Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom
2018-10-11 · Guest: David Harsanyi (Senior editor at The Federalist) · 51:49
History of firearms and the Second Amendment
Bob Zadek interviews David Harsanyi about his book First Freedom, exploring the deep-seated history of firearms in America. They discuss how the right to bear arms is fundamentally tied to the natural right of self-defense and how modern gun control debates often ignore historical context and technical reality.
Topics: Second Amendment, Gun Control, American History, Self-Defense, Individual Rights, Sam Colt, John Browning, Heller v. District of Columbia, Sullivan Law
Speakers: Bob Zadek, David Harsanyi
The Politicization of the Gun [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. Yes, we are this Sunday morning and always live and, as they say, unrehearsed. Thank you so much for listening this morning.
Why does everything in America get politicized? So many activities which are just interactions between humans, or humans behaving in a rational way—it all becomes politicized. It becomes red and blue, people take sides, and we have yet another subject to fight about. There is perhaps nothing, nothing in America that has become more politicized than a mechanical device known as a gun.
Guns have always been a part of American culture, of the history of America. Guns have been crucial in our development. Our development would have been radically different without guns. The story of guns is the story of America. Yet now, gun, gun control, gun ownership, the classification of guns—it has all become the subject for politicians. How did that happen? Where exactly do guns fit in the history of America?
Thank goodness my guest this morning, David Harsanyi, has written a wonderful book, First Freedom: A Ride Through America’s Enduring History with the Gun. The book is available on Amazon. It is number one in its classification on Amazon. David is a senior editor at The Federalist, he’s a columnist at National Review, he’s written four books. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Weekly Standard, New York Post, RealClearPolitics, and my favorite, Reason, together with USA Today. He’s appeared on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, and the NBC Nightly News. And now David can add to his list the Bob Zadek Show. David, thank you for joining us this morning.
David Harsanyi: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Bob Zadek: Now David, you are one of a small group of my—you don’t know it, but private tutors, because your intellectual curiosity is so broad and the depth of your knowledge is so great that I search you out whenever you appear or write in public. And your intellectual curiosity satisfies a deep need that I have. So thank you very much in advance for all of the work that you have done and will be doing in the future.
Why “First Freedom”? [03:42]
Bob Zadek: Now, you’ve written First Freedom: A Ride Through America’s Enduring History with the Gun. The title is intriguing. “First Freedom.” People don’t think of guns and gun ownership as the first freedom. In fact, many people wish we didn’t have it at all. It’s perhaps the only freedom provided for in the Bill of Rights that many Americans wish wasn’t there. I can’t think of any other. So, why “First Freedom”? How did you pick that title?
David Harsanyi: Well, I picked it for two reasons. One is historic. Without the Second Amendment, without the natural right to self-defense and a gun, which allows you to have that right, we wouldn’t have any of the other rights. It’s very simple. You don’t have to be a gun fan or pro-Second Amendment to believe that, to know that. It’s a historical fact. When Lexington and Concord—at the Battle of Lexington and Concord—it was the gun that not only protected or tried to protect those people, but they were actually trying to stop the British, the best-trained army in the world, from taking a cache of weapons because they knew without those weapons, without the powder, without the muskets and the artillery, they would not be able to protect the freedoms that were their natural rights. So that’s the first reason.
The second reason is because I think when you talk about the Second Amendment, it’s really sort of a manifestation of the natural right to self-defense. And that right goes back farther in our history—meaning sort of Western history and in particular British law—the right to self-defense goes back farther than the right to freedom of religion or freedom of speech or basically any other right we have. How you feel about the ability of an individual in the United States to protect themselves, their family, their property, tells us a lot about how you feel about the Constitution and the underpinning ideas of individualism rather than collectivism. If you think that everyone should have to go to the state and always rely on the state for their well-being, you’re probably not a really big fan of the Constitution at all.
Bob Zadek: So it’s very interesting what you said, because what you have pointed out is that the right to carry a gun is a subset of a more basic right, which I don’t think anybody would challenge, which is the inherent, the natural right of self-defense. So gun control simply wants to start with an accepted right, the right of self-defense, and then say, “Okay, you can have self-defense, we support that natural right, but we’re going to limit the effectiveness of your ability to exercise it. We’re going to take away probably the most valuable tool in self-defense, which is the gun.” So it’s like saying you can have self-defense, but you can’t use a closed fist. So it’s kind of hypocritical because I don’t think anybody, even the most ardent gun control advocates, would argue against self-defense. They just argue how effective you can do it.
