Opinion Joni Ernst Is Right On Guns

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

There is a new argument against Iowa Republican Senate candidate Joni Ernst. To wit, that she should be excluded from the United States Senate because she just might shoot the parliamentarian the first time a procedural ruling goes against her.

In a recently unearthed video from a 2012 National Rifle Association meeting in Iowa, Ernst explained her devotion to her Smith & Wesson 9 millimeter in particular, and to her gun rights in general. “I believe,” she said, “in the right to defend myself and my family — whether it’s from an intruder, or whether it’s from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.”


The Left reacted to her statement a little like the squealing hogs Ernst talked of castrating in her famous ad, and with about as much care and rationality.

Margaret Carlson of Bloomberg said that Ernst declared “she would shoot first and ask questions later if the government violated her rights.”

“In the American system,” Paul Waldman of The Washington Post scolded, “we don’t say that if the government enacts policies we don’t like, we’ll start killing people.”

Ed Kilgore of the Washington Monthly alleged that the point of these kind of statements is “to intimidate liberals, and ‘looters’ and secular socialists, and those people.” (Yes, Bill Maher must be terrified.)

And Paul Begala accused her of toying with treason.

Ernst better not hope to get invited to any White House Christmas parties if she makes it to Washington, because she’s been all but deemed a security threat.

All of this is frank distortion or willful misunderstanding. Ernst never said she would shoot first and ask questions later, or lock-and-load if an increase in the federal minimum wage passes over her objections.

Accusing her of any of this is like saying that, because she promised to protect her family, she wants to shoot anyone who makes one of her grandkids cry.

The fact is that Ernst has a much more traditionally American attitude toward rights and gun ownership than her critics do, and for much of American history, her statement would have been utterly uncontroversial.

We live in a country founded by traitors, at least according to the view of the duly constituted governmental authority of the time, and these alleged traitors vindicated their rights by taking up arms.

There is a reason that an individual’s right to gun ownership is in the Constitution.

Joseph Story — who as one of the finest legal minds of the 19th century and the author of one of the greatest treatises on the Constitution is, admittedly, no Paul Begala — explained that “the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic.”

He warned that “one of the ordinary modes by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance is by disarming the people and making it an offence to keep arms,” and urged the preservation of “this powerful check upon the designs of ambitious men.”

It’s strange that the Left finds it completely fantastic that the government might so disregard peoples’ rights that they would have to undertake to defend those rights themselves.

It happened in this country in living memory, in connection with one of the main dramas of American history: the violent repression of blacks and their perseverance in the face of it and eventual triumph over it.

As my colleague Charles C. W. Cooke has cataloged at length (I draw on his work extensively here), guns are an integral part of the story.

The racist resistance to the new dispensation promised by the Union victory in the Civil War began, according to Adam Winkler of the UCLA School of Law, “with gun control at the very top of its agenda.”

For good reason: It is manifestly easier to lynch an unarmed man. Especially if he can’t call the authorities for help because the government is in bed with the bandits waging a low-intensity war against the constitutional rights of an entire class of people.

The journalist Ida B. Wells wrote of this post-bellum period: “The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense. The lesson this teaches, and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

The civil rights movement eventually transformed the country with its nonviolent agitation, but in the meantime many blacks in the South believed, to borrow the title of Charles E. Cobb’s recent book on guns and civil rights, “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed.”

Fannie Lou Hamer, the righteous Mississippi civil rights leader, had a robust view of her right to self-defense: “the first cracker even looks like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.”

Charles Cobb told NPR, “I lived with families in the South. There was never a family I stayed with that didn’t have a gun. I know, from personal experience and the experiences of others, that guns kept people alive.”

They all must have been gun nuts like Joni Ernst.

Of course, it is basically unthinkable that we’ll ever confront analogous circumstances again. For that matter, it’s also unlikely that Joni Ernst will ever have to defend her family against an intruder.

Just in case, though, she has her 9mm insurance policy, like a free and independent American.