NRA, unload your guns
When I read the following letter it stirred emotions in me that I have not felt in a long time. First and foremost was my disappointment in an educational system that would allow a student majoring in education to get this far along with such little actual knowledge. Please read this letter and the follow-up response from Bob Pruden. It is a long read but well worth the time.
The following letter appeared in The Indiana Daily Student and is reprinted with permission.
Matt Csanyi is a senior majoring in education.
Published Wednesday, April 4, 2001
Updated 10:46:48 PM
The Senate passed Senator John McCain’s campaign finance reform legislation Monday, restricting the amount of money various individuals and groups would be allowed to donate as “soft money.” This is good news. It is especially good news for those of us who favor increased gun control. Why?
Because one group, the National Rifle Association, notorious for buying gun-friendly candidate’s victories, will see its dark grip on national politics eased.
That said, now might be the time to refresh everyone’s memory as to exactly what the NRA believes, what it’s done in the past and why its existence is a thorn in the nation’s side. And, considering that my opportunities to belittle the NRA (something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time now) are dwindling like words in Charleton Heston’s vocabulary, I’d say the time is at hand.
I’d like to begin by calling the majority of the NRA’s members less than intelligent. These are the good folks who won’t be swayed by any amount of relevant, statistical proof, so it doesn’t matter what I say because they will all hate me no matter what.
If this is you, stop reading right now. You probably have better things to do anyway, like filling Bambi full of hot lead or protecting your trailer from armed intruders.
But be careful — they might be trying to steal your collection of NASCAR shot glasses! Or, even worse, they may try to cut a lock from your beautiful, flowing mullet while you sleep! Better train the kids to use the sawed-off shotgun!
And then there are the members of the NRA who may not have fully considered the consequences of their stance on gun control. These are the individuals with whom I’d like a word. They have been misled by the propaganda spewed forth by those cap-poppin’ good ol’ boys down at NRA headquarters. It’s hard not to believe them — they have the Second Amendment on their side, right? Wrong.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you your Second Amendment: “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.” Eloquent, huh?
Seems to me the right to bear arms is pretty heavily tied into having a well-regulated militia, no? And, as it turns out, we already have a well-regulated militia. You might have heard of it — it’s called the National Guard. It was established in 1903. So, even if some limey Brit tries to sneak into my backyard and knock me out of my hammock, it’s not my job to pop him. And I don’t really want Billy Bob protecting me with his AK-47 assault rifle he usually uses for squirrel hunting, either.
Use your heads, people. The Second Amendment was written in 1793, when there was a legitimate fear of a tyrannical national government and other oppressive groups. Remember, in 1793 they also used to bleed you to cure a case of the sniffles. Can you say outdated?
Our judicial system can. Did you know that no federal court has ever overturned a gun control law on the basis of the Second Amendment?
The only true barrier to real restrictions on guns is the $15.8 million the NRA has paid out to congressional representatives since 1989 to keep gun control legislation off the books, according to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.
Still proud to be an American?
Even if our forefathers had felt it reasonable for us to tote Uzi’s around in our backpacks, on a practical level it would still be too dangerous. Common sense should tell us that our right to shoot animals and beer cans in our backyards does not supercede a person’s right to live in safety. And when stupid people get ahold of guns (and we know most people are, in fact, stupid), people get hurt.
Nobody’s going to shoot you when they’re robbing your house, dumbass! They want your DVD player, not the electric chair. Statistics show gun owners are far more likely to shoot themselves, a family member or a pet rather than any sort of intruder. According to a 1998 ABCnews.com poll, only 20 percent of gun owners store their weapons unlocked and unloaded. Now that is tragic.
Firearm injuries are the second leading cause of death of youth ages 10-24 nationwide, according to the Center for Disease Control. In case you’re wondering, the leading cause of death for this age group is car accidents. The difference with this is that we need cars. We don’t need guns.
So, if you gunslingers out there are still listening, put ‘em down.
Isn’t saving thousands of lives worth the price of finding a new hobby? I say it’s certainly worth a shot. no pun intended.
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His address is mcsanyi@indiana.edu.
Or you can e-mail letters to the campus newspaper at
Bob Prudens Response
Mr. Csanyi, let me begin by saying that I started at Indiana University in 1949, well before you were born. In fact, I was in the first group to live in what is now McNutt Quadrangle.
That aside, let me proceed to what I guess we could charitably refer to as your ideas concerning the Second Amendment to the Constitution. First, you missed on the dates, sir. Since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791 and drafted in 1789, your statement of the origin was off by a few years. But we won’t quibble over that. I understand you are an education major and not a historian. I do hope you will check your facts more closely once you begin teaching others though.
You cannot really begin a debate by stating that those who oppose you are not intelligent. Sir, I’ll stack my IQ and GPA against yours any day. You display an appalling lack of manners with your constant putdowns of anyone who is a gun owner or believes in the efficacy of the Second Amendment.
