Ashcroft has been unfairly maligned
By Chris Plumblee
Student Columnist

> February 1, 2001

It now seems all but impossible that John Ashcroft will not be confirmed as George W. Bush’s Attorney General, and it’s about time. He has been raked over the coals because of his views on all sorts of things, from abortion to racial tolerance. No issue has provoked as much study, however, as his stance on gun control. This is a pet project of mine because frankly, I don’t see any real need for it. How many criminals do you think are worried about the fact that their backgrounds may be checked when they go to a gun shop or pawnshop to buy a gun? How many of them think about getting a pistol permit before they purchase a handgun in North Carolina?

The answer is, of course, that none of them do. This afternoon, I watched a news conference held by the various law enforcement organizations responsible for capturing the “Texas Seven.” If someone like one of these people wants to get a gun, do they go through the proper channels? No, they go to a sporting goods store and steal them, they go to the corner and buy a stolen gun from their friend Boo, or they break into the home of a law-abiding gun owner and steal his property. How does gun control legislation prevent these types of crimes? The answer is that it doesn’t. Gun control legislation stops law-abiding people who are interested in protection or hunting from buying guns. It infringes on the freedom of many Americans for the purpose of making it more difficult for the relatively few criminals who want to go through legal procedure to purchase firearms.

Groups such as Handgun Control, Inc. have demonized John Ashcroft because he supports enforcing the laws most states have already enacted involving stiff penalties for people convicted of using a gun in a crime. The fact is that this legislation is odious enough, but groups such as Handgun Control, Inc. seek a nationwide ban on handguns except those owned by police officers.

Later, once these groups attain these goals, they will look for a comprehensive ban on firearms of any type. This is not just rhetoric from a person trying to frighten those interested in keeping their guns into voting against legislators interested in keeping them; this is a sincere plea to all people to think about the ramifications before you let the government decide that one specific part of the Constitution is obsolete! If the Second Amendment goes, will the government decide that it is inconvenient not to have a career President? Will the 22nd Amendment be next?

There is precedent to change the Constitution through the amendment process, but should we let the legislature decide that it is acceptable to circumscribe the rights of the people at will? Will the right of young people to vote at age 18 be taken away because it is not exercised? I have heard it said that, of the eligible youth in America, only half register to vote when they reach 18 and that only half of those registered actually vote.

This is certainly a sad state of affairs, but I do not think that it is grounds for taking away that right. However, if a liberal Congress took it in their mind to take away that right “for the good of the people who choose to vote”, then would we as a country not reject that? This is exactly the position that many Americans are in as we speak. Their rights are slowly being taken away from them, and they are vilified if they speak out against that.

This was not intended to be solely a John Ashcroft column because I wrote one of those earlier this semester, but it is intended to make this point: people like John Ashcroft are what makes this administration better than the last administration. Bill Clinton’s choices for cabinet positions frequently had no more of a moral sense than he did. Let’s not forget, this was a President that had no qualms about looking the American people right in their collective eyes and lying. John Ashcroft will not bow down to the will of George W. Bush if that ever goes against his interpretation of the law, and he will interpret the law as strictly as any attorney general has ever interpreted it.

The responses he gave at his confirmation hearings bear that out: when questioned by liberals such as Ted Kennedy on his personal beliefs and if he thought they would weigh on the advice or counsel he would offer the President, he repeatedly stated that he did not want to get into a position of trying to anticipate the situations in which he would be asked for his advice, but he also repeatedly stated that he would uphold the law as it is stated and will not seek to use his position to weaken any law that he personally disagreed with. This response certainly seems reasonable and is as much as one could hope from any candidate for cabinet position, but the opposition to the nomination of Ashcroft did not believe him when he stated this, and they maintain that they know what he will do, and that the American people cannot believe this man when he says he will not work against the laws with which he disagrees. Their narrow-mindedness on this issue only works to conceal his record.

If Ashcroft voted against an appointment once, was that necessarily because he was black? If Ashcroft gave an interview and called the Fathers of the Confederacy patriots, it is because they were patriots. Let us not forget that they did what they did for the same reasons that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and Benjamin Franklin rebelled against their government, because they believed that they were not served well by that government, and they saw no other way to attain their goal than by armed revolution. I do not deny that there were atrocities committed during the Civil War, and I do not deny that slavery was a problem in the pre-Civil War South that we find abhorrent today. I also believe that the Civil War was not caused by slavery except in the most general sense.

The South rebelled against the government of the United States because they believed that they had a purer conception of what the Constitution meant when it outlined the rights of the individual states. The leaders of the South believed that they had the right to withdraw from the Union when it served their purposes to do so. The leaders of the North saw the United States as an indivisible whole, and any rebellion of any one region of the country was an unbreakable division.The reason that the South believed that they were not being served adequately was because of slavery, at least in part. The majority in Congress at this time was not a matter of Democrat and Republican, but of North and South. Most Northern Congressmen believed that slavery should be prohibited from expanding. Southern Congressmen believed that the states had a right to determine if they would be slave or free.

That last paragraph probably just got me a huge number of enemies on all quarters, but let’s remember that my interpretation of events is just as valid as anyone else’s, and that I carefully did not deny that slavery was an abomination. What I did choose to refute is the opinion that the leaders of the Confederacy were acting solely to preserve their right to keep slaves. They did what they did because they felt that the government was not respecting their rights as they interpreted them from the Constitution.