We Don’t Trust You… Trust Us!

Every time something really bad happens, people cry for safety, and the government answers by taking rights away from good people. — Penn Jillette

The President, the main stream press, liberals, and anti-gun folks (but, I repeat myself) have turned the Orlando shooting, an act of terrorism committed by a man who embraced radical Islamic beliefs and who pledged allegiance to an organization that overtly called for such acts of terrorism, into yet another assault on the rights of millions of law abiding Americans. I’ve written about the President’s clinging to his preferred narrative, about the utter inscrutability of those who have subordinated (or dismissed entirely) any blame for radical Islam and its teachings to finger pointing at conservative Christians and at gun rights advocates, and about how our natural tendencies to act or to want action are being leveraged to advance preferred agendas, even if those agendas won’t address the proximate issue and incident.

Here’s what the government does: It demands for itself that which it does not wish to give to its citizens: Trust.

The proposed remedy to the fact that the Orlando shooter opted to use a black gun as his primary weapon (and, lest we forget, he also had a pistol and was also wearing a vest that he identified as explosive) is to restrict citizens’ access to those black guns. The mechanisms – this time? Adding the people on the TSA’s no-fly list and the FBI’s terrorist watch list to the NICS do-not-buy list, and banning those black guns. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? After all, the names on those lists are there for a reason, aren’t they? After all, those black guns have been used in several mass shootings, haven’t they?

Those rationales are neither sufficient nor compatible with our rights as codified in and protected by the Constitution.

People may be added to the no-fly list and may be investigated by the FBI merely on suspicion. Suspicion is sufficient to investigate, but not to convict, and we have a system for translating suspicion into conviction or exoneration. It’s structured, it contains protections for The People, and, most importantly in this case, it’s transparent. The TSA no-fly list is not, and its lack of transparency and the insufficiency of remedies for people improperly added to it earned it a smack down from the courts. The FBI may investigate anyone it wishes to, subject to the aforementioned Constitutional protections, but being investigated is no proof of guilt.

The persistence of the no-fly list is a combination of the obvious and the insidious.

First, the obvious: the 9/11 hijackings. Air transport security was greatly heightened (I wrote about its totalitarian flavor last year) in the wake of (the government’s failure to connect the dots and stop) 19 hijackers taking over four planes using box cutters. People want to feel safe, and despite the fact that you’re more likely to die from any of a long list of “benign” happenings than be killed in a terrorist attack, the concentrated shock and horror of 9/11 has prompted people to accept massive intrusions on their liberties and personal space.

Next, the insidious. There are certain liberties that the drafters of the constitution presumed so obvious that they didn’t see the need to enumerate them or protect them any more specifically than the blanket coverage of the 9th and 10th Amendments. Among these are the right to contract and the right to freely move about. Traveling on an airplane is a combination of those two, yet we are debarred from traveling on an airplane unless the government gives us permission. We’ve grown so accustomed to the government restricting our movements and interfering with our voluntary economic transactions that we don’t even recognize these infringements most of the time.

So, we have a no-fly list. We also have the aforementioned FBI terrorist watch list. The Orlando shooter was not on either one. He was investigated by the FBI, but that investigation found nothing actionable and was concluded. The shooter was also vetted by both his employer and the government (twice by each, as I recently noted), so even if the no-fly and investigation lists were added to the no-buy list, he would not have been debarred purchase of the firearms he used. Furthermore, he was a licensed security guard who already had access to firearms, so there’s even less reason to think that the newly proposed “common sense” measures would have stopped him.

That last bit is a common refrain. After every mass shooting, restrictive proposals are put forth in order to do something, but those do somethings often wouldn’t have stopped the shooters’ access to the very firearms they used and there’s little reason to think they wouldn’t have found different means to acquire the tools they wanted.

That brings us to the persistent desire to ban black guns. Or, as the press and many anti-gun people call them, “assault weapons.” People also erroneously call them “assault rifles,” but I shan’t digress. The industry term for these black guns is Modern Sporting Rifle, or MSR for short. Among these is the AR-15, which many people erroneously conflate with the more generalized “assault weapon” and which was not used by the Orlando shooter. That term, “assault weapon,” has no single formal definition, but in general terms it’s a semi-automatic rifle with a detachable magazine and some cosmetic aspects that make it look either scary or cool, depending on your perspective. MSRs are among the most popular rifles in the country, with 20-30 million owned by Americans. Functionally, they’re no different than many other varieties of rifle that don’t fall under most people’s definition of “assault weapon,” but that doesn’t stop anti-gun people from demonizing them.

Consider the context of a ban solely from the ownership figure. How would a ban be instituted and executed? The 1994 Assault Weapons Ban didn’t work, and given the large number of MSRs currently owned, the rarity with which rifles are actually used in crime, the surge in gun sales in the wake of the Orlando shooting, the extremely low compliance rate with MSR registration mandates in New York and Connecticut, and the difficulty in actually defining an “assault weapon” in a fashion that would encompass black guns but not more traditional hunting rifles (in this picture the lower rifle is an “assault weapon” per the NY State SAFE Act definition, while the upper one is not. Both function identically, and fire the same ammunition), it’s hard to believe that any new ban would make a difference.

Still, many people think that a valid response to this latest shooting is to engage in a blanket infringement of the rights of millions of people, rather than to contemplate that its anti-terrorism approach didn’t work, or how/why they didn’t stop the shooter despite being aware of him, or how current ideas (like gun free zones) are ineffective and counterproductive, or how the almost pathological avoidance of naming the elephant in the room creates an environment that works against stopping such people. Rather than talk about the [proximate cause of the Orlando shooter’s radicalization i.e. radical Islam, the government wants the right to ban people’s purchase of firearms based solely on its own criteria and without due process AND it wants to ban a style of firearm that’s among the most widely owned and popular in the country.

The message regarding no-buy lists? “Trust us to get it right.” This would be laughable were it not so tragic. Libraries can be filled with tales of government corruption, government incompetence, and government failure. Our system of government, the tripartite structure, the checks and balances, the principles of limited government, the enumerated rights, the very flavor of the language of the Constitution, is rooted in distrust of government.

The message regarding “assault weapon” bans? “We don’t trust you with guns.” Sure, they aren’t saying they want ALL the guns banned, just the scary ones that “have no purpose other than killing lots of people.” That last bit is tendentious garbage, given that tens of millions of MSRs haven’t been used to kill anyone. What will happen if they get their ban and another mass shooting happens? What do you think.

Government can accomplish little without hordes of sheep bleating support, and that is exactly what is happening in the wake of the Orlando shooting. Many people with antipathy to guns and gun rights are doing just that – bleating. They’re bleating that no one should have such guns, but when pressed to define which guns they mean, they exhibit ignorance or have no rational answer. They’re bleating that bad guys shouldn’t be allowed to buy guns, but when asked how they’d make that happen, they come up with ideas that starkly violate individuals’ rights. They’re bleating that something must be done, and have little care whether that something would actually work because that something doesn’t infringe on rights they themselves consider important. Worst, they’re bleating that the real reason the Orlando shooter killed all those people isn’t true. They trust their government more than they trust their fellow Americans.

That’s the great tragedy – that incidents such as this are used to foment distrust for millions of Americans who’ve done nothing wrong.