Can cultural snobbery crowd out common sense?
by Raheem Kassam
When Austin Petersen first met me in 2009, I must confess, I was as anti-Second Amendment as Bashar al-Assad probably is right now. Guns in the hands of citizens is not a concept that I, as a Brit living in a leafy London suburb could ever understand the importance or sanctity of. It was a foolish an uneducated position that I blame myself for primarily, but also a cultural snobbery that I now realise suggests an inherent belief not just in government as an entity, but in those who are charged with disposing the powers that government gives them. I hereby repent publicly, as I have done privately for over a year now. And I hope you, dear reader, can forgive me.
My familiarity with the Second Amendment (for we have no such concept in Britain) came as recently as what the British media would describe as the “spate” of public shootings in the United States. Bizarrely, instead of concerning ourselves with our own issues, Britain submerged itself in the American gun debate, starting with Gabby Giffords, through Aurora, and reaching schadenfreudesque frenzy over Newtown. Media pundits as well as my Facebook friends seemed to revel with glee at the deaths of the victims – as it gave them all a chance to say, “I told you so.”
I’m sorry we’ve exported him to you, but I am pleased, for my own sanity, that Piers Morgan no longer has a platform in Britain by which to exercise his idiocy.
I, at the time of each of the shootings, became outspoken on the issue. The comparisons being made between Britain and America were to my mind, entirely farcical. As one of the last remaining Americophiles in the classical liberal movement in Britain, this irked me. So I threw myself into research. Did places with higher gun ownership have higher crime rates? Did the perpetrators obtain their guns legally? Are “mass shootings” becoming more frequent in the United States? And so on. The answers to all these questions will likely be quite obvious to American readers with any semblance of integrity about their arguments, but to the British media and the wider establishment it was unclear that to all those queries the answer is emphatically, “No.”
Bonnie Greer. We both arrived at the Channel 5 studios sure of our respective positions. She was supposed to be the anti-gun voice, and me, the callous, conservative, gung-ho gun but. I am unsure as to whether it is fair to say this, but chatting over stale coffee and make-up in the green room, I felt a distinct alteration in Ms. Greer’s position. After over 30 minutes of off-air discussion on the matter, I had quite efficiently explained all of the findings of my research on the matter to Ms. Greer. The result? That when we appeared live on the debate together, there was almost no debate to be had. Greer was almost completely on my side now, assuring the audience that American gun rights were embedded, intrinsic, and almost crucial. Did we both care deeply that many had died and suffered? Of course. But finally the truth was beginning to permeate. And that, on this issue, in Britain and elsewhere, is novel.
All of this isn’t to say that my contemporaries will overnight change their minds and their attitudes towards gun ownership, but it heartened me to see that when provided with the evidence, those whom we might class as instinctively and irretrievably hostile to guns, can and have been swayed by the truth.
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