How does the anti-gun ownership bias in the mainstream media manifest itself, and why does it exist?  How has Hollywood’s treatment of guns changed over the past three-plus decades, and what are the possible social repercussions of these changes?  How have various elites attempted over the centuries to use gun controls to keep non-elites in line?  How are these issues related to each other?  These are among the questions addressed in Gun Control=People Control, a collection of eleven essays originally published in such periodicals as Reason, Liberty, Chronicles, and Gun Week.

Starting back in the middle 1970’s, careful scholars, many of whom were themselves uneasy about guns, began producing studies demolishing gun-prohibitionist claims that widespread gun ownership fosters high violent-crime rates, that guns are useless for self-defense purposes, and that the Second Amendment guarantees no individual right to keep and bear arms.  However, these gun-prohibitionists claims have yet to be publicly discredited and are widely accepted in circles considered to be enlightened.  Why?  Could it be that attempts to control civilian gun ownership to the point of prohibition have nothing to do with crime control?  Read this book and find out.

William R. Tonso is a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Evansville, where his teaching specialties were minority and ethnic group relations, social deviance, social theory, and the sociology of sport.  His Ph.D. in sociology (1976), M.S. in business administration specializing in personnel management (1966), and B.S. in industrial education (1955), are all from Southern Illinois University - Carbondale.  He is the author of Gun and Society:  The Social and Existential Roots of the American Attachment to Firearms and a number of gun-issue pieces published as book chapters or in periodicals such as USA Today, Reason, American Rifleman, Outdoor Life, and The Quill, and is the editor of and a contributor to The Gun Culture and Its Enemies.

But the people-manipulating interests of big business and industry and centralized big government, assisted by big education and big media, have left non-experts in these areas easy to convince.  These interests have afforded various applied social and behavioral scientists, educators, specialists in communications, medicine, and management, and others claiming expertise in people-manipulation, coordination, processing, and so forth, the chance to entrench themselves in influential settings where they can encourage the “educated” classes to accept what economist and syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell has referred to as their “unconstrained vision” of man.  According to Sowell, who does not subscribe to this vision himself, “Given that explicitly articulated knowledge is special and concentrated in the unconstrained vision, the best conduct of social activities depends upon the special knowledge of the few being used to guide the actions of the many.”  Sowell goes on to note, “It is consistent for the unconstrained vision to promote equalitarian ends by unequalitarian means, given the great differences between those whom [John Stuart] Mill called ‘the wisest and best’ and those who have not yet reached that intellectual and moral level.”  And sociologist Peter Berger, another scholarly critic of knowledge-elite pretensions, has called attention to this elite’s vested interest in government intervention due to its heavy reliance on public sector employment.  According to Berger, “Because government interventions have to be legitimated in terms of social ills, the New Class has a vested interest in portraying American society as a whole, and specific aspects of that society in negative terms.”

Through countless magazine and journal articles, newspaper stories, columns, and editorials, TV commentaries, documentaries, talk shows, situation comedies, and crime shows, and textbook treatments of the issue, America’s knowledge-creating and -transmitting elites have, with relatively few exceptions, made it abundantly clear that they agree with sociologist Morris Janowitz:  “I see no reason . . . why anyone in a democracy should own a weapon.”  Democracy, from this elite point of view, is something that “experts” know how to run better than do ordinary citizens, but these “experts” apparently recognize that while the pen may be mightier than the sword in the long run of history, the swordsman can make quick work of the penman in the short run of individual existence.  If not sold on reforms deemed necessary by the all-knowing “experts,” an armed populace might be troublesome.  Therefore, the people-control-through-gun-control efforts of the knowledge elites not only converge with but transcend those of the traditional business elites.  The business elites need only docile workers and consumers, while the knowledge elites need docile citizens who can be manipulated through elite-formulated state interventions...such as busing, affirmative action, quotas, and so forth, often assisted by an activist judiciary...intended either to homogenize the populace in order to abolish the conflict-generating differences within it, or to eliminate the conflict-generating aspects of these differences.

The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword because the whole body of the people are armed.”  And Elbridge Gerry:  “What, sir, is the use of militia?  It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty.”  And Joseph Story, Associate Justice of the United States from 1811 to 1845:  “The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of the republic; since it offers a strong moral check against usurpation and arbitrary power of the rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance; enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”  Even the late Hubert H. Humphrey, the liberal Democrat senator and vice president, issued the following statement in 1959:  “The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safe-guard against tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.”  And this from Judge Ronald M. Gould of the ultra-liberal US 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals in his recent rebuff of a fellow judge’s “December dicta remarks about the meaning of the Second Amendment:”  “[T]he Second Amendment was designed by the Framers of our Constitution to safeguard our Nation not only in times of good government, such as we have enjoyed for generations, but also in the event, however unlikely, that our government or leaders would go bad.  And it was designed to provide national security not only when our country is strong but also if it were to become weakened or otherwise subject to attack.”

Judge Gould’s recent comments concerning the purpose of the Second Amendment are very timely, because the liberal left, particularly since the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing and all the attention it brought to the militia movement, has demagogued against this “insurrectionist” interpretation of the amendment.  How dare anyone suggest that American citizens would ever have to take up arms against their own government!  And the American talk-radio right, particularly since the terrorism of 9-11, is so enamored of our military and police forces that it apparently can’t conceive of them ever being used to establish a tyranny.  But as Gould implies, the amendment’s purpose is to provide a means for the citizenry to protect itself when things have gone very wrong.  While our government is not now tyrannical, is it really less likely to become so at some future date than it was in the early days of the republic?  And can today’s large professional military be trusted with advanced firearms while civilians can’t be trusted with them?  What reason would we have to answer “yes” to either of these questions?  The liberal establishment has long viewed the Constitution as an obstacle to its social engineering efforts, we now have exactly the kind of large professional military the Founders feared, and who knows what impact the war on terrorism will have on our civil liberties.  In fact, with respect to the last point, even to voice such concerns since 9-11 is to risk earning the suspicion of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, which reportedly has been cautioning law enforcement to look out for “defenders of the U.S. Constitution against the federal government and the UN. . . .”  That’s scary!