The Gospel of the Gun-Control Foes

Unless you suffer from some sort of obsessional disorder, you probably don’t remember what The Times’ editorial said on New Year’s Day when the sale of military-style assault weapons became illegal in California . I didn’t recall--and I wrote it.

I pulled that editorial out of the files this week and was reminded that we hailed the prohibition as part of a landmark series of firearms regulations, a model for a national program of rational gun control.

I still believe that. But both the Assault Weapons Control Act and a companion law that imposes a 15-day wait between sale and delivery of a gun are failing in important respects.

First, fewer than 20,000 out of 300,000 privately owned military-style semiautomatic weapons have been registered with the state as of Dec. 31 of last year, as the law requires. And the 15-day wait is being ignored in thousands of so-called “private” transfers of firearms that occur up and down the state.

In part, these failures can be blamed on the complexity of the law and the inertia and inefficiency of the state bureaucracy. But there is another element that perhaps was underestimated--the vehemence with which the laws would be resisted by a small but increasingly influential group of gun owners.

To spend time with these “irreconcilables,” as I did this week, is to recall an eccentric but important streak in the American character.

The United States never has had an established church. In its place we have constitutional democracy. The Constitution is our “sacred text” and the framers our sages. That is why, to foreigners, our legal arguments sometimes seem to take on a theological character.

Like any community of faith, America’s constitutional democracy has its fundamentalists. Many opponents of gun control fall into that camp, holding to the literal truth of the Second Amendment.

T. J. Johnston is one of them. As chairman of the Gun Owners’ Action Committee, he hopes to parlay organized resistance to California’s Assault Weapons Control Act into a seat on the National Rifle Assn.’s board of directors. He and a group of like-minded insurgents hope to seize control of the 2.6-million-member NRA, whose leaders they accuse of insufficient fervor. By profession, Johnston is an unlikely leader for such an insurrection. For more than a decade, he has been a studio production coordinator on the ABC soap “General Hospital.”

Born, raised and educated in Orange County, where he and his family still live, Johnston is a kind of archetype: tall and fit with blue eyes, blond hair, a quiet manner and an optimistic faith in self-improvement demonstrated by the glint of braces on his middle-aged teeth. He has, he said, “as many assault weapons as I can afford,” and is resolved to go to jail rather than register them. His organization is against any legal restriction on the possession of guns and believes Americans have an inherent right “to go into a hardware store and buy a machine gun.

“Firearms can be equated with self-determination,” he said. “If a person has a firearm, he has the ultimate ability to say, ‘no.’ No, you will not oppress me; no, you will not take my wallet.

“The Second Amendment,” he says, “is the foundation of all liberties.”

Like their religious counterparts, Johnston and the other Second Amendment fundamentalists believe they live in the shadow of apocalypse. As result of his study of philosophical libertarianism, particularly the late Ayn Rand’s objectivism, he believes America’s slide toward Armageddon began with enactment of the anti-trust laws and imposition of the income tax. When the government can no longer meet the needs of the millions it has reduced to dependency, Johnston believes, “we’ll have civil war. It will be a war of the haves against the have-nots.”

In Johnston’s view and in the literature his committee distributes, the defeats they have suffered in the Legislature and in the courts are the consequence of tyranny, not a democratic process.

In one pamphlet, “Alter or Abolish,” the anonymous author charges that all states, including the United States, are engines of mass murder. “People in government,” the author writes, “seek to tax our earning to pay for their whims, to draft our children to fight in wars they start, to regulate and interfere with our lives out of pure love of power. . . . They have become as tyrannical as any Tory redcoat, Soviet commissar or Nazi Gestapo. And they are coming to steal your last line of defense against them. Will you meekly obey?”

If you’re with Johnston, apparently not. And for those who believe in rational regulation of firearms, that poses a perplexing problem. The gun lobby’s insistence that regulation simply turns otherwise law-abiding people into criminals becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To listen to T. J. Johnston’s summation of his own purpose is to understand why: “All I want,” he says, “is for people to live a full and happy life in freedom”--and presumably armed to the teeth.

For constitutional democracy, our established church, that translates into a preference for the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence over the workaday discipline of the Constitution. The Declaration’s which is to say, Thomas Jefferson’s--assertion that the “pursuit of happiness” is self-evidently an inalienable human right is America’s unique contribution to the art of governance--and its most enigmatic.

In that sense, T. J. Johnston and the other libertarians among us simply are Jefferson’s wild children.