Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 13
July 16, 2019
When It Comes Gun Violence, Guns Aren’t Cars.
Way back in February, a ‘summit meeting’ was held in
Chicago, bringing together 44 medical associations whose representatives spent
a weekend patting each other on the back for how engaged they have all become
over the issue of gun violence. If I am sounding somewhat skeptical of this
so-called ‘historic’ event, it’s because nearly a half-year has gone by and I
am still waiting for any of these groups to actually do something tangible to
reduce gun violence.
If anything, many of these physician-led organizations
actually spend time, money and effort to increase gun violence by
donating millions of dollars to members of Congress who then go out and vote
down each and every effort to pass the most benign and least-restrictive gun
laws. In the last three election cycles alone, the American College of
Emergency Physicians gave GOP Congressional candidates nearly two million bucks, and this bunch
has the nerve to show up at Chicago to help lead the medical effort to respond
to injuries caused by guns? Yea, yea, I know. These GOP officeholders may be
voting the wrong way on guns, but they deserve financial support from the
medical community because they vote the right way on so many other issues, like
getting rid of Obama-care, gutting Medicaid, positive things like that.
I shouldn’t be surprised at how the physicians who met
in Chicago and then published a detailed pronouncement on gun
violence could be so willing to ignore the egregious behavior of the
professional associations to which they belong. Because if you take the trouble
to read the high-sounding document which came out of the meeting, you quickly
become aware of the fact that the selfsame blindness about political
contributions which is endemic to the medical profession infects their views on
how physicians should respond programmatically to the issue of gun violence as
well. And the blindness appears right at the beginning of this Magna Carta
which says that physicians should adopt a public health model “that has
been so effective in improving outcomes in traffic-related injury.”
Ever since I organized the first medical conference on gun
violence which awarded CME credits, I have been listening to this nonsense
about how we can reduce gun violence by using the public-health template which
was developed to reduce injuries on our highways, byways and streets. And the
reason that the public health approach to gun violence is nonsense is very
simple, namely, that cars are designed to move people from here to there
without causing an injury; guns are designed to cause injuries – that’s
what guns do. When I hit the brake and my car doesn’t slow down, obviously there’s
some kind of defect which needs to be fixed. When I pull out my Glock and shoot
me or someone else in the head, my Glock is working exactly the way it was
designed to work.
I have read virtually every single pronouncement by
every single medical organization, public health researcher, journalist,
advocate and everyone else, and I have yet to see any of them, even one
of them mention this obvious and basic fact. So let me state it as simply as I
can, okay? Guns aren’t ‘safe.’ That’s not how they work. That’s not what they
are designed to do. I have owned guns for more than 60 years. I have sold more
than 11,000 guns in my gun shop. I know a little bit more about guns than any
of these self-professed medical experts, most of whom have never even put their
hands on a gun.
The physicians who attended the Chicago ‘summit meeting’
will immediately respond by reminding me that there’s something out there
called the 2nd Amendment which gives their patients the ‘right’ to
own a gun. To which my answer is this: So what? Since when should physicians
develop proper responses to medical threats based on whether or not patients have
a Constitutional ‘right’ to purchase and own a product which creates that
threat?
July 15, 2019
In Virginia The Gun Guys Won With Or Without The NRA.
If I had a nickel for everyone who has predicted the
demise of the NRA since the national meeting back in April, I wouldn’t
have to go out today and watch a bunch of cops try to hit the broad side of the
barn with the guns they haven’t cleaned since the last time they tried to punch
some holes through the broad side of the barn. And until last week, between
closing down their video network and stumbling through a lawsuit against their
own advertising agency, there was every good reason to believe that Wayne-o and
the boys from Fairfax were just hanging onto the ropes, if not down for the
count.
That was then, this is now. And now happens to be what took place at the State House in Richmond, VA where America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ demonstrated that any thoughts about their impending demise might be a bit immature.
Let’s not forget that in June there was a really bad
mass shooting at Virginia Beach. And let’s also
not forget that it wasn’t all that hard for gun-control groups to show up at
Richmond in force because Virginia’s capitol city is less than 100 miles from
Washington, D.C. But what we also shouldn’t forget is that once you leave the
affluent, liberal-minded DC suburbs of Virginia and travel through the
hinterland, you’re in the old South, and the old South still has folks who own
lots of guns.
