God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy

by Mike Huckabee

  But as much as there is a great divide in this country between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” there is also a great chasm between the “believes” and the “believe-nots.” And, increasingly, the “believes” in America have come to feel like cultural lepers—untouchables and undesirables—and an embarrassment to their fellow Americans who equate the holding of traditional views on marriage, religion, family, patriotism, and even the rule of law and the Constitution with ignorance and superstition. The snobbery and bold bigotry aimed at the “believes” goes unchecked and unchallenged by “believe-nots” who call themselves “mainstream.” But such condescending attitudes toward people of faith are hardly mainstream in the geographical center of America.

  The disconnect between the two can be jaw-dropping. When the Duck Dynasty controversy erupted over the impulsive decision at A&E to “suspend” Phil for his views on marriage, some genius PR hack working at the popular Cracker Barrel restaurant chain jumped forward to declare that their stores would yank those dastardly Duck Dynasty products from the shelves. Yes, it’s noteworthy when a New York-based company such as A&E reflexively shuts the lid on a “cash cow” like Duck Dynasty, but shockingly brain-dead for Cracker Barrel to drop Duck Dynasty products, given its Southern middle-class customer base. Accordingly, when that little announcement was made public, the reaction was nuclear. A torrent of raw outrage fell on Cracker Barrel, who appeared to have nothing but chicken on their menu. Their monumentally stupid decision was a kick in the groin to their core customers who eat meatloaf, corn bread, and black-eyed peas, and who may have considered what Duck Commander Phil Robertson said to be on the mild side.

  Threats of boycotts lit up the Internet, and phone lines to individual stores were burning hotter than the pepper sauce they keep on the tables. It was only a matter of hours before someone decided to bring a brain to work at Cracker Barrel corporate headquarters and announce that the Duck Dynasty products would stay. Whoever in the Cracker Barrel organization made the original lamebrain decision is a mystery, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, or Jackson, Tennessee! It was yet another reminder of the growing gap between those in the catfish-and-corn bread crowd vs. those in the crepes-and-caviar set. The very fact that a large company made such a boneheaded decision so impulsively is indicative that losing the faith community is seen as less of a problem than ticking off the militant secularists. It defies logic and defies demographics.

  While corporate America touts “tolerance” as the basis for its policies, there is very little tolerance for views that provide respect for the “believes.” In April 2014, Mozilla, the online giant that runs the Internet browser Firefox, accepted the resignation of CEO Brendan Eich because he had donated all of $1,000 of his own money to the successful, voter-approved Proposition 8 campaign that affirmed natural marriage between a man and a woman in California. Gay rights activists demanded his firing after his six-year-old donation was made public. So much for tolerance! In fact, the chairwoman of Mozilla, Mitchell Baker, crowed, “We have employees with wide diversity of views. Our culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions in public” [The Mozilla Blog, April 3, 2014]. Amazingly, she said it with a straight face (no pun intended), and few in the mainstream press acknowledged the utter hypocrisy of Mozilla’s position, which may be interpreted as this: “We are very tolerant as long as you hold the views of the loudest voice demanding conformity, which happens to agree with our own. We are utterly intolerant of people whose views on marriage reflect a major portion if not a majority of the American public. And we encourage people to share their beliefs and opinions as long as they aren’t biblical and if they are, we demand they shut up or we’ll fire their butts from our tolerant and diverse workforce.” Equality has come to mean “sameness.” Religious and personal freedom will not be tolerated!

  Incidentally, Phil Robertson hasn’t stopped talking about the dictates of his faith; he occasionally does so at his own church, before his own congregation. But a trip online will show comment after nasty comment that he and his “homophobic rant” should be silenced. (The “homophobic rant” in question was Phil’s accurate quoting of Scripture during an Easter sermon.) In other words, he’s not even allowed to express his personal religious views behind the doors of his own church.

