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Finally, if you've made it this far into the web site, check out this great essay by Cindy Hill, a pro-gun progressive from Middlebury, Vermont. (Used with permission from Dragonfire: www.dfire.org/x400.xml)
"I'm beginning to see what you’ve been saying all these years about the gun thing," my friend Linda said recently, clearly incredulous at her own words. Linda worked as an educator with disadvantaged youth in the international-refugee resettlement city of Burlington, Vermont, where people from Romania, Bosnia and the Sudan have been placed by government aid programs. She was a union organizer, card-carrying liberal Democrat and social activist.
She told me of a community storytelling event she had put together to give immigrant youth a chance to share personal histories in the hopes of defusing some tension and group antagonism. One after another, students from elementary through high school talked about urban poverty or agrarian land theft in their homelands. Then, a 10-year-old girl from Eastern Europe stood up and began to talk about a night when the army came to every home, removing guns. There would be no more shooting, no more war, no more crime. But two days later, said the girl, they came back and took away all the men – our fathers, our brothers, our uncles. We’ve never seen them again.
Linda’s eyes were wet; I know she could not help but think what she would do if someone came to take away her husband and son. "This wasn’t 1945," she said haltingly. "This was last year. These people couldn’t even defend themselves." All I could do was put my arms around her. Saying "I told you so" was hardly called for.
I am the worst nightmare for people on both the left and the right of the political spectrum: a liberal woman lawyer with a gun. But I am not alone. My list of shooting buddies is thick with Greenpeace activists, ACLU members and Democratic-party -voting soccer moms. But why would a liberal American, 200 years after the last foreign troops occupied our shores, carry a gun?
Defense against tyranny is one reason, even here in America, where law enforcement is increasingly militarized and federalized, where the Patriot Act sanctifies warrantless searches, where federal gun control now makes gun possession illegal for about 40 percent of the population. This is the essence of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, pure and simple: Armed people can secure and maintain their freedom.
But this isn't the only reason liberals have guns. Five more spring easily to mind.
1. Agriculture. How do you think that lovely organic beef gets from the field where it’s happily munching grass to your plate? Do you think Buddhist monks meditate on convincing the herd to lay down and die so you can eat? The cow takes a bullet through the head. People on farms use guns every day just like they use tractors and shovels. Meat is harvested, injured animals are relieved of misery, and rabid threats to farms are removed – all using the business end of a barrel. Here in New England and across the rural South, many small farmers are liberals with guns.
2. Personal defense. In the midst of an unsuccessful political campaign a few years back, a locally renowned lesbian activist in a wheelchair pulled up to me at a public appearance. "I want to talk to you about guns," she said. I braced myself. "I want to thank you for your support of gun ownership," she continued.
I blinked. Did I hear that right?
"These anti-gun people apparently don't know what it’s like to be knocked out of your wheelchair, robbed and left to die on the sidewalk on a cold night. The second time that happened to me, I said never again. I mean, what am I supposed to do? Run away? Speak sternly to them?" She raised a corner of her chair seat cloth enough for me to glimpse the butt of a large handgun. She sat silently a moment, lost in painful thoughts. "Guns equalize physical power," she said. "Women, the elderly, those of us with disabilities, we can't physically protect ourselves with our bodies. This gives my body back its dignity."
3. Recreation. A summer morning spent shooting .22 caliber rifles with my three girls is a wonderful family event. They exercise extraordinary responsibility and are rewarded with ever-increasing skills visibly demonstrated by clusters of holes punched in paper plates. The physical effects are similar to tai chi or yoga: target shooting requires mental focus, body awareness, breath control, fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. The Zen of target sports is that the focus required – and the reward of a shot well made – releases tension and infuses the shooter with self-confidence.
4. Environmentalism. Wouldn’t it be nice if poachers just stopped killing elephants in Africa, seals in North America, tigers in India? If simply passing laws and running photo spreads of tortured animals in environmental magazines made them stop? Well, they won’t. Commercial poachers are best stopped with their own medicine: a well-placed bullet. Print all the cute animal posters you want, but threatened wildlife is protected by guys and gals with guns. Many a liberal American environmental activist has put his or her shooting skills to use volunteering with governmental and private organizations dedicated to doing just that.
5. Civil rights. Charlton Heston – good ole’ white-boy past president of the National Rifle Association – was one of the major speakers at the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington. Hard to fit those two images together? Blame a media that has increasingly insisted that gun owners and right-wing Republicans are co-terminus groups. It’s easier to tell a two-sided, good guy/bad guy news story than to confuse it with complicated facts.
Here in Vermont, our state constitution insists that Vermont citizens not only have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the state, but a duty to bear arms to protect the civil rights of our fellow citizens. As we watch daily the decay of our criminal justice system, the erosion of our protected liberties, a federal government bulldozing over state and local control, protection of our civil rights is something we liberals are willing to shoot for.
Cindy Hill is an attorney and freelance writer in Middlebury, Vermont. She is author of Creative Lawyering: A Handbook for Practice in the Twenty First Century (Xlibris 2005) and Brady Denial? You Can Get Your Guns Back (Paladin Press 2005). When not writing and lawyering, she raises chickens, target shoots, spins and knits, and plays fiddle in an Irish pub band.
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