WHY GUN OWNERS WON’T GIVE UP : The Last Refuge of the Law-Abiding : Disarming citizens while the culture of violence thrives is a sociological experiment that none can afford or will allow.

The passage of the so-called Brady bill is being heralded by latter-day prohibitionists as the breach through which further anti-gun legislation will rush, eventually to deprive me and millions of other Americans of my class of the most cherished of our constitutional and natural rights, the right to keep and bear arms for our own and the common defense. I am heartsick.

When I speak of “my class,” I’m not talking about wealth or race or national ancestry. Some of us are wealthy, others poor. Our complexions range from “black” to “white” and all the shades between. Our ancestors spoke Cherokee or Spanish or English or Korean or German or some other one of the world’s thousands of tongues. Some of us can trace our ancestry on this soil for thousands of years, others remember coming here as strangers. Some, like me, are political liberals, others, like my brother, conservatives.

We are farmers, artists, housewives, soldiers, schoolteachers, factory workers, doctors--nothing grand, but respectable. We are far from perfect, but we try our best and we have evolved with the consciousness of the times. It’s perhaps not too inaccurate to describe ourselves as typical of the rootstock of the American nation.

But the unifying factor that makes us a class is our devotion to this country and its traditions, including the tradition that Americans have the right to own their own arms, and the duty to know how to use them and to come to the aid of their families, their communities and their nation in time of need.

When called upon, we have entered the military with our skill at arms and as civilians we have been equally ready to defend ourselves, our families and our communities in times of riot, insurrection, natural disaster or criminal infestation. We are, in fact, members of the militia, the body of the people, armed, as conceived by the Founding Fathers and as defined by law. We take pride in this and in our self-reliance, and to be told now that we are not to be trusted, that only the agents of the state are to be armed, is to cheapen our citizenship.

In advocating the disarmament of the American people, the intellectual elite promoting gun prohibition has considered only possible benefits: the reduction of gang shootings in the cities and an eventual limitation of the arms available to criminals through theft and the black market. But what of the probable cost of these “reforms”? More than half of the households in the United States contain firearms. While a bare majority of the public is said to favor “gun control,” far larger majorities reject it when it is defined as meaning that only the police and military may possess handguns and semi-automatic rifles.

When faced with confiscation of their arms or prison, some will resist violently. How many Wacos will result? How many otherwise peaceful citizens will die in the noble experiment to make the world a little safer for gangbangers? I don’t know; those aren’t my circles, I can only testify to what will happen when this solid middle-class guy opens a letter from some agency of the state commanding me to report to an armory or police station with my arms and surrender them.

I will call my lawyer and the summons will be ignored. There would then necessarily follow some process of the authorities obtaining a search warrant, coming to my house, confiscating any arms they find and then arresting me as a felon. I would not resist by force, but I would feel compelled to make my arrest and trial as legally arduous and as expensive for the state as possible. To do otherwise would be to dishonor myself by consenting to this degradation of my status as an American.

Multiply my case by millions and imagine the result for public morale, law enforcement and the judicial system.

I might add that enthusiasm for such a search-and-seize process would be almost totally nonexistent among street police officers, who generally have strong feelings favoring the rights of law-abiding citizens to own personal arms.

And after a few thousand resisters have been killed and millions of Americans have been embittered in the prosecution of this new victimless crime, how will justice have been served and how many lives will we have saved?

All of this activity on behalf of “gun control” may make those who propose it feel good, but it is a dangerous distraction from our real problems.

What is it in contemporary American society that produces so many people who are willing and eager to kill? Why do young men join violent gangs and search for self-worth by terrorizing their neighborhoods? Why does discontent with a jury decision lead to riot and looting, rather than nonviolent civic disobedience? Why have so many American families dissolved and why are so many young men growing up without fathers, finding their role models in actors in violent movies or anarchic singers? Why do the media feature so many full-page movie ads featuring angry men waving exotic and powerful weapons? Why were the previews of the new TV season filled with shot after shot, explosion after explosion? Is the American public, like the citizens of the later Roman Empire, capable of being entertained only by violence and death?

We not only shoot; we stab, strangle, and bludgeon to death a higher percentage of our citizens than more peaceful countries.

Have we given up on curing the problems of our society? Have we decided that since we are failing to make every one of us good, we should settle for making all of us harmless? A society of psychopaths in straitjackets is still sick; we need to cure the love of violence in a few, not provide straitjackets for everyone.

Would it not be better to cooperate to discover and attack the root causes of all this violence rather than to split the country over an issue that, however serious, is only a symptom?

We ordinary Americans recognize the terrible problem of violence in our society, and we realize that too-easy access to arms can be a factor in the expression of that violence. We are willing to consider some legislation regulating the access to firearms for the criminal, the insane and the irresponsible as part of a far wider effort to heal America. But we will not, cannot, cooperate in the effort to suspend our constitutional right to bear arms for the sake of a sociological experiment.