The gun-control proposals promoted by a Democratic Governor
who is up for re-election, included the usual comprehensive background checks
and regulating assault rifles and hi-cap mags, along with a law that would have
re-instated a 30-day waiting period between the purchase of handguns. And while
the Democrats control the Executive Mansion at the moment, the legislature is
still in GOP hands. Which means that Governor Northam’s proposals went nowhere
fast. Zilch. Finished.
The NRA‘s strategy to defeat the gun bill was
the group’s usual concoction of anti-crime rhetoric combined with support for 2nd-Amendment
‘rights.’ Here was their post-session statement: “We commend the House and Senate Republican
leadership for renewing the focus on putting violent criminals behind bars and
a much needed refocus on mental health initiatives. The discussion before
the Virginia Crime Commission should focus on solutions that provide strong due
process and put a stop to the continued politicization of law-abiding
individual’s constitutional rights.”
In other words, gun violence is caused by criminals and nuts, not
by lawful gun owners exercising their Constitutional ‘rights.’ And this happens
to be a very powerful argument, given the fact that a majority of Americans not
only believe
that violent crime is always and has always been on the rise, but that having
access to a gun is a foolproof solution
to the problem of crime.
Yesterday I was up in New Hampshire and drove through Swanzey,
which is one of those old, red-brick factory towns which saw its best years
sometime before World War II. The local propane dealer had a sign offering a starting
salary of $55,000 for someone to make home deliveries – you can rent a nice,
one-bedroom in the next town for $700 a month.
These are the kind of guys who can and do walk into a gun shop any
time they want, plunk down five or six hundred bucks and walk out with another
gun. And while they may have heard something about problems at the NRA
with Wayne-o outfitting himself at Zegna or Chris Cox opening his own lobbying
firm, it’s my friends in Gun-control Nation who pay attention to such
headlines; those gun guys couldn’t care less.
On the other hand, those gun guys vote and they have actually met
their local government reps at the annual Knights of Columbus bar-b-que or at
the gun show held up the road every few months. Until and unless my friends in
Gun-control Nation figure out how to communicate with those guys, what happened
in Richmond last week will continue to happen in other places as well.
July 12, 2019
How To Properly Clean A Gun.
How to Properly Clean a Gun
Being a responsible gun owner means taking care of your guns. This isn’t just a matter of
keeping your guns safe – it’s also a matter of keeping your guns clean. Dirty
guns have reduced accuracy and are more prone to failure, and failure to keep a
gun clean can reduce its useful lifespan significantly. If you want to make
sure that you’re getting the best performance from your guns as long as
possible, make sure to follow these basic cleaning steps.
Step One: Gather Your Materials
The first step in cleaning your weapon is
gathering all of the right materials. You’ll need a cleaning rod, lubricant,
patches, and a brush at the bare minimum to get the job done right. Don’t go
cheap with any of these materials – you’ll want to ensure that you use
high-quality lubricants and tools to avoid damaging your gun during the
cleaning process.
Step Two: Ensure Your Safety
The next step is to make sure that your gun is
safe to clean. Make sure that it is completely unloaded, that there are no
rounds chambered, and that you still have the safety on when you’re cleaning.
There’s no such thing as being too safe, after all. Even after you’ve unloaded
your gun, follow the best safety practices by still treating the weapon as if
it is loaded.
Step Three: Clean Individual Parts
You’ll want to break your gun down as much as
possible before you start cleaning. Once you’ve got it disassembled, you can
clean each part. It’s generally recommended that you grab some kind of gun
brush (or even a toothbrush) to clean those parts that are too hard to reach.
Never skip cleaning a part – guns are precision machines and every part plays a
role in ensuring that your gun works up to its specifications.
Step Four: Wipe it Down
Take some time to wipe every metal part of your
gun down with a well-oiled rag. This is a necessity if you want to protect the
metal and prevent damage from occurring due to heat or moisture. You don’t have
to spend much time on this step, of course, but you should make sure that you
do it every time you clean your gun.
