Tehran guns

Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, positioning himself as the right-wing standard-bearer as he prepares for a primary battle against more moderate Gov. Charlie Crist, has gotten himself some attention this week for a curious Tweeter comment on Sunday:  “I have a feeling the situation in Iran would be a little different if they had a 2nd amendment like ours,” the 38-year-old Republican tweeted.

The assertion quickly drew hoots from Rubio’s critics, and praise from the occasional gun enthusiast.  ”Instead of free speech, the right to peaceably assemble, a free press, and the separation between religion and government, Rubio is apparently thinking, ‘Boy, if those folks only had lots of guns….,’” wrote Steve Benen. Chris Matthews opined that “it wouldn’t really be a non-violent protest, would it Mr. Rubio, if the non-violent protestors were walking around with guns,” which drew a snort from Newsbusters poster Geoffrey Dickens: “Our Founding Fathers understood that it is much harder to repress a free people that is armed,” he wrote, under the headline “Matthews Mocks GOP Candidate for Upholding 2nd Amendment Principles.”

I’m fascinated by the contretemps, because there actually is an example of a well-armed society right next door to Iran–and it’s a place where the guns owned by the citizenry proved remarkably ineffective when it came to resisting dictatorship. I remember reporting in Iraq sometime in mid-2003, just as the “Mission Accomplished” era was giving way to something a lot uglier. It turned out that pretty much everyone had guns. Even on good days, people had a tendency to get wounded when celebratory gunfire came crashing down to earth. This was a country that until a couple months earlier had been in the brutal grip of Saddam Hussein. Had all the guns simply arrived since his regime fell?

As it happened, no. It turned out that while Saddam had little respect for the other nine items in the US bill of rights, ordinary Iraqis had been more or less free to arm themselves. And, over the course of his reign, the fact that Iraqis could own rifles did little to crimp the dictator’s abilitity to be brutal.

Reporting my story, I interviewed the owner of one of the nine gun shops in Mosul, who pointed to the license on his wall, dated 2001. He said anyone 25 and over had been free to buy a gun, though he had to register their name and address. Business had been good, he said, especially since the war, as people knew there would be looting afterwards. Among the indirect casualties of the postwar anarchy was the gun store, which saw its market disappear as a glut of cheap Kalashnikovs, likely stolen from Iraqi army facilities, hit the market. The gun shop was now empty, and the  city’s vegetable market doubled as a bazaar for pistols, rifles, semiautomatics and even bayonets.

In fact, it was the American occupiers–the ones from the land of the 2nd Amendment–who were warning buyers to stick to the officially licensed stores. Tellingly, the gun store owner told me that the illegal business would restart moments after a US patrol passed.

Which is all just to say that while Rubio’s tweet may win him points with the NRA, the policy prescription it implies wouldn’t do much to help Iranian democracy advocates face down a vastly better-armed and apparently shameless authoritarian establishment.