  American Christians used to hear about the “underground church” in totalitarian countries like the old Soviet Union, Cuba, and Communist China. But the times they are a-changin’. As those countries become increasingly open to freedom of religion, America is becoming more and more openly hostile. At the rate we’re going, churches will one day have to go underground here to protect themselves from a totalitarian government and a “tolerant” culture that shamelessly censors dissent and acts with open bigotry and hatred toward people of faith … all in the name of “diversity” and “tolerance.”

  2

  Guns and Why We Have Them

  WHO ARE THE “GUN NUTS”? If you live among the urban elites (in Bubble-ville), you probably think gun owners are. If you live where I do (Bubba-ville), you probably think the real gun nuts are those firearm-fearing folks who, despite years of research to the contrary, still think a so-called “gun-free zone” makes life safer for the people in it. We know the truth of that bumper sticker whose common-sense message has long been the object of their scorn and ridicule: WHEN GUNS ARE OUTLAWED, ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE GUNS! Anyone who thinks we can simply ban guns and—poof—make them all disappear, even from the hands of criminals, is deluded. Maybe on drugs (we have laws against those, too).

  Clearly, city slickers who are more afraid of guns than of the criminals who might use them have a serious mental condition rendering them incapable of critical thinking. A February 2013 headline in the liberal Boston Globe pretty much sums it up: GUN CRIMES INCREASE IN MASSACHUSETTS DESPITE TOUGH GUN LAWS. It reminded me of the classic obtuse liberal media headline that always cracks up conservatives: CRIME DOWN DESPITE RISING PRISON POPULATIONS. Gee, how could putting more criminals in prison possibly make crime go down?

  It’s always a surprise to the progressives that if you take protection away from law-abiding people, you virtually assure criminals that when they go on a shooting rampage, they’ll be the only ones armed. A gun-free zone is really just a defense-free zone: a designated area where law-abiding citizens have agreed—however reluctantly—to be defenseless. They accept that if a bad guy starts shooting up the place, he’ll be the only person armed until the cops can get to the scene. As the saying goes, “When seconds count, the police are just minutes away!” Depending on where you are, they might even be hours away. (This is not just a Southern rural concern: The New York rap group Public Enemy had one of their biggest hits with “911 Is a Joke,” a song about the slow police response time to calls for help from inner-city African Americans.) So, who ya gonna call? Try Smith & Wesson.

  If you still think it’s safer to wait around for the police than to allow law-abiding citizens to have concealed carry permits, consider this: Blogger Davi Barker analyzed thirty-two shooting rampages that were stopped by outside intervention. Among the roughly half where an armed citizen happened to be on hand and stopped the shooter, the average number of fatalities was 1.8. When the victims had to wait for the police to arrive, the average number of deaths was 14.29. “Car 54, Where Are You?!”

  I have never known a time in my life when there were not guns in my house. I had my first BB gun, a Daisy Model 25, when I was not more than six years old. I remember how proud I was to have my very own air rifle (an actual thing, not like an “air guitar”). My parents gave me the Daisy BB gun for Christmas, but the deal was that I’d have to buy the BBs for it. They came in little round tubes that I could purchase at the local Western Auto store in Hope, Arkansas. I collected pop bottles in a little red wagon and turned them in for deposit at the nearby Piggly Wiggly supermarket so I’d have money for BBs. Early on, I couldn’t shoot the gun
without my dad there to drill into me all the safety lessons—drill them so hard that I remember them to this day! Over the years, I would graduate from the Daisy BB gun to a pump model pellet gun. The idea was to pump in air to increase velocity—the more pumps, the more firepower. It was basically a souped-up air rifle. By the time I was around nine years old, I’d bought my first real gun—a Springfield single shot .22-caliber rifle. A few years later, I would obtain a used .20-gauge shotgun.

  I still have all those guns. Actually, one of my sons does, and I suspect he’ll pass them on to his son. The BB gun and the single shot .22 rifle are in mint condition, but the air bladder on the old pellet gun is pretty well worn out, and the .20-gauge shotgun has seen better days. Even so, every time I see or handle those guns, I’m taken back to some of my fondest childhood memories. I grew up with guns, ammo, and shooting, but never considered murdering anyone. When I hear people with a profound ignorance of firearms say idiotic things like “children shouldn’t grow up in a house where there are guns,” I want to say, “More people are killed by cars than guns each year, so maybe children should grow up in a house with no cars around.”