Step Five: Clean the Bore
Your final step should be to clean out the bore.
There are a number of tools made specifically for this process, including
brushes and patches. You’ll want to use each to make sure that the bore is
clean and maintained. Make sure to rub down the bore with your cotton patches
to finish the job. Be careful during this process, though, as even a small bit
of damage to the bore can have a huge impact on your weapon’s accuracy.
Once you’re done cleaning, make sure that your
weapon is put away safely. The amount of time you need to spend on cleaning
your weapon is going to vary greatly depending on the weapon itself and how it
is stored, so choosing a temperature-controlled, dry area will always be the
best way to reduce your maintenance. Make sure you clean your guns after using
them, and always take your maintenance seriously. If you follow the basic
instructions, you’ll have a weapon that shoots more accurately and that lasts
much longer.
July 11, 2019
Why Do People Like Guns? Because They Like Guns.
Earlier this week one of my readers sent me a link to
the video of a debate
I had at Northern Michigan University with John Lott. The event was held in a large auditorium on
campus and the place was filled with students, faculty and nearby residents,
many of whom were gun nuts. How do I
know they were gun nuts? Because at the
beginning of my remarks I asked all the gun nuts in the audience to identify
themselves by holding up their hands, and then I asked some of them to prove
their gun-nuttiness by telling me and the audience how many guns they actually
owned.
As I recall, the guys who were willing to ‘fess up
about the size of their gun collections said they owned somewhere between 10
and 30 guns. I laughed in response to
every single answer and then told the audience that I currently owned around 60
guns, give or take a few, and that at the moment my private collection was kind
of ‘light.’
I speak to pro-gun groups all the time. I’m something
of a contrarian and I enjoy telling people what they don’t expect to hear. And
when someone tells a group of gun guys that he owns 60 guns but would like to
see a more serious effort made to reduce the 125,000 gun injuries we suffer every
year, I can say without fear of exaggeration that this is an argument that
Gun-nut Nation doesn’t often hear. I make it clear that I don’t buy into the
nonsense about how all those ‘good guys’ with guns can protect us from all
those ‘bad guys’ with guns. I also say that just because someone sits in a room
for a couple of hours and falls asleep while someone else reads through some
boring text about gun ‘safety,’ that this experience doesn’t meet even a minimal
qualification for using a gun.
What I don’t do in my public appearances is talk about
the research on gun violence which has been published on both sides, for the
simple reason that I don’t believe that the average person makes up his mind or
even thinks about making up his mind based on data or facts. At least not the average
person who owns a gun. Why do I say
this? Because I happen to have sold guns to more than 10,000 residents of Massachusetts,
New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont over the past 17 years; I have
also taught the required gun-safety course to more than 7,000 residents in Connecticut
and Mass., and I earn my living now by doing lethal-force certifications for
local, state and federal law-enforcement agencies. So I know a heckuva lot more
about how gun owners think about guns than anyone else in either Gun-control
Nation or Gun-nut Nation, that’s for sure. And here’s what I know.
People who buy and own guns do it for one, simple
reason. They want to buy and own a gun. They may tell you that they need a gun
to defend themselves, or they need a gun because it’s their 2nd-Amendment
‘right,’ or maybe they need a gun because pretty soon they won’t be able to buy
a gun. I had a female customer, an educated business executive, come into my
gun shop two weeks before the 2016 Presidential election who told me she ‘knew’
that if Hillary was elected, that she wouldn’t be able to own a gun. How did such a crazy idea get into her head? By the same token, I love how some gun-control
advocates tell me about the ‘debunked’ research published by John Lott. As if
they’ve ever read his research. Yea, right.
I’m going to continue talking to pro-gun audiences and gun owners as often as I can. I wish that some of my dear friends in Gun-control Nation would spend a little less time talking to each other and try talking to the other side. Who knows? They might actually learn why people like their guns.
July 10, 2019
Want To Argue About Nothing? Try Concealed-Carry Or Gun-Free Zones.
