By Dennis Gruending

Canada’s long gun registry could soon be scrapped thanks to a vote on a Private Member’s Bill that passed in the House of Commons on November 4th. Candice Hoeppner, a Conservative MP from Manitoba, introduced it with the blessing of the prime minister, who sees it as a timely wedge issue to shore up his base, mainly in rural and northern areas. The bill will now go to a committee for further consideration and it will have to come back before the House for another vote, as well as passing in the Senate prior to becoming law. It is ironic, to say the least, that this vote occurred just a few weeks prior to the 20th anniversary of the December 6th Montreal massacre, when Marc Lepine mowed down 14 young women at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal with a semi-automatic weapon. Although this bill will not touch the ban on handguns, it will, if it becomes law, eliminate the requirement to register the type of people-hunting firearm that Lepine used in 1989. It was that gruesome killing which prompted the then-Liberal government of Jean Chretien to pass the Firearms Act in 1995, requiring gun owners to obtain permits and to register their guns. The act did not prevent people from owning and using rifles and shotguns, but they were legally bound to register them.

Supporters, including Canada’s police chiefs, believe the registry is a valuable tool for preventing gun violence, often arising from criminal activity and domestic disputes. Some people can be denied ownership of a gun if they have a record of instability or violence. With a registry, police arriving on the scene of disturbances can find, by running a computer check, if there are registered firearms at the address. In fact, death and injury from firearms have declined by over 40% in Canada during the era of stronger gun laws. The Conservatives opposed the registry vociferously in opposition. In government, they have refused to enforce the registry’s provisions and are now poised to get rid of it altogether.

Opposition to the original registry was centred in the Reform Party led by Preston Manning and among fellow travellers in gun, wildlife and hunting lobbies. Manning was able to turn the issue to his advantage. The registry’s implementation went badly, a saga that involved large cost overruns and expensive computer software that didn’t work – but that wasn’t the main reason for the opposition. As with many issues in the culture wars, the gun registry became a proxy for something much larger.

Guns in the trenches

I have considerable experience in the trenches on the guns issue. I was a candidate in four federal elections in mixed urban-rural constituencies in Saskatchewan and the gun registry featured in every one of those campaigns. In 1997, I was a candidate in Saskatoon-Humboldt, the area where I was born and raised. One day I was campaigning in a small town that was clearly suffering from the rural economic crisis. The rail line had been removed and the two tall grain elevators at the head of Main Street were being dismantled.  The town’s business buildings were shabby and much of the housing stock was run down. I came upon a man who was backing his truck out of a driveway. He recognized me and said that he knew my sister. “I haven’t got much time,” he said. “I just want to know one thing. What is your position on gun control?” I asked him if that issue was more important to him in an election than the fact that his town had lost its rail line and its grain elevator. “You bet it is,” he said. I lost that election by 221 votes to the Reform Party candidate.

I have asked myself many times since why people would base their vote on something that has little or nothing to do with their personal well-being and that actually makes their communities more prone to gun violence. Then in 2004, I read a book that provided a good part of the answer. It’s called What’s The Matter with Kansas and was written by Thomas Frank. He says that Kansas has changed. In the early 1900s it was a hotbed of agrarian radicalism. People took on the banks and the railroads and the business and political Establishments who they believed were ripping them off. In this way it was very much like Saskatchewan in the same era, and at least a bit like the Saskatchewan in which I grew up. In Kansas today, the rich vote Republican as they always did, but they are not nearly such fervent supporters of arch-conservatism as are farmers, elements of the middle class and even the poor. How can this be? Frank says these people are angry. They are in backlash mode. And who are they angry with? Not with greedy bankers or industrialists or right wing politicians who lie to them in every election.

Frank writes: “The backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues – summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art – which it them marries to pro-business economic policies. Cultural anger is marshalled to achieve economic ends. And is these economic achievements – not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending cultural wars – that are the movement’s greatest monuments.”

I found this analysis instructive about Saskatchewan. There was a lot of anger among the gun crowd aimed at what they called big government — and the firearms registry was a new government program. These people said they were good, law-abiding citizens and that the government was treating them like criminals. There was anger at bureaucrats, at liberals and anger directed against big city dwellers. The people most opposed to the gun registry were generally from towns, smaller cities, and rural areas. The people most in favour were from larger cities like Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. The people against the gun registry did not want a bunch of city slickers telling them what to do. Some also feared that the government wanted information about their guns so that it could take them away, and then do bad things to them. They said they had the right to have guns to protect themselves and their loved ones, a ludicrous argument that sounded as though it may have been imported from a Montana militia.

There was another sombre overtone here. The Reform Party made good mileage in the West by being anti-Quebec and the party also contained anti-feminist elements. My experience in four election campaigns was that you got nowhere with people opposed to the gun registry if you said that the Montreal massacre was a reason why firearms should be registered. That argument left them cold. There was rarely, if ever, any acknowledgement or sympathy expressed for Marc Lepine’s victims.

Guns a symbolic issue

To summarize, the gun registry issue became a symbolic issue, even a metaphorical one. This was no accident because the Canadian right, borrowing from the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby in the United States, framed the debate. They constantly talked about “gun control” by a big, bad government — but the issue was really about registering firearms, and if you had no criminal record or record of violence or instability you could register your gun. We register cars, boats, mortgages, even bicycles and dogs. What is so sinister about registering firearms?  The right coined the phrase “gun control” and many of us fell into the trap of using their language. When you do that, as American linguist George Lakoff tells us, you have lost the debate.

