‘Because that’s the way we’ve always done it’

Remember a few months ago when the Somali pirate menace saw the Entebbe-like rescue of Captain Richard Phillips after his Maersk Alabama was hijacked? Although it unleashed immediately an outbreak of other Indian Ocean pirate boardings, a rather amazing fact came to light for the public. The problem looked to those following the news as simple. Just arm the sailors to forcibly repel attackers on the high seas. Most admit that the U.S. Navy, credited with the rescue, cannot police a million square miles of ocean. So what would stop issuing automatic rifles to trained crewmembers for their use in an emergency?

Only one of the most powerful forces in the world, the same one that extorts so much from you to protect your life and health and home and car, the one that has a lock on the protection business, the one with the muscle of the former AIG: the insurance industry. Insurers will not allow the arming of sailors, even in pirate-infested international waters. They say it would result in much higher chances of crew being injured or killed. This would put coverage out of reach for most sea carriers and it would wreck insurers.

Think of it. Economic dogma outguns even the National Rifle (and, let’s face it, Handgun) Association. Whenever gun-control voices call for outlawing handguns for any but police and military, as do most other countries in the world now for decades, the NRA replies that we need the 280 million handguns currently in civilian hands for our protection. They say college students carrying handguns would have stopped the massacre that took place at Virginia Tech. They would have brought down the demented assassins who slaughtered innocent people in churches and shopping malls and post offices.

Why don’t the omnipotent insurance companies buy this logic? It is in their best interests to protect cargo and lives on the high seas. Damages for the seizure of whole ships, laden with valuable cargo and providing ransom millions in return for the crew, would bankrupt them, you would think. Maybe they know that the wild-west gun-slinging envisioned by the gun lobby will result in far more bloodshed and far higher payouts. And maybe they are so powerful they are out of the reach of the mighty NRA.

What is the success of those many nations that prohibit civilian possession of handguns? They have far fewer handgun deaths caused by criminals. Civilized countries with more than 50 million citizens claim they have fewer than a hundred handgun deaths per year. Those which they have trace back to the world’s greatest exporter of handguns, the U.S. So if they report incontestable success at stemming the carnage we take for granted, why do we not do likewise?

In a word, because that’s the way we’ve always done it. We have abortion for the same reason. God forbid that we change. We despise change. You would think that change-resistant conservatives would easily see the sense of this change. There was a time when we had slavery for the same reason. We had always had it. It was the snake beneath the table on which they wrote the Constitution. Then, too, we have abortion and hand guns and we had slavery for the immense money therein.

So, America, spare us your crocodile tears after every handgun massacre, lamenting the terrible deaths and injuries once every delusional murderer locks and loads. We really do not mean the words of consolation we see in distraught letters to editors because we know beyond any need for further proof that across the board allowance of such weapons necessarily brings with it the “unintended” slaughter. We want the guns? Then we want the consequences. Tired of the effect? Get rid of the cause.

The NRA and fellow travelers have us so hornswoggled that we brand every anti-gun person as a communist, socialist, pinko, pansy, wuss, and, worst of all, anti-American for denying someone his or her second amendment right. Forget the fact that no U.S. court has ever decided in favor of the NRA misinterpretation of that amendment.