David Harsanyi: I think that’s right. And I’m not sure that all of the people who are gun control advocates think about it in a sort of idealistic way as you just laid out, though. So they think of it more as a public safety issue. And that is fair. Obviously, there are people who use—like you mentioned in the intro—it’s a tool. It’s about the people who use it. And the people in America have always had a tradition with firearms. So they’re—despite having many, many more than most people—they mostly use them (and I know gun control advocates would disagree) but they mostly use them responsibly, and especially, most obviously, law-abiding people who have guns.
But if you—what you just said is correct—I mean, if you say that someone has a right to self-defense, an inherent right to protect themselves, their families, and their property, and then you don’t give them the means to do it, then it doesn’t really matter what you’re saying about the ideal. You’re in practice not allowing people to defend themselves. And that is an attack on the Second Amendment, and more so an attack on the ideas behind it, even though you might profess holding different views.
Dependence on the State [08:10]
Bob Zadek: Now, you said something in your comments a few moments ago that I would ask you to build upon because I think it’s quite important, especially to a libertarian or libertarian-ish audience, and even in fact a general audience. You pointed out that to the extent that you limit, minimize, make ineffective one’s right of self-defense, of protection of your home and your family and your property—to the extent that you limit that, how does an individual get protection? The answer, David, as you explained, is from the government, from the state. So gun control inherently builds extreme dependency upon the state. And that is one of the fault lines between libertarians and others on the right, and those on the left. Those on the left would encourage dependency upon the government because the government knows better and does it better. So it subordinates the individual to the government in a very profound way.
David Harsanyi: Right. I mean, most of the Bill of Rights are individual rights. It’s what the government can’t do, the rights inherent in the individual’s life. That’s how it’s laid out. So when you hear someone talking about socialism and someone else says it’s un-American, they’re correct because socialism, for instance—I’m not trying to veer off the topic of guns—undermines the idea of individualism for collectivism and the state. That’s just not how it’s done.
So when you have a Second Amendment right, and then people tell you, “Well, you can’t do this and this and this”—we’ll talk about it later, I’m sure—but there are some obvious restrictions on what kind of guns you can own. However, the idea that a person should have to go to the state to ask permission to even have the guns that are within the scope of legality cuts against everything the Constitution’s about. And that’s why Heller was so important in making sure and codifying, basically, that—hopefully forever—that the right of gun ownership is an individual right, not a collective right. It’s not just about militias; it’s about people defending themselves.
And that goes for the—I mean, imagine—it does happen in certain circumstances, unfortunately—but imagine having to go and ask the government permission to exercise your First Amendment rights. It shouldn’t work that way. Government has no business, should have a very limited business, in those freedoms.
Bob Zadek: David mentioned Heller. Heller, of course, refers to a Supreme Court case involving—Heller was the defendant, I believe. Heller was the case, it was a groundbreaking case, and probably the first case which clearly established at the Supreme Court level that the right to bear arms described in the Second Amendment was a right of individuals, an individual right, and not a collective right, that is, the right of a militia. It was an important case. And what’s interesting about it is, in the long history of constitutional law in America, it took a very long time for the Supreme Court to actually speak to this individual right. It’s probably the least litigated of all of the rights in the Bill of Rights.
A History of Gun Legislation [11:52]
Bob Zadek: Now, for most of our history, David, as you explain in your book, guns, regulation of guns, gun ownership was so accepted as of course there is a right, that it was not the subject of much litigation or legislation. Can you explain—give us some context, give us the history of gun legislation in America and how did it come about?
David Harsanyi: Well, let’s work backwards, actually, to answer that question. So you have Heller, which was basically the first time ever—and if you think it was such a contentious issue before, why would we only have one real case? And then McDonald was another case, it’s not too important to dive into that. But Heller telling us that it’s an individual right, not a collective right.