Lakoff also describes how political conservatives in the United States made a conscious decision in the 1970s to spend the money to build an intellectual culture for the right. For example, wealthy people financed think tanks and set up professorships and scholarships at many universities, including Harvard. “These institutions have done their job very well,” Lakoff says. The right deliberately transformed the language of American politics and in Canada the right has borrowed techniques and language on guns and a range of other issues.

Safe communities

The Conservatives talk constantly about safe communities, but what they mostly mean is locking people up. How can they, in good conscience, believe that our communities are safer with unregistered guns, and presumably more of them? This position is simply bankrupt and immoral. A nurturing vision of a safe community is one where women, children and men do not have to fear gun violence, or any other violence. We want to keep our families safe so let’s have fewer guns around, and if we are to have them let’s certify and register them.

By Dennis Gruending

I have been curious about where Barack Obama will find the antecedents and inspiration for his inaugural speech on January 20. American writer Kathleen Hall Jamieson is an expert on rhetoric, particularly that of presidents. Jamieson says that while modern speeches may contain some new content, they always draw upon a stock of earlier speeches and existing rhetorical forms. Northrop Frye, the late Canadian literary critic, made much the same point. Inaugural addresses exist as a genre. They are a new president’s opportunity to set a tone, to think big and to talk in terms of lofty vision.

Delivering an historic speech about what George Bush Sr. called the “vision thing” is not easy. Most inaugurals are forgotten almost as soon as they are delivered. Only a few survive the test of time and enter the nation’s literature, to be quoted in generations to come. John F. Kennedy’s speech in the 1960 inaugural is recalled as a classic. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” he said, “but what you can do for your country.” Kennedy was America’s first television age president and like Obama, he was elegant and articulate – but Obama is unlikely to draw heavily upon Kennedy in the inaugural speech.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech in 1933 was another a classic. The Great Depression confronted him when he took office, much as Obama is beset by a raging economic crisis today. When Roosevelt delivered his speech on March 4, people were gripped by fear and anxiety. Roosevelt told them: “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear it fear itself…” He promised decisive action to put people back to work and he launched the New Deal, a massive program of public works – what today we would call infrastructure. Expect some echoes of Roosevelt’s steely determination in what we are going to hear from Obama, but he won’t be a major source either.

It is clear that, among presidents, Obama has chosen Abraham Lincoln, a man from Illinois and the emancipator of slaves, as his touchstone. Obama and his family took the train on January 17 from Philadelphia to Washington with six stops along the way, just as Lincoln did nearly 150 years ago. Obama also decided to swear his oath on the same Bible that Lincoln used for his.

The power and cadence of Obama’s speech, however, will likely owe at least as much to Martin Luther King, someone never elected, but rather a pastor and prophet whose destiny was to speak poetic truth to those in power. Obama’s focus on Lincoln allows him to complete the great American narrative of race and justice that runs from Lincoln the emancipator, through King the prophet, to Obama in whom the prophecy is fulfilled in almost religious terms. Obama, a black man, has become president in what was an apartheid-like state, but only after Martin Luther King paid with his life for his prophecy to that state and its citizens. I am a fan of Roosevelt’s but somehow his New Deal, as important as it is, does not have the same narrative power as that of the progression from Lincoln to King to Obama.

Lincoln made several speeches that have become deeply embedded in the American psyche and the country’s narrative. He won the 1860 election and delivered his first inaugural on March 4, 1861 when the storm clouds of secession and civil war were gathering. He opposed slavery but for him the paramount issue was that of national unity. He agreed that the founding fathers had condoned slavery in existing states, but argued that a proper reading of the constitution forbade slavery in the new territories that were opening up. A number of southern states threatened to secede from the union over the issue but in his speech Lincoln insisted on majority rule and said that he would not allow secession. But he ended his speech on a conciliatory note. “I am loath close,” he said. “We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” Although slavery has long been banished, Obama has made it a priority to reach out to opponents, much as Lincoln did to his. Listen for that in his speech.

The Southern states did secede and the war was fought. On November 19, 1863, Lincoln made a short speech at the dedication of a cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where thousand of soldiers had been slaughtered in several days of intense fighting. Lincoln’s 266-word Gettysburg address is legendary in the United States and elsewhere. He used the consecration of a graveyard to rededicate the nation to its founding principles. “…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Obama is not likely to talk too much about war, but he will echo Lincoln on freedom and democracy.

Lincoln’s second inaugural address occurred on March 4, 1865. The cruel war was still raging and Lincoln wondered aloud if the Almighty was punishing the nation for its offences. Wearily, but firmly, he promised to prosecute the war to its completion but even in its midst he offered a conciliatory gesture that he knew would be needed in the future. “With malice toward none, with charity for all … let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who will have borne the nation’s battle, and for his widow and his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

In the 150 years since the Civil War, that American promise has been badly, some would say hopelessly, tarnished. The beacon of equality, freedom and democracy lived on in the mind of Martin Luther King and countless others, and it was King’s stirring oratory that captured the dream. He spoke on August 23, 1963, appropriately from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. during a peaceful civil rights rally. One hundred years after the Civil War, King said, “we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.” King spoke with a sense of urgency about what must happen. He used the familiar phrase about the American dream to rhyme off eight parallel constructions about his own dreams for the future, including this one: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Many of the abuses that King described have been overcome; others remain; and King was assassinated for holding the dream that he did. Obama is seen as tangible fulfillment of King’s promise of a better day. No matter how good a president he is, he is bound to disappoint these almost messianic expectations once he has to make hard decisions about taxes, wars and social justice. But as he places the finishing touches on his inaugural (and he will write it mostly on his own), Obama has a rich tradition of American oratory upon which to draw.