Boston's Gun Bible (Series 3: chapters 31-46 of 46) by Party Boston T. & Royce Kenneth W

Author:Party, Boston T. & Royce, Kenneth W. [Party, Boston T.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Javelin Press
Published: 2015-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

DOWN THE SLIPPERY U.K. SLOPE

This section was lifted from an excellent essay by Joseph E. Olson and David B. Kopel called All The Way Down The Slippery Slope: Gun Prohibition in England and Some Lessons for Civil Liberties in America. You can download it from www.2ndlawlib.org/journals/okslip.html. I've spliced together some of the most concise sections, as the essay is 56 pages long.

Separating future generations from guns

The British government in the 1950s left the subject of gun control alone. Crime was still quite low, and issues such as national health care and the Cold War dominated the political dialogue. Even so, the maintenance of the existing, relatively mild, structure of rifle and pistol licensing would have important consequences. As the Firearms Act remained in force year after year, a smaller and smaller percentage of the population could remember a time in their own lives when a Briton could buy a rifle or pistol because he had a right to do so rather than because he had convinced a police administrator that there was a "good reason" for him to purchase the gun. As the post-1920 generation grew up, the licensing provisions of the Firearms Act began to seem less like a change from previous conditions and more like part of ordinary social circumstances. A similar process is at work in the United States, where only part of the population remembers the days before 1968 when federal registration was not required for people to purchase firearms.

The 1968 law contained one other provision that illustrated a key strategy of how to push something down a slippery slope: it is easier to legislate against people who cannot vote, or who are not yet born, than against adults who want to retain their rights. Reducing the number people who will, one day in the future, care about exercising a particular right is a good way to ensure that, on that future day, new restrictions on the right will be politically easier to enact. Thus, the 1967 law did nothing to take away guns from law-abiding adults, but the Act did severely restrict gun transfers to minors. It became illegal for a father to give even an airgun as a gift to his thirteen-year-old son. The fewer young people who enjoy the exercise of a civil liberty such as the shooting sports, the fewer adults there will eventually be to defend that civil liberty.

This conditioning young people not to believe they have rights can exist in other contexts, of course. For example, the current American practice of denying American schoolchildren constitutional protection from locker searches, dog sniffs, metal detectors, and random drug testing is a good way to raise a generation with little appreciation for the Fourth Amendment.

If, over the course of generations, the percentage of a population that is interested in a right can be gradually reduced, stricter controls become more politically feasible, and the stricter controls can further reduce the long-term number of people who exercise their rights. This suggests the long-term importance of young people exercising their rights.

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