22nd Annual Gun Rights Policy Conference

by Dave Workman
Senior Editor

Our GRPC 2007 report is divided into sessions for easier reading.
Click on the desired section to read.

October 6, 2007
October 7, 2007

“We believe that the way to deal with hate crimes is through armed self-defense...”

Pop Culture
Author Clayton Cramer led the next panel, recalling how he became involved in the gun rights culture and, as a result, authored books and articles promoting gun rights from a historical perspective. He is largely credited with debunking the now-discredited book by Michael Bellesiles a few years ago entitled Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture.

His new book, Armed America, documents in detail the historical presence of firearms in America and how guns have been part of traditional America.

“This has been a country where gun ownership is the norm,” he said. “It is accepted and has often been required.”

Cramer explained how in the 1980s, the gun community was “in deep, serious trouble in this country.” The assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and later on John Lennon, turned off an entire generation to gun ownership. They considered guns evil, he said.

“We now have a generation that has grown up after those great traumas and they’re able to approach the question of guns quite a bit more rationally,” the author said.

They have realized that ordinary people can carry firearms in public and not cause tragedies. This new generation sees guns not as a negative, but perhaps in neutral terms or even as a positive.

He also believes that the 9/11 terrorist attack changed the popular attitude about guns.

Cramer said the “national elites” are “divided from the people” on the issue of gun ownership, but he added that nationally, “Democrats are running from gun control, doing their darnedest to pretend that it is not an issue. They recognize that it is a loser for them in elections.”

He called that a “positive sign.”

Dr. Timothy Wheeler, director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Claremont Institute, noted that, “today we’re riding a wave of success” in the gun rights movement.

“That success was won by battles that were fought very hard in the Congress,” he observed, “in the legislatures and in the city halls, often times out of sight of even us activists and we owe those people who have been in the trenches a debt of gratitude.”

Wheeler, a GRPC veteran speaker, discussed how the country has shifted toward a right-to-carry philosophy, but not without difficulty. When he was a resident surgeon at a Cleveland, OH, hospital, he was one of three doctors who carried guns to and from work. The laws have changed to allow legal concealed carry in Ohio since then, thanks to the work of grassroots groups like the Buckeye Firearms Association, he noted.

But Wheeler’s primary message to the group was that they are the vessels of change. Quoting Abraham Lincoln, Wheeler told them, “Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the government. Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes possible or impossible to be executed.”

He then explained how he and pro-gun colleagues struggled for years to overcome what he calls “bigotry in white coats” practiced by anti-gun physicians who tried to take over the medical community.

“I tried to reason with them, but to my amazement,” he recalled, “they were not interested in facts. These people with “M.D.” after their names, who prided themselves on scientific objectivity, they not only ignored the mountain of scientific evidence accumulated by scholars like John Lott that defended responsible gun ownership, they actively suppressed that research. They tried to keep it from coming to light. I couldn’t believe it. These ivory tower doctors were bigots in white coats.”

But then a change began, he said.

“When we took our case to the people and tapped that deep well of public sentiment, we got results,” Wheeler said.

He and other pro-gun doctors suddenly found themselves doing interviews on talk radio, and they appeared on television. Finally, after the public overwhelmingly supported their position, the president of the medical association invited the pro-gunners to be on a panel during a conference. It was a learning experience, Wheeler said.

“He learned how deadly serious we are in our fight to protect our way of life,” he noted.

Wheeler said the time has come when people no longer have to sit silently while their family physician spouts anti-gun rhetoric unchallenged.

“They are no match for the truth and they are no match for you,” he said of anti-gun doctors. “You don’t have to be shamed into silence when someone attacks your right to keep and bear arms. You don’t have to meekly go along when some doctor, in the privacy of the exam room, probes you or your kids about how many guns you have and tells you to get rid of your guns.

“Each one of you can be a cultural warrior for gun rights,” Wheeler added. “Each one of you can mold public opinion. By standing up and speaking out for gun rights each one of you can make it possible for statutes and decisions to be executed.”

Wrapping up the panel, Nicole Stallard, spokesperson for the Pink Pistols, a gay gun rights organization, told the audience that the organization was formed “to deal with hate crimes.”

“We believe that the way to deal with hate crimes is through armed self-defense,” Stallard said. “Our group overwhelmingly supports the Second Amendment. We overwhelmingly support the right of carry. We want to see 50-state carry.”

The Pink Pistols, Stallard continued, “overwhelmingly opposes feel-good (hate crime) legislation.”

“It’s ineffective, it’s divisive, it creates more government in our lives, it destroys the concept of equality under the law,” she noted. “We prefer national carry, not federal hate crime laws. 9-1-1 gets you dead, 1911 (pistols) keeps you alive.”

Acknowledging that the gay community is paranoid about firearms and about being persecuted, Stallard said that logically, gays should be overwhelmingly pro-gun “to protect themselves from violence from individuals and protect themselves from violence from government.” However, gays largely associate themselves with the anti-gun political left, and because they are largely urban dwellers, they have very little if any experience with firearms. When they watch the news, all they hear is that guns are bad, so they form an opinion reflective of what the media tells them.

Gays are politically active, and “that’s bad for us,” Stallard added.

“Gunowners are negatively linked to radical Christian rights bigots,” Stallard said. “Most Christians I’ve run into are actually pretty good people.”

Stallard concluded by noting, “Today we live under what I call soft tyranny. Hard tyranny comes in a gun free society.”
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