Rosie's Dead Wrong
by C. Dodd Harris IV

Rosie O'Donnell is a modern day wonder of the world. American liberals do not have a monopoly on making their own hypocrisy into virtues, but Rosie takes the cake and eats it, too. An ardent supported of what she calls "sensible gun legislation" (defined as "licensing and registering of all guns in America") she was shunted not so long ago from making a little cash on the side by flacking for K-Mart because that company is the third-highest volume seller of firearms. Now she's back, making even bigger waves because her bodyguard has applied for a concealed carry permit.

Now Rosie is by no means the first gun-grabber to decide she herself needs the protection of a firearm while continuing to work to the rescind that right for the unwashed masses. Every constitutionalist worth his salt will spew a steady and reliable stream of invective merely at the mention of the name Dianne Feinstein. We all know, as well, that Saint Hillary's bodyguard recently left her purse in a washroom and that it was found to contain a handgun. Sly Stallone, not the most liberal guy in Hollywood (which, I suppose, is akin to saying Deng Xiaoping was an admirer of Edmund Burke), has openly advocated house-to-house searches to confiscate other people's handguns, but he himself maintains an apartment he never visits in Culver City, CA because the local sheriff is pretty easy to get a concealed carry permit from - if you happen to be a celebrity, anyway.

But, even compared to such luminaries of the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do set, Rosie is in a class by herself. She has the requisite blind spot for her own behaviour that is the hallmark of the liberal, to be sure. But few are as blatant about their hypocrisy. Steven Spielberg is rumoured to have one of the largest private firearms collections in Los Angeles County yet he donates considerable time and money to the likes of Bubba, Algore, Boxer and Feinstein. For myself, I don't call that hypocrisy, because I've never personally heard the man express a desire to take a right he enjoys from others. Rather, I call it doing a poor job of looking out for one's own interests. Rosie, by contrast, positively wallows in such fine distinctions.

If the inconsistencies were all there was to it, we could write her off as an ordinary limousine liberal. But she's more dangerous than that. First of all, she has a bully pulpit from which to opine at will to a loyal following. Second, she has a distinctly skewed view of the facts and isn't shy about spreading it around.

Pressed, surprisingly, to justify the apparent hypocrisy by Katie Couric on a recent episode of the Today Show, Rosie demonstrated her willful ignorance in Technicolor. Lets consider some of her statements (on Today and elsewhere) and see if she knows of what she speaks….

"[O]ur main goal is… not to take anyone's gun. Not to take away Charlton Heston's gun or any other law abiding citizen's gun. We're trying to regulate an industry that's not regulated. The Consumer Product Safety Commission regulates every product made in the United States, it has to adhere to safety standards. Every product except guns…. Well you can make a gun, it doesn't have to adhere to any safety standard, it can drop it, it can shoot, it can have as many clips loaded into it as they want. You know it's basically, totally an unregulated industry because of the pressure that they've had in the Congress and Senate."

Seems reasonable on the surface, I suppose, but it's flawed in several ways. For one, the CPSC only regulates every product in America in Hillary Clinton's dreams. For another, firearms are subjected to very strict quality assurance - without the help of government regulators - if for no other reason than that our out of control tort system (a subject for another column) assures the industry that they will be sued down to the fillings in their teeth if they put out a shoddy product and someone gets hurt by a malfunction. I could go on, but this is just smoke she's blowing. It gets worse.

"I hate to disappoint the gun lobby but it would've been a big feather in their cap had they found an unlicensed, unregistered gun on the bodyguard of one of America's most vocal gun control advocates."

She's speaking here of the allegedly illegal search of her bodyguard by police in Connecticut. And she's right, to a point. It would indeed have been a feather in our caps, of a sort, had her bodyguard been found to be carrying a weapon illegally. But then, given the proclivities of the mainstream media - the media that essentially ignored similar revelations about the First Lady, perhaps it wouldn't have mattered much. In any event, Rosie's providing us plenty of fodder as it is. This one's a trifle.

"[T]he Second Amendment has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to be regarding 'a well-regulated militia.' That the Second Amendment refers to 'a well-regulated militia.' The Supreme Court has continually upheld this and it never ever was interpreted that the Second Amendment meant individual's rights to bear arms."

