Armed and the Man

Charlton Heston was a man ahead of his time when he alerted us to the risks arising from the threat to the second amendment (that’s the right to bear arms). Brandishing his flintlock, the fabled actor proclaimed, "I'll give up my guns when they pry them from my cold, dead fingers." The graphic image and strong words point out a gaping problem, quite literally, that challenges America today.

Namely, that thanks to our wishy-washy banning of various small arms, America now faces a gap as dangerous to our national security as the old-timey, cold-war missile gap. Namely, the now emerging "small arms gap."

Think of it. We are falling behind our enemies day by day in the race to maintain parity in small arms.

While a decent assault weapon costs upwards of 1500 dollars, and that’s crippled into a semi-automatic variety, in Iraq, the same weapon can be had for a couple of hundred bucks. If that, actually. Before the war, prices were as follows:
· Shotgun $100
· Iraqi-made "Tariq" 7.65 mm pistol $200
· AK-47s, full-auto of course, $120 and $250 (depends if they are cheap Chinese knock-offs or the real, indestructible Russian ones)
· Israeli Uzis and German MP5 submachine guns $400
· 9mm Beretta for $850.
· Each bullet about 25 cents.

And just when we launched our triumphant race to the quagmire, Saddam flooded the civilian market, dropping even these moderate prices to more reasonable ones. AK-47s were going for $70. RPGs $30 to $40. And Hand grenades, always a delightful table center piece if placed in a simple basket, were a steal at $3 to $10. People had so many they were trading them for food.

However plentiful, the second amendment has many friends in Iraq. It may, in fact, be the only thing about our culture that our new partners in democracy truly understand and agree with. There’s even an old Iraqi saying that puts it perfectly, “Give everything to your friend, except your car, your wife, and your gun.”

Highly personalized AKs and the like are really considered personal ornaments for men, like jewelry. They bestow gravitas and prestige to the wearer. You wear them like a Rolex, or love beads. As bling-bling is to modern American pop culture, Bang-bang, if you’ll pardon the expression, is to more modestly unhip Iraqi mores.

But it’s not all just for show. A very philosophical people, they are eager debaters. So eager, in fact, that weapons are quite valuable when trying to make a subtle point. The line from talking to shooting is…faint. Conviction of your principles often require punctuation with a quick burst, in the air, at celebrations, funerals, during air raids, whenever. Of course, if a shot in the air fails to convince, you can lower your expectations—and sights—and fire level at your fellow debaters.

How poorly American public discourse fares in comparison. Here we yell “shut up” and cut off opponents microphones. We storm out. We protest and chain ourselves to things and nothing much happens. A few arrests. An endless round of yammering from Fox, to CNN to MSNBC to the Web to the front page of the New York Times a week too late, with analysis of no import and news already broken. But I digress in criticizing the news cycle.

The real crisis is that we have so restricted a citizen’s right to bear arms that we have made public discourse toothless. And more importantly we are woefully ill prepared to debate with those nations, like Iraq or Afghanistan, where the heart of the second amendment is so much better understood.

True, at last count there were 500 million small arms in the world (a grossly low number as various countries like China didn’t respond to the researchers). Here in the U.S. best estimates are that about half of us own guns, so that’s probably a couple of hundred million, if you figure most owners have more than one.

So right there, you can see the frightening effects of our present small arms gap. Only half? Why every home in Iraq and Afghanistan has a weapon. Like Switzerland.

But that isn’t the worst of it. Our guns are hopelessly modest when compared to the full-auto assault weapons preferred in Iraq. Recently, there was a story from Saniya, Iraq. In it Abdel-Hamid Ahmed, who cooperates with the U.S. and is on a circulating hit list, said basically that he only carried a 9mm, not an AK, because if someone was going to kill him they wouldn't give him any warning, so what was the point.

Well, maybe that's good enough for Ahmed. But we've been warned. We might as well be wielding Charlton's flintlock against guys with RPGs.

We can’t even buy a full-auto here and that brings me to the final, devastating condemnation of our present gun policies. Restricting our ability to own state of the art weaponry has created a huge gun technology gap. It isn’t just the numbers, it’s the type.

How can we defend our neighborhoods against better-armed terrorists when all we have is some stupid semi-auto or handgun and they’ve got a full on AK47 or an RPG?

And what about those Martha Stewart centerpiece baskets full of grenades?

The time to close this gap is now. We should, we must, and we will, I pray, pass laws that mandate gun ownership by every American—and reverse the laws that now cripple our ability to own weapons with real stopping power.

To paraphrase a great American, “Ask not what country can do you, ask who you can do for your country.” ¶ 1:48 PM