I have to confess that the TV show “Gunsmoke” was never one of my favorites. I’m too young to have caught the show when it aired originally, and as a teen growing up in the late 1980s and early 1990s my re-run tastes ran more towards shows like “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Monkees” than westerns.
So, I’m a little lost with some of Jim Mittelman’s “Gunsmoke” analogies to the issue of violent crime today, especially when the Boulder, Colorado columnist starts trotting out phrases like “dispossession and cultural erosion”. And I’m still not sure what that old TV show has to do with Mittleman’s argument that, instead of gun control activists focusing on the distribution of firearms, they should be going after production.
Today’s public debate on gun control centers on distribution. This is not the basic problem. The crux of the matter is production. To curb gun deaths, sturdy guardrails must be placed on producers. If gunmakers were subject to strict limits, there would be few guns to distribute. Without weapons, killing would diminish significantly.
Is that really the case though? There are already some 400-million privately owned arms in the United States that can be “distributed” through sales (or thefts, if we’re including illicit transfers). What does Mittelman propose to do about them?
Nothing, as far as I can tell. Maybe he’s just keeping that to himself, or maybe he just hasn’t considered all of the guns that are currently out there. If so, it wouldn’t be the only bit of myopia from Mittelman in his column.
The barriers to structural reform are, of course, money in politics and powerful lobbies. Nevertheless, I remain hopeful that in this divided nation, our fellow citizens can be persuaded to stop gun violence by clamping down on its choke point, the production of firearms.
No, the barriers to the kinds of gun control policies he wants aren’t just money and gun owners who lobby the government. The Constitution itself is an impediment to Mittelman’s vague agenda. We have a right to keep and bear arms, and that right necessarily entails a right to acquire firearms as well.
What gives Mittelman hope that a) most Americans would go along with his fuzzy call to action and b) it would make a difference? We shut down the production of most alcohol in the 1920s, and saw a booming black market take its place. There were more than five times as many drug overdose deaths than homicides last year, and the vast majority of those came from drugs that were illicitly produced as well. How can Mittelman be so sure that his “guardrails” on gunmakers would result in fewer firearms being produced and not a thriving underground economy full of illegally made and distributed firearms?
I wish I could rebut or even detail what exactly Mittelman is calling for, but like most anti-gun activists penning opinion pieces these days, he never did get around to offering any specifics about what he’s proposing. He spent paragraphs on an old TV show, but not a single sentence explaining what those “guardrails” and “strict rules” he believes gunmakers should be subjected to actually look like. It’s almost like he has nothing to offer other than vacuous talking points and cultural criticism of a show that went off the air 50 years ago.
I wonder if Second Amendment advocates can get away with this same nonsense. If I wrote a column for the Boulder Daily Camera that devoted most of its space to discussing the cultural implications of “Dobie Gillis” or “Leave It to Beaver” before shoehorning in a demand for national right-to-carry reciprocity, do you think they’d run it?
Editor’s Note: The radical left has no shortage of half-baked ideas to strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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