We now know that the National Rifle Association will be joining Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin for Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th Anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Is it possible to imagine a greater offense to the legacy of Dr. King?

The NRA, the leading purveyor of the noxious notion that guns are legitimate tools of political dissent, will be standing in the historic shadow of Dr. King, the apostle of non-violent protest. Dr. King resisted calls to violence from within the civil rights movement with these words: “There is more power in socially organized masses on the march than there is in guns in the hands of a few desperate men. Our enemies would prefer to deal with a small armed group rather than with a huge, unarmed but resolute mass of people….” As history shows, the civil rights movement touched the moral conscience of our Nation, and ended the Jim Crow era, by pursuing Dr. King’s path of peaceful sit-ins and marches, rather than resisting Bull Connor’s water hoses with bullets.

What would Dr. King have thought of the wild cheers that greeted the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, when he said this at last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference: “Freedom is nothing but dust in the wind till it’s guarded by the blue steel and dry powder of a free and armed people . . . Our founding fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules.” The noxious idea, long promoted by the NRA, that the Second Amendment is really about ensuring the threat of violence against the government as a legitimate strategy to achieve political change, is now an anthem of the Far Right. As Sharran Angle, the Tea Party candidate nominated by the Republicans to run for Harry Reid’s Nevada Senate seat, put it recently, “If Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.” In other words, if the Right cannot change the direction of the country through peaceful discussion and dissent, it will be time for the “guys with the guns” to “make the rules.” We have seen the words of political intimidation translate into action, as guns have been openly brandished at Tea Party events and town hall meetings.

What irony could be more cruel than the NRA’s presence on the steps of the Memorial to President Lincoln, on the Anniversary of Dr. King’s speech, a stark reminder that both these American icons were struck down by gunfire in acts of political violence? John Wilkes Booth and James Earl Ray were “guys with the guns” who sought to change the direction of our country through armed force. We need no more powerful demonstration of the horror that can be too easily justified by the insurrectionist ideas of the NRA and its Tea Party friends. And what could be uglier than the planned appearance of guitarist Ted Nugent, an NRA Board Member, who once said that “apartheid isn’t that cut and dry,” because “all men are not created equal”?

The “Restoring Honor” rally is being sold as an entirely “non-political” event that simply will pay tribute “to America’s service personnel and other upstanding citizens who embody our nation’s founding principles of integrity, truth and honor.” But the ideological agenda is barely concealed. “Help us restore the values that founded this great nation,” says Beck’s promotional material. What values have been lost that must be restored? Who lost them? How should we restore them? The theme of “lost values that must be restored” is indistinguishable from the Tea Party demand, “We want our country back!” The NRA’s presence is an implicit statement that if our values cannot be restored throughout peaceful dissent, the “guys with the guns” will be there to restore them through other means.

In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. King said this: “We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.” The appearance of the NRA at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 shows a shameful contempt for Dr. King’s memory and the principles of non-violent protest for which he lived, and died.

We must have faith that Dr. King’s legacy will remain strong enough to ensure that the guys with the guns do not make the rules.

For more information, see Dennis Henigan’s Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy (Potomac Books 2009)

A disturbing magazine cover crossed my desk last week announcing, in big bold print, that Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and the NRA are hosting a “Restoring Honor” rally next month.

It’s being held at the Lincoln Memorial — a place that honors America’s most revered president – the one who saved our union, freed African slaves, and breathed the healing balm “of malice toward none,” at the conclusion of our bitter Civil War – and who was killed by a gun.

It’s also being held on the 47th anniversary of the “March on Washington.” The march where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke so eloquently of his dream that one day his children would live in a nation where “they will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character;”

…Where this same civil rights giant, and pacifist who won the Nobel Prize for Peace, was joined on the podium — and in the 200,000-plus audience — by Americans of all races, backgrounds, and religions; and

Where the transformative power of non-violent protest and forgiveness traveled deeply into the racially scarred American consciousness, and prodded political leaders to pass laws that struck down decades of discriminatory practices that had relegated a group of people to the desert of second-class citizenship.

Now picture the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, on the anniversary of I Have a Dream, with Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre at the podium, and our National Mall teeming with their followers to, in Beck’s words, “pick up Martin Luther King’s dream…”

Calling the date of his rally “Divine providence,” (as noted ironically by the Colbert Report) this is the same Glenn Beck, a life-member of the NRA, who has insulted the Anti-Defamation League; challenged Keith Ellison, a Muslim who had just been elected to Congress to “prove to me you are not working with our enemies;” repeatedly called President Obama “a racist” and accused him of having “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” This same Beck recently urged Christians to leave their churches if their ministers ever spoke about “social justice” – the very foundation of King’s leadership during the 1950’s and 1960’s – because he considers the term code for “communism and Nazism.”

This is the same Sarah Palin, who has purposely stoked fears and resentment among gun-owners by wrongly accusing President Obama of wanting to ban guns; who disregards the 70 percent of Americans who want restrictions on semi-automatic assault weapons; and rejects the medical community’s assertion that gun violence in America is a national health problem.

This is the same Wayne LaPierre, who insists that “…it’s the guys with the guns make the rules.” Not Jefferson’s ‘We, the people,’ the American voters, or their representatives. No, “the guys with the guns” – a statement that bears eerie similarity to the one John Wilkes Booth authored in a letter on April 14, 1865, the morning before he assassinated Lincoln, that “Might makes right.”

The same LaPierre who just weeks ago debated me on PBS’s News Hour and argued that laws, such as requiring criminal background checks on all gun sales at gun shows are the equivalent of a “poll tax.”

