When the anti-gun side dons a Marine uniform

But we love to invest certain people with special standing on policy questions — especially when doing so advances our own preferences. I feel bad for 9/11 widows and orphans, but I don’t especially want the CIA to consult them about counterterrorism questions. One newspaper carried an interview with the children of Eugene Stoner, the ingenious designer behind the AR-15. They averred that dear old dad never intended his rifle for civilian hands. Maybe not. So? Eugene Stoner’s own views are of no special interest on the question of the Second Amendment and its implementation; those of his children are of less interest still. I once had the pleasure of meeting Mikhail Khalashnikov, for whom the famous AK-47 rifle is named. I don’t especially care what his kids think about gun control. (One of his grandchildren has had a positively Trumpkin career, running a business whose sole purpose is putting the word “Kalashnikov” on products ranging from umbrellas to vodka.) Kalashnikov might have had some interesting thoughts about the liquidation of the kulaks (his father had been one) or Russo–German relations. I very much doubt he ever knew enough about U.S. gun-control policy to have a meaningful opinion on the question. He was a great realist, though: Asked why he ended up a firearms designer rather than pursuing his original plan of designing farm implements, Kalashnikov provided an excellent answer: “Nazis.”

Kalashnikov was largely divorced from sentimentality. If we, too, divorced ourselves from sentimentality, what would we conclude? One, that it doesn’t particularly matter what Marines-turned-congressmen, widows and orphans, survivors of horrifying episodes, or the Dalai Lama think about gun control. That is nothing more than a series of cynical attempts at emotional manipulation. The Second Amendment is the law, and it says what it says, a fact that has been affirmed by our Supreme Court many times. Every time I hear someone with a novel theory about how the Second Amendment doesn’t really say what it says, I’m reminded of the accountants and bankers who write me twice a month claiming to have definitively disproved the theory of evolution or the Big Bang hypothesis. The scholarly journals are ready when you are, Bubba.

The United States is a violent society. It has relatively high rates of gun-related violence . . . and of practically every other sort of violence, too. We shoot each other more often than do Canadians or Germans, and we beat each other to death a lot more often than do Canadians or Germans. The Germans seem to have got it out of their system, and the Canadians never much had it. It isn’t the guns: It’s us.