Gun-Fu: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 182-184

 The chapter begins like all of Cooper's chapters with a title and then a bunch of sub-titles. The title of this chapter is "Lessons from Lithuania" and then it subtitles with the Second Amendment--surprisingly the whole thing. Cooper does not ignore that inconvenient first half that modern gun fetishists concentrate on. He then goes on to Patrick Henry's famous quote, but again he gives the full thing: "I know not what others may do. But as for me, give me liberty or give me death." 

Cooper is unlikely to know this: it's very doubtful that Patrick Henry uttered these words. What we know is that he gave a speech in Virginia in 1775 which pushed the Virginia legislature toward desiring independence from England, but his speech was never recorded. The line comes from the recollection of people decades later. As much as I would like to attack Cooper for getting this wrong, I cannot do so, he would not have access to the scholarly research on the subject, and the book that made that research popular would not come out until after Cooper's death. 

Cooper has primed us to think that this chapter is going to be about gun rights and Cooper further impresses upon us that idea, "I had intended to write a long and thoroughly referenced chapter on the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, the right of the people to keep and bear arms."

Cooper is being a little superfluous: no one who reads this book is going to be unfamiliar with the Second Amendment. The entire description reads like someone trying to reach a word count. As further quibble I sincerely doubt that Cooper was planning on doing this. He's not going to replace a thoroughly referenced chapter with this, only because this is two pages long. I have no doubt that it would be referenced but I've seen his references and his sources are never what he thinks they are. 

He admits eating crow with this addition to his book. So we have to talk about who wrote the section. Neal Knox is the reason that the NRA is the militant organization that it is today. Prior to the late 90s the NRA's magazine, American Rifleman, was a much different thing. It focused on gun safety, hunting, and shooting competitions. They had a recurring article that would find news pieces about people defending themselves from crime with guns and a steady editorial section concerning the right to bear arms. However, in the mid-90s it began taking a tone shift. Cover articles calling federal law enforcement "jack-booted thugs," excoriating any possible restriction on gun ownership, and even background checks were now normal. The first example caused President George HW Bush to turn in his membership. The tone was now panicked, fear-mongering, and borderline conspiratorial; and we have Neal Knox to thank for it. 

Knox was always a hardliner on gun issues and in 1991, he and like-minded extremists took over the NRA board. He narrowly lost becoming president to Charlton Heston in 1997 and was removed from the organization. So Knox is going to bring his "expertise" to what Cooper was going to write. Cooper believes that Knox is a better writer on this subject than he is, but that is what we will have to find out. 

Knox begins his essay by claiming that "If Lithuania had a Second Amendment, Mikhail Gorbachev violated it on March 22, 1990 -- Russian troops seized arms from the Lithuanian militia. Or was "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" actually violated two days earlier, when Premier Gorbachev ordered private citizens to turn in their hunting and competition guns to the Russian army within one week "for temporary safekeeping" or have them confiscated and their owners imprisoned?"

What's happening here is the conspiratorial bait and switch. In the first sentence, Knox makes the claim that if Lithuania had a 2nd Amendment, then the USSR violated it. This is hypothetical, Lithuania does not, nor did it, have a second amendment. When Knox goes on, he talks as if the US law extends to Lithuania. Also, we should note that the Soviet confiscation of weapons was against the Lithuanian militia, and what neither Knox (nor Cooper) provides is context. 

In 1990, specifically on March 11th, Lithuania declared independence from the USSR. The USSR disagreed and began issuing orders to assert its control over the new country. On March 22nd, the date Knox speaks of, there was no confiscation of guns, but there was a suspension on the legal sale of hunting rifles. It is true that they asked citizens to turn in their weapons. Premier Gorbachev was specifically trying to avoid a civil war. I'm curious where Knox is getting his information though, he's not incorrect but he's got the wrong interpretation. 

Knox uses the phrase "right of the people to keep and bear arms" twice in the same paragraph but it's a non-sequitur because that's US law. It does not apply to a Soviet nor does it apply to a Lithuanian after March 11th, 1990. 

Knox knows this because he later remarks that the Soviet Union guaranteed the right of the citizens to own firearms. He's not exactly right. Immediately after the Russian Revolution, the new government confiscated all weapons. Then slowly it began allowing citizens to own various types of hunting rifles. By 1960, the law allowed more ownership rights but these were restricted to hunting weapons (including pistols). There was never a "Constitutional freedom" to own a gun in the USSR, it was a matter of legal permission from the Soviet Union. Knox may think that the "Declaration of the Rights of Working and Exploited People" is similar to the US Constitution and thus its aim to arm the working classes is legally binding, but Knox fails to understand that this declaration was amended repeatedly. He should also realize that this document is about arming all people with the goal of a Socialist revolution--which is something I'm sure that Knox opposes. 

With all of that being said, none of these matters. The situation in Lithuania had long been resolved by the time this book had come out. Lithuania was granted independence in a relatively peaceful manner. By September of the following year, even the USSR recognized Lithuania as a sovereign nation. Knox does not want any of his readers to know this. What he wants is for his readership to fear the oncoming Stalinist army taking their guns in order to subjugate them later. What matters the most is that the firearm ban, the gun confiscations, and the dissolution of an armed militia in Lithuania had no effect on the outcome of the revolution. Knox is telling the story of a disarmed populace that still earned their freedom, this is the opposite of the story he wants to be telling. 

Knox ends with a quick aside about General Jaruzelski who declared martial law and confiscated all of the guns in Poland in 1981. He then explains that this is the only path that martial law leads to. Now, I'm a bit curious as to why this story isn't the focus. It doesn't take long to figure out why though. The Polish government was afraid of a Soviet invasion if they didn't crush the solidarity movement that was developing in Poland. It would turn out that the USSR had no plans, according to Russian President Boris Yeltsin later, to invade Poland. I think that because martial law was introduced to prevent a Soviet intervention Knox avoids focusing on this, more drastic and more pertinent to his position, event. 

The above summary is the salient point of the Knox addition to this book. Which is very disappointing. Knox will, as I said, reshape the NRA into what it is today--but this was the best he could do? He has a poorly understood historical event which argues the opposite of his point. Cooper had to eat humble pie for this? No. Cooper had no intention of writing a thoroughly referenced and detailed chapter on gun rights. He found this post by Knox somewhere on the internet and then inserted it. 

While it is refreshing that the chapter is so short, it's a bit frustrating that we aren't getting Cooper's thoughts on guns.