Not With A Bang, But A Whimper

This is how the world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
-T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

How are rights lost? As a rule, the answer is, “In much the same manner as they are won.” Rarely do free societies abandon their liberties in a swoop. Instead, they let them go over time—slowly, subtly, even imperceptibly. Whatever the movies might imply, it is complacency—not shock—that marks the disintegration of once-cherished freedoms. With exquisite precision, the walls are dismantled piece by piece, so that by the time the final brick is removed, there is little surprise to accompany the milestone.

Should Americans lose their Second Amendment-protected rights, it will almost certainly be by dint of this hidden and unlovely process. As a native of Great Britain, I am often asked why the British were so quiet back in 1997, the year their government summarily banned all handguns. (And I do mean all: So complete is the prohibition that the UK’s Olympic shooting team now has to train in France.) “Why,” curious Americans like to inquire, “didn’t anybody do something?”

The answer is elementary: Because the British were at the end of a long century of harsh restrictions, and the citizens had grown quietly accustomed to the infringement of their rights. It is true that the handgun ban was popular; the few protests that were staged that year were small in size and short in length. But it is also true that the citizenry was witnessing the final assault in a long and dulling series. Step by step, the attitudes of the people had been reshaped and transmuted, such that by the time the coup de grace was inflicted, they didn’t know—or care—what they were losing.

Before 1903, there were no gun laws to speak of in the UK. (Readers of a literary bent will recall that Sherlock Holmes frequently accosts passers-by on the streets of London and asks to borrow their pistols.) By 1997, they were manifold. In the interim, a culture was lost.

To review the relevant history is to notice that there was no obvious turning point in the history of British gun control—no dramatic hinge on which the eventual collapse could be hung. Every decade, things just got worse, until eventually there was no road left to travel.

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