The Weekly Screed (#621)

There are no gun laws in Fantasyland
By David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Even though his Facebook portrait shows him fondling a rifle, I don’t think my friend Roger in Reedsburg is a gun nut. However, I know he consorts with gun nuts, because he now and then shares with me some of the voluminous propaganda output of the NRA and its zombie army.

Roger recently forwarded a dozen anti-gun control “arguments,” largely in the poster, cartoon and bumper-sticker form preferred by below-grade level readers . Typically, these rhetorical flames were fraught with bad grammar and hyperbolic alarmism. But far worse was their dissemination of the sort of seductive falsehood that appeals to trusting country boys like me and Rog.

For example, Roger probably believes the gun lobby’s favorite warning — recently revived by NRA president David Keene, that jackbooted G-men (or maybe Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo) are mobilizing, at this moment, to goosestep from “door to door” confiscating every legal gun in the U.S.A. (leaving behind only the illegal guns secretly stowed away by Mullah Obama’s million Mau Mau minions).

I spent an hour looking for a single federal law, either written, introduced or passed, providing for the confiscation of guns. The closest I could find was a sad little 2013 proposal ( H.R. 226) by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Ct.) that would grant a $2,000 tax credit to any citizen voluntarily surrendering one of the sort of assault weapons that mowed down the 20 tots in Newtown. Rep. DeLauro’s idea, based on gun buybacks that local police run regularly all over the country, isn’t confiscation, but it’s the closest that any federal lawmaker has ever ventured — ever — in 237 years of U.S. history. Kurt Nimmo, who blogs at a site instructively titled “Infowars,” insisted that DeLauro’s toothless bill “is yet more evidence that federal and state governments are now pulling out all stops short of door-to-door confiscation in their coordinated effort to disarm the American people.”

Really?

Kurt’s right, sort of. The danger of gun confiscation is well-documented. You can find “gun-grab” threats all over the Web. But every one has been issued by gun advocates. Only the NRA and its allies talk about gun confiscation. No liberal has ever suggested repealing the Second Amendment (although there are thousands of English teachers who would love a chance to give it a D-plus and correct it). The left-wing gun threat of “forced buybacks” and “door-to-door confiscation” (both terms are David Keene’s) is a figment of right-wing fantasy.

A gun nut named Robbie Cooper crafted a classic wet-dream response to the fantasy: “You know what else would be an option, Mr. Cuomo? A bunch of gun owners refusing to surrender their God-given right to self-defense opening fire on anybody showing up at their doors to try to confiscate their firearms… And heavy crossfire, as news of the confiscation quickly spreads…” Hoo-wah!

Or as George W. Bush and Kirsten Dunst have both said: “Bring it on!”

The flood of fallacies forwarded by Roger is also includes the fiendish “free Obama phones” conspiracy. According to the right-wing myth machine, free phones were handed out to millions of paupers so that they can get calls from the President urging them to support gun confiscation. A brilliant tactic if true. But…

Free phones for the poor started in 1934, required of The Phone Company by the Federal Communications Commission, so that people who couldn’t afford phone service could call the Fire Department when their house is burning. This federal rule has been updated regularly — with little Congressional opposition — to keep pace with technology. It happened in 1985 (Reagan phones), 1997 (Clinton phones) and 2008 (Dubya phones). President Obama hasn’t touched the program, which is not taxpayer-funded. Phone operators are supposed to pay for it out of their revenues, but some pass the cost through to subscribers.

There is, by the way, a website — http://obamaphone.net/ — that explains the program, but it’s not affiliated with the White House, the government or the FCC.

Another whopper in Roger’s propaganda dump was this juicy pro-gun quote from Thomas Jefferson: “The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.”

Boy, talk about our Founding Fathers traveling back to the future to tell us not to let liberals take our guns from our cold, dead hands! Except, according to the Jefferson Foundation, and every editor of Jefferson’s writings, he never said that.

The beauty in this quote is that we know where it did originate — in a self-published 2007 novella by a paranoid fantasist named Matt Carson. The book, On a Hill They Call Capitol: A Revolution is Coming, is the heartwarming story of a bunch of government-hating patriots with frat-boy nicknames, inspired by a fake quote from Thomas Jefferson, who take up arms and start a revolution.

Finally, there’s the obligatory spurious Third Reich reference. You can’t read more than three paragraphs into any gun-nut riff without an Obama/Hitler parallel. The one in Roger’s chain-letter is a 1935 Hitler quote. Because it’s made-up, it comes in lots of variations, but the commonest has the Feuhrer saying, “This year will go down in history. For the first time a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police will be more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future.”

Spooky, huh? Except, yeah, well…

First of all, German history books document the fact that the Third Reich generated no firearms laws, regulations or restrictions in 1935. Before, in 1919 and 1920, the Weimar government imposed some of the toughest gun laws in Europe. And in 1931, when Nazis and Communists started shooting each other in the streets, killing bystanders until they were dropping like kindergarten kids in Connecticut, the Weimar government again tightened the screws — to little avail. The Nazis gunned and bullied their way to power in 1932. After that, the only firearms rules imposed under the Nazis came in 1938, when Hitler banned Jews from owning guns, while liberalizing weapons restrictions for most everyone else. The law totally deregulated the sale of rifles, shotguns, and ammunition.

About the Hitler quote the NRA loves to repeat, Bernard Harcourt, political science chair at the University of Chicago, wrote, “[This] infamous quote is probably a fraud and was likely never uttered. The citation reference is a jumbled and incomprehensible mess that has never been properly identified or authenticated, and no one has been able to produce a document corresponding to the quote. It has been the subject of much research, all of it fruitless, and has now entered the annals of urban legend.”

Ironically, the guy who started the e-mail to Roger — which eventually reached me — titled his message: “How much clearer can it be?”

Well, Norm, once you do the homework, the answer is: “A lot.”