Letters to a Young Conservative (13 page)

Dear Chris,

I was amused to read about the safety briefing that you attended on campus following the attack on a female student in her sorority house. The campus police, you say, counseled students to engage in “passive resistance” if confronted by a criminal. Now it is true that, when an unarmed person is confronted by an armed criminal, passive resistance is generally better than fighting back. But that’s because “fighting back” involves everything from using one’s fist to kicking and screaming to trying to run away. “Fighting back” doesn’t work for female victims because their assailants are almost always men, and men are typically much stronger than women. By far the safest way to defend oneself against criminal threat is to own a gun and know how to use it.

That guns deter crime is well known to many liberals, especially those politicians and celebrities who make
the loudest public noises in favor of gun control. Take Richard Daley, the mayor of Chicago, or any number of Hollywood bigwigs. These people routinely assert that there is no advantage to owning guns. Yet many of them have full-time bodyguards who follow them everywhere they go. What hypocrites these liberals are! Mayor Daley wouldn’t even consider setting foot in some of the crime-infested neighborhoods of Chicago without his gun-toting bodyguards. But the people who live in those areas, mostly the poor, face continuing danger, and yet Mayor Daley does not want them to to protect themselves with guns.

But what about the police? Isn’t it their job to protect people? Yes, but you know as well as I do, Chris, that the typical campus police officer is far more adept at reaching for his doughnut than for his gun. Moreover, how often are the police on the scene when a crime is being committed? Usually the police show up after the fact and then try to track down the criminal. The best protection for a person who is being attacked is not to yell for the police, who are too far away to help, but to reach for a concealed weapon. Indeed, since many crimes are never solved, the police department may even be a lesser deterrent to criminals than the knowledge that an intended victim may be carrying a gun.

These speculations have been given empirical support by Yale economist John Lott, whose study
More Guns, Less Crime
is the largest ever conducted on the effects of gun control laws. After examining every county
in the nation over two decades, Lott and his colleagues found that the more restrictive the gun control laws in a given county, the higher its crime rates! In general, when counties pass right-to-carry laws, which allow people of sound mind who have no criminal record to carry guns, their crime rates go down. Moreover, when counties make it more difficult for their law-abiding citizens to buy and carry guns, their crime rates go up. The reason for these outcomes is not merely that gun-owners are in a position to defend themselves against criminals, but also that criminals are more likely to be deterred when they don’t know who is armed and who is not.

But what about “sensible” gun laws that require background checks, mandatory waiting periods, safety locks, and that guns be kept hidden and out of the reach of children? Lott shows that background checks are largely useless since they have no effect in preventing criminals from acquiring guns. Mandatory waiting periods mainly extend the period in which people are vulnerable to crime before they can secure the protection of a firearm. You may be surprised to discover, Chris, that the number of young children who die by setting off a firearm is very small: between thirty and fifty a year. Of course, even one death is tragic, but vastly more children drown in pools and bathtubs, or are killed in automobile accidents, than die from self-inflicted gun wounds. Yes, gun owners should keep their guns under lock and key, out of the reach of children, but guns also have to be accessible for use when needed.

None of this is to deny that guns are dangerous things, like automobiles. Recklessness with guns, as with cars, can lead to accidents and suffering. We do need gun laws, and the National Rifle Association supports laws that prohibit the possession of guns by convicted violent criminals, laws forbidding the sale of guns to juveniles, and laws requiring computerized criminal records checks on retail gun purchases. Gun owners also need to be educated, and no organization provides better or more comprehensive education than the NRA.

But the single-minded liberal focus on the dangers of guns can blind us from seeing that guns, like cars, also make our lives better and more secure. Guns do this by making it easier for us to defend ourselves. For women, guns are a great equalizer: They neutralize the strength advantage that male assailants enjoy. For people who live in dangerous neighborhoods or who engage in dangerous professions—like operating a grocery store, or driving a cab—guns are a virtual necessity.

Upon completing his research, John Lott, a mild-mannered Yale professor, went out and bought a 9 mm Ruger. If these criminal attacks persist on your campus, Chris, my advice to you is take a study break and go out and get yourself a gun.

Dear Chris,

I really enjoyed the details of the “gun debate” you had with your history professor. When he began to quiver and describe your views as “truly scary”—that, Chris, was when you could feel sure you had really gotten to him. One way to be effective as a conservative is to figure out what annoys and disturbs liberals the most, and then keep doing it.

Yes, harpooning liberals is a lot of fun. I am especially fortunate because I get paid to do it. I lecture to college groups and to business groups. The business groups pay me better and treat me better. Their conferences are usually at very nice resorts, and there is typically a limousine to pick me up. By contrast, college towns are often in the middle of nowhere, the food and accommodations are mediocre, and sometimes there is no one to meet me at
the airport, so I end up telephoning my student contact in his dorm.

Even so, I continue to do college lectures for two reasons. The first is that I enjoy them. My speaking is an equivalent of college teaching but without having to grade papers and deal with irascible department chairs and administrators with room-temperature IQs. I get to speak to large groups of students who, even if they disagree with me, have come voluntarily to hear what I have to say. I have also had the pleasure of debating a wide range of characters: Jesse Jackson; Kweisi Mfume, head of the NAACP; Nadine Strossen, head of the ACLU; Mary Francis Berry, head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission; and leading liberal scholars such as Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson. My series of debates with Stanley Fish even led to that rarest of outcomes, a genuine friendship.

A second reason I do so many college lectures is because they are desperately needed. Our campuses have become intellectually quite monolithic. Recently, a student came up to me and said, “Until I heard your lecture, my liberal arts education had not really begun, because my basic assumptions remained unquestioned.” More typically, students come up to me and say, “Wow, that was really interesting. I’ve never heard this stuff before.” And they’re being truthful: They haven’t. The central arguments that underlie the great debates about globalization, the role of America, the impact of new technologies, and the issue of cultural
decline are utterly unfamiliar to students on our best campuses. How tragic.

