Those Above, and Those Below

The Eloi and the Morlocks from 1960’s The TimeMachine

A recent NBC News poll shed light on an under-reported trend. 52% of Americans say that they or someone in their household owns a gun. Yes, gun ownership has now reached majority status, and it's up from 42% just ten years ago.

While it has been well documented that the number of guns in private citizens' hands has been growing steadily - about 150M guns were manufactured in the US in the last 25 years and another 75+M were imported - critics have often dismissed the data by claiming it's just the same gun owners buying more guns. Polls tended to back that up, with the fifty year historical trend oscillating around the 42% mark until ten years ago.

Depending on your preferred corner of the political sandbox, it might or might not surprise you to learn that the recent growth in ownership is being driven by women and minorities. Across the past few years, women comprise 50% of all firearm purchasers, and there have been sharp uptrends in gun purchases by blacks, hispanics, and asians.

Gun rights have also been trending strongly in a pro- direction. Fifty years ago, most states either outright banned concealed carry by civilians or retained arbitrary discretion over who was allowed to get a concealed carry permit - a doctrine known as "may-issue." Since the 1970s, more and more states have enacted "shall-issue" laws, wherein an applicant cannot be denied a concealed carry permit unless specifically disqualified by such things as a felony conviction. Furthermore, in the past twenty years, the number of states that do not require a permit to carry a firearm (known as "Constitutional Carry") has grown from one to twenty-seven. Prior to the Supreme Court's Bruen decision last year, which struck down "may-issue" laws as unconstitutional, forty-two of the fifty states comprising 75% of the US population already had shall-issue or Constitutional Carry.

You wouldn't know much of this if you limited yourself to the legacy media's reporting. Or, you'd be alarmed at the trend, falsely conflating rising ownership rates with murders and mass shootings. Fact is, there is no correlation.

What we do have is a substantial decrease in crime across the past 30 years. While there are many factors that contribute to this decrease, it stands as a rebuttal to the "more guns more crime" trope being peddled by the Left.

One might think that the gun ownership and gun law trends would be a message to those in Washington, D.C. That they'd read the will of the people in those trends, in addition to upholding their oaths to defend the Constitution.

One might be a starry-eyed optimist.

Thing is, the guy at the top, his party, and his apparatchiks all ignore the message. They, instead, continue to insist that we the People unwashed masses be denied our inalienable and Constitutionally protected right to possess the tools of self- and national defense.

This is a reflection of a broader attitude, one voiced by Captain Jack Aubrey:

Men must be governed! Often not wisely I'll grant you but governed nonetheless.

Aubrey was speaking in the context of a Naval vessel, where discipline and chain-of-command were the difference between life and watery death, but the attitude unfortunately pervades our civilian overseers. People drawn to government are rarely of the sort to tear much of it down and liberate citizens to live lives as unencumbered by restriction as possible. Instead, they are usually the sort who would impose their "better" view of how things should be on the rest of us, who presumably don't know any better. To paraphrase Barack Obama, "they are the people they've been waiting for."

The people who would stand above us, who would impose their visions of society upon us, don't bother to pay much attention to how those below want to live their lives. This has been depicted literally in two recent science fiction offerings I've enjoyed: Silo and For All Mankind. In the former, a tale of a dystopian future, people are living in an actual, 144 level silo, with the people who run the silo's machinery live at the bottom. In the latter, which is an alternate-history take on the space program that starts with the premise that Russia beat the US to the moon, the fourth season (spoilers!) starts with an established Mars colony where the tradespeople, who maintain the equipment and do other grunt work, living three levels down. These mirror H. G. Wells' Eloi and Morlocks, with the benighted, subterranean latter working to provide a life of ease for the exalted former.

As Wikipedia notes, the "narration suggests that the divergence of species may have been the result of a widening separation between social classes."

That separation, today, is across political classes. It's not simply a matter of rich vs poor. While it doesn't escape me that the dark secret of Wells' tale is that the Eloi are food stock for the Morlocks, nor have I forgotten the irony of the Left embracing the slogan "eat the rich," the real division is between the controllers and those who don't want to be controlled.

The controllers, living up high, have no interest in those down below. This is why the pro-gun trend is dismissed, why such failed social-engineering experiments such as bail reform and non-prosecution of criminals persist rather than being reversed, and why the adverse effects of rampant illegal immigration are only now being fretted over (they finally reached our Eloi).

Those above don't want to learn the political lessons of ignoring those below.

In 1994, Bill Clinton and the Democrats enacted an "assault weapons ban." That law played a significant part in the Dems being routed in the mid-term election.

In and leading up to 2016, the Left either ignored or embraced illegal immigration, which proved to be the wedge issue that elevated Trump to the GOP nomination and then the Presidency.

Today, they embrace the same views on both issues, despite the obvious from-below messages, and are relying on a broad personal antipathy for Trump and a mainstream media that's essentially their propaganda machine, just as they did in 2020, as a path to victory in 2024.

Only time will tell if this electoral strategy will work, but even if they win the White House again, the from-below messages won't change. Nor will things get better or more harmonious, no matter how much control they try to impose.

Those of us who fear for our rights and liberties and for the future of the nation should take heart in the from-below. Often dubbed grass-roots, when the are genuine and broad, they are hard to corrupt and hard to defeat in the long run. Good change is indeed possible even in this climate, as the gun-rights trend has shown, and we also see the seeds of good change in such things as parents’ revolts against progressive schooling. In short, don’t despair - there is still hope for liberty in America.