Control (2 page)

Glenn Beck

Dallas, Texas

March 2013

A
fter the Newtown massacre in December 2012 it quickly became obvious that gun control was again going to take over the national dialogue. The president, who had barely used the word
gun
over his first four years in office, was about to rearrange his second-term agenda. Gun control would now be right near the top of the priority list.

Sensing a once-in-a-generation opportunity, controllist politicians and groups began to pounce. News programs devoted full hours to the issue. Opinion hosts like Piers Morgan, sensing an issue to make their mark with, began virtual crusades, discussing the topic nightly. Hollywood celebrities, brought together by the progressive group Mayors Against Illegal Guns, “demanded a plan” to end gun violence via YouTube videos and television commercials. This, of course, despite that fact that many of those who appeared in the videos had made their careers—and their millions—
depicting intense gun violence in movies.

It was during this time that I realized the need for this part of the book, something that would answer all the lies about guns that are repeated again and again and often go uncontested. But instead of making up arguments—which would inevitably result in critics saying that no one really makes those claims, or that I misrepresented them—I wanted to use actual quotes. So we started a little project. Each night my staff and I watched countless
hours of cable news and read hundreds of newspaper columns and articles. We listened for the quotes about guns and the Second Amendment that seemed to come up most often, the stuff that is so pervasive that it’s barely even questioned anymore.

It wasn’t difficult. Before long we had enough for not only one book, but several of them. We whittled the quotes down to those that seemed to be repeated the most often—and then we sat down with a team of economists, criminologists, and other gun experts and answered each of them with the truth.

“Leaders in Washington from both parties and groups like the NRA all say that now is not the time to talk about how gun safety laws can save lives in America. I agree, now is not the time to talk about gun laws. The time for that conversation was long
before all those kids in Connecticut died today.”

—REPRESENTATIVE CAROLYN MCCARTHY
(D-NY), December 14, 2012

“If there’s one thing about the gun debate that everyone seems to agree on, it’s that
we’re going to have a national conversation on the subject. Great news!”

—CINDY HANDLER
(
Huffington Post
columnist), January 11, 2013

Actually, we’ve had a national conversation about guns for the last two centuries; you just don’t like the way it turned out. You may not have noticed, but the so-called gun debate was settled quite a while ago.

In 1791.

“[My bill] will ban the sale, the transfer, the importation, and the possession, not retroactively but prospectively. And it will ban the same for big clips, drums, or strips of more than ten bullets. So there will be a bill. We’ve been working on it now for a year . . . .
It’ll be ready on the first day.”

—SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN
(D-CA), December 16, 2012

Hang on, you’ve been “working” on this bill for a year? Was it just sitting in a desk drawer waiting for a terrible massacre that you could leverage for political expedience?

Wait—don’t answer that.

“[T]he point about guns is that they are so much more lethal than anything else you have around. I mean, that is why the American military arms its troops
not with knives, but with automatic weapons.”

—NICHOLAS KRISTOF
(New York Times
columnist), January 8, 2013

“
When [a .223-caliber round] hits a human body, the effects are devastating.”

—GENERAL STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL
,
January 8, 2013

I know this might be breaking news to Nicholas Kristof, but guns being “more lethal than anything else you have around” is sort of the whole point. The issue should not really be the lethality of the gun, but the psychology of the person holding it. If we are teaching people how to respect their weapons and use them safely, then the times when they’re “lethal” are the times when we want them to be.

Outside of hunting and sport shooting, guns serve as “equalizers.” With a gun, even an elderly grandmother might well be able to fend off an attacker. Violent criminals are, after all, overwhelmingly young, strong males. To them, anything—from a knife to their bare hand—could easily serve as lethal weapons.

And it is not just Grandma. The equalizer argument applies to most women, to older men, and especially to the disabled—a group that is a particular target for robberies. Guns provide the only effective way for them to defend themselves.

The evidence—and there is plenty of it—points to the exact opposite of what Kristof claims: cutting access to guns mainly disarms law-abiding citizens, making criminals’ lives that much
easier. Guns allow potential victims to defend themselves when the police aren’t there.

Besides, guns may be the most lethal weapon around that’s easily accessible, but if we’re just talking about overall ability to kill a lot of people, it’s hard not to include explosives, which are used by the military and mass killers alike. The first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, was a bombing. The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 killed 168 people and was caused by bombs created from such easily available items
as fertilizer (ammonium nitrate), a common cleaning solvent (liquid nitromethane), and diesel fuel. And the worst school massacre in U.S. history, in which thirty-eight people were killed, occurred in 1927 and
was carried out with a bomb.

“
No one is saying that people’s guns should be taken away, or that taking the Second Amendment rights away. No one is saying that [is the answer] . . . ”

—DON LEMON
(CNN anchor), July 22, 2012

“
Nobody questions the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms.”

—MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG
(New York City), December 16, 2012

“Guys, gals, now hear this: No one wants to take away your hunting rifles. No one wants to take away your shotguns. No one wants to take away your revolvers, and no one wants to take away your automatic pistols, as long as said pistols hold no more than ten rounds.”

