Biden Goes to War with . . . Charlie?

I s Charles C. W. Cooke the most dangerous man in America? The Biden administration seems to think so.

Other than the British accent (and maybe that weird extra middle initial), Charlie doesn’t have a lot of attributes that you’d call stereotypically super-villainous. My Beatles-loving, Oxford-educated National Review colleague and Mad Dogs & Englishmen podcasting partner is a young father and confirmed suburbanite, a scholar of rollercoasters who can be found riding around his quiet Florida neighborhood in an electric golf cart — a highly customized golf cart, because Charlie, as he has written here from time to time, is a tinkerer. He likes to build things. And one of the things he likes to build is rifles.

As far as Joe Biden is concerned, this makes Charlie a menace to society: Homemade firearms and the people who build them are now Public Enemy No. 1 for the Biden administration.

There is some irony in this: Charlie, as he will tell you, was once as skeptical of American gun culture as most of the people you will meet on the other side of the Atlantic. It was at Oxford, where he made a study of the Second Amendment, that he came around to his current views. Many of us cradle rednecks imbibe the Second Amendment from early childhood; Charlie, an adopted member of the tribe, has the great advantage of having given the issue serious and sustained study.

President Biden will from time to time say something very stupid about “deer wearing Kevlar,” but the Second Amendment has almost nothing at all to do with hunting. What it has to do with mainly is tyranny (the political sin from which sprang the Founding generation’s intense distrust of standing armies) and independence (the belief that Americans could and would rule themselves, without any need for a king or the superfluous things that go along with kings). At the time of the American Revolution, these ideas were considered in most quarters to be plainly bonkers: Yes, there had been republics before in European history, but they had either decayed into absolutism and empire, as with Rome, or never grown much beyond compact city-states, as in the Italian examples. The Republic of Venice had a population of fewer than 200,000 — smaller than modern-day Tallahassee, Fla., or Amarillo, Texas. When King George III said he hoped his former subjects would not suffer too much for their want of a monarchy, he was not being facetious. The American experiment was unprecedented.

The right to keep and bears arms was far from incidental to that experiment — it was central.

To the very modest extent that the Second Amendment has anything at all to do with hunting, it is in its contribution to the kind of independence Americans envisioned for themselves — which was never to be mere political independence from Great Britain. While there already was a very comfortable urban life to be had in Boston and Philadelphia, and an equally comfortable provincial life to be had for the owners of great farming estates (it was a good deal less comfortable for the owners’ slaves), the experience of the Puritan colonies and the frontier were deeply imprinted on the American national consciousness.

That sense that Americans could invent their own kind of life in what really was from their point of view a New World is everywhere evident in the culture and economy of the first century of American independence, during which the enterprising men of the new republic undertook a remarkable campaign of invention of . . . well, everything, from new religions (Methodism in 1783, Mormonism in 1820, Seventh-Day Adventists in 1863, Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1870, the Theosophical Society in 1875, Christian Science in 1879, Black Hebrew Israelites in 1886, Pentecostalism in the late 19th century) to new technologies (Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were born within a few months of each other in 1847, and their lifetimes overlapped with those of Samuel Colt, Henry Ford, Samuel Morse, Charles Goodyear, Cyrus McCormick, John Browning, George Westinghouse, etc.) to new political instruments (that formerly Grand Old Party was founded in 1854). That the frontiersman clearing his fresh acres and the men who had dreamt up all the new tools in his workshop were engaged in the same kind of activity was something consciously understood by Americans of that time. Invention and agriculture were so closely related that you can go into the Capitol and look up at The Apotheosis of George Washington, where you will see the agricultural goddess Ceres seated upon a McCormack harvester.

The armament entrepreneurs of the era had a profound effect on the political culture of the nation, too: “God created men, and Colonel Colt made them equal.”

It is an understatement to observe that the idealism of that era — and not only as enshrined in the Second Amendment — is in tension with the realities of life in a modern, urban, technologically advanced society that has long since settled all its frontiers. But that current in American culture is still very much with us — and it should be encouraged rather than regulated into economic and cultural anemia.

On the particular matter of Americans who build their own firearms at home, some attention to proportion is due. The number of murders committed with such firearms is minuscule, while there are other very strong points of correlation: About 90 percent of murderers have previously been arrested, in some of our cities half of the murder suspects have had prior gun cases dismissed (a genuine, shocking scandal), etc. At both the federal and state levels, our existing gun laws often go unenforced (straw buyers are almost never prosecuted except as a result of major organized-crime investigations, the ATF doesn’t even bother to go around and pick up guns from buyers the federal government has mistakenly approved, etc.), while both the gun-control lobby and federal regulators spend most of their energy on what is bought and sold at federally licensed firearms retailers, the customers of which are — by definition — pretty much the most law-abiding group of Americans there is.

If the disconnect between these realities and Biden’s rhetoric seems like a mystery, it shouldn’t. This debate, of which the “ghost guns” panic is the most recent representation, is not about guns at all: It is about the tension between that old, independent American culture and the new, regimented one preferred by our nation’s vice principals and human-resources directors — and about which culture will prevail.

Sometimes, that is clearer to an English immigrant than it is to the native-born American. I am not personally much of a tinkerer, but I consider myself fortunate to live in a country in which most of what is good in the modern world — from Apple computers to rock-’n’-roll — was invented by somebody experimenting in a garage somewhere across the fruited plains.