Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
From: [an 25970] at [anon.penet.fi]
Subject: Massad Ayoob
Date: Fri, 27 May 1994 15:13:36 UTC

The following essay is written by Massad Ayoob, the ranking sensei of
the defensive pistol.  Mr. Ayoob is not only the leading instructor and
instructor trainer in handguns, he is also heavily in demand as an
expert witness in lawsuits involving the use of lethal force, as well as
being a sworn police officer for almost 20 years.  Ayoob runs his
defensive firearms academy, Lethal Force Institute, in Grantham, New
Hampshire.  This essay was printed in the June, 1994 issue of _Guns_
Magazine.  

Start essay:

I have been an activist for firearms rights all my adult life.  However,
only now have I begun to feel like a Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto.  Only
now have all of us American gun owners lived under a regime that has
made it clear that it would rather 'our kind' did not exist, and which
has publicly dedicated itself to reducing our numbers.  

Let us, for a moment, set aside the Second Amendment.  In the time
of political correctness, we need to address politically correct issues
before we talk about the fundamental cornerstones of freedom
guaranteed by our Constitution.  

Do not speak to me of James Madison.  Speak to me of defamation. 
There are Americans alive who can remember the Jim Crow years,
when African-Americans were stereotyped in cartoons as baboons or
Stepin Fetchit characters.  There was a time when Jews were portrayed
as hook-nosed, snaggle-toothed avatars of soulless greed.  Until very
recently, national newspapers and magazines ran cartoons that depicted
Arabs with vulpine features.  

Except for racist hate literature, that sort of thing is gone from the
mainstream media of 1994.  Well, almost gone.  

Caught some anti-gun political cartoons lately?  The gun owners and
gun dealers will be depicted as physically unattractive, dirty, unkempt,
and possibly keeping company with drug dealers.  Mario Cuomo,
spoken of as a potential Clinton appointee to the Supreme Court, has
described hunters as drunken slobs who lie to their wives about their
whereabouts over the weekend.  Cuomo's implicit caricature of us is
a graphic example of how we are seen by the "in crowd" that currently
occupies the White House campus.  

We who own guns for personal and family protection are targets of
opportunity for this sort of slander and libel.  We have no "anti-
defamation league" of our own.  Shall we go to the American Civil
Liberties Union for help?  We shall receive there as much succor as the
victims of the pogroms would have received from the Hitler Youth.  In
both cases, the victims were not "politically correct," and in both
cases, the organization in question would never have spoken against its
own candidate.  

Do not speak to me of Thomas Jefferson.  Speak to me of civil rights. 
President Clinton has spoken enthusiastically of the proposals by the
politically opportunistic mayors of our two largest cities to limit
handgun ownership with a scheme of "needs-based licensing."

History shows where they come from.  We've seen it in their cities in
the issuance of permits to carry concealed handguns.  In the Los
Angeles of Mayor Riordan or the New York of Mayor Guiliani,
"needs-based licensing" has meant and still means, this: If you are a
Eurocentric white male with a lot of money, and preferably have
contributed money to the party in power, you have a need and we'll
consider giving you a license.  

When that is applied to mere ownership of handguns, I think we all
know where it is going.  The Clinton-approved concept of needs-based
licensing for ownership discriminates against citizens, black, brown,
red and yellow.  It discriminates against the old, with their traditionally
fixed incomes, and against the sick and the crippled who need a defense
gun most, but are most likely to be burdened by the sort of medical
debt that the First Lady has so often decried.  

Although those who would make the gun owners of America as extinct
in America as German Jews in 1944 Berlin would paint themselves as
the champions of the poor and the oppressed and the people of color,
the fact is in this nation that the yoke of poverty has fallen most heavily
on just those citizens.  It is they who are most likely to be trapped in
the pockets of poverty that the call the inner city, the places where
crime breeds.  It is they who are most likely to be preyed upon by
criminals.  It is they who most need the wherewithal to defend
themselves.  

It is they who, cruelly and ironically, will be hardest-hit by the
enormous guns and ammunition taxes proposed by the Clinton
administration and its supporters, taxes that would make the tools of
self defense prohibitively expensive for all but the rich and secure. 
These proposed laws impact most brutally, sometimes with life or death
consequences, upon the poor, upon the victims of politically incorrect,
but nonetheless very real, discrimination.  

Don't speak to me of the Minutemen at Concord and Lexington.  Speak
to me of sexism.  Who among today's electorate does not remember
the horror of the young woman ravaged by the "wilders" in Central
Park?  Would Mace or a rape whistle have worked for her?  Can any
mother of any daughter, no matter what her political beliefs, examine
the scenario and not wish that, if the daughter in question was hers, she
would have in hand a high-capacity semiautomatic pistol she knew how
to use?  

The gun isn't know as the equalizer for nothing.  Nothing less will
balance the lethal disparity of force that the predatory male, alone or
in packs, can exert at will over the lone female.  How great would be
the hypocrisy of politically active women who worked to keep that life-
saving power away from their sisters and their daughters?  

Don't tell me about the Second Amendment.  Tell me about the Fourth.
The one that supposedly preserves us from unlawful search and seizure. 
The administration speaks of banning assault rifles.  Where the toe
has been dipped in those waters--New York City, and the New Jersey
of the same former Governor Florio who, insiders say, the President
wants to appoint as a "gun czar" -- the five year-old model of Great
Britain has been followed.  Expensive firearms are banned, citizens are
paid a few cents on the dollar for turning them into the government, or
nothing at all if they destroy their property.  

Understand the horror!  For the first time in this nation's history, we
are talking about the confiscation of private property, lawfully
purchased and responsibly owned, without fair market value
compensation under the eminent domain principle!

'Eminent domain' says that if the Government determines that to
preserve the public good it must take your property, it must at least pay
current fair price to you before doing so.  Considering how many guns-
-some with more than a century of service in hunting fields and the
target ranges-- are involved, and how high the current readily-salable
retail has gone for AUGs and AR-15s and the like.  The Government
would have to spend many billions of dollars to compensate under the
eminent domain principle.  Billions that would save far more lives if
devoted to medical research or housing the homeless, or drug
interdiction, or feeding the hungry, or...

Finally, at the end, do speak to me of the Second Amendment.  Tell
me why this alone, amongst every other precious standard of individual
liberty in the entire Bill of Rights, should apply to auxiliary soldiers
when the rest speak to citizens one by one?  

Don't be so blatantly stupid as to tell anyone who passed elementary
school American History that the Second Amendment was about the
National Guard.  In the time of American Revolution, the "national
guard" would have been Tories loyal to King George.  I do not think
that Madison and company felt a need to keep them armed.  

The fight for the next three years goes to the heart of your freedom,
and that of you children and grandchildren.  It will not be fought with
guns and bullets.  It will only be about them.  

It will be fought with political activism and common sense.  It will be
fought by reaching out to new allies, by forging coalitions of those who
have already learned the hard way the truth that those who ignore
history are doomed to repeat it.
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