“WELL REGULATED”, A Report From The Minnesota Gun Rights Rally

“WELL REGULATED”,  A Report From The Minnesota Gun Rights Rally

Spray painted in fluorescent green on two sides of a cardboard sign, “WELL REGULATED”.  I took that message to the pro gun rally on March 31st  at the Capitol in St. Paul.  I chose these Second Amendment words a week after the youth-led rally of up to 20,000 (my guess was there were 10 or 15,000, but who really knows) demanded an end to gun violence and legal action to limit the ever-increasing number of deadly weapons in the U.S..  

This Saturday the winds were moderate and the temperature a few degrees higher than the cold march a week before.  I walked up the mall past a car with an InfoWars bumper sticker towards the Capitol steps arriving just after the rally got underway. 

I thought gun control advocates would be on the sidelines wearing orange t-shirts and holding signs to assert rights of safety, children’s education and freedom from fear.  But I saw none.  The steps of the Capitol were one-quarter filled with “don’t tread on me” flag carriers, burly men and women in camouflage gear, a few kids,  people carrying misspelled signs, American flags on poles and blue jean patches, pre-printed pro-Trump signs and tributes to their interpretation of the Second Amendment.  Many stood with handguns strapped to their sides.  I wandered through the gathering, very generously estimated by some media at 400 people.  

A convenor of the rally, probably Chris Dorr or Ben Dorr or Aaron Dorr, got it underway and made it plain that he, recently arrived from Iowa, or maybe Ohio, or perhaps some other state, was very unhappy with the Republicans at the Capitol. (City Pages, 5-10-2015, reported that the head of Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance here in Minnesota views the Dorrs as rip-offs:  "They prey on people's fears and paint things as pretty much going to heck in a handbasket right away if you don't send us money.”  They have a traveling show for gunners.)  GOP House Speaker Dowd, he complained, did not  allow a “stand your ground” law that would encourage civilian use of deadly force, even when less dangerous alternatives are evident and required by modern self-defense law.  One of the Dorrs made it clear that no legislator was welcome at their rally, to general applause.

WELL on one side, REGULATED on the other.  My sign.  Yes, I know that Antonin Scalia’s opinion in Miller was that “well regulated” was applicable to the militia only, but I wanted a conversation not a legal debate.

A man, probably about forty years old, dressed like he was going to a movie or back to the office for a  couple of hours stopped to talk.  I explained that I wanted to talk to people at the rally about what made sense for drawing practical lines within this abstract gun debate.  

He went right to the  “shall not be infringed” language of the Amendment.  I said:  “Well does that mean that any civilian should be able to keep and carry armed grenades?  An armed M-1 tank?  A shoulder launched missile?”  He responded with “I guess we can debate what constitutes a firearm.”  Not being a Second Amendment geek, I did not correct him to say the words are “keep and bear arms.”   But there is a line whose placement on the spectrum of deadliness was at least subject to debate.

He moved onto “what about machine guns, I suppose you don’t like machine guns, but it is legal to have and to shoot machine guns, if you have a federal license.”   I agreed that I did not like machine guns and thought that licensure was a very good thing if they are around.  That is another line that he agreed needs to be drawn somewhere.  The “militia” from Illinois who are charged with firebombing a mosque in Bloomington were recently indicted for having an unlicensed machine gun, but that was after the gun rally.  

He went on to ask about limits on the number of bullets in ammunition clips and I said limiting those would also be good.  I explained I particularly fear such guns because my son, a police officer, is required to go into dangerous situations, not retreat, situations made more dangerous because of the number and deadliness of guns out there.  He argued that restrictions on ammunition clips would disarm police and stated that “you never want to go into a gun fight with fewer bullets than the other guy.”  

I am not sure how that undercuts “well-regulated” gun ownership policies, but I think that in nearly 50 years in Minnesota, police have only been involved once in what I would call a gunfight.  In St. Paul in 2014 a criminal shot and killed one officer at a traffic stop and then triggered a shoot-out with other police several hours later. It  appears that neither Officer Patrick or any other police who were the shooting victims of other tragic crimes lacked firepower.  And the murderer of Officer Patrick might have killed more had he had bigger guns and more ammunition.

He proceeded next to the argument that possession of guns, lots of guns, guns with huge firepower, is the people’s last protection against government tyranny.  “That’s the first thing tyrants do, they take away people’s guns.”   

I heard revolutionary romantics make similar arguments in the 1970s.  I knew that the justifications offered by the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Weather Underground were rooted in the same kind of thinking and that it increased the apparent power of their movements.   I also know that the state, deep or shallow, is very ready to kill, imprison, threaten, blackmail, buy off or otherwise neutralize such threats, whether real or imagined.  

