One Side of the Great Gun Divide

To the Editor:

(Hubbardsville, NY – March 2013) The last three weeks of February, I worked out of my home signing people up for the civil rights rally that took place in Albany, Feb. 28. Whatever the actual figure – 10,000, 12,000, 14,000 – there is no question it was the largest rally Albany has seen in our lifetimes and – just guessing – probably ever.

My work took the form of answering phone calls, taking names, directing checks for $20 to my address to pay for seats on the two buses our Hamilton area added to the 180-plus from around the state. I swear this kitchen more resembled a bookie joint of an earlier time – phone jingling off the cradle, papers stacked and unstacked, spilling from envelopes and tucked under accumulated news releases.

What really took form over those days and evenings was 88 people reserving their seats and a small place in history, a community of injured souls – good people united by a profound sense of grief and betrayal at the hands of their state government.

What had started as a liaison post, really only a switchboard operator to fill seats, took on a far more compelling aspect, more a role of confessor, counselor or triage nurse, witness to a wounding not even dreamed of in any coverage of our current Bill of Rights debate by print, net or TV journalists.

Indeed, the “lead” in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, the human-interest angle editors pursued in search of justice and Pulitzers, has been howlingly absent in the coverage of Americans’ battle to retain our Second Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution.

Just as there are victims of violence done by gun, so there are victims of gun crime laws. Jan. 15 saw the passage of NY S.A.F.E. Act and the instant criminalization of the majority of New York gun-owners. These victims are my people; it’s their stories that came to me over the telephone, stories in which our press seems to have no interest.

I wish I were a clever film documentarian who could have spliced my conversations with the manifold misrepresentations and crude characterizations of gun owners by our leaders and propagandists. I wish the unguarded voices of the innocent could have been backdrop for scenes of the decent, caring, responsible citizens of Upstate New York in their chosen pursuits with firearms new, antique or “assault” – on the firing range, in the field, at their sporting clubs or gun shows, gathered hearthside in their dens where tales are told and retold, carried concealed on a workday in dangerous neighborhoods and unlit parking lots after the second shift, in all manner of situations where their sober self-control prevails every day and night of their law-abiding lives.

I wish I could have had the disapproving scolds of the other side of the gun divide be a fly on the wall as the testimony from our communities reached by ear in what became a marathon of mutual support and comfort.

I wish they could have heard the wife who spoke for her husband because he himself was too upset to trust his voice to speak.

I wish they could have counted the sheep of sleepless nights endured by those who awoke Jan. 15 to discover their sudden slip into criminal status.

I wish they could have heard honest American hearts breaking.

The scolds would have been amazed at the bewilderment of these men and women, at their sincerity and commitment to an arcane sense of fair play and to the dignity due them before the law. Would they have been moved by any of this that affected me so?

I wish I could have pulled back the veil Gov. Andrew Cuomo, his henchmen and their national counterparts have woven over this entire “conversation” we’re supposedly having about the right to self-defense.

I could have shown there are no assault weapons in the hands of the law-abiding, that there are no guns on the street among the law-abiding, that there are no gun show loopholes amongst a free and civil people, that further cynical application of misaimed policies merely creates a fresh-minted criminal class out of grandparents, military sons and daughters, shut-ins and store managers.

In short, the common people.

I might have been able to get across to the flies on my wall how unjust the SAFE Act is in turning the rule of law on its head. How you don’t punish the good, as though they are bad. And maybe they’d have come to hear the righteous resolve in those voices I heard, the resolve that cuts through the false promises and equally false fears ginned up by those who characterize our American heritage as the “psychosis of individualism.”

But I’m not clever, and there are no flies on the wall that heard what I heard. Now that the buses have headed down other roads and the phone is settled into its rack, I myself can tell you, and I don’t lie, if you are of good intent, you have nothing to fear from the peaceful gun owners of our neighborhoods and communities.

There will be a reckoning for those who tread upon our God-given rights. At least here, in this time, evil will not prevail, because good men and women have chosen to not remain silent.

And, on the last day of February 2013, I had the honor and blessing of their company on the capitol grounds in Albany. My fellow citizen patriots, the ladies and gentlemen of New York’s volunteer militia, I salute you.

Ned Lamb, Hubbardsville