Hold That Tiger
Gun Rights
In April, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Department of Justice seeking documents related to its restoration of Second Amendment rights recognition for Hollywood A-lister Mel Gibson and nine other citizens. Because it’s so easy to end up on the “prohibited persons” list (including the innocent pleading out to avoid great expense and threatened draconian punishment if they lose), it seemed in the interests of gun owners to know what criteria were used and who is likely to be eligible for consideration.
Among the records sought are all those “reviewed by the Attorney General for each individual listed in the filing; All records that each individual submitted to receive relief [and] All other records not submitted by the list of individuals, but relied upon by the Attorney General in establishing that ‘each individual will not be likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety and that the granting of the relief to each individual would not be contrary to the public interest.’”
We’ll see if we have the information I’m looking for by the time this article goes to press.
Can’t Be Trusted …
Regardless of the government’s response, if anything, one truism will remain unchallengeable, an observation I made years ago that induced a reader to make an entry in the online Urban Dictionary that he named “Codrea’s Law”:
“Anyone who can’t be trusted with a gun can’t be trusted without a custodian.”
It’s true, and it’s not just guns. There are people whose behaviors have proven they can’t be trusted with knives. Or blunt objects. Or fists. Remember that the greatest mass murders in this country have ostensibly been committed with box cutters you can get at any office or shipping supply store (9/11), with fertilizer and fuel oil (Oklahoma City bombing), and with a bit of gasoline and a match (do an internet search for “Happyland fire”).
Anything can be a weapon. Bottom line: You can’t trust violent people with peaceable ones.
Predator’s Nature
The trust idea had its genesis years earlier, from an interesting passage in the indispensable desk reference Gun Control, a 1973 classic by the late administrative law judge, author and lecturer Robert J. Kukla on the history of the 20th-century citizen disarmament movement. It’s now out of print, but a limited number of copies in varying conditions are still available on Amazon. If you don’t grab one before they’re gone, it’s your loss.
Kukla relayed the story of a 1964 CBS hit piece on guns (how little things have changed since then!). A violent career felon had been conditionally released from a federal penitentiary and went on to murder a police officer. Naturally, gun laws were blamed by both a police official and the warden.
“Can you visualize CBS-Television calmly interviewing a zookeeper who had recently released a ravenous tiger that promptly devoured the first person it encountered?” Kukla asked readers, drawing an obvious logical parallel. “Suppose the zookeeper replied: ‘Tigers are vicious flesh-eaters. This one had been vicious all of his life, and the first thing he would think of when he gets out of his cage is to tear some person to shreds.’”
There are some behaviors so aberrant, some crimes so vicious, and some consciences so amoral that it can never be safe to allow a congenital predator unfettered access to a potential victim pool and not expect that innocents will be attacked. The Aesop tale of the scorpion and the frog comes to mind; the predator will do what’s in its nature.
The Flip Side
Conversely, if someone is not anger management-challenged and homicidal, what’s the point of a lifetime ban on a fundamental right enshrined in the Constitution? With the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision standard of text, history and tradition at the time of ratification, no one can make the case that disarming DIY home décor, crafts and recipe maven Martha Stewart for lying to the feds about some stock trades made the world a safer place (even though she is a Democrat and supports the party of “gun control”).
Then there are abuses that have arisen under the Lautenberg Amendment, which turned misdemeanor domestic violence charges into lifetime prohibitions.
“Lautenberg Gun Ban Racking up the Horror Stories,” Gun Owners of America documented back in 1998, citing examples such as “A wife tears her husband’s pocket during an argument. A daughter throws keys at her mom — and misses. Both ‘assailants’ are arrested, fingerprinted and booked.”
Then we have temporary prohibited persons, those disarmed under so-called “Red Flag Laws,” stripped of a supposedly unalienable right without so much as being charged with a crime, let alone convicted. That madness evokes nothing so much as the ludicrously despotic Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland: “No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first — verdict afterwards.”
So much for a bedrock principle of American jurisprudence, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. And that can only happen after full due process.
As for the proven guilty? It’s up to those who have been proven guilty of violently victimizing others to prove they’re no longer a danger and no longer need to be segregated from society. Until the laws recognize that reality, expect tigers to behave like the predators they are.