One of
the issues which can always get everyone hot and bothered on both sides of the
gun debate is the issue of gun-free zones. On the one hand, proponents of
armed, self-defense (John Lott, et. al.) argue that denying folks the right to
carry their self-defense gun into a public space makes that space a likely target
for any nut who wants to commit mass mayhem using a gun. On the other hand,
maintaining and/or expanding gun-free zones is seen by Gun-control Nation as a
fundamental strategy for reducing the 125,000+ injuries that we suffer each
year from the use/abuse of guns.
I happen
to believe that both arguments are bunk and do not, in any way, shape or form,
align with the relevant facts. This is because we don’t know the relevant
facts, nor has anyone even attempted to figure them out. But making arguments
without any factual underpinnings is hardly a new approach when it comes to
advocating for or against anything, particularly when it comes to advocating an
issue as emotionally-laden as the issue of guns.
It just
happens to be the case that most public spaces are gun-free zones, and that’s
not about to change. The reason that John Lott says that most large-scale
shootings occur in gun-free spaces is because prohibitions on carrying personal
firearms are typical of shopping centers, auditoriums and stadiums, which
happen to be the places where many people congregate at the same time. Federal
law also designates
all public K-12 schools as gun-free zones.
The
other problem in the gun-free zone universe is that the issue is confused
because it’s often attached to a second gun argument which is equally
mis-stated on both sides, namely, the issue of mass shootings which, by
definition, occur in places where lots of people congregate at the same time. The
commonly-accepted definition of a ‘mass shooting’ is an
event in which four or more persons are killed, but this usually excludes
shootings in private residences or shootings in the street between rival gangs.
So, for example, the gunfire which erupted on May 17, 2015, between two motorcycle gangs in a Waco, TX restaurant
parking lot wouldn’t necessarily make the mass-shooting hit list, even though
18 bikers and bystanders were injured and another 9 ended up dead. And by the way, how come we don’t hear about
this event as being the ‘proof’ that armed citizens can prevent crimes when
just about everyone standing outside the Twin Peaks Restaurant that day was
carrying a gun?
On the
other hand, what makes my friends in Gun-control Nation crazy about expanding
gun-free zones is that invariably this proposal is tied to the increase in
concealed-carry licensing, which is on its way to covering more than 20 million
gun owners at last count. But if you want to argue that an increase in armed
citizens leads to an increase in gun injuries you’ll find yourself facing two
facts which don’t bear this out.
First,
although the latest numbers of CCW puts the national figure at
17.5 million, this figure may represent more than five times the number of
people actually walking around on a regular basis with a
loaded gun. Do these 3 million gun-toters represent a serious threat to
community safety and health? To answer that question we turn to our friends at the
Violence Policy Center whose report,
Concealed Carry Killers, found that between 2007 and 2017, roughly 1,000
people shot themselves or others with legally-carried guns, the division
between homicide and suicide about 50 percent. Over that same eleven-year period, more than 350,000
Americans overall died from gun homicides and suicides. Ok? Get it?
Nobody
has yet to come up with a definitive explanation for whether or not shooters,
particularly mass shooters, are attracted to gun-free zones. But as far as I’m
concerned, the whole issue of concealed-carry and gun-free zones is a side-show
when compared to figuring out what to do about the daily, run-of-the-mill
shooting events that each year now claim more than 40,000 lives.
July 9, 2019
The Supreme Court Just Shattered A Favorite Pro-Gun Belief.
Talking about adding insult to injury. Last week the
Supreme Court jumped on the ‘let’s get rid of the NRA’ bandwagon with a
decision which undermined one of the basic tenets of the pro-gun movement;
namely, the idea that the best way to reduce gun violence is to lock ’em up and
throw away the key. America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ never talks
about gun owners without referring to this population as ‘law abiding,’ the
idea being that as long as ‘good guys’ own guns, they will protect us from the ‘bad
guys’ who own guns.
Congress went along with this marketing scheme for
selling more guns by passing a law in 1986 which gave federal judges undefined
authority to increase penalties if someone was convicted of a crime in which
they used a gun. So if a guy robbed a mini-mart by brandishing a knife he might
be sentenced to prison for so-many years, but if he pulled out a gun, his time
in jail could be many more years.