The only other case—actually, let me take a step back. So before the 1930s, there was literally no, not a single written federal law that limited gun ownership in any way that I know of, and I’m pretty sure I’m correct. Occasionally on the statewide level, but more likely on the city level, you had some gun control laws. Typically in the West, you’d have a red-light district and they would say you can’t really bring your guns in here. But never once did any of those laws encompass someone having to ask the state, the city, the council if they could carry guns. No one had a license for a gun; they just bought a gun whenever they felt like, any gun they wanted.
In the 1930s, it was the first time where people sort of gallivanting around the countryside with fully automatic weapons, robbing banks… Chicago, because of government intrusion into drinking through Prohibition, they created a huge criminal element. And that element involved themselves in some pretty bad criminality, obviously, and there were murders using machine guns and things of that nature. So people became scared. And that’s when the federal government started passing some legislation during FDR’s administration—the National Firearms Act, twice, two different iterations—which led to the first Supreme Court ruling on gun ownership, which was Miller. And that simply—the Supreme Court in that case simply found that the government could basically limit the kinds of weaponry people owned. But nothing in common use, only sort of exotic weapons or sort of military weapons. And even then, mostly the time people could own, until 1986, fully automatic weapons simply by paying some money and things of that nature.
So if this was such a contentious issue, if it wasn’t an individual right, if the people didn’t have that many guns and only criminals had them as many revisionists say, then why is it that there had never, ever been a case that had been taken to the Supreme Court to clarify this until Heller? The modern debate over guns really came to fruition and the distinction between Second Amendment advocates and the gun controllers really came—was framed in the 1970s and late ’60s when urban areas had a ton of criminals and basically half of Americans who lived in these places said, “We have to take the guns off the streets,” and the other half said, “We need more guns to protect ourselves.” And that’s basically the debate that we still have today.
The Sullivan Law and Arbitrary Enforcement [15:35]
Bob Zadek: And also, actually, we should mention also something which I know you and I grew up learning about—you grew up in New York, I believe—is the Sullivan Law. I think New York was one of the first localities to try to regulate guns. And the Sullivan Law, which is still on the books today—it’s strange in a way because it prohibits gun ownership, doesn’t it, in New York City without a license?
David Harsanyi: Well, without a license, yeah. So the Sullivan Act was in the earlier 1900s. Essentially, in the beginning, it was used for political reasons and there were gangs involved to try to control people as gun control laws. And I should mention something about the last question that ties into this new one is that there were some gun control laws, for instance, in the South after the Civil War to try to make sure that African Americans didn’t have weapons to defend themselves. Most of the early civil rights leaders of that time were very pro-Second Amendment because they saw it as a way to defend their communities. And even going back before the Revolution, there were often gun laws used to try to make sure that local Indians or some other minority that you didn’t like couldn’t have weapons. And the Sullivan Law was in some aspects the same sort of thing. But yes, that was the first law where a big city said, “You have to register your handguns, especially to carry,” and that’s sort of the law that’s still on the books and it’s still sort of the template for a lot of cities used afterwards, especially in the ’70s.
Bob Zadek: And what’s really strange about the Sullivan Law, which I observed when living in New York, is the number of people who carry guns in New York City in violation of the Sullivan Law is probably in the hundreds of thousands. And yet there are very few prosecutions. So if one thinks that, “Ah, the way to regulate guns is simply to license it and then be strict about who gets the license,” how—there’s no more obvious example that it cannot work than New York City’s very strong gun control laws that virtually are never enforced. It’s like just on the books but otherwise doesn’t exist.
David Harsanyi: Right. I mean—one thing just about the Sullivan Law is that you make a great point. And more than that, initially, especially the local sort of political bosses who were basically crime bosses, arbitrarily decided how to use the law and they could arbitrarily help their allies and hurt people they didn’t like. And that’s what’s dangerous about a lot of gun laws even today. Sorry to interrupt.
Bob Zadek: Well, of course, and you’re exactly right. And of course, that’s true of laws in general. When you have laws that are pervasive in their scope, and then since laws cannot be strictly enforced—there simply isn’t enough manpower—then you end up with prosecutorial discretion and laws are enforced arbitrarily against the political class’s enemies of the day. So laws then become arbitrary if they are overly broad and generally not acceptable to the public. They simply become another weapon of those in power to use selectively against those outside of power, which is another strong argument against these gun control laws.