Here's where we begin to get into the serious errors. She's deluding herself in the same way that so many of her ilk are prone to do. The Supreme Court has never - not once - held that the Second Amendment serves only to secure a well-regulated militia. In fact, the Court has scarcely ever heard a Second Amendment case. The closest they have come to this was in Miller v U.S.. In that case, they upheld the defendant's conviction on an interstate firearms violation on the grounds that the sawed-off shotgun could not be shown to have any reasonable relationship to maintaining a well-regulated militia. It's not such a stretch to get to the position that that case stands, therefore, for the proposition that the Amendment exists to secure a militia, but even that position does not rule out the correct interpretation: That the Second Amendment was ratified to codify an already existing, individual right.

In fact, so ubiquitous is this constitutional interpretation that one of the lone legal scholars who agrees with Rosie has dubbed it the Standard Model. And the Supreme Court agrees, though you won't hear this from Rosie. The Court unanimously affirmed in United States v. Verdugo-Urquirdez (1990) that, where the Constitution uses the phrase "the People" - and, yes, they did explicitly include the reference to The People in the 2nd Amendment - that usage consistently refers to individuals and, where they meant the States, the Founders said so explicitly.

"There are 12 children killed everyday in America. When I stand up and say cystic fibrosis, pediatric AIDS, childhood cancers everyone says isn't she great? More kids die from gunshot wounds than those three diseases combined every year. It is an issue of child advocacy for me. And the NRA and the gun lobby can try as hard as they want to scare me, to threaten me, to make me into a hypocrite. This is what I believe and I will not be quiet about it."

This "statistic" is so typical of gun-grabbers it tires me to deal with it. The stat is true if you define the word children to include 19 year-old drug dealers - which is how the people who are promulgating it defined the term. But, as with the apparently specific but, in fact, meaningless term "assault weapons", the purpose of their usage is not to inform but to obfuscate. People will be horrified to learn that 12 children die from guns a day because they will envision a crowd a tots on their way to second grade viciously mown down in the street.

The reality is that only a handful of such (real) children are killed by firearms every year. In 1997, the National Center for Health Statistics reported a total of 21 accidental handgun deaths for children through age 14. You read correctly: 21. Check it yourself if you don't believe me (look under ICD 922.0 for handgun accidental deaths). Each and every one is a tragedy, yes - and no-one means to belittle it by pointing out how the gun-grabbers are abusing those tragedies - but the fact remains that more children die by drowning in bathtubs or by ingesting household chemicals.

On whether the NRA cares about children: "I would say, maybe their own kids, but not kids in general. The only life that is important to them is white, Republican life. Regardless of skin color, it offends me when someone is shot dead in America. [The NRA's position] is based on financial gain, not patriotism or love of children."

So there you have it: The NRA only cares about white, Republican lives. As an NRA member, I do not feel I need to dignify this comment with a response (note to the chuckling detractors: This does not mean I don't have one!).

Rosie perceives a threat to her family (in Greenwich, CT!), allegedly because she's a gun control advocate, and see no contradiction in hiring armed guards to meet that threat. Yet she would deny you and me - who cannot afford bodyguards - the same right to take responsibility for our own protection. I do not believe her when she says she only wants licensing and registration. Those measures always lead to confiscation. Her allies admit that their goal is an outright ban on civilian ownership of handguns. (cf. - Peter Shields, Founder, Handgun Control, Inc., 1976: "We'll take one step at a time, and the first is necessarily... given the political realities... very modest. We'll have to start working again to strengthen the law, and then again to strengthen the next law and again and again. Our ultimate goal, total control of handguns, is going to take time. The first problem is to make possession of all handguns and ammunition (with a few exceptions) totally illegal.")

I for one, will not stand idly by while hypocrites try to strip me of my Constitutional rights - and call me a greedy racist to boot. I urge everyone to boycott Rosie's show, her movies, and any products she endorses. We Constitutionalists are the real silent majority -the NRA would have no clout were we who are its members not so numerous. It's time we stood up and were heard, instead trying to placate our enemies to avoid sounding like "extremists."

C. Dodd Harris IV writes a regular column for The Potato, and can be reached at muaddib@free-market.net