Why America is arming
With the shooting death of Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch volunteer who was legally carrying a 9 mm handgun, the familiar wail has arisen from our cultural and media elite:
America has too many guns! "Open carry" and "concealed carry" laws should be repealed. Florida's Stand Your Ground law threatens to turn America into the Tombstone of Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp. This is insane!
The United Nations agrees. This year, the world body takes up the global control of firearms, including small arms in the hands of citizens.
According to Sen. Rand Paul, the U.N. Small Arms Treaty will almost surely mandate tougher licensing requirements to own a gun, require the confiscation and destruction of unauthorized civilian firearms, call for a ban on the trade, sale and private ownership of semi-automatic weapons, and create an international gun registry.
Memo to the U.N.: Lots of luck. Forty-five Republican and 12 Democrat senators have declared their opposition to any such treaty. For when it comes to Second Amendment rights, Middle America has spoken -- at the ballot box and the gun store. And Congress, most state legislatures and the federal courts have all come down on the side of the Silent Majority.
In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court struck down one of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation, assuring district citizens of their right to keep a gun in the home.
U.S. Judge Benson E. Legg just struck down the section of Maryland's gun law that left it to local authorities to decide if a citizen could carry a gun outside his house.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell just signed a law striking down a ban that kept residents from buying more than one pistol per month. The new law ignited New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who calls Virginia "the No. 1 out-of-state source of crime guns in New York." Two New York cops have been shot this year, one fatally, with guns from Virginia.
But University of Houston Professor Larry Bell relates another side to the gun story:
"Law-abiding citizens in America used guns in self-defense 2.5 million times in 1993 ... and actually shot and killed two and a half times as many criminals as police did ... . These self-defense shootings resulted in less than one-fifth as many incidents as police where an innocent person was mistakenly identified as a criminal."
The figures tell the story. Along with rising incarceration rates, the proliferation of guns in the hands of the law-abiding has been a factor in the nation's falling crime rate.
And that proliferation has accelerated under President Obama. According to ammo.net , tax revenues from the sale of firearms and ammunition have gone up 48 percent since 2008.
On the day after Thanksgiving, there were 129,666 background checks of individuals seeking to buy guns, the highest one-day search in history. Background searches in December broke the all-time monthly record set in November.
Why are Americans arming themselves?
More and more citizens, says the National Rifle Association, fear that if or when they confront a threat to their family, lives or property, the police will not be there. Reports of home invasions and flash mobs have firmed up the market for firearms. Others argue that a fear of new laws in an Obama second term, or even the possible confiscation of handguns, is driving sales.
Whatever the answer, it is our business, not the U.N.'s.
Pat Buchanan is the author of "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?"