It happened when President Washington marched the Army on the Whiskey Rebellion’s armed tax protesters in 1794.  It happened in the Civil War.  It happened at Wounded Knee in the 19th and 20th centuries.  It happened in Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s bedroom in Chicago.  It happened at MIssissippi State and Kent State.  I think that the threat of actual tyranny is much greater now than it was in 1970 but think that armed resistance is both futile and misguided.

I said to my interlocutor:  “Surely you must know that the government has firepower that would immediately overwhelm even a well-armed citizenry, such as what you aim for?”  He agreed, saying, “Its not for something like, say, seizing an armory; but like if a police officer comes to your home without a warrant and insists on coming in.  Wouldn’t it be good to be able to say,  ’I stand on my rights and have a shotgun at hand.  Leave!’?”  

I did not respond with “Yeah, the armory raid didn’t work so well for John Brown.”  Nor with my view that in a democracy the answer to police violating constitutional boundaries is not firearms.   I did not  comment that there are already too many people, particularly black and brown-skinned people, shot by police for no reason or for bad reasons and that we don’t need to have even more situations where officers feel forced to use their guns.  Nor did I voice my reaction that I don’t want my son having to worry more than he must already do about encountering firearm threats when trying to protect the people. 

I think I just shook my head.  

I think that this fellow can repeat the cant, but doesn’t really believe in the “resistance to tyranny” argument.

I moved on to say how glad I was that the Second Amendment has not been so inviolate that my severely mentally ill brother, who for time obsessed about wanting guns to protect himself from imagined drug dealers, could get his hands on such weapons.  My debater fully agreed  that someone like my brother should not have guns.  

I said:  “But I thought there were no permissible limits on the people’s rights under the Second Amendment?  It make no exceptions for reason, age, capacity, wisdom, judgment or sanity.   So I guess we agree that lines must be drawn, we need to have discussions and have a government that makes reasonable choices about where those lines should be drawn.”  

In that space, his zone of power and passion, he was not convinced, but we had a civil discussion and I hope he will hang onto the idea that he, a gun guy, actually agrees  with “regulated.”  What sets us apart is our view on what constitutes “well”.  Our conversation ended and I turned my attention back to the speaker on the steps.  

This fellow identified himself as a member of the clergy and a former handgun permit holder.  I’ll call him Reverend Ruger as I missed his name.  He reported that he has relinquished the permit, and hinted that he continues to carry deadly weapons, in defiance of the law.  He is a proud, a very very proud, gun owner.  A Second Amendment absolutist, I suppose we might call him.  

He expressed his disdain for the “perverts back there” gesturing back at the Capitol.   “And they are all perverts, whether they call themselves Republicans or Democrats.”  His voice rose higher and higher through the PA,  cracking with greater emotion each time he spat out the word “pervert”, but I could not understand his charge of perversion.   Does he know something about men’s room rituals in the Senate Majority offices that the Red Star, I mean the Star Tribune, has failed to uncover?  

Not long ago, “Reverend Ruger” discovered that just down the road from his favorite place for target practice is, how could you guess, a training facility for swat teams.  He has, therefore, gathered together his buddies who also love their guns and they have all now bonded over the scent of cordite at his shooting place, organized themselves and made a pledge of mutual self-defense.  

Having thus established his readiness to confront tyranny, the speaker returned to his religious fervor …. and I lost his train of thought.  He went on at some length on several articles of faith, including the establishment of or the existence of or the threat of the Sanhedrin.  

The Sanhedrin?  The name echoed from somewhere....  Did this appear in some mystery novel I read about medieval religious artifacts and murders?  Is it in The DaVinci Code?  Does it appear in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?   (“Fake news” of a scurrilous nature created by a Russian anti-semite at the start of the 20th century.  800,000 copies were distributed by Henry Ford in the 1920s.)  

Wikipedia later informed me that the Sanhedrin was a 71 member “Supreme Court” of the top  rabbis of the Jewish people.  The Sanhedrin ceased to operate  about 1700 years ago but some have tried to reestablish from time to time:  Napoleon Bonaparte, for one, and orthodox Jews in Israel more recently. 

Did our speaker endorse the Sanhedrin?  Aspire to adjunct membership?  Did “Reverend Ruger” advocate taking up arms against the Sanhedrin?  I do not know.  

It was cold even though the rhetoric was hot.  I headed for home, but kept my sign.  The gun fetishists will have another rally on another, warmer day.  

Perhaps I’ll have some more line drawing discussions then.