23:29 18/05/1996
This is the second version of a piece that has already been
published on the Internet. I offer it again because of the
Supplement that I have just added at the end.
Sean Gabb
cea01sig(a)gold.ac.uk
0181 858 0841
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GOLDSMITHS' COLLEGE DOES NOT NECESSARILY AGREE
WITH A WORD OF THE FOLLOWING
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Putting the Case Against Gun Control:
Reflections on an Outrageously Effective
Television Performance - May 2nd 1996
by Sean Gabb
(Published as Tactical Notes No. 17
by the Libertarian Alliance,
London, May 1996, ISBN 1 85637 343 6)
2nd edition
Last 2nd May, a Thursday, I was invited to Scotland to sit on the panel in
Words with Wark, a television discussion show which replaces Question
Time there once every month. The researchers, it seems, had been unable
to find anyone in the country to denounce gun control, and so had to make
do with an English accent. Having found me, though, they did their best
to keep me happy. I was offered a taxi from South East London to
Heathrow, which I only turned down because public transport is faster
during the day. I was given a business class seat on a flight to Glasgow -
cost L120 - and a first class railway sleeper back down to Euston - cost
L85. Then there was a stretched Rover to Ayr Town Hall, where the
programme was to be recorded. Adding my fee - which I could probably
have doubled had I been inclined - I may have cost them more than the
average MP. Nice work when you can get it.
On the panel with me was the Editor of The Sunday Mail, and a journalist
whose name I never caught but who looked just like someone I knew and
loathed at university, and Guy Savage, representing the Shooters' Rights
Association. These first two were there to argue for a ban on the private
ownership of guns, the third to claim that the Firearms Acts 1920 to 1988
strike a fair balance between competing interests, and that this should not
be upset just because a pair of lunatics in Dunblane and Tasmania had
decided to shoot lots of people. In the studio audience were four politicians
- Sir Michael Hirst, Chairman of the Scottish Conservative Party, Margaret
Ewing, from the Scottish Nationalists, and two others whose names I again
missed but which are not worth looking up. I have no idea how many
people watch Words with Wark. But I imagine the BBC had given me a
seven figure audience to regale with my opinions.
And my opinion is that gun control is wrong in any form. I believe that an
adult should be able to walk into a gun shop and, without showing any
permit or identification, be able to buy as many guns and as much
ammunition as he can afford; and that he should be able to carry this
round with him in public and use it to defend his life and property. This
is not a popular view, I grant. On the other hand, I doubt if many armed
criminals would take more notice of a gun ban than they do of the present
controls. And it is worth asking how many people Michael Ryan could
have killed had anyone else in Hungerford High Street been carrying a gun.
As the Americans say, "God made men equal, and Smith & Wesson make
damn sure it stays that way".
I earned my fee by saying all this in the studio. I am sure I pleased the
researchers. They spend much of their lives talking to people who say the
most outrageous things on the telephone, but who then lose heart in the
studio and agree with everyone else. The audience was another matter.
Speaking on the Kilroy programme here in London, I could probably have
made people bounce up and down on their seats with rage. Just as likely,
there would have been a few Dunblane parents to sob pathetically into the
cameras. Speaking in Ayr, the response I got was a shocked silence. I
looked out into a sea of faces that reminded me of nothing so much as the
Jewish audience in Mel Brooks' The Producers, during the opening number
from Springtime for Hitler. At last, someone who claimed to be a minister
of religion and a father of two denounced me for pulling God into politics -
as if that were not what He is there for. Someone else who said he fought
in Korea claimed I was so plainly unbalanced that I should never be let
near a gun.
As soon as what passed for debate had started again, I took care to score
a big "own" goal. An Olympic shooter spoke, followed by a clay pigeon
shooter. They were not against a gun ban - so long as their guns were left
out of it. No said I, this would never do. The purpose of guns was to kill
people. The only matter of importance was to make sure they were used
to kill the right people, namely burglars and street criminals. From the
look on the Olympic man's face, he was thinking of quite another category
of people to kill.
Twenty minutes pass very quickly in a television studio. I had barely
warmed up before my panel was ejected, to make way for the politicians
to come on and bore everyone stiff with rail privatisation and nursery
vouchers.
Afterwards in the reception, I found myself shunned like the lepers of old.
The locals turned their backs on me. Sir Michael Hirst looked straight
through me as I sidled up to him with my glass of orange juice - so much
for the party of individual freedom! Guy Savage muttered that my
comments had been "unconstructive". On the ride back to Glasgow, he
pointedly ignored me, talking to the driver instead about negative equity.
This was a shame. On the ride over, he had been very friendly, sharing
with me his vast knowledge of the present law on guns, and even agreeing
to address a Libertarian Alliance conference on the right to keep and bear
arms. Realising that my presence was not desired, I pretended to sleep all
the way back.
On the whole, I did pretty well. One of the great falsehoods of modern life
is that arguments are won by being "moderate" - by conceding the other
side's point and then haggling over the details. They are not. The gun
lobby, for example, spent nearly half a million after Hungerford trying to
stop the Firearms Bill that resulted from it. I imagine most of the cash
went straight to a gang of sleazy PR hacks, who organised a few lunches
with politicians too corrupt even to stay bought. What little found its way
into the media was one long grovel, by clay pigeon and Olympic shooters
begging for laws that would hurt only other gun owners. They rolled over
and showed their bellies to Douglas Hurd. Not surprisingly, he gave them
all a good, hard kicking.
