National Review Staff Writer Charles Cooke is a graduate of the University of Oxford, where he studied modern history and politics. He writes on the Second Amendment, Anglo-American history, free speech, and American Exceptionalism. He is the co-host of the podcast “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.” In addition to National Review, his writing has appeared in National Interest, the Washington Times, and the New York Post. He lives in Connecticut with his wife.
You were born in England and grew up in an anti-gun culture. Now, you write in support of the Second Amendment. How did your viewpoint change?
Well, I always joke that I’m a recovering hoplophobe, and I mean that quite literally. I absorbed, a bit by osmosis, the English distaste for guns. The English see the American attitude towards guns and the American legal protection of the right to bear arms and American gun culture as being, at best, a foible, and at worst, a character flaw. I had no reason to question that. And so when, in 1996, a man named Thomas Hamilton walked into Dunblane High School in Scotland and killed 18 children and himself, I had no problem whatsoever with the British government’s response, which was to ban and gather up all handguns. When Columbine happened, I remember thinking, as did everyone in England, that there was no other reasonable solution than to summarily ban all firearms. I’d never heard anyone make a case that guns should be legal or that it was a positive and virtuous thing for guns to be legal. So, I was pretty standard anti-gun Brit.
But I started reading American history. I wrote a thesis on the Second Amendment at Oxford, and I imagined I’d take a fairly standard line, which is that the notion that the Second Amendment protects individual rights is preposterous. But it’s not (laughs). It was extremely irritating to find that out.
Was it all that research or did something more convince you?
I think it was three things. Having done that research, I looked more into the practical side of things. Can you take a country with 400 million privately-owned firearms and, by force of law, confiscate them or make sure they only end up in the hands of the good guy? You just can’t do it. Especially with the Second Amendment and a culture built around firearms, and to try to do so would probably start a civil war. So, when you hear the anti-gun brigade talk about Australia and talk about Britain, they are comparing countries that don’t even remotely have the same cultures. In Britain, when they banned firearms, there was a protest for about an hour, attended by 2,000 or so people outside Parliament. That was the end of it. In America, you’d see death. So, that practical side of things just doesn’t work. And the third point, when my politics changed, my conception of how the government and the citizen related to one another changed. I’m not sure there’s a better, more effective, more instructive proxy for that relationship than that the government is not permitted to disarm those who employ it. It really makes no sense when you stop and think about it. To say you’ve created this government to serve us, and now the representatives that we employ are going to turn around and disarm us to remove the means by which they might, in a crisis, be removed. That’s not a gun point as it is so much a general philosophical principle.
Maybe we shouldn’t fear outright confiscation, but should we fear further restrictions on guns?
I think there are two big threats at the moment. One is the continuing attempt to criminalize firearms that look a certain way, these so-called assault weapons. I have an AR-15. It looks like a machine gun, but it’s not. It’s no different than my hunting rifle. It’s just lighter. It’s more customizable, and it’s easier for my wife to shoot because of that. That gun has, in some states, been banned for those reasons. There’s no material difference whatsoever. The second threat is, I think, from these universal background checks. What they’ve done, in Colorado in particular, is draw very broad laws that leave the general population in doubt as to what constitutes a transfer. There’s a woman I talked to in Colorado who was in a car accident and had a concealed weapon. She was taken to the hospital. She was in overnight and, by law, the police had to store her firearm. And that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that law. You don’t want rogue firearms wandering around the hospital. But when the police looked up the law, which was badly and broadly written, they discovered that they had, by taking it off of her, transferred it, and therefore couldn’t give it back to her. It took three months for her to get it back. Now this is a woman who was poor. There’s no other way of putting it. She was a cleaner, and she worked in a dangerous area. She refused to go into the area without a gun, and so she didn’t work while all of this was straightened out. That’s just unacceptable.