Giving judges arbitrary authority to impose stiffer sentences
for gun crimes is not the same thing as mandatory sentences for using a gun
during a criminal event. The latter
legal strategy exists in many states, but these
statutes usually spell out exactly how much additional jail time will be tacked
onto the sentence pronounced by the court.
In the case of the 1986 federal law, the statute is silent regarding the
specific additional penalty that a criminal earns by using a gun, and these arbitrary
punishments can be tacked onto the harsher
penalties stuck into the federal criminal statutes by Clinton in 1995.
There has been a lot of back and forth over the years
about whether criminal charges for violating gun laws make any real difference
when it comes to how we try to deal with violent crime. For the most part,
tacking an additional criminal charge onto a case of armed robbery doesn’t
change the fact that the offender invaded someone’s convenience store and tried
to take away money or goods with force. In fact, the studies on whether longer
sentences for gun crimes reduces violence shows little, if any
connection between sentencing and crime rates at all.
Studies aside, there’s always been some kind of
nostalgia for the idea that at some point in the distant past, we were tougher
on crime and criminals than we are today. And much of this nonsense is peddled
by the same hot-air balloons who are quick to remind us that everything has
gone down the drain since we let the ‘element’ move into our neighborhoods, get
more welfare and food stamps and vote multiple times so that a guy born in
Kenya could end up living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for eight long, miserable
years.
That’s right. The bottom line on all this talk about
getting ‘tough’ on crime and particularly gun crime, is the issue of race.
Because when Dana Loesch goes on NRA-TV and loudly proclaims that she uses her
gun to protect herself and her family from ‘street thugs,’ she’s not talking
about guys who happen to be White. The good news is that even though Dana
blocked me yesterday from her Facebook page, a small legal issue between the
boys in Fairfax and the PR mavens at Ackerman-McQueen, has now blocked her from
appearing on NRA-TV.
Know why my friends in Gun-control Nation didn’t
mention or even notice the SCOTUS decision to redress what has been a hallowed
argument by Gun-nut Nation for reducing violence caused by guns? Because the
5-4 decision found the 4 liberal justices joined by none other than one of
Trump’s main guys, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch. Remember when he was
confirmed that all the gun-control noisemakers were saying
that he would tip the balance of the Court towards a more aggressive protection
of 2nd-Amendment ‘rights?’ Yea, right.
This decision is exactly in line with what Gun-control Nation has been arguing for years. The silence is remarkable in this respect.
July 8, 2019
Mike The Gun Guy Goes On Trial.
On Friday, July 19, I am going to be a defendant on trial in Las Vegas; I can only hope I will be found innocent of all charges and allowed to go free. The main charge against me is that I am against the 2nd Amendment, and the prosecutor is none other than the ‘hated’ John Lott. There will be a judge, there will be a jury and I suspect that when the trial comes to an end, I’ll be found guilty as charged.
The event is actually taking place at the Paris Hotel
and Casino, and it is a featured presentation of this year’s FreedomFest,
billed as a conference where “free minds meet to
celebrate ‘great books, great ideas and great thinkers’ in an open-minded
environment.” If you haven’t figured it out yet, FreedomFest is the
libertarian equivalent of TED or Aspen, a place where folks can learn
about one important issue or another while really getting together to cut a deal.
This isn’t the first time I’ve shot my mouth off before a pro-gun group, nor is it the first time I’ve had a public debate with the ‘hated’ John Lott. Increasingly, I go out of my way and will even endure a crummy, five-hour plane ride if I get a chance to say what I have to say before a group which fervently believes in 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ After all, why would I want to fly out to Seattle to appear before a meeting of Grandmothers Against Guns? I love how some of my friends who do public health research on gun violence will only speak in front of gun-control groups. What’s the point of that?
There are also some folks in Gun-control Nation who are so childishly screwed up that they attack me for being a renegade, a turncoat, a troublemaker and a not-so-secret NRA partisan by appearing on the same stage as the ‘hated’ John Lott. After all, as a good friend who happens to be a leading public health scholar once lectured me, “You’re just giving him credibility which he doesn’t deserve.”