You state that members of the NRA have been “misled by the propaganda spewed forth….” Well , sir, try Doctor Gary Kleck of Florida State University. Have you ever read any of his treatises on firearms and firearm owners? Dr. Kleck is a certified liberal. He belongs to every Green organization known to man, but he is guided by facts and not emotion. His studies, repeated twice, have shown that ordinary citizens use a gun to defend themselves from criminal attack between 750,000 and 2.4 million times each year. Now before you say this is more propaganda from the NRA, his original study won an award from the American Society of Criminologists as the best bit of research in the field of Criminology in the year it was published, 1993.
I suppose you think that the research of Dr. John Lott and Dr. David Mustard (before Dr. Mustard got his Ph.D.) is “flawed.” I have heard that stated, but the individuals never explained how it was flawed. There was the ad hominem attack by Senator Schumer, which he was forced to retract, but nobody has refuted the study itself other than with rhetoric.
But I digress, you maintained that, “no federal court has ever overturned a gun control law on the basis of the Second Amendment.” Try, US v Timothy Joe Emerson. Judge Sam Cummings of the Northern District of Texas, held that the Lautenberg law (18 USC 922g) was unconstitutional because it violated the Second and Fifth Amendments. Now it is on appeal to the Fifth Circuit, where oral arguments were held last June, but Judge Cummings is a federal judge, and he did overturn a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds. So you were wrong again.
Are you familiar with a gentleman named Sanford Levinson? He is a real Liberal of the Harvard/Yale liberal stripe. Well, Mr. Levinson published a study a few years ago about “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.” Mr. Levinson believed it would be a very simple matter to show that the Second Amendment did not apply to individuals. After looking into it, he found that it did. Hence the title of his monograph. He was mortified to find that he had thought all his adult life that it did not, but it did. He at least had the intellectual honesty to publish his findings and admit that he was wrong.
Have you ever heard of Dr. Eugene Volokh of the UCLA Law School? He teaches a course on Constitutional Law at UCLA. He has come to the conclusion that the Second Amendment does indeed confer the right to own firearms on individuals. As a matter of fact, legal scholar after legal scholar has come to the same conclusion after researching the subject.
Have you ever read the Federalist Papers? They are a marvelous guide to the thinking of the founding fathers of this country. They explain much of what they did and why they did it in the fashion they did. The explanation there is very clear that they intended the people to have the right, and the means, to defend themselves.
You also raise the specter of the millions of dollars that NRA has “paid out to congressional representatives” over the years. Let’s just accept your figures as accurate, $15.8 million over the past 12 years. Do the math; that works out to about $1.3 million per year. In case you haven’t been paying real close attention, that’s $2,461.00 per representative and senator. How much do you think $2,461 buys from one of those legislators? I can tell you that wouldn’t have much of an effect on any election or any legislator. If you think $15.8 million over 12 years is a lot of money, you haven’t checked what the UAW/CIO puts in each year.
Nobody is seeking to carry “Uzis in their backpacks.” That is simply the rhetoric used by those who do not believe the citizens of this country have any sense of decency or integrity. We do. You think nobody is going to use deadly force when committing a burglary? Then why is the burglar armed? There are no valid, peer reviewed studies that confirm the claim you made about gun owners being far more likely to shoot someone in the household. There was the “study” done by Dr. Kellerman of Emory University that covered one county in the state of Washington. He refused to make the data available for others to check the accuracy of his conclusions. He refused to even give the methodology used in the study. It was a case of “You don’t need to check the facts, just take my word for it.” Drs. Lott, Mustard and Kleck have made their data available to any and all who want to review it.
Your listing of an age spread from 10 to 24 is pretty loose there, young man. When you get up around 17 to 24, you’re into the age range of the “gangbangers” of society. Yes, they are killing themselves at a pretty good clip. But gun deaths among children, real children, are way down.
One other figure you might want to check is that more people die each year from mistakes made by physicians than from auto accidents and firearm deaths (whether or not accidental) combined! It sounds unreasonable, but it is absolutely accurate.
So, Mr. Csanyi, I have tried to treat your little rant as though you were truly an adult. Your use of such terms as “dumbass” and “most people are stupid” notwithstanding. No, Mr. Csanyi, I do not hate you. Actually I feel sorry for you. You’re living in a dream world populated by goblins that don’t exist. You have bought into the hysteria and fear mongering preached by those who want all citizens of this country to be good little boys and girls and let those criminals have anything an everything they want, including our lives. Well, sonny, when they come to get me, they had best pack a lunch. I won’t go that easily.
Robert L. Pruden
IU Class of 1973 (between 1949 when I entered and 1973 when I graduated, I spent 20 years in the Army, 16 in Armor and 4 in the Infantry)
Secretary/Treasurer, KFFI