letter to a liberal colleague l neil smith posted by cathy smith for l neil smith letter to a liberal colleague author s note adrian name changed to protect the guilty and the author are science fiction novelists who once worked with the same editor at a famous new york publishing house dear adrian i m way behind schedule on my current book again so this reply to your note criticizing the recent magazine interview i gave and generally attacking gun ownership will necessarily consist mostly of assertions you re free to believe or not i can back with evidence and logic i ve neither time nor energy to present now i ve written fully on this topic before and will again in the future when i do i ll make sure you get copies there are many arguments i might make from the futility and danger of delegating self defense to the police see don kates in the jan wall street journal to the real effect of prohibition shifting consumers from newly outlawed handguns or semiautomatic rifles to items like sawed off shotguns or homemade bombs but i ll limit myself here to commenting on the newspaper clipping you sent with your note first the freedom to own and carry the weapon of your choice is a natural fundamental and inalienable human individual civil and constitutional right subject neither to the democratic process nor to arguments grounded in social utility second publication of some latter day scientific study doesn t alter the fact that the gun prohibitionists i discussed in my interview annoying you so much in the process were lying third the freedom to own and carry the weapon of your choice is a natural fundamental and inalienable human individual civil and constitutional right subject neither to the democratic process nor to arguments grounded in social utility fourth as often happens with these things the study doesn t support the gun prohibitionists original numerical contentions anyway but simply adds a new layer of spurious claims to an older body of lies omissions and distortions fifth the freedom to own and carry the weapon of your choice is a natural fundamental and inalienable human individual civil and constitutional right subject neither to the democratic process nor to arguments grounded in social utility sixth the fact that gun prohibitionists have been caught lying on countless occasions carl bakal author of no right to keep and bear arms even confessed to it publicly makes the value of this present study dubious to say the least seventh the freedom to own and carry the weapon of your choice is a natural fundamental and inalienable human individual civil and constitutional right subject neither to the democratic process nor to arguments grounded in social utility eighth given your own lifelong service as a federal bureaucrat not to mention the cynical sophistication of your fiction you should be better aware than most people how progress in designing studies to prove whatever you want outstrips our ability to collect meaningful data a case in point we might agree on is the fact that it took another kind of prohibitionist or years to create studies proving that pornography causes crime more naive and probably more honest efforts in the s and s clearly indicate the contrary ninth the freedom to own and carry the weapon of your choice is a natural fundamental and inalienable human individual civil and constitutional right subject neither to the democratic process nor to arguments grounded in social utility tenth another reason to doubt all such studies is that human behavior as the austrian school of economics demonstrates is far too complex and unpredictable to be meaningfully quantified the attempt to do so and then create public policy based on the resulting pseudo information is wrecking our civilization eleventh the freedom to own and carry the weapon of your choice is a natural fundamental and inalienable human individual civil and constitutional right subject neither to the democratic process nor to arguments grounded in social utility twelfth the study is also worthless because it incorporates figures for suicide which is not necessarily a tragedy but basically another individual right sometimes with ancillary social benefits if anything perhaps suicide intervention should be a criminal offense thirteenth and finally the national rifle association officials quoted in the article whatever their shortcomings and they are many are correct in this instance the study is meaningless because the freedom to own and carry the weapon of your choice is a natural fundamental and inalienable human individual civil and constitutional right subject neither to the democratic process nor to arguments grounded in social utility and because of that adrian even if the study were valid it wouldn t deter me from a lifelong personal objective of seeing that anyone can own any weapon he or she prefers and carry it however whenever and wherever he or she desires without asking anybody s permission in this i m ably assisted by gun prohibitionists themselves whose yawping invariably moves previously unarmed people to go out and buy their first gun while they still can before the gun control act most of the shooting fraternity viewed handguns incorrectly as it turned out as inaccurate ineffective toys there probably weren t six million of them in the whole country now thanks to kennedy metzenbaum the bradys and their ilk america s greatest sporting goods sales team we probably manufacture at least that many every year the fascinating datum is that handgun control et al are perfectly aware of this so i guess you ll have to ask them yourself what their real motives are look gun making isn t an arcane or difficult art and by the way it s easier to make a fully automatic weapon than a semiautomatic the fact that i can still obtain my own weapon of preference the self loading pistol is the only thing which keeps me from pursuing this further even if it were difficult there are already a quarter billion firearms in america with an estimated half life of years possibly more for stainless steel guns are gonna be around a long time adrian whether you like it or not as for me to paraphrase elmer keith regardless of what the law provides or any court decides i m always going to be armed and i will always work to see that others are as well the bad news is that there are thousands more perhaps even hundreds of thousands where i come from we can t be stopped by passing laws we can only be forced to arm ourselves and others secretly and given both the practical and alleged differences between full automatics and semiautomatics perhaps more efficiently so what s the point l neil smith author the probability broach the crystal empire henry martyn and forthcoming pallas lever action bbs fidonet libertarian second amendment caucus nra life member my opinions are of course my own