And one more comment, David. You mentioned, and I want to remind the audience that you said it, you pointed out in the history of gun control legislation in our country, there was a racist component. That cannot be understated. As an example of the selective enforcement is just like drug laws in this country, and just like so many other laws that were done under the guise of “it’s good for society.” The hidden agenda was, just like minimum wage laws and narcotics regulation, it was done targeting a certain minority, usually a racial minority, and that’s of course true in the ugly history of gun control.
Historical Figures and the Gun [20:04]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek, I’m speaking with David Harsanyi. David has written a wonderful and important new book, First Freedom: A History of Guns in America. It is a fascinating history. The history of guns is the history of America.
Now David, in your book, one of the wonderful parts of your book is you introduce us to, or expand upon our limited knowledge of, some wonderful, wonderful—I’ll say characters, but that sounds demeaning—important Americans, perhaps misunderstood Americans. You mention Daniel Boone, and of course you mention Browning, the automatic rifle, and Sam Colt. We’re going to go to break in a moment. When we come back, I’d like you to share your friendship that you have made through your studies with these important Americans who have played an important role in the history of guns in America. This is Bob Zadek talking to David Harsanyi. The subject is guns, our first freedom. We’ll be back in 60 really short seconds. Please stay tuned.
(Sponsor break removed)
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live—yes, I mean live—libertarian talk radio show in America. This morning we are talking with David Harsanyi. The subject of our conversation is David’s new book, best-selling book on Amazon in its class, First Freedom: A Ride Through America’s Enduring History with the Gun.
David, before we went to our very short break, I asked you to introduce us to some of your newfound friends that you have become quite interested in and you share that interest with us in your book: Daniel Boone, Sam Colt, Browning, Maxim, and others. Who are some of your BFF best friends forever that you have met through your book, and share with us some of the reason why you were drawn to them?
David Harsanyi: Well, I would say that Sam Colt would be the most, I think the most interesting person I wrote about. Not just having to do with guns, but just as an American character, as you say. He was just amazing. He was, first of all, he was an autodidact; he taught himself engineering. He had this amazing invention, the revolver, which turned one person, as he said, into an army of six. He invented that—I mean, there had been some stabs at trying to make a revolver, but he certainly invented the one that worked best.
But it wasn’t just that. He was a forerunner of what Henry Ford would later do: interchangeable parts, which made the gun cheaper so ordinary people could afford to have them. He used celebrity endorsements; he used the press in a very modern kind of way. He built a campus that reminds me sort of of like the Google campus or something where people worked and life centered around it. And he was the first industrialist in America to build a factory in Europe, in England. It didn’t really work out because he didn’t think the English worked as well as Americans did, but he was a hugely famous man around the world. When you read about American history today, very rarely do they mention him, for instance, and I think it has a lot to do with the gun because people don’t like to romanticize the gun. So he was one of my favorites to write about. I think he deserves a big new biography. He was an amazing man.
But obviously, there are so many great characters. You mentioned Daniel Boone, who used the Kentucky rifle. He was known—all the pictures of him always have him standing with a Kentucky rifle. The Kentucky rifle—we don’t know who invented it; it was probably a collective effort of Germans early on, which is an amazing gun. It could shoot 300 yards around, maybe 250, which was a lot because a musket could maybe shoot only 50 and with very poor aim. So it basically changed the way the world sooner or later thought about the potency and the sort of space that you can have between you and your enemy when you shot a rifle.
So those were definitely two of the people. And you mentioned John Browning. John Browning was also just a very uniquely American character, a Mormon from Utah who basically invented all the guns we use today. We just keep improving on his ideas. The 1911 pistol that he invented, for instance, was used by the American Army from 1911 until 1986. So from before World War I until almost the end of the Cold War, people were using that gun that he invented; it was so well-made. And obviously, he came up with gas-powered automatic weapons, which we still are using today basically in all our guns.
Bob Zadek: One of my favorite quotes about Sam Colt is—and the genesis of this quote is not known—but it was “God created men, Sam Colt made them equal.” It’s a great quote that summarizes the effect that Sam Colt has had. And of course, the other interesting quote also from gunmakers Smith & Wesson is—often you see in movies, mostly film noir, where some tough guy would say to another tough guy, “I’m represented by Smith & Wesson.” They were another gun manufacturer who made a lot of money and a lot of innovations in guns.
