by C. Rodney James
I had a wonderful opportunity at NRA in Indianapolis for a one-on-one interview with Mike Pence—Indiana’s governor.
As a card-carrying Ph.D. I often wonder why America funds universities, staffs them with scholars with doctoral degrees, tasks these professors with doing original research (much of it with government funding) then proceeds to ignore their findings. For a nation claiming a high value on education this makes no sense.
I about gag listening to TV anchors and pundits as they discuss “gun violence” and “gun control” in a discourse limited to a kind of horserace analysis of how a particular proposed gun law or amendment to such a law appears to be gaining or losing ground as it goes through Congress. When the likes of Senator Feinstein or ex-Mayor Bloomberg pontificate on the critical need for more gun control laws (ASAP) I have yet to hear a news anchor raise the question of whether these will actually be of any use, let alone, request a justification for same.
In the wake of the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968 a number of sociologists and criminologists, many of them filled with enthusiasm for the new law, began looking for hard evidence that bans, waiting periods and background checks would effect significant reductions in homicide and other violent crimes. They went into the field, collected the data and crunched the numbers. Over 40 years and more than 100 studies later, with the publication of nearly that many books detailing their results, the researchers found that 95% of these studies concluded that gun-control laws made no statistical difference in homicide rates. The remaining 5% were inconclusive. How could anyone consider such results resounding support for gun control?
Whatever happened to those tough journalists who asked tough questions? I was just a kid, but I remember how Edward R. Murrow took on Sen. Joe McCarthy;in the televised ArmyMcCarthy hearings where Judge Joseph Welch asked the senator: “Have you no sense of decency?” Journalists have been replaced by “news anchors” whose tough questioning is (selectively) confined to nodding their heads while looking concerned. Those of us who look to the PBS News Hour for something better haven’t found it. The News Hour folk love to stand tall (particularly at pledge time) to remind us of their dedication to “indepth, fact-finding, unbiased reporting.” Judy Woodruff gets an “A” for nodding while looking concerned. Mark Shields shakes his jowls and lectures us that “nobody needs an assault rifle!”
Gov. Pence favored me with a look of patient tolerance as though he’d heard this harangue before.
“Everybody has an agenda,” he said “Political figures and organizations. The media has its agenda and selects and ignores facts as it chooses.”
He went on to make clear that his position, in regard to Second Amendment issues, is based on the Constitution. It may be added the governor was a Constitutional scholar when he studied law at Indiana University’s Robert H. Mckinney School of Law, where he received his JD.
When we elect our political leaders it is with the hope they are better than we are—smarter, more honest, more thoughtful, more caring, more inclined to do the right thing. Not long ago I watched our president on TV. He looked very peeved in speaking of the defeat of the latest gun-control effort; how Congress had failed to step up and do something MEANINGFUL. “That if it could save one life…”
Before the passage of GCA 68, before there was any research on the worth (or lack thereof) of gun control, Pete Shields—president of Handgun Control, Inc. (that metamorphed into The Brady Campaign) would weep before the TV cameras using those exact words to support gun control as an act of faith.
Gov. Pence has stuck to the Constitution in his position on firearms issues. He voted yes in support of the rule prohibiting product misuse lawsuits against gun manufacturers and again against product misuse suits against gun makers and sellers. He supported the National Cross-State Standard for concealed carry. He cosponsored the Firearms Interstate Commerce Reform Act to loosen restrictions on interstate gun purchases. He commended the NRA for its Eddie Eagle GunSafe program for the life-saving work it has accomplished, urging local support for the continued use of this program in elementary schools.
Gov. Pence has received the NRA’s “A” rating for his support of the Second Amendment.
