A former "brain dead liberal"
sees the light! Mamet wrote Hannibal and Glengarry Glen Ross.
From the Daily Beast
From the Daily Beast
Mamet: Hands Off My Gun
Jan
29, 2013 12:00 AM EST
The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own
personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so. By David Mamet. Get
the full issue of Newsweek today on your iPad
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Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his
ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which,
in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery,
poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.
‘In announcing his gun control proposals, President Obama
said that he was not restricting Second Amendment rights, but allowing other
constitutional rights to flourish.’
For the saying implies but does not name the effective
agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto,
fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State
will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to
each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective.
So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the
State shall give.”
All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found,
to our chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning
public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried
bureaucrats. These, as all bureaucrats, obtain and hold their jobs by complying
with directions and suppressing the desire to employ initiative, compassion, or
indeed, common sense. They are paid to follow orders.
Rule by bureaucrats and functionaries is an example of the
first part of the Marxist equation: that the Government shall determine
the individual’s abilities.
As rules by the Government are one-size-fits-all, any
governmental determination of an individual’s abilities must be based on a
bureaucratic assessment of the lowest possible denominator. The government, for
example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than
white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted
with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but
monstrous. And yet it is the law.
President Obama, in his reelection campaign, referred
frequently to the “needs” of himself and his opponent, alleging that each has
more money than he “needs.”
But where in the Constitution is it written that the
Government is in charge of determining “needs”? And note that the president did
not say “I have more money than I need,” but “You and I have more than we
need.” Who elected him to speak for another citizen?
It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government
to determine needs. One person may need (or want) more leisure, another more
work; one more adventure, another more security, and so on. It is this
diversity that makes a country, indeed a state, a city, a church, or a family,
healthy. “One-size-fits-all,” and that size determined by the State has a name,
and that name is “slavery.”
The Founding Fathers, far from being ideologues, were not
even politicians. They were an assortment of businessmen, writers, teachers,
planters; men, in short, who knew something of the world, which is to say, of
Human Nature. Their struggle to draft a set of rules acceptable to each other
was based on the assumption that we human beings, in the mass, are no damned
good—that we are biddable, easily confused, and that we may easily be motivated
by a Politician, which is to say, a huckster, mounting a soapbox and inflaming
our passions.
The Constitution’s drafters did not require a wag to teach
them that power corrupts: they had experienced it in the person of King George.
The American secession was announced by reference to his abuses of power: “He
has obstructed the administration of Justice … he has made Judges dependant on
his will alone … He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction
foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws … He has erected a
multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass out
people and to eat out their substance … imposed taxes upon us without our
consent… [He has] fundamentally altered the forms of our government.”
This is a chillingly familiar set of
grievances; and its recrudescence was foreseen by the Founders. They realized
that King George was not an individual case, but the inevitable outcome of
unfettered power; that any person or group with the power to tax, to
form laws, and to enforce them by arms will default to dictatorship,
absent the constant unflagging scrutiny of the governed, and their severe
untempered insistence upon compliance with law.
The Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a
necessary evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches,
and between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the
individual’s greed for power and the electorates’ desires for peace by
submission to coercion or blandishment.
Healthy government, as that based upon our Constitution, is
strife. It awakens anxiety, passion, fervor, and, indeed, hatred and chicanery,
both in pursuit of private gain and of public good. Those who promise to
relieve us of the burden through their personal or ideological excellence,
those who claim to hold the Magic Beans, are simply confidence men. Their
emergence is inevitable, and our individual opposition to and rejection of
them, as they emerge, must be blunt and sure; if they are arrogant, willful,
duplicitous, or simply wrong, they must be replaced, else they will consolidate
power, and use the treasury to buy votes, and deprive us of our liberties. It
was to guard us against this inevitable decay of government that the
Constitution was written. Its purpose was and is not to enthrone a Government
superior to an imperfect and confused electorate, but to protect us from such a
government.
Many are opposed to private ownership of firearms, and their
opposition comes under several heads. Their specific objections are answerable
retail, but a wholesale response is that the Second Amendment guarantees the
right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. On a lower level of abstraction,
there are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed citizen deterring
or stopping armed criminals; a number four times that of all crimes involving
firearms.
The Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the
hands of a citizen is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be
used in the prevention of crime, but what is there about criminals that ensures
that their gun use is accident-free? If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous
to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the
government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is
this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.
Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with
the strictest gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is
only the criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been
disarmed, and so crime runs riot.
Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and
elsewhere, which leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed
in the Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less
crime. What criminal would be foolish enough to rob a gun store? But the
government alleges that the citizen does not need this or that gun, number of
guns, or amount of ammunition.
Do you agree with David Mamet's position on gun control in America?
Do you agree with David Mamet's position on gun control in America?
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But President Obama, it seems, does.
He has just passed a bill that extends to him and his family
protection, around the clock and for life, by the Secret Service. He,
evidently, feels that he is best qualified to determine his needs, and, of
course, he is. As I am best qualified to determine mine.
For it is, again, only the Marxists who assert that the
government, which is to say the busy, corrupted, and hypocritical fools most
elected officials are (have you ever had lunch with one?) should regulate gun
ownership based on its assessment of needs.
Q. Who “needs” an assault rifle?
A. No one outside the military and the police. I concur.
An assault weapon is that which used to be called a
“submachine gun.” That is, a handheld long gun that will fire continuously as
long as the trigger is held down.
These have been illegal in private hands (barring those
collectors who have passed the stringent scrutiny of the Federal Government)
since 1934. Outside these few legal possessors, there are none in private
hands. They may be found in the hands of criminals. But criminals, let us
reflect, by definition, are those who will not abide by the laws. What purpose
will passing more laws serve?
My grandmother came from Russian Poland, near the Polish
city of Chelm. Chelm was celebrated, by the Ashkenazi Jews, as the place where
the fools dwelt. And my grandmother loved to tell the traditional stories of
Chelm.
Its residents, for example, once decided that there was no
point in having the sun shine during the day, when it was light out—it would be
better should it shine at night, when it was dark. Similarly, we modern Solons
delight in passing gun laws that, in their entirety, amount to “making crime
illegal.”
What possible purpose in declaring schools “gun-free zones”?
Who bringing a gun, with evil intent, into a school would be deterred by the
sign?
Ah, but perhaps one, legally carrying a gun, might
bring it into the school.
Good.
We need more armed citizens in the schools.
Walk down Madison Avenue in New York. Many posh stores have,
on view, or behind a two-way mirror, an armed guard. Walk into most any
pawnshop, jewelry story, currency exchange, gold store in the country, and
there will be an armed guard nearby. Why? As currency, jewelry, gold are
precious. Who complains about the presence of these armed guards? And is this
wealth more precious than our children?
Apparently it is: for the Left adduces arguments against
armed presence in the school but not in the wristwatch stores. Q. How many
accidental shootings occurred last year in jewelry stores, or on any premises
with armed security guards?
Why not then, for the love of God, have an armed presence in
the schools? It could be done at the cost of a pistol (several hundred
dollars), and a few hours of training (that’s all the security guards get). Why
not offer teachers, administrators, custodians, a small extra stipend for
completing a firearms-safety course and carrying a concealed weapon to school?
The arguments to the contrary escape me.
Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre rattles off a list
of places protected by armed guards at an NRA press conference.
Why do I specify concealed carry? As if the weapons are
concealed, any potential malefactor must assume that anyone on the
premises he means to disrupt may be armed—a deterrent of even attempted
violence.
Yes, but we should check all applicants for firearms for a
criminal record?
Anyone applying to purchase a handgun has, since 1968,
filled out a form certifying he is not a fugitive from justice, a convicted
criminal, or mentally deficient. These forms, tens and tens of millions of
them, rest, conceivably, somewhere in the vast repository. How are they
checked? Are they checked? By what agency, with what monies? The country
is broke. Do we actually want another agency staffed by bureaucrats for whom
there is no funding?
The police do not exist to protect the individual. They
exist to cordon off the crime scene and attempt to apprehend the criminal. We
individuals are guaranteed by the Constitution the right to self-defense. This
right is not the Government’s to “award” us. They have never been granted it.
The so-called assault weapons ban is a hoax. It is a
political appeal to the ignorant. The guns it supposedly banned have been
illegal (as above) for 78 years. Did the ban make them “more” illegal? The ban
addresses only the appearance of weapons, not their operation.
Will increased cosmetic measures make anyone safer? They,
like all efforts at disarmament, will put the citizenry more at risk.
Disarmament rests on the assumption that all people are good, and, basically,
want the same things.
But if all people were basically good, why would we,
increasingly, pass more and more elaborate laws?
The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own
personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right
to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution.
President Obama seems to understand the Constitution as a
“set of suggestions.” I cannot endorse his performance in office, but he wins
my respect for taking those steps he deems necessary to ensure the safety of
his family. Why would he want to prohibit me from doing the same?
