Many years ago, presidential candidate Senator Barry M. Goldwater talked about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons against North Vietnam and about possibly using napalm to defoliate the area along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, by which the North sent men and materiel to the South, in order to denude it of hiding places. He was denounced as dangerously mad, and, despite my ardent support, he lost the 1964 election to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide.
Afterwards, he was asked whether he would actually have done such things. Probably not, he responded. But — and I’m going to paraphrase his salty language for this very-Mormon blog — he thought it wise to let the North think he might. Why should they have the assurance, and feel safe and secure, that he wouldn’t? Let them worry.
I feel rather the same way about churches and other places that declare themselves “gun-free zones.” I like the idea, too, of random and anonymous “air marshals” aboard passenger planes.
I have no idea whether others in my LDS ward are “packing heat.” But I would be opposed to assuring a would-be shooter that nobody is. I can easily imagine a loon specifically choosing such a church or other assembly, reasoning that he’ll have unhindered ability to shoot and kill as many people as he wants, in as leisurely a fashion as he desires. Let him, rather, worry that there might be somebody — or six or seven somebodies — in the group who both has a gun and knows how to use it. Let him be nervous that, if he sets out to kill a large number of unarmed innocents, a lethal volley of lead could come from any direction, at any time. Perhaps it will dissuade him in the first place.
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The horrific shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, has predictably — and quite understandably — awakened renewed calls for stricter gun control. I’m not exactly sure how stricter rules would have prevented this massacre. The Texas murderer was, for example, denied a government license to carry a gun:
“Texas church shooting suspect Devin Kelley denied gun license, governor says”
Moreover, while some anti-gun activists appear to dream of a gun-free America, the realization of that dream appears to be extremely improbable: There are, by some estimates, roughly 300 million guns in the United States, the vast majority of them — rather obviously — in the hands of law-abiding citizens (e.g., hunters, hobbyists, collectors, and, yes, people concerned about protecting themselves). Making those 300 million guns disappear would require an enormously enlarged police state and massive government intrusion upon American liberties — and it’s probably impossible anyhow. (How’s the war against illegal drugs going these days?) The very people in whose hands such guns represent the greatest danger are among the people least likely to comply with hypothetical laws against gun ownership.
I am, incidentally, a bit of a contrarian on a number of issues; I resist it when I see certain positions becoming unquestionable public dogmas. On gun matters, specifically, I have no particular dog in the fight. I own a few guns, but they were given to me. I’ve never bought one. I’m neither a hunter nor a hobbyist nor a collector. I don’t belong to the National Rifle Association. But I do occasionally point people, as I will again now, to the website of Dr. John Lott:
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In any case, read about what actually happened in Sutherland Springs:
“This man may have prevented the Texas mass shooting from getting any deadlier”
I’m profoundly grateful for the fact that there was an armed neighbor near the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs — and that, in the parallel late-September case in Antioch, Tennessee, a church usher had a pistol available.
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We all know that religion and religious people are terrible forces for evil in the world. It would be unsporting in this context to mention Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, the French Jacobins, the Castro Brothers, or even the ambiguous Adolf Hitler and Timothy McVeigh, and I certainly won’t attempt to draw the kinds of broad conclusions from the Sutherland Springs case that critics of religious faith sometimes draw from cases of seemingly religious-inspired violence. But this shouldn’t be overlooked:
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