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Mother's Day, the "Million" Mom group will rally at the
state capitols around the nation to demand new laws
restricting
the freedom of gun owners. Unfortunately, an observation by Oliver
Wendell Holmes aptly describes the leadership of the "Million"
Mom organization: "The mind of the bigot is like the pupil
of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract."
The Oxford
English Dictionary defines a bigoted person as one who is "obstinately
and blindly attached to some creed, opinion, or party and intolerant
towards others." Million Mom March National President Mary
Leigh Blek claims, "We need to cry out in one loud voice that
we love our children more than the gun lobby loves its guns."
Blek's comment
is clearly bigoted. She suggests that gun owners do not love children,
even their own. She paints her group as a grassroots effort taking
on the behemoth "gun lobby," a reified "it"
rather than a group of people. In reality, Blek's own anti-gun lobby
operates in a way similar to, say, the National Rifle Association.
Yes, the NRA has a lot of money, but that's because its four million
grass-roots members send in donations. Thus, the NRA is much more
of a grassroots organization than is Blek's group, which attracted
less than a hundred thousand donors.
Blek suggests
that gun owners have some sort of fetishistic "love" for
their guns which causes them to willfully endanger their own children.
Again, reality tells a different story. Millions of American parents
own guns precisely to protect their children from violent criminals.
A gun-control
advocate who wasn't a bigot might say something like, "Both
sides of the gun debate want to protect children; but the pro-gun
people are mistaken for thinking that guns will help. The best way
to protect children is to have more gun control." But instead,
the Million Mom group makes the outrageous accusation that Second
Amendment supporters are so subhuman that they don't care about
children's lives — that they only love inanimate objects. This kind
of hate-mongering is the same charge that anti-Semites have long
made about Jews — that Jews don't have normal human emotion, and
that Jews kill children.
Rather than
talk about why she thinks her policies would improve public safety,
Blek demonizes guns and their owners. She fits the definition of
intolerant: "disposed to persecute those who differ."
The Million
Mom group is pushing a program called "ask for safety."
The idea is that the children of non-gun owners aren't supposed
to play with the children of gun owners.
Not too long
ago, some white parents forbade their children to play with children
of different races. These bigoted parents would sometimes use a
safety pretext, claiming that people of other races were dirty or
were crime-prone, or the like.
The MMM's bigoted
opinions about gun owners are no more factual than are bigoted racial
opinions. Seventy million Americans own over 250 million firearms,
and over 99.9 percent do so safely and responsibly. Even though
the Million Moms try to blame law-abiding gun owners for crimes,
in fact the crime rate is driven almost entirely by hard-core repeat
criminals. In terms of accidents, in 1999 there was a total of 96,900
deaths by unintentional injury of all types, and less than one percent
of these deaths, 700, involved a firearm (National Safety Council).
In 1997, 142 children ages 0-14 died of unintentional gun fire,
while 185 died by choking, 676 by burns, 965 by drowning, and 2,900
by car crashes.
But the statistics
tend to obscure the root problem. People who are irresponsible with
guns are also irresponsible with cars, water, and throat-sized objects.
We should want our children to play where they are monitored by
responsible adults. Unfortunately, the Million Moms' program is
not about ensuring careful supervision, it is about ostracism and
exclusion.
At last year's
Mother's Day event in Denver, Jeff Wright was peacefully carrying
a sign expressing his support of the Second Amendment, an action
the First Amendment affirms is his right. One woman wearing a "Million
Mom" T-shirt walked up and spat on him.
In Fort Collins
last August, the "Million" Mom group advertised a "public"
meeting, so a small group of civil arms activists, led by Bob Glass,
showed up to take notes. Million Mom member Cherie Trine described
Glass's group to Boulder Weekly columnist Wayne Laugesen
as "a neo-Nazi group that wants to terrorize the whole community.
They're very anti-Semitic, anti-gay, racist people. They might as
well be wearing KKK caps. They're like the people who hate government
and want to bomb federal buildings." In fact, Glass is a Jew
who advocates civil rights for everyone and denounces acts of violence.
Apparently,
Trine's demonization of Glass and his friends made it easier for
her to strike one of them with a clipboard, resulting in her subsequent
arrest.
Assaults and
other violence by Million Mom members have been documented in other
places, including Philadelphia. In one case the Second Amendment
Sisters found their property destroyed. No one is suggesting that
the Million Mom organization directly advocated the assaults, property
damage, or spitting. But the Million Mom group does foment a climate
of rage and intolerance. And there is no indication that the Million
Mom March has denounced the criminal conduct by its members or taken
steps to remove those members. When the Colorado Million Mom March
was asked what actions were taken concerning Cherie Trine, the representative
replied, "no comment."
The MMM's opposition
to violence, even to gun violence, appears to be rather selective.
Shortly after last-year's rallies, the press revealed that MMM poster-person
Rosie O'Donnell has hired an armed bodyguard for her child, and
the bodyguard wanted to bring his firearm onto school property.
Also speaking
on the Washington Mall with Ms. O'Donnell last year was Barbara
Graham. Several weeks later, Ms. Graham was arrested for shooting
22-year-old Kikko Smith in the spine, paralyzing him. Graham incorrectly
thought that Smith was connected to the murder of her own son. When
Graham's home was searched pursuant to her arrest, four handguns
were found, including a TEC-9. How did the MMM react to Graham's
arrest for gun violence? The Washington Post reported that
"the women from Million Moms are backing her at her trial."
The jury, however,
convicted her of aggravated assault with intent to kill.
Now imagine
that a speaker at the biggest rally in NRA history was arrested
for shooting an innocent person in a plainly unjustified act of
(misdirected) revenge, just a few weeks after the rally. And suppose
that the NRA "stood by" the shooter who had paralyzed
an innocent young man. You'd hear howls of protests against the
NRA from Boston to Honolulu, and those protests would be justified.
NRA memberships would plummet, and gun rights advocates would desert
it, and instead join gun policy groups which didn't tolerate criminal
violence.
Perhaps the
same thing is happening with the MMM. Even at the group's peak,
last Mothers Day, the "Million" Mom rally attracted about
one-tenth of a million people in Washington. Last weekend, the state
MMM rally in Charlotte, North Carolina was supposed to attract thousands,
but instead drew only 125-150.
Nationally,
the MMM has laid off 30 of its 35 paid staff, and has been expelled
from its offices in the San Francisco General Hospital, which were
apparently obtained under false pretenses.
The "Million"
Mom March was the darling of the establishment media last year,
but the election victories that it promised never materialized.
Today, the focus of attention in the gun-control movement is no
longer the mean-spirited "Million" Mom March, but instead
the more temperate Americans for Gun Safety (AGS). In terms of actual
policies, AGS differs hardly at all from the MMM. (Indeed the big
donor behind AGS also gave generously to MMM.) But AGS is pursuing
its goals by making policy arguments, not by denouncing gun-owners
as child-killers. For that reason, the new prominence of AGS, and
the decline of MMM, represent a welcome step forward for tolerance
and decency.
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