Gunning for the Guns

Americans are buying guns. A lot of guns. Gun sales set new records last month as, it seems, they have been doing almost every month since the election of Barack Obama as president. If you talk to people in the industry, they will tell you that Obama is the best salesman for guns in American history. They might laugh when they say it, but they don’t think it is funny.

Guns are serious business, and the issue of "gun control" is a kind of subtext in this election year, when the nation is otherwise focused on issues like .  .  . oh, the weight of a former Miss Universe. Still, the matter of firearms occasionally crowds its way into the conversation. It happened in the first debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, when they seemed to agree that someone whose name is on the "no-fly list" should not be allowed to purchase a gun. The gun-rights forces quickly pointed out that the "no-fly list" is a bureaucratic concoction and that people find their names on it for reasons that may not mean much when it comes to predicting how dangerous they might be. Buying a one-way airline ticket when traveling overseas might be enough to get your name on the list. (This happened to Stephen F. Hayes of this magazine.) And it is not easy to get your name off that list. Which means, in the view of gun-rights people, that you could be denied a constitutionally protected right because of a bureaucratic foul-up.

But this is about guns, so there are different and very special rules. Guns are a synecdoche for some of the deepest fissures in our culture, something that Barack Obama recognized when he made his famous—and private—remarks about people who "cling to guns or religion." His view was, plainly, that such people are primitives and to be pitied, as the modern world leaves them further and further behind. They are also the same folks, of course, who are among the "deplorables" of Hillary Clinton's political universe.

On guns, Clinton is all over the place. On the one hand, she assures audiences that "I am not here to take away your guns." Then, according to a New York Times article, at an event when she was asked about the program "under which the Australian government bought back roughly 650,000 guns and then imposed stricter standards for gun purchases," she answered, "I think it would be worth considering doing it on the national level if that could be arranged."She then went on to compare the Australian buyback program to the "cash for clunkers" program, where people were paid to turn in older automobiles for which they were given lavish credits toward the purchase of new, fuel-efficient cars. The "clunkers" were then destroyed, depriving a lot of people of affordable transportation but .  .  . well, that is an argument for another day.

Clinton's offhand comparison is flawed and troubling to gun-rights people on two counts. First, when you turn over that old Remington pump to the government, there won't be any cash credits given toward the purchase of new guns. Whatever money you get for your guns, you'll have to spend on something else. Video games, perhaps, where the shooting is all done digitally. And then, more to the point, among people who believe in government "solutions" to every problem, the Australian example depends on compliance, which is accomplished by government's primary go-to tool—namely, force. Someone from the government shows up at the door and tells you to hand over your guns. You may be paid something for them, but there is nothing voluntary about the arrangement. It is confiscation, pure and simple.