printIn “Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm,*” the talented Hollywood playwright, author, director, and producer David Mamet motivates for his individual right to defend life, liberty and property.
As a conventional conservative or Republican, Mamet’s positions are often pat, lacking philosophical depth. For example: He fingers The Bureaucracy as ineffectual because lacking in compassion and common sense. However, like most members of the right-leaning establishment, Mamet is incapable of explaining the underlying dynamic or structure that accounts for the inversion of economic incentives in the bureaucracy, irrespective of the good intentions and good character of the bureaucrats.
Mamet also mouths the conventional conservative talking points about affirmative action: that it is based in the mistaken premise that “black people have fewer abilities than white people,” a notion Mamert calls “monstrous.”
The “I love blacks, so I want to make them compete on an equal footing” mantra is as prevalent a platitude among conservatives as it is stupid. Affirmative action is based on the immutable fact of blacks’ lower aggregate scores in academia and in other fields. The “monstrous” part of it is that quotas treat all individual blacks as part of an underachieving, oppressed cohort. As does it lump all whites—the poor, the underprivileged and the victimized too—in a group that needs to suffer for the sake of black upliftment.
Also lackluster or absent is Mamet’s defense of a natural right that predates the constitutional right to bear arms. But Mamet should be appreciated for writing very well, and for being a lone voice for reason and rights in Hollywood, writing that,
…there are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed citizen deterring or stopping armed criminals; a number four times that of all crimes involving firearms.
The Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the hands of a citizen is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be used in the prevention of crime, but what is there about criminals that ensures that their gun use is accident-free? If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.
Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed, and so crime runs riot.
Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less crime. What criminal would be foolish enough to rob a gun store? But the government alleges that the citizen does not need this or that gun, number of guns, or amount of ammunition.
[SNIP]
* Chelm: From Mamet’s reference to Chelm, I concluded that he is probably Jewish (and well-educated, of course, which he is).