SHARE

By

While riding as a passenger en route to a gun show, I asked the driver what kind of magazines he had stuffed into the three cardboard boxes in the back seat.

"Playboys," he responded, "One hundred and thirty of them from the 1960s that I recently bought at a rummage sale for $20."

When he offered any one of my choice to me for free, I reached backward beyond my view and randomly extracted the issue from March of 1969. My first impression was that coincidence, and not fate, had intended that particular magazine for me. On the very first page was an ad for air-cooled Volkswagens, a breed of car that I fell in love with at age 18, and have had at least one of in my garage ever since. We chuckled and went to the show. Later that week, I thought perhaps some other force had caused me to select this magazine from the stack.

On page 80, there was a lengthy and blistering article authored by U.S. Sen. Joseph D. Tydings titled: "Americans and the Gun." Tydings began by proclaiming that he was an avid sportsman, hunter and gun owner who strongly believes in constitutional rights. He finished his article by stating that he would be more than willing to register his guns with the government and have his possession of those guns subject to the government being willing to issue a license to him to allow that possession. The bulk of the article berated the National Rifle Association and its then 1 million members for defeating proposed federal legislation that would mandate nationwide licensing and registration.

Tydings wrote that letters in opposition from Americans were so great in number that they had to be stored in the hallways. A reader might draw the conclusion that since the letters, according to Tydings, were the result of the NRA's legislative alert, the concerns of these Americans were of no value. The senator wrote little about the wholly unpopular concept of gun licensing and registration with the remainder of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Included, of course, are paragraphs and paragraphs of arguments that since guns are engines occasionally used to kill people, making it very difficult for Americans who don't kill people to obtain and possess firearms will in some way result in having murderers and criminals unable to have easy access to guns as well.

Today, the NRA has more than 5 million dues-paying members who donate additional money so that the organization can continue its defensive battles against those who, like Tydings, would infringe on America's unique freedom to "keep and bear" arms.

Now the parents of some of the children murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy have initiated litigation against the arms industry claiming that the type of legally obtained and lawfully possessed firearms used in that shooting never should have been available to American citizens. The plaintiff's argument is that only the military and police should be armed with firearms capable of heavy firepower.

And yet the AR-15 rifle and Glock pistol are two of the most popular guns in America and have been so for decades. The fact is that high-capacity, semiautomatic firearms were developed and have been in the possession of American citizens since the late 1800s. Even the famed German Luger, actually invented by an American, and otherwise known as the pistol(e) of 1908, was available with a 32-cartridge magazine. By the early 1900s, machine guns were commonly and legally owned by private citizens. They still are. While slightly different in appearance, the guns used at Sandy Hook employ the same mechanism as firearms manufactured decades before World War I.

A lawsuit asking the courts to declare that the sale of certain firearms to citizens establishes liability for the arms industry is likely as frivolous and without standing as previous efforts. Testimony during congressional debates of a previous bill stated that this type of litigation was like blaming the automakers for deaths caused by drunken drivers or claiming that the manufacturers of dinnerware made one become obese.

Strangely, and now predictably, every assault on the Second Amendment results in the NRA growing bigger, stronger and more influential. Perhaps the final word on the subject is a recent Pew Research Center report that showed 60% of Americans are opposed to restrictions on their gun rights. The figure rises to 70% among Hispanics with an ever-growing number of African-Americans opposing restrictions on their American firearm freedoms, as well.

James E. Fendry is director of Wisconsin Pro-Gun Movement.