The Kentucky Rifle and Revolutionary Warfare [26:48]
Bob Zadek: Now, when you talk about the Kentucky rifle, I’m reminded of there was a somewhat lesser-known soldier in the Revolutionary War, Daniel Morgan, who organized using Kentucky rifles and made quite a difference both in the Southern campaign and in the Northern campaign because he was using, as you said, the technique of snipers, unknown in classical European warfare and could not exist without the Kentucky rifle. And the difference between a rifle and a musket, of course, is a rifle you can actually aim; a musket you pull the trigger and hope for the best. So Daniel Morgan was another somewhat less understood soldier and officer during the American Revolution whose success was based upon his tool, which was the Kentucky rifle.
David Harsanyi: Yeah, I mean, the Kentucky rifle was—so there were some big moments in the Revolution where the Kentucky rifle was used, but generally it was not well-used because of a number of reasons. For one, most soldiers didn’t know how to use one because it was sort of a unique gun that was mostly used by people on the frontier, not by an everyday person. Second, the gun, though it had tremendous aim from far away, was hard to load, took a long time to reload, and the big puff of black smoke when you shot it so people would—so you’d get one shot off and then they would find you basically, so it was a little difficult to use in that sense.
Moreover, and this is a theme that kept popping up in my book, was that the military leaders of the time were very stubborn about what’s known and unknown in the sense that it would have been very difficult for them to incorporate new tactics and a new weapon into an army when all they knew was marching in lines with muskets. So while there were some units of snipers and they performed well when they were involved, generally it didn’t happen. It did happen in the beginning when the colonials had surrounded Boston where the Americans were picking off officers, which was unheard of at the time, through sniping. And the British were really intrigued and scared by these Americans who were so excellent using the Kentucky rifle. But it wasn’t a main, sort of a huge weapon, though it’s been depicted that way since then, sort of romanticized for the Revolution. Later, obviously, it was an important weapon as people started to push west.
Deconstructing Gun Control Vocabulary [29:38]
Bob Zadek: David, in your book, you help us a lot in understanding the vocabulary of the gun control debate. We hear phrases, especially from Dianne Feinstein and others who have the same political point of view, worrying to heck about “assault weapons.” We all can roll off the phrase “an assault weapon ban.” We worry about automatic, semi-automatic weapons, automatic weapons—some should be banned, some should not be banned. That whole discussion, as you explain, is all political with buzzwords and totally vacuous and devoid of real content. Help us understand some of the gun vocabulary, how it’s used, how it’s misused in the public debate so that our friends out there can sort of follow along the discussion on a more factual basis.
David Harsanyi: Well, words like “assault” to describe a gun is kind of, as you say, it’s vacuous. I mean, it’s an empty word. All guns can be used to assault someone else. And I think quite often with the “assault weapon,” you hear the word “weapon of war.” So for instance, ARs, AR-15s and so forth, which is probably the best-selling rifle in America, is often thought of in that way because of how it looks aesthetically. It looks like a war weapon. But in truth, for instance, the AR was on the civilian market before it was a weapon of war during the Vietnam War. And it’s a different kind of gun, the M16, power-wise.
And as you mentioned, automatic weapons. So I remember watching after the Parkland mass shooting, there was a CNN show where they had all the sort of players and some politicians, and Marco Rubio was there being yelled at and all of that. And someone, one of the kids, yelled that it was time to ban all semi-automatic weapons and everyone cheered in the crowd. Well, semi-automatic shoots one bullet at a time as you pull the trigger. Automatic, fully automatic weapon, shoots bullets if you pull the trigger once; it continues to shoot bullets. So automatic weapons, which are often mentioned by gun controllers when they’re making their arguments, have been banned since 1986. You can get one, but it’s extremely hard and so typically people who have special licenses have them. I believe there’s only been three crimes since maybe 1986 that involved a fully automatic weapon in the whole country.
