It's a funny old world when a mere entertainer understands the Constitution better than a supposedly smart leader like the mayor of New York:
Ice-T: Well, I'll give up my gun when everybody does. Doesn't that make sense? If there were guns here, would you want to be the only person without one?
Krishnan Guru-Murthy, anchor, Channel 4 News: So do you carry guns routinely at home?
Ice-T: Yeah, it's legal in the United States. It's part of our Constitution. You know, the right to bear arms is because that's the last form of defense against tyranny. Not to hunt. It's to protect yourself from the police.
Well, from tyranny in general, but I'll give him "police." That one statement -- "I'll give up my gun when everybody does" -- states the case against both gun control and nuclear disarmament as succintly as it can be stated. We can't erase the knowledge of firearms or nuclear weapons, so somebody is always going to have them. Laws controlling or limiting them will be obeyed by the responsible, ignored by the wicked, so the stronger the controls are the more likely we are disarming the wrong side.
Ice-T has had one of the weirdest career arcs in show business. He started out as a gangsta rapper whose "Cop Killer" song included the immortal line "Die, die, die pig, die!" and ended up playing a cop on the long-running "Law and Order, SVU." Guess that makes him the perfect example of how it's not the gun that's the problem, it's how people decide to use it for good or evil.