Liberals love to talk about diversity and to celebrate diversity, but when they get a real dose of it, they often react with horror. I discovered this more than a decade ago when
Illiberal Education
was published. I vividly recall a talk I gave at Tufts University, where I was alarmed to see a group of students sitting in the front row
in chains.
These students, who were African American males, had chained themselves to each other, and to their seats. I guess their point was that my criticisms of affirmative action amounted to a justification of oppression. Even before I started my lecture, the students noisily rattled their chains. I was inexperienced in handling protesters at the time and I didn’t know how I could possibly give my talk with all the noise. Nor was anyone from the administration in sight to establish any kind of order.

Fortunately, I was saved by divine intervention. The controversy over my appearance had brought out a huge crowd, and students were crowding the hallways and standing outside. So the organizers decided to move the lecture to a larger hall. As the crowd shifted to the new location, the protesters were still chained to their seats! “Where’s the key?” one fellow yelled out.

Since then I have become quite a veteran at handling dissent. While I relish speaking and debating at left-wing campuses—some people consider it my specialty—I am less enthusiastic about speaking at campuses that are left-wing
and lowbrow. I am thinking of campuses such as San Jose State or the University of South Florida. On these campuses, a large contingent is both radical and dumb, a lethal combination. These students listen to the facts I present; but because they are too uninformed and inarticulate to rebut them, they experience an inner rage. More than once, I have had a student run shrieking from the room. Sometimes the students simply cover their ears, or shout out obscenities. In a way I sympathize with them: Their worldview has come crashing down, and it is very painful for them to cope with this recognition.

At more highbrow campuses, the students don’t react in this way. Sometimes, just as I begin my speech, a student sitting in the front row will slowly and deliberately stand up, stretch out as if in an uncontrollable yawn, and then pick up his backpack and slowly walk out, obviously drawing the attention of everyone in the audience. This is a situation in which, as a speaker, I have to humiliate the student completely if I am to defeat his distraction strategy and regain the audience’s attention. There are several ways to do this. Usually, I address the student, “Excuse me.” He turns around; he doesn’t expect me to do this. And then I say something like, “It’s the third door on the right.” And then, as if explaining the situation to the audience, “I realize that diarrhea can be a serious problem.” There is a burst of laughter, the focus of the audience returns to me, and now I can go on with my speech.

Hecklers can be intimidating, but the speaker has a great advantage: He has the microphone. Not long ago,
while I was lecturing at UCLA, an American Indian whose body was literally a billboard of buttons began to shout. Every time I said something, no matter how benign, he would yell, “That sounds like Hitler.” “That’s just what Hitler thought.” “More Adolf Hitler.” Finally I had to pause and say, “Look, if you keep this up, by the end of this talk you will have given Hitler a good name.” That shut him up.

The brighter students don’t go the route of the heckler. They try to outsmart the speaker. “Mr. D’Souza, I appreciate your quotation from Orlando Patterson, but you have quoted him out of context.” To this I reply, “Of course I have quoted him out of context.
All
quotations are out of context. If I were to quote him in context, I would have to quote his entire book.” Another condescending opener that I have heard several times is: “Mr. D’Souza, has it occurred to you . . .” What follows is a question that I have heard a hundred times before. “Mr. D’Souza, has it occurred to you that you are a beneficiary of affirmative action? How, then, can you criticize it?” When I hear a question like this, I rub my chin, as if thinking deeply, before giving my ready answer. “I may have benefited from affirmative action. I didn’t ask for it, but I may have received it. If I have, then my reaction is not to be pleased but ashamed. The reason is that it puts all my accomplishments into question. No matter what I achieve in life, there will always be someone to snicker and say: Well, yes, but he only got there through affirmative action. And, look, it isn’t some Ku Klux Klan guy
saying that, it’s liberals like you! So the premise of your question illustrates one of the ways in which racial preferences harm those of us who are minorities.”

On more than one occasion I have been asked, “You have made some interesting points, but isn’t it true that you can only say these things because you are not white?” The person asking this expects me to go into stuttering denial. Instead, I say, “Of course that is true. As a person of color I enjoy a kind of ethnic immunity, and that allows me to speak with much greater candor. If a white guy said the things that I say, he would be hounded off the podium! This shows the degree to which the race debate is rigged. Many people’s opinions are excluded at the outset. My goal, therefore, is to use my ethnic immunity to raise the curtain on some of these taboo issues, and to expand the parameters of what it is permissible to say, so that we can have an honest discussion that includes all parties.”

Some questions are so inane that I find it hard to believe that I am in a university setting. Indeed, the caliber of questions I have heard from professors over the years confirms my suspicion that many people in the academy are educated beyond their intelligence. Recently, I heard the following challenge from a law professor at Texas Tech: “Mr. D’Souza, I was appalled by your simplistic remarks. Your comparison of the United States and other cultures was completely tautological. You should have compared America to its own ideals.”

I replied, “Professor, let me begin by noting your misuse of the term
tautological.
If I say ‘all bachelors are
single,’ that would be tautological, because the term ‘bachelor’ means one who is single. My comparison of America with other cultures may be an inappropriate analogy, but it most definitely isn’t tautological.”

This was very embarrassing for the professor, so he attempted a salvage operation. “You are not answering my question!” he cried out.

“I am about to answer your question,” I said, “but first I wanted to expose something that is underlying your question, which is pseudo-sophistication.” This was a crusher. The audience laughed and applauded, and I could see that even the professor’s radical supporters were wearing pained expressions.