Yes, you read that correctly. LaPierre equates laws restricting access to guns by dangerous people with a tax designed to keep African-Americans from exercising their 15th Amendment right to vote, which had been blocked for a century after the Civil War. A tax that ultimately was consigned to the dustbin of history by the groundswell of support for the 24th Amendment, which became law on the heels of the 1963 March on Washington. Somehow a proposal designed to slow the mind-numbing gun violence touching so many in this country equals – in LaPierre’s mind — the century-long disenfranchisement of former slaves and their descendants.

On that podium also will be Ted Nugent, a guitarist and NRA board member, who has insulted women and gays, and who told the Detroit Free Press Magazine that, “Apartheid isn’t that cut and dry. All men are not created equal. The preponderance of South Africa is a different breed….”

A large part of the audience likely will be those who identify themselves as members of the Tea Party, some of whom at past public events have openly carried guns and used tactics of intimidation; brandished racially offensive posters depicting President Obama; and shouted racial and anti-gay slurs at congressional leaders outside of a rally to allegedly protest health care legislation. One of the spokespersons for the Tea Partiers even wrote a facetious letter “from the Colored people” to Abraham Lincoln praising slavery, to challenge the NAACP’s claims that the party harbors racist elements.

Most jarring is the sad irony of all of these people at the podium, with their supporters spread across our National Mall, celebrating, in part, their worship of guns, while invoking, quite blatantly, the legacies of two great Americans whose magnificent lives were cruelly cut short by bullets.

And as you hold that image in your mind, consider the words of Dr. King, who, while mourning with all Americans the loss of President John F. Kennedy to gun violence, suggested: “While the question ‘Who killed President Kennedy?’ is important, the question ‘What killed him?’ is more important. Our late President was assassinated by a morally inclement climate. It is a climate filled with heavy torrents of false accusation, jostling winds of hatred and raging storms of violence. It is climate where men cannot disagree without being disagreeable, and where they express dissent through violence and murder.”

Are Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, and Ted Nugent, at this place and time, the new keepers of King’s dream and of Lincoln’s legacy? Or do they, with this event at this place and time, in one of the boldest and most public ways imaginable, mock, and indeed, slander, everything for which these men so nobly stood, and for which they died?

The “gun rights” absolutists are continuing their campaign to ensure that guns are carried into every corner of American society, with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal signing legislation to allows guns in places of worship, Arizona allowing the carrying of concealed weapons without a permit, and Utah giving out concealed carry licenses like candy to folks who have never set foot in the state. The madness is driven by the “more guns=less crime” malarkey that has become the mantra of the gun lobby.

The “more guns” argument goes like this. The world is neatly divided into good guys and bad guys. The bad guys will always have guns and will attack the good guys who are unarmed, but not the good guys who may be able to shoot back. “Criminals still prefer to prey on the weak,” says former NRA President Sandy Froman, “and they don’t like armed victims.” According to this argument, the bad guys will be deterred from committing criminal acts by the fear that the good guys are carrying guns. In the fantasy world constructed by the “gun rights” crowd, this idea is taken as presumed truth. In the world we actually live in, it doesn’t work so well.

Proponents of the deterrence theory attempt to give it a quasi-scholarly veneer by citing the work of John Lott, who has made headline-grabbing claims that state laws making it easier to carry concealed weapons have caused sharp reductions in crime. Lott’s studies were long ago discredited by economists and public health scholars at a veritable Who’s Who of major research universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins and Carnegie-Mellon.

The most recent critique of Lott’s work, by Ian Ayres and John Donahue of Yale Law School, finds that the “right to carry” laws not only have not reduced crime, they actually are associated with an increase in aggravated assault. Lott continues to peddle his pseudo-science, as he did in his two recent appearances with me on John Stossel’s show on FoxBusiness and on C-Span’s Washington Journal.

And then there is the self-inflicted damage to Lott’s credibility from his admission that he posed on the internet as a fictional former student named “Mary Rosh.” Mary was a passionate defender of Lott’s work and gushing admirer of his teaching ability. The strange story of John Lott as “Mary Rosh” is set out in my book, Lethal Logic. Lott recently landed a job as a commentator on Fox News, which tells us as much as we need to know about his objectivity.

Apart from the statistics, the deterrence theory poses an interesting conundrum. If criminals are deterred by the prospect that their victim may be armed, how can we account for attacks by armed criminals against other armed criminals? Why do armed drug dealers have anything to fear from other armed drug dealers? Why do armed gangs have anything to fear from other armed gangs? Pro-gun researcher Gary Kleck of Florida State University reports that street gang members are over eight times more likely to own handguns than other youths, and nineteen times more likely to be homicide victims. Drug dealers are almost four times more likely to own a handgun and six times more likely to be homicide victims. Why doesn’t their gun possession deter attacks on these criminals? Surely it can’t be true that bad guys fear only armed good guys, but not other armed bad guys.

The real problem with the deterrence theory is that it little to do with the real world. It has a tough time explaining, for example, what happened last Saturday in Lake Sammamish State Park near Seattle. A fistfight broke out between two groups of people with apparent gang affiliations, and ended in a gun battle in which two were killed and three others were wounded. It seems safe to assume that when the fistfight began, those present had reason to believe that some in the two groups were armed with guns. Yet the likely presence of guns did nothing to deter violence. The guns simply made the violence more lethal. What started as a fistfight ended up with two dead and three wounded (with the attendant public cost of treating the wounded).

More guns means less crime only in the imaginary world of the “gun rights” movement as it tries to push us toward an America where there is nowhere to go to escape the guns – even into churches. The real world was last Saturday in that state park near Seattle.

For more information, see Dennis Henigan’s Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy (Potomac Books 2009).