Semi-automatic weapons, if we ban them, we basically would be banning most guns. People don’t typically walk around with revolvers that often; most weapons these days sold, I think, are semi-automatic. So we have to be careful with the words because when liberals write legislation typically—liberals sometimes not, but when they write legislation—they’re much more concerned with aesthetics than they are with actually making things safer. An “assault weapon” has some sort of loose government definition that doesn’t really make any sense. The AR-15 isn’t even the most powerful weapon out there as far as rifles go. So those are just two of the things that people get wrong.
But then they—for instance, just comes to mind, Dianne Feinstein tried to ban barrel shrouds. I think it was her, I forget which senator. You know, which is just an aesthetics thing. It goes on the barrel so that you don’t have to touch a hot barrel. It is just something sort of extra on a gun that people buy. And she wanted to ban it simply—and then someone asked her if she even knew what it was and she didn’t. I believe it was her, might have been another senator. So they don’t even understand their own language, their own rhetoric. It’s just what sounds scary to people who don’t have guns is politically expedient to bring up because it helps scare them and then it helps pass legislation.
Bob Zadek: And of course they also use the phrase—which I love this phrase—“military-style weapons.” So in other words, if it’s painted khaki, it’s military-style. But if you carried around a weapon that was Glen Plaid, it probably would not be a military-style. So the whole concept of “style,” “military-style,” is simply a way to capture with the broadest brush possible as many weapons as you can to simply reduce the number of weapons per se in America, but not to reduce a very specific type of weapon.
David Harsanyi: Right. I mean, most of the time when they’re saying that, “military-style weapon,” they’re talking about AR-15s, which have a very specific style that looks like a military weapon. But the truth is, Eugene Stoner, who was the inventor of that weapon, made it very light. And that’s why people like it; it’s light. It revolutionized the rifle. And initially, the government didn’t want it; they thought it was too light and weak for combat. And it was on the civilian market and people bought them, I guess in the ’60s already, for sporting, for sports and things of that nature. And it’s an incredibly popular gun. And as Heller found, that guns in common use—and that’s certainly one that’s in common use—that aren’t fully automatic should be legal. So I’m not even sure if it’s constitutional to ban the AR-15, but that’s the gun they’re talking about when they talk about military-style weapons most of the time, obviously there are others as well.
Individual Right vs. Militia [35:40]
Bob Zadek: What’s interesting is, in the gun control debate, much of the attention is spent—and we’re not going to spend much time on it on this show—on whether or not the Second Amendment does in fact create an individual right. And there is what’s—there is this strange comma in the middle of the Second Amendment. Just for the record, the Second Amendment is very short; it’s one sentence with three commas: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Now, to discuss what the founders meant with those commas—it’s a strange sentence—is not very satisfying because the debate on gun control, while it’s always starts with the Second Amendment, we would have the debate irrespective of what the Second Amendment says because those people who oppose, who favor gun control, don’t do it because of the wording of the Second Amendment; they do it because they don’t want guns. So the Second Amendment has almost nothing to do with the debate at the policy level. And the debate that we are having in this country is a social debate: should we ban guns, should we make society dependent upon the government for its protection or not? Is that a fair way to follow the debate—that it’s much more about policy rather than about deconstructing the one-sentence Second Amendment?
David Harsanyi: Absolutely. I think that there is a component to it that’s trying to revise history to help them in the contemporary debate. But the truth is that the Second Amendment is not particularly well-written. But I go through the history of why the wording is the way it is, and it was a long edited process that had much to do with revisions to make it clearer, ironically, that did not. But at the time, there is not a single quote from a single founder anywhere that contends that somehow owning a weapon is not an individual right. In fact, there are many, many quotes, and I feature a bunch of them in my book, that show that they believed the Second Amendment was so important that it wasn’t even really debated.
The only debate around the Second Amendment between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists was who would control the militias. It had nothing to do with whether the individuals would hand back their weapons. The Minutemen didn’t hand back their weapons after fighting in Concord and Lexington. That’s absurd. The militias themselves existed because of individuals, not the reverse. People brought their own guns. Occasionally there were some communities where weapons were expensive and not everyone had them where they would purchase some weapons, but for the most part, it was all individuals; they would take their guns home afterwards.
