Emergency!

It’s an emergency! Well, maybe not that kind of emergency, but the kind which allows our political leaders to seize power. Like our current emergency, where we’re facing down a virus that kills something like .05% of the people it infects; a situation so dire we have surrendered the power to decide if we can safely operate our business, to decide if we can visit with family, or to decide if we want to wear a face covering. In order to protect us during this emergency, those powers have been assumed by the state.

You can argue whether or not it’s necessary, but you can’t argue that this is freedom.

I guess we should be glad that official emergencies are rare, and that our benevolent benefactors only invoke such powers for our benefit! The only thing is that as it turns out, governments have no compunction about declaring emergencies. At the federal level alone, we are currently under 35 active national emergencies, declared by five different presidents and going back as far as 1979. (I shudder to think what the count could be at the state level.) Did you know that we are still under the “Declaration of a National Emergency and Invocation of Emergency Authority Relating to the Regulation of the Anchorage and Movement of Vessels”, enacted by President Clinton in 1996? Wonder what kind of mask we need to wear for that one?

Of course, unlike the current pandemic situation, most of these sorts of “emergencies” affect the average American very little, if at all. So what’s the point? The point is the relative ease with which such things have been enacted historically, and the more recent propensity to use them to override the rights of hundreds of millions of Americans. What if elected officials realized how easy it is to assume emergency powers, and just how much they can do with them?

Think this guy wouldn’t use emergency powers against the 2nd Amendment?

What if they decided to declare deaths from citizen-owned guns to be a “public health emergency”? What if they declared that emergency, and then used the emergency powers which come with it to enact stringent ant-gun measures? Go do a search on the words, “guns in us national health emergency” and you’ll see that this isn’t a new idea. In fact, this 2017 article from NPR references the Zika and Ebola outbreaks in discussing the possibility of using public health as justification for gun control.

What is new is that during the current pandemic, we have shown our elected officials just how easily we will surrender our freedom in the name of public health. If this isn’t you, that’s all well and good, but the truth is that the vast majority of Americans have surrendered many freedoms for the offer of protection from a virus which is survived by 99, 995 of every 100,000 it infects. And let’s be honest…with a (disputable) per-100k death rate of about 4.43 (as of 2018), gun deaths could easily be passed off to the public as being in the same ballpark. (Especially since a large majority of Americans are not very savvy on the ins and outs of that number.)

Emergency? No problem.

I fear we have taught gun banning politicians a very dangerous lesson. Some states, such as my state of Kentucky, are attempting to check the powers which may be assumed by the government under a state of emergency. I hope this action and others like it are successful, before we find ourselves dealing with emboldened politicians with anti-gun ambitions. That would indeed be an emergency.