  I knew where Dad’s more powerful guns were kept and actually had access to them. If I had wanted to get to them, I could have, because we couldn’t afford a gun safe; they took up a corner on the upper shelf in my parents’ bedroom closet. But getting a chair or ladder to reach those guns never crossed my mind. Not once was I tempted to get one down and play with it or, worse, use it for the commission of a crime. I knew what those guns could do, and—foremost in my mind—I knew what my dad would do if he ever caught me even thinking about touching those guns without his supervision. I grew up with a very healthy respect for guns, but I had an absolute fear of my father! The guns at worst could kill me. I’m pretty sure my old man could do far worse than that to me.

  It still catches me off guard when I have a conversation with an adult who has never owned a firearm, never fired one, and yet who speaks so passionately against them. How does this staggering lack of knowledge result in such an abundance of opinion? I can see the look of horror on the faces of friends of mine who have spent their lives in New York City when I talk about owning a wide variety of firearms. It’s the look one would get announcing in a synagogue that one owns a bacon factory.

  In the world I come from and choose to live in, “gun control” means that you hit the target.

  Yes, guns can be dangerous. And in the wrong hands, the hands of someone who has a nefarious purpose or is careless and fails to respect the power of the firearm, or is mentally ill, they are dangerous. Fire in the hands of a cook is useful; fire in the hands of a pyromaniac is deadly. Water can be for bathing or drowning. A pair of scissors can be for opening a box or stabbing someone. An airplane can be an incredibly efficient vehicle to travel between distances, or it can be a missile to be flown into buildings. I don’t, however, hear any suggestions that we ban fire, water, scissors, or airplanes. Well, schools have banned scissors, or even holding up two fingers in the shape of scissors, but that’s another chapter.

  Before I even touched a BB gun, I knew the fundamentals of handling a firearm: Always treat any firearm—any—as if it’s loaded and cocked. Many people are accidentally killed by “unloaded guns” because some bright individual assumed the gun was unloaded. The most famous case was Terry Kath, the great original guitarist for the band Chicago. He was playing with his pistol and had just shown a nervous friend that the magazine was empty. Kath assured him that the gun wasn’t loaded, then pointed it at his own head and pulled the trigger. Those were his last words. He’d overlooked the bullet already in the chamber.

  I was taught that all guns are loaded; that is to say, even if you can see daylight through all the chambers, you are still to act as if the gun were loaded. Just in case. You never, ever point a gun at someone you don’t intend to shoot. All my friends during my childhood and adolescent years were raised the same way.

  So, let’s review:

  1. All guns are loaded (even if they aren’t).

  2. Never point a gun at any person, animal, or object unless you plan to shoot it.

  3 Before you squeeze the trigger, know the target (and know what’s behind the target).

  4. If you aren’t absolutely certain of what you’re shooting, then don’t shoot. (Shooting at leaves rustling or at a figure that “sure looks like a buck from here” would’ve cost me the use if not the ownership of my gun. I think my dad was looking more at me and whether I was safely handling my weapon than he was scanning the woods for things to hunt.)

  5. Never leave a gun unattended; always know where it is and immediately put it back in its place when finished.

  6. Never shoot an animal you don’t plan to eat.

  After every horrible mass murder involving a gun, political opportunists race to the microphones to make the strongest possible emotional pitch for watering down the Second Amendment—and weakening the liberty and safety of law-abiding citizens. Even if it’s indisputable that their proposals wouldn’t have had the slightest effect on the latest bloodbath, the gun-hating left and a sympathetic media team up. Together, they crank up the volume to “11” in calling for—no, demanding—immediate “action.” It’s understandable that emotions would run high; these incidents are heartbreaking and families are shocked and grieving. They want to do … something! Typically, they punctuate their urgent call with phrases like, “If just one child can be saved, it will be worth it!” We’re supposed to go wobbly at that and acquiesce to expanded liberal legislation that punishes people who didn’t break the law to somehow stop people who did break the law. I can’t explain that rationally, because it isn’t rational. The real “gun nuts” are the ones who know the least about firearms or freedom, but who most want to make sure the good guys are unarmed when the bad guys decide to murder a few.