I am not only pleased to be invited to talk at FreedomFest,
I’m hoping that my appearance will lead to more speaking invitations from
like-minded groups. And if those appearances involve sharing the stage with
John Lott, just as well. When John appears before a meeting of the Federalist
Society or some other politically-conservative group, he’s not converting a
single person in the audience to his point of view. On the other hand, when I talk
at a get-together sponsored by the NRA (and since I’m an Endowment
Patriot Life member they can’t kick me out no matter what) someone always comes
up, thanks me for coming and says, “Gee, that’s the first time I’ve heard
what you had to say.”
To my friends in Gun-control Nation, we’re not going to
challenge America’s gun culture by talking to the folks on our own side. We’re
not going to convince the majority of Americans who currently believe that a
gun protects them from crime, by telling them about some public health study
which shows the idea to be untrue. The last time that Gallup asked whether a gun made a home more or less safe, the ‘more’ outnumbered the ‘less’
by two to one, and 79% of gun owners told Pew that having a gun makes them feel safer than not.
I happen to disagree with these views. I have watched
more than 7,000 people run through a live-fire drill on my range and even with
some practice now and again, hardly any of these folks would ever
be able to protect themselves with a gun. When I talk to a gun-rights group and
tell them to find other ways to deal with the fears which drive them to buy and
own guns, I’m telling them something they won’t hear from John Lott.
Gun-control Nation should spend a little more time
thinking about why the ‘other side’ clings to their guns and a little less time
promoting their self-righteous beliefs.
If
anyone is terribly offended by what I just said, they can have all the space
they want on my blog to reply in kind.
July 4, 2019
Independence Day: What It Really Meant When It Was First Celebrated.
Every American knows what Independence Day is. Alongside Christmas and Thanksgiving, it’s one of the few holidays that hasn’t fallen prey to having to be celebrated on the closest Monday, rather than the actual day it falls on. However, less known is the history of the Fourth of July as a holiday. How did the celebrations emerge and what is the history of this, America’s birthday?
Few know that the 13 Colonies actually legally separated from the mother country, the United Kingdom of Great Britain, on July 2nd, not July 4th. This was the day that the Continental Congress voted to approve a resolution of independence. After voting in favor of independence, the Congress then turned toward the actual drafting of the resolution, which we known today as the Declaration of Independence. It was on July 4th that Congress approved the resolution.
For his part, John Adams believed that July 2nd would be the day to be celebrated throughout the ages in the United States. While his prediction was two days off, his prediction of how the day would be celebrated is pretty close to the mark:
“It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”
Independence Was Radical
In 1775, when independence first became discussed in the Congress, total independence was considered a very radical option among many. “Common Sense,” by Thomas Paine, however, radically changed the political mood of the country. If independence was “radical,” then Paine was successful at radicalizing a significant portion of the incipient country. It was on June 7, 1776, that Richard Henry Lee, the delegate from Virginia, first introduced the motion to declare total independence from the United Kingdom. A vigorous debate ensued, the final result of which was a five-man committee (Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston) charged with drafting a document detailing the causes of separation.
When the time came to vote on the Declaration of Independence, the vote was nearly unanimous – every state voted in favor, except for the delegate from New York who abstained, but later voted in favor, of the resolution.
What’s more, while it’s commonly believed that the Declaration was signed on the 4th, it’s actually more likely that it was signed on August 2, 1776, despite the recollections of Thomas Jefferson and some of the other signatories. Only two of the signers eventually became President of the United States: the aforementioned Adams and Jefferson. Calvin Coolidge is, thus far, the only President to be born on the Fourth of July, in the year 1872.
Early Independence Day Celebrations
It didn’t take long for the newly independent nation to begin celebrating its birth. In 1777, Bristol, Rhode Island, became the first town to celebrate the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. At dawn and at nightfall, 13 gunshots were fired in remembrance. The July 18th edition of The Virginia Gazette notes a celebration filled with feasting, gun salutes, music, parades and, yes, fireworks. Ships were decked out with red, white and blue bunting for the occasion.
