08/03 © Ronald L. Moody (2003)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

Guns & Violence in U.S. Cities
Raises Threat to Hunters

The quickest way the written word can become a needle thrust in the eye of the American hunter is with the words: gun rights or gun control.

Passions rise quickly; many people have already decided there is nothing to talk about. So, nothing gets said that may threaten the rigid, uncompromising, conventional wisdom that dominates the hunting community today.

That we American gun-owning hunters are sleeping peacefully under the swinging sword of Damocles seems not to be a worrisome thing to the vast majority of nimrods. As a proper scout, however, I am compelled to point out the stones in this part of the hunter’s path.

First, let me say that my motive for this essay is one of a hunter who owns more firearms than he can shoot straight — and who intends to continue owning both my present arsenal and at least one more shot chunker if I can raise the purchase price. Yet, I have a great fear as a gun owner that the very political castle keep that now bulwarks the Second Amendment eventually will become the undoing of individual gun ownership.

One Columbine massacre too many, one workplace shooting spree too many, and the hard, brittle walls raised since 1968 to exclude the larger American society from the world of Boone and Crockett will break and fall. Such an end to gun ownership, when it comes, will be swift and dramatic — not gradual or well-reasoned.

Earlier this year a documentary program aired on National Public Television titled: “Guns And Mothers.” The story contrasted the perspective of two American women. One was the mother of a dead teenage son killed in an inner city drive-by shooting. The other mother was the parent of a thriving family in which target shooting and hunting made wholesome recreation of the guns in the house. The TV program was fair and uncompromising.

The dark chasm in the social bond between these two women illuminates the danger to gun rights that not even a Constitutional amendment can forestall. In the program, at the moment when opposing citizens were toe-to-toe in personal confrontation, they still were in separate conversations, each talking to themselves - neither comprehending the other. Of such circumstance are wars and divorces made, and in wars and divorces even the winners are always losers.

American gun owners have, heretofore, relied on a strong defense to preserve their right to own firearms. An unyielding political unity centered around the National Rifle Association is the “castle keep” I refer to above. The logic of this defense is that adaptation to a changing society can be avoided by a gun-owning sub-culture through total solidarity, zero dissent, and the raising of a solid political wall with their votes. The problem with this logic is that it works all the way up to a point where it stops working, then it breaks down in catastrophic failure. Whatever the actual events of the breaking point, its nature will be the same. The larger society will decide that tolerating the sub-society of gun owners is more trouble than it is worth and the sub-society is then shunned and legislated out of existence. The shunning part is the real social killer. The legislating will only amount to a ‘coup de grace’ at the end.

Hunters who look at American society through objective eyes will see that wholesome firearms recreation is already confined to a well-defined sub-society and firearms are generally shunned outside that sub-society. The constricting force of the shunning will only become stronger until the sub-society changes its strategy or it disappears.

Simply put, American gun owners must re-organize for the purpose of committing to, and investing in, an attack on the causes of urban firearms violence. We must take the first step to put our self-centered message aside and listen to what the mothers of murdered children are saying. Saving our own value is dependent on our reaching out and solving the problem of people whose grief is associated with our value.

I know it is easier and more comfortable to stand behind the walls we’ve already raised. But let’s not kid ourselves that we will bequeath a legacy of human liberty to the generations of the 21st Century comparable to what was handed to us from the 20th Century. This whole thing is going to break at some point and it will all fall down.

And please, locking up more violators is not a whole solution. If we Americans have proved nothing else in recent decades, we have shown we can produce criminals faster than we can afford to lock them up.

The true human cost of urban gun violence is actually hidden by the dry statistics released by the FBI. Making murder into numbers does nothing to communicate the impact on people’s lives and the nearing of a political crisis. More revealing to me was a recent radio news program in which U.S. military doctors who cared for wounded soldiers in the Iraq war were describing the useful training they had received in the emergency ward of Los Angeles General Hospital. In one evening, one doctor commented, he had treated10 gunshot wounds just to the chest. That’s a bit too much of a specialized practice for a civilized society to endure when one considers the morgue entries and other wounds that undoubtedly surrounded those ten bullets to the chest.

My argument is that no society will forever tolerate such a frequency of lethal violence in its cities. When the roots of such violence eventually are removed, the branches of the Second Amendment are likely to be hewed as well.

Much better that we responsible gun owners are seen as leaders with a commitment to the people now at risk, than as reluctant followers when the inevitable climax arrives.