Shooting the Government

After a recent column about terrified gun owners rushing to buy as many deadly weapons as they could carry, panicked that President-elect Barack Obama would institute common-sense restrictions on military-style assault weapons, I received e-mails from all over the country informing me of my ignorance.

After that outpouring of angry rhetoric, I have to admit at least one of my assumptions about gun owners was wrong: A substantial number of gun owners are far crazier and more dangerous than I ever imagined.

I’ve always thought the vast majority of gun owners were living in a fantasy world as a result of seeing too many bad movies. They imagined themselves as heroes casually shooting the guns out of the hands of the bad guys and saving the entire town.

It seemed like a harmless enough fantasy as long as gun owners never got into a situation where they were actually required to use a gun against another human being.

People who use guns for a living undergo constant training in how to respond to lifethreatening situations without losing lots of innocent lives in the process. Armed amateurs are a danger to everyone in the vicinity, including themselves and their families.

Since most gun owners go through their lives without ever using the guns they cling to against another human being, I naively believed a majority might one day understand the wisdom of restricting military-style street sweepers. That’s because I never really understood just how twisted some of the fantasies of gun owners truly are.

A surprising number of e-mails vehemently argued that automatic weapons of mass destruction were precisely the guns Americans needed most because the real purpose of the Second Amendment was to make it possible for citizens to shoot their own government.

“The purpose of the Second Amendment is to allow the citizens to protect themselves from tyranny, which will certainly be enforced with government ‘assault weapons,’” one writer patiently explained to me. “Logically, that is the type of weapon that we the people should have access to if we ever need to resist.”

The whole point to constitutional protection of gun ownership, another said, was “for the purpose of arming people so they could revolt in case of government gone wrong.”

Over and over, gun owners told me the reason they desperately needed assault weapons had nothing to do with hunting or even to protect their families from crime. They needed to be armed and ready, at a moment’s notice, to shoot it out with their own government.

When I accused gun owners of engaging in absurd movie fantasies, I was thinking of the wrong movies. They weren’t remembering Westerns. These guys are more into science fiction.

Their futuristic fantasy goes like this: Our government is taken over by evildoers who have no respect for the Constitution. The government uses the full might of the most powerful military on Earth to suppress citizens’ rights, especially the all-important right of gun ownership.

Fortunately, a few courageous Americans have had the foresight to stockpile military assault weapons and plenty of ammo. They lead the attack on Washington to restore democracy. They shoot their way into the Oval Office and throw off tyranny.

You can no longer call it a harmless fantasy when people actually start considering the possibility of shooting government officials.

Protecting Our Rights

Interestingly, these twisted fantasies got one thing right: We have always faced the danger in this country of a government coming to power that would attempt to take away our constitutional rights. In fact, we are ending eight years of a government that had no respect for our Constitution and made a concerted assault on the rule of law.

The government has rounded up hundreds of people and imprisoned them for as long as seven years without ever charging them with crimes, giving them access to legal counsel, presenting any evidence they had done anything wrong or providing them a single day in court.

The president of the United States authorized torturing these prisoners in clear violation of provisions of the Geneva Conventions, which our own country led the world in making part of international law.

At home, the government went to extraordinary lengths to try to deny the right to vote to anyone who wouldn’t vote for them. Yet, not once during the past eight years did our heavily armed, patriotic gun owners rise up to revolt against this government gone wrong and start shooting members of the Bush administration.

Fantasy gun battles aren’t the way we save democracy in the real world. We save democracy through the constitutional process.

After one of the worst governments in our history, the pendulum swings back and we elect a constitutional law professor as president to appoint Supreme Court justices who will protect all of our constitutional rights.

What’s your take? Write: editor@shepex.com or comment on this story online at www.expressmilwaukee.com.