The Conservatarian Manifesto by Charles C. W. Cooke

Author:Charles C. W. Cooke [Cooke, Charles C. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3973-1
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2015-03-10T05:00:00+00:00

Here, the role of the conservative is twofold. First, to act as that more intelligent type of reformer, standing in the road, chained to the fence, better to resist the incoming machinery. Second, to ensure that by the time the modern reformer has gone away to think about the fence, he has been subjected to such a protracted and thorough inquiry that he has come to his senses, conceived of its value, and renounced his intention to destroy it.

6

GUNS: A STUDY IN SUCCESS

SITTING in my room at Oxford in April 2007, I watched the horrible news unfold on my little portable television. A man had walked onto the campus at Virginia Tech and murdered thirty-two people.

This was my final year of university, and by now I had changed my opinion on firearms completely. Once I had exhibited the reflexive sneer of the British establishment; now I had arrived at the uncomfortable conclusion that the profusion of guns was not only uncontrollable in the United States, but that the attempt to limit their impact with flaccid and fanciful laws was also dangerous both to liberty and to the constitutional order. My undergraduate thesis, written that year on the passage of the Second Amendment, had served only to help me along.

It will come as little surprise to you, I would imagine, that articulating this position on an English college campus didn’t win me too many friends—particularly at a time when the news was full of death and grief. So, hoping to be spared the mawkish reactions of my friends—who, I figured, would probably come up to grill me on the subject as soon as they heard about it—I went and locked my door.

It didn’t help. For as long as I live, I will never forget the look of astonishment and despair on the face of the BBC correspondent who had been sent to cover the massacre. Stopping to interview local residents, he almost immediately encountered a young man who suggested that, had more people on campus been armed, the carnage would likely have been stopped earlier. Another interlocutor urged caution, wondering aloud whether the state legislature’s recent rejection of a concealed-carry bill had deprived some of the victims of a fighting chance.

This was almost too much for my fellow countryman to bear. A few miles away lay thirty-three bodies—still warm, and riddled with bullets—and yet he was having difficulty finding anyone who would tell him that harsh reform was needed. Spluttering and blinking, and trying as hard as he could to shake off everything he thought he knew, he made a valiant effort to grasp his interviewees’ positions. But it was no good. For him, as with most Brits, the conviction that strict gun control is necessary is a standard part of the political catechism—absorbed as if by osmosis from a young age. Wrapping up his piece, he couldn’t help but snidely conclude that the Americans’ skepticism toward gun control was the product of an irrational and abstract belief system with which one simply cannot reason.

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