Not a debate about this throughout the 19th century. There was not anywhere a debate about whether this was an individual right. In fact, I have many quotes in my book from noted people, from people in the Supreme Court, that clearly celebrate the idea of the Second Amendment as an individual right, pointing out that they don’t have it in tyrannies and that the first thing in tyrannies that they do is take away your weapons. It was just a convenient revisionism to look at the Second Amendment, to look at the commas. I wish there were two of those amendments, so one would have been militia and one would have been the individual.
And one last note on this is that of the 13 colonies, I forget what the number is, but most of them in their own constitutions had a Second Amendment, you know, or something similar, that was much clearer and just outright about it being an individual right.
American Exceptionalism and the Gun [40:15]
Bob Zadek: One of the subjects that when I have these conversations or when I travel, and you experience people or spend time with people who are living in Western Europe, for example, they will sometimes say, “What is it about America and guns? Why does America have this special relationship with guns that the rest of the civilized world doesn’t have?” And after all, we are unique in our gun legislation, in the social role that guns play in American history. Can you give us the perspective of why are we different from other first-world countries in our relationship to guns?
David Harsanyi: The answer to that question is actually the reason is my book and the reason why I wrote it. When a kid today is taken hunting for the first time by their parent and given a gun, that’s a continuum. It started when the first pilgrims landed here and within a day arrows were falling on their heads. Now, they had to fight back. In Europe, many people were settled already; it wasn’t the sort of pioneering attitude that people here had because from day one, the people who came here to the colonies, the British, they were moving westward and they didn’t stop moving westward until the 1950s when people were still going to California. And that spirit is very individualistic. And individualism means defending yourself, your family, and your property by yourself, and that means guns because it’s the best and only way to most of the time do it.
So part of it was philosophical and ideological. When people came here, they already believed in that natural right because they came here and it’s the most—self-defense is a liberal idea, small ‘l’ liberal, classical liberal idea, and they brought that here with them, most people. And they never let that go. Then the Revolution could not have happened without that right because it was an armed citizenry here, more armed here than anywhere in the world. And that won us our freedom. That is ingrained in us, or has been in the past for the past 200-plus years. I hope it continues. And that had a lot to do with us being armed.
People don’t like to talk about that, but that’s what it is. And when you take a narrow view of history and say, “Hey, you’re not going to fight the—what do you need guns for? You’re not going to fight the government of the United States, they have nuclear weapons,” or whatever stupid comment they make—that might be true, but just because a person doesn’t use their Fourth Amendment right or their Fifth Amendment right or even their First Amendment right doesn’t mean the right itself isn’t important and it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t protect it and nurture it.
Now, I think there’s been, especially in the urban places today, guns are thought of in a very negative way despite there being a dramatic drop in gun homicides for the last almost 30 years. And during that time, a huge spike in gun ownership. So there’s an irrationality to the argument that doesn’t really make very much sense. Now, of course there are tragic events, and we should try to think of ways to deal with them. But when these debates break out, it seems to me like the left doesn’t understand any of that history and doesn’t understand, like a Western European person doesn’t understand, why guns are important to many people in this country. And maybe if they understood that a little bit better, the debate would make more sense, but it doesn’t right now.
Prior Restraint and Due Process [43:59]
Bob Zadek: And a point you just made, which again I’d like to emphasize it for our friends out there, is merely having the right to own a gun doesn’t mean you are determined to use it. In fact, many people who own guns for self-defense hope they never have to use it. So it’s simply knowing you have the right, the right to protect yourself, and the means is sufficient in and of itself. That’s part of the freedom.
So people who argue for the right to own a gun are misunderstood as being they want the right to harm others. No, they don’t want the right to harm others; they want the right to simply know they are protecting themselves. They are doing what they can to protect themselves. So the right to gun ownership doesn’t mean you have the right to harm somebody with the gun. In fact, we have an extensive civil and criminal legal system that punishes you if you improperly harm another with a gun. So we can’t be arguing against gun ownership because it’s going to harm somebody, because if you harm somebody improperly, we have laws that cover that, just like we allow you to own a car, but if you improperly harm somebody, there is an extensive and well-established civil and criminal system to take care of that.
So this is one of the few bodies of policy, David, I think where we try to cut off, prevent the crime from happening by denying a freedom rather than simply punishing the crime after it occurs. It is almost like that Tom Cruise movie where they try to read somebody’s brain and predict who is going to commit a crime and arrest you before it happened. It’s kind of a law that tries to prevent a crime rather than punish it after it happens.