Another early celebration took place in 1778, when General George Washington issued a double ration of rum to his soldiers, as well as an artillery salute. Meanwhile, in France, there were celebrations as well. John Adams and Benjamin Franklin held a celebration for the Americans living in France while on their ambassadorial duties. While we generally celebrate Independence Day on whatever day of the week July 4th falls on, in 1779 when it first fell on a Sunday, celebrations took place the following Monday.
July 4th was first officially declared a statewide celebration by Massachusetts in 1781. This set the precedent of states declaring that it was a day to be celebrated. In 1783, Salem, North Carolina, held what it claims to be the first public celebration of the holiday, with a suite of music by Johann Friedrich Peter. This was documented by the Moravian Church, and there are no earlier records of public (i.e., government) celebrations of the holiday prior to this event.
In 1870, Congress declared that Independence Day would be an unpaid holiday for all federal workers. Some 58 years later, in 1938, Congress changed the holiday from unpaid to paid.
It was the War of 1812 that saw Independence Day celebrations becoming widespread and common. This was due to an overall upsurge in patriotism and nationalist fervor during what was effectively a Second War of Independence against Great Britain.
Thomas Jefferson, who was not born on the Fourth of July, but died on it, was invited to a 50th anniversary celebration of Independence Day in the nation’s capital. Jefferson was extremely ill at the time and declined the invitation in what would be his last letter ever. In doing so, however, he stated his belief that American independence carried significant weight not just for the United States, but for the entire world, writing:
“All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. …For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”
Unlike other patriotic holidays like Memorial Day or Veterans’ Day, there is no underlying spectre of loss, sacrifice and death with Independence Day. July 4th is a day of celebration for its own sake. So has it always been. There’s nothing wrong at all with partaking in the revelry of fireworks, hot dogs and (if you’re on a capable military base) gunshots. The Founding Fathers, if they fought for anything, wanted you to have at least one day where you could revel in the excess and largesse provided by their struggles.
July 3, 2019
Some Memories For The 4th.
One of my best friends, if not my very best friend, was
my old hunting buddy in South Carolina, Sherrill Clement Smith. Smitty, as he was called, or ‘SC,’ as he was
known to his close friends, which were me and a South Carolina Highway Patrolman
name of Pat Patterson, was acknowledged to be the best white-tail hunter in a
state where a lot of pretty skilled guys hunted white-tail deer. And in a state
where the legal deer season ran from August 15 until December 31st,
that was a lot of guys.
But make no mistake about it, Sherrill was the best.
And he was the best for three reasons: First and foremost, he started going out
in March or April ever year to scout for deer.
Some years we ended up hunting in dense, hilly woodlands around Rion, the
county seat of Fairfield County. Other years we were down in the low country
alongside some bean fields near the Santee. Sherrill never had trouble finding
some Black sharecropper who would let us hunt his property in return for
getting half the meat. In a state where
many Blacks and even some Whites still didn’t have enough money to eat
store-bought meat, having Sherrill Smith as your provider was not a deal you
were likely to turn down.
The second reason that Sherrill was the best white-tail
hunter in Carolina was that once the season opened, he was out there every day.
He didn’t just go out one or two weekends with some friends, set around for a
while drinking some beers. Sherrill was a switchman for the Southern, as the
Southern Railroad was called, and it was simply understood at the yard that
between mid-August and end of December, once the whistle blew at 3 PM, you
didn’t ask Sherrill to stick around.
Third and last, if Sherrill could see the animal
through his 3X9 Weaver scope set on top of his Winchester Model 70 in 30-06,
didn’t matter whether the creature was 100 yards or 500 yards away, that buck
was going down. So Sherrill didn’t have to take just any old deer, he could
wait and wait and wait on the biggest old white-tail to come around. One year he only took four, but I guarantee
you that every animal would have easily made the Boone & Crockett list.