  A study by Mark Gius of Quinnipiac University, published in Applied Economics Letters, showed what Left Coast bubbleheads and East Coast bubble-dwellers just can’t believe—that if guns are taken away from people who haven’t broken the law, gun violence will increase. Conclusions were based on data gathered between 1980 and 2009, so this represents one of the most significant longitudinal surveys ever done on the effect of gun laws on gun violence.

  Overall, the study showed that gun-related murder rates were 10 percent higher if a state had more restrictive laws relative to concealed carry. Perhaps even more startling to the Hollywood hypocrites who fill their movies with violence and their pockets with profits, but who think Southern gun owners like me are the problem, is this inconvenient truth: Banning so-called “assault” weapons results in murder rates that are 19.3 percent higher than when no such laws are in effect.

  FactCheck.org revealed that from 2001 to 2007, gun ownership in the United States rose from 84 to 88.8 guns per 100 people. Yet in 2011, there were 50.8 gun-aggravated assaults and 45.8 gun robberies per 100,000 people, the lowest rates since 2004. The murder rate from guns was 3.59 per 100,000, which marked the lowest rate since 1981. Granted, gun suicides were up to 6.28 per 100,000, the highest rate since 1998, but was that a gun issue or a mental health issue?

  Most of the incidents of mass carnage that sparked calls to “take action now!” have occurred in gun-free zones. Makes sense, in that the shooter is relatively assured that there won’t be an armed citizen around to fight back. Good citizens tend to obey a law, even one they don’t like. A criminal doesn’t abide by the laws we already have, so why should we expect him to adhere to any new and more restrictive ones we pass?

  Forget the assumption that a gun-free zone will lower the risk of falling victim to a gun crime. John Lott, former chief economist with the U.S. Sentencing Commission and noted expert on gun laws, has noted that, with just one exception, every mass shooting involving three or more deaths since 1950 has happened in a gun-free zone. That one exception was the attack on Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in a shopping center parking lot in Arizona. Every ot
her one happened in a gun-free zone, in large part because “gun-free zone” translates to bad guys as “sitting duck zone.”

  Mother Jones is an ultra-leftist magazine, and it’s fair to say that their position on guns is about as supportive as Michelle Obama would be of passing out free candy and soft drinks to school kids in the cafeteria. But even in their attempt to justify new restrictions on law-abiding gun owners, Mother Jones [“A Guide to Mass Shootings in America,” July 20, 2012] found that of the sixty-nine mass shootings in the past thirty years, the majority were committed by people who “were mentally troubled—and many displayed signs of it before setting out to kill.” (And I’m thinking that maybe we just didn’t notice the signs in other cases.) Yet there is little said by the elites about the need to ramp up “brain control.” Ironically, many on the left strenuously oppose mental health intervention on the principle that it violates the privacy rights of the patient.

  One of the most fascinating guests I’ve interviewed on my Fox News Channel television show was Dr. Suzanna Gratia Hupp, a victim of the Luby’s Cafeteria shooting in Killeen, Texas, back in 1991. A crazed gunman killed twenty-three people and wounded twenty others after crashing his truck through the window. Dr. Gratia Hupp was dining there with her parents when it happened. At the sound of the gunfire, they all dived for cover. She started to reach into her purse for her pistol, only to remember that because she was a good, law-abiding citizen, she had dutifully left her gun in her vehicle instead of carrying it in. She watched helplessly as both her parents were murdered. She would go on to say that she wished she’d broken the law that day and kept her pistol in her purse, for she felt that her parents might still be alive if she had. Her compelling story helped pass a concealed carry law in Texas, and she was elected to the state legislature in 1995.