David Harsanyi: Yeah, like Minority Report. It’s—I don’t know if you remember two bit more than two years ago, Democrats had a sit-in for more gun control. And the law they wanted to pass was to prohibit people who had ever been on a secret government terror watch list. So you’re talking about a million Americans who had no due process from owning a firearm ever in their lives. In fact, Dianne Feinstein said she wanted—or she did push a bill that would have banned people who traveled to certain countries like Syria and elsewhere from ever owning a gun, or maybe it was five years, I forget. There are new laws in California that prohibit people—that allow your neighbor, if they’re—if you scare them in some way, to call the police and the police take your gun away, and then you get due process basically.
So it’s a very dangerous thing. These are attacks on the Second Amendment, but the Fourth and the Fifth. And it is something that they can’t admit, gun controllers, is that they want to inhibit the amount of weapons. And usually people are inhibited by laws are law-abiding people, not criminals. And that is a problem that law-abiding gun owners see, and that’s why they don’t want to participate in laws because it won’t help bring down violence because the lawbreakers will continue to break the law; it will only stop them from having their own right, from being able to practice their own rights. And they shouldn’t have to explain what they do with guns either. I see this new trend where like, “Well, you don’t need this gun and you don’t need that.” It’s not for you to decide what people need in the First Amendment or the Tenth Amendment or any other amendment. It’s the job of the individual or the state to deal with that question—meaning the state as, you know, like California or whatever state, not the federal government.
Bob Zadek: And you made a very important point earlier in our conversation when you pointed out to us that the Second Amendment, which of course follows the First Amendment, is the amendment that allows you to protect your rights given to you in the other amendments. And just to put gun control in a context that is so obvious to us but not so obvious to the public who doesn’t think about these issues perhaps as much as we do is: just imagine that we have freedom of speech, but we have what is called in free speech law “prior restraint.” That if you want to say something which of course might be illegal—there are slander laws and libel laws and inciting a riot—there are certain types of speech that are illegal. Well, the fact is, just imagine if whenever you spoke in public, you needed to get a license to say what you’re going to say in advance to prevent you from doing—from saying something illegal. That’s gun control in a nutshell. You need a license in advance to prevent you from misusing your speech or misusing your gun. It is so abhorrent to the norms on which our country was founded. It’s kind of like, David, isn’t it prior restraint in speech?
David Harsanyi: Absolutely. That’s what it is. Now, obviously they’ll argue that there’s a difference because guns are dangerous and can kill someone, whereas, you know, a slander or, whatever, it can’t. But the bottom line is there’s a process and a way to get rid of the Second Amendment if they really wanted to do it. But, you know, they don’t, or I’m sure they do, but they can’t, so they won’t.
But I think your point is excellent. And, you know, again, I just want to reiterate, this is a brand new argument, this gun control argument, because in the 1930s, we banned automatic weapons because they were not in common use; a normal person did not have a Maxim gun in their front lawn to protect themselves. And I think that most people, most people agree that certain kind of real-life military weapons, not the kind that they call military, should probably not be handled by—I mean, we can argue about this, but should probably not be handled by people because they’re so dangerous in a way. Same way you can’t drive a tank down the road, but you can drive a Hummer down the road. So I think that we’ve already laid out the sort of framework for how we deal with guns. And everything else past that, people see, gun owners see it as just incremental steps as trying to inhibit them from owning guns in general, whether it’s attacks on…
Bob Zadek: David, we have—regretfully, we have only 30 seconds left. How can our friends out there follow your writings?
David Harsanyi: They could go to thefederalist.com or, you know, I’m also in many newspapers, the National Review, and can get my book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or anywhere where books are sold.
Bob Zadek: David’s book is First Freedom: A Ride Through America’s Enduring History with the Gun. It’s a must-read. It is number one in its category on amazon.com. David, thank you so much for spending a Sunday morning with us. Good luck in your book sales. We sure will follow your writings. This is Bob Zadek saying so long for now. Have a wonderful Sunday. I’ll be back again next Sunday for a live, always live, libertarian hour. Thanks so much for listening.