One of the reasons Sherrill was such an accurate shot
was because he made his own ammunition from scratch. This activity occupied him
for much of the Winter months before April rolled around, which is when he
started tracking deer. I never shot Sherrill’s ammo because my gun, a Remington
Model 700, was chambered for .270 Winchester, and don’t think we didn’t have
endless arguments over which was a better caliber for taking deer – the
flat-shooting 270 or the more powerful 30-06. What else should we have argued
about? The federal debt?
Like myself, Sherrill was also a lifetime member of the
NRA. And like me, he had joined the NRA when he was a kid, probably enrolled
by his daddy, old ‘Red’ Smith. Sherrill’s father had been a policeman and
carried a gun. Not that he particularly liked guns, but a gun was always
around. On the other hand, my father never wanted a gun in his house after he
saw what guns could do when he went ashore after the amphibious landing at
Kwajalein Atoll. Who knows why kids grow up liking guns?
Part of my frustration with my gun-control friends is
that every time they tell me about the importance of safe-storage, or
comprehensive background checks, or any of the other schemes to reduce the
violence, sometimes I recall going out to the woods with my friend Sherrill Smith
and high-sounding moralisms about ‘responsible’ gun ownership and ‘reasonable’
gun laws mean nothing. Other times, those words don’t bother me at all.
I want to wish everyone a Happy and Safe July 4th.
July 2, 2019
Have You Taken The Hopkins Gun-Violence Course? If Not, Why Not?
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Several months ago, when the stench from Fairfax was just
beginning to roll out and the 2020 Presidential wannabees hadn’t yet begun to
try and top one another in terms of their plans for gun control, our friends at
the Bloomberg School rolled out an online course,
“Reducing Gun Violence in America,” which offers a definitive
syllabus on the research which has been done on gun violence. The course modules do a good job of covering
what we know and what we don’t know, and each module is accompanied by a
bibliography that is the best and most complete compilation of relevant printed
sources compiled to date.
So far, 2,750 intrepid students have registered for the
course, a number which, in and of itself, has an awful lot to say about the
intentions and motivations of folks who want to do something about the violence
caused by guns. Because for all the talk about how gun-rights groups like the
NRA do nothing except peddle half-baked truths about the joys and blessings of
gun ownership, you would think that our side, the gun-control side, would
contain a sufficient number of people who want to make sure that what we say
about gun violence aligns with the truth.
Of course who am I to question the honesty and sagacity (I’ve
never used that word before) of the folks who create and promote the narratives
on gun violence that have become a de rigeur component of the political
messaging for entry into the 2020 Presidential campaign? After all, we know
that universal background checks keep guns from getting into the ‘wrong’ hands.
We know that red-flag laws keep guns away from people who are at risk.
We know that leaving a loaded and unlocked gun around the house means
that more teen-agers will use the gun to hurt themselves. We know all these
things, so why bother to sign up for the Johns Hopkins course?
I’ll tell you why. Because if there’s one thing that emerges
from the careful and candid presentations by the Hopkins faculty members, along
with some guest appearances by others as well, it’s that when all is said and
done, we don’t really know squat. And
the reason we don’t know squat is because gun-control laws are such a jumble
from one state to another, and because we are a country of very diverse regions
with diverse cultures and diverse histories, the idea that what has worked to
reduce gun violence in one place will work just as well when applied somewhere
else is, at best, a shot in the dark (pardon my pun.)
I live in a state – Massachusetts – where it is estimated
that only one out of five or six households contains a legal gun. Now these gun
owners probably think about their guns the same way that gun owners in a
gun-rich state like South Carolina think about their guns. But I used to
live in South Carolina, and I can tell you that none of my neighbors even
noticed when I walked out of my house carrying a gun. If I lived in Boston and
a neighbor spotted me carrying my trusty Mini-14 out to my car, there’s a
pretty good chance that the Boston PD would shortly be following me down the
street.
And this is precisely what makes the Hopkins course important
for folks on our side, because there aren’t any simple answers to deal with the
problem of gun violence, no matter what you hear on NPR or MS-NBC.
Oops, I forgot. There is one simple answer. Get rid of the
guns. But that’s not going to happen even if, in the best of all possible worlds,
Wayne LaPierre gets appointed Ambassador to Moscow and the NRA joins the dodo
bird as something which used to exist.
