ability of handgun manufacturers to pay for defense attorneys--even if the plaintiffs could never win a single case on the merits. The expected gun-ban endgame was that, to avoid bankruptcy, the manufacturers would submit to a regulatory regime run by the anti-gun lobbies, although the same regulations had been repeatedly rejected by legislatures as well as by voters in ballot initiatives.
In the end, democratically elected legislatures in most states banned the abusive lawsuits. Then the democratically elected Congress of the United States of America enacted a national ban, and the democratically elected president of the United States signed it. All of this was done in accordance with poll after poll that showed a very large majority of U.S. citizens opposed the junk lawsuits.
It’s hard to believe that anyone will ever outdo Horwitz and Anderson in dredging Internet comment boards for “insurrectionist” quotes to use in their book. Yet one quote is oddly omitted. It cannot be that Horowitz and Anderson missed it, because the quote is used repeatedly in many of the articles they cite.
It’s the quote that gives the lie to the Horwitz/Anderson pretense that everyone who believes that resistance to tyranny is an inalienable right must also believe that “Government is the enemy.” The quote comes from the great man who, from the 1940s to the 1970s, personified big-government liberalism. His heartfelt faith in the positive power of a large and active federal government was at its best in his tireless, relentless, triumphant work for federal civil rights legislation to banish Jim Crow forever.
Mayor of Minneapolis, United States senator and then vice president of the United States, Hubert H. Humphrey wrote: “Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.”
An “insurrectionist”?
No. Hubert Humphrey was simply a patriot who revered our Constitution, who walked forthrightly in the bright sunshine of human rights, who loved democracy and the rule of law, and who wanted our government to be the best in the world.
As do all of us who believe in the principles of the National Rifle Association of America.
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