Arguments are won by being honest - by saying what you believe as clearly
as possible, as often as possible, and never mind how "unconstructive" it
seems in the short term. Doing so has three effects. First, it shifts the
middle ground in a debate. This is valuable in a country where being
moderate is so in fashion. For this middle ground is not an independent
point of view, but can be pulled sharply to and fro by what is happening
at the extremes. Before about 1975, for example, the public spectrum on
economic policy stretched between Soviet communism and social
democracy. Accordingly, the moderates were all pink socialists. Now there
are libertarians demanding a total free market, the moderates have become
blue social democrats. And, though important, the collapse of the Soviet
Union was not entirely to blame for this - in those countries without a
libertarian fringe, after all, the consensus is still decidedly pink. In my
own case, had I not been in that studio, the spectrum would have stretched
between a total ban and the status quo; and anyone trying to sound
moderate would have had to favour many more controls. As it was, Mr
Savage came across as the centrist - a fact recognised by the people who did
not shun him as they did me, and a fact worth noting by the Shooters'
Rights Association if it ever wants to live up to its name.
Second, it gets converts. Granted, my audience in the studio was full of
glum blockheads. But there must have been dozens of people at home who
were hearing what I said for the first time and who agreed with every word
of it. Most of these will stay at home. Others - one or two, perhaps - will
become committed libertarian activists. They will join the Libertarian
Alliance. They will hand out its publications. They will write for it. They
will appear in television studios, putting the libertarian case on whatever
they have been called in to discuss. Moreover, even the blockheads have
a function. If they can remember what I said in the studio - not hard,
bearing in mind how clear I was - they will spread it by explaining to
friends and relations how scandalised they were by it. Sooner or later, the
message will reach someone who is not at all scandalised; and another
convert will have been made. And that is how intellectual revolutions get
under way. With his claim that Hungerford and Dunblane were "failures
of policing", and the like, I doubt if Mr Savage enthused anyone to go out
and do something against the gun grabbers.
Third, it establishes a position. Unusual ideas are generally ignored at
first. Then, if they continue being put, they are laughed at. Then they
must be argued with. Occasionally, they become the common sense of the
next generation. That is how it was with socialism in this country. More
recently, it was like that with monetarism and council house sales. I do not
know if my dream of abolishing gun control will be so lucky. But, to be
sure, no one will take notice of it unless someone goes to the trouble of
clearly arguing for it.
Yes, I did pretty well in Scotland. I may do even better the next time I am
allowed into a television or wireless studio.
Supplement - Saturday May 18th
I was allowed back yesterday morning. I cast the first version of the above
onto the Internet on May 10th. The following morning, Jim Hawkins of
BBC Radio Northampton replied by e-mail. He had read my pamphlet and
liked it, and he wanted me to repeat it on his programme on Friday the
17th.
So there I sat for an hour yesterday morning, telling another million people
why the gun control laws should be abolished. I was against Anne Pearson
(at least, that is how her name sounded) of the Snowdrop Campaign - this
being a group set up after Dunblane to press for a total ban on handguns.
Though honest, she was not very bright, and I went through her like a hot
knife through butter. When I accused her of wanting to live in a slave
state, she answered "Yes, I do". When I further accused her of trusting no
one else with guns because she felt unable to trust herself with one, she
started to panic. When I repeated my wish that someone else in
Hungerford had been armed, she referred to my appearance on Words
with Wark, saying only that I had worried her then, and I worried her
now.
I said much else, ranging from the Jews in Nazi Germany ("what if they
had been able to shoot back?"), to Waco ("men, women and children
murdered by the American Government"). In short, I indeed did even
better this time than last - and if anyone doubts this, I have a tape to
proves it.
Enough of boasting, however. The reason for this Supplement is to
emphasise that extremism does work. Consider:
First, it was extremism that got me on Words with Wark, and an extremist
report of what I did there that got me on the Jim Hawkins show. It annoys
me that I can never make the national press - versions of my pamphlet, for
example, came straight back to me from The Spectator and The Sunday
Telegraph, as if wafted on cries of horror. Nevertheless, the electronic
media can hardly get enough of me and Brian Micklethwait and the rest of
us. Whether or not we can ever win it, we lack no opportunity for putting
the libertarian case.
Second, it is extremism that makes us so effective in debate. The gun
grabbers and other enemies of freedom have so far had an easy ride in the
media. They have only had to argue with cowards and fools who, worried
not to upset anyone, have failed to make most of the good points. They
have never known principled, uncompromising opposition. Faced with it,
they behave like rabbits faced with a new strain of myxomatosis: they have
no defences. If Mrs Pearson was out of her depth with me, so at present
are all of her colleagues. They have ready answers to the whinings of the
clay pigeon lobby, but none to anyone who asserts a right of self defence
against "burglars, armed robbers and other trash".
Third, extremism really does shift the middle ground. In the main
pamphlet above, I was unable to give examples from my own experience.
Since yesterday morning, I can. Someone from a shooting club called in,
and said "I want to take a middle view between the speakers". He then
argued against any change in the gun laws. Without me there, he could
never have got away with that. He would have been denounced as a
potential Thomas Hamilton, trying to save his penis extension. Half an
hour of me, and Mrs Pearson nearly embraced him. Guy Savage and the
Shooters' Rights Association - again, please take note.
In a few minutes, I will send this revised pamphlet to Brian, for publishing
by the Libertarian Alliance. Before he even sees it, though, it will be all
over the Internet - there to be read by anyone else who happens to have a
studio to fill.