—STEPHEN KING
,
Guns

“I don’t want to change the Second Amendment. I don’t want to change an American’s right to bear an arm in their home to defend people.
I want to get rid of these killing machine assault weapons off the street.”

—PIERS MORGAN
,
January 7, 2013

“ ‘Gun grabber’ is a mythical boogeyman.
No serious person, including Obama, is even proposing taking away owned guns. #StopFearmongering.”

—TOURÉ
,
February 16, 2013 (via Twitter)

Anyone who’s closely watching the bullying from the controllist crowd, and knows their history, has good reason to be concerned. The environment that’s been created is eerily similar to what nations like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada experienced just before introducing severe private gun ownership restrictions or banning them altogether.

Here in the United States, the Second Amendment has seemingly gone from being a God-given natural right to a privilege that must be defended. Yet the moment anyone dares voice those concerns they are usually met with mockery and dismissed as a bloodthirsty, paranoid freak who is bitterly clinging to their guns even as the mainstream of society passes them by.

Gun rights advocates are thought by the elite controllists to be creatures with the intelligence of a Neanderthal, stubbornly unwilling to accept “commonsense” gun control measures that would allegedly save the lives of countless American children. The mere mention of a “slippery slope,” with the Second Amendment itself being the real target, is brushed off as laughably preposterous conspiracy theory.

The truth—which, as you’ll soon see, is not a conspiracy or a theory—is that there are many controllists who want nothing more than to ban guns. They admire Australia and the United Kingdom and Japan and believe that the “civilized” nations of the world have evolved and left America behind. Those countries are the grown-ups while we Americans are the toddlers throwing temper tantrums in a corner.

But controllists have a major problem: the Bill of Rights. Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms—and lots of people want to keep it that way.

According to a December 2012 Gallup poll,
74 percent of Americans oppose a ban on the possession of handguns. So that leaves controllists in a bind: They
believe
that guns have no place among civilians, but they can’t really
say
that. So they carefully parse their language. Instead of talking about handgun bans they focus on “military-style” assault weapons or “high-capacity” magazines or laws that make it more difficult to purchase a weapon or ammunition.

But what do you think happens once they get these initial laws passed—do they just stop? Do they pat themselves on the back for getting clips limited to ten bullets, or do they start a new push for eight or five? Do they celebrate getting the sale of new semi-automatics banned, or do they now start to go after all of the ones currently in circulation? That question can easily be answered for anyone willing to listen to what the controllists actually say.

Last we left Senator Dianne Feinstein—the author of the 1994 and 2013 federal assault weapon bans—she was explaining to
60 Minutes
in 1995 that she would’ve liked to have gotten rid of all so-called assault weapons (not just the specific guns included in the ban), but she just couldn’t get it through that pesky Congress:

If I could’ve gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for
an outright ban, picking up every one of them—Mr. and Mrs. America turn ’em all in—I would have done it.

President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have also given strong assurances about their commitment to the Second Amendment, but then they put Attorney General Eric Holder in charge of crafting Obama’s executive orders on gun control in the wake of the Newtown massacre. Why is that an issue? Because you’d be hard-pressed to find someone more anti-gun (except, of course, when it comes to handing them to Mexican drug cartel members) than Holder.

In a 1995 talk before the Woman’s National Democratic Club, Holder said that he hoped we could one day make gun owners feel as ostracized as the smokers who “cower” outside of buildings:

What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we’ve changed our attitudes about cigarettes. You know, when I was growing up, people smoked all the time. Both my parents did. But over time, we changed the way that people thought about smoking, so now we have people who cower outside of buildings and kind of smoke in private and don’t want to admit it.

And later, in the same speech: “We have to be repetitive about this. We need to do this every day of the week, and just
really brainwash people
into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.” (emphasis added)

Eric Holder may have been smart enough to not use the word
ban,
but others haven’t been so careful.

Remember the quote at the beginning of this section where CNN anchor Don Lemon claimed that “no one is saying” we should take people’s guns away? Well, just five months later, he was contradicted by someone he knows very well: Don Lemon.

“We need to get guns and bullets and automatic weapons off the streets,” Lemon said. “They should only be available to police officers and to hunt al Qaeda and the Taliban and
not hunt elementary school children.”

So we should get rid of guns and bullets but no one is saying we should take people’s guns away? Same guy. Same year. Incredible.

In case Don Lemon isn’t impressed by his own inconsistency, here are a few more concrete examples of people openly calling for gun bans:

How can we possibly have assault weapons? And frankly, why do we need guns?
We don’t need guns. We have 10,000 murders a year.

—BUZZ BISSINGER
, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and
Daily Beast
columnist

But the logic is faulty, and a close look at it leads to the conclusion that
the United States should ban private gun ownership entirely, or almost entirely.

—JEFF MCMAHAN
, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, writing in the
New York Times