How to Think About Guns
(I wrote this initially after the mass shooting at Sutherland Springs, Texas in November, but it applies just as much after yesterday’s Parkland school shooting in Florida, AND THE MAY 24 ELEMENTARY SCHOOL SHOOTING IN UVALDE, TEXAS).
After the latest mass killing in America, in Texas, at a tiny church in the middle of nowhere, in a town that loves its guns and still loves them–another demonstration to us all, as though another demonstration was needed, that we human beings are made of some kind of special steel that is impervious to evidence and logic and heartache—after this bloodbath we were inundated, again, with calls to treat the perpetrator’s mental condition, or fix the loopholes that kept him from being listed as a child-abuser and on a no-buy list for guns. From the Attorney General of Texas, no less, we heard once again the astonishing truism that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people.’
I say truth because it is, of course, undeniable. Human beings are the problem. On this we can all agree. If we can fix the human problem, it would be safe for us to have guns. If we can keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, we will be safer. If we can keep guns out of the hands of all the people who lose their tempers, who get road rage, who envy their neighbor’s shiny new car or hate the way they keep their yard; all the people who drink too much at parties, or use opioids or meth or coke; the ones who take anti-depressants and lithium, and the ones who throw them away; all the people who get jealous at their girlfriends and boyfriends, who want to dominate a spouse or a date; all the people consumed by lust, who think ‘no’ means ‘yes’; all those obsessed by power and needing praise and validation; every young man on the streets with too much testosterone; everyone who’s careless and forgets to put dangerous things away or lock them up; everyone who’s lost their job, had a bad boss, got passed over, seen their dreams go up in smoke; all the daredevils, the risk-takers, the ones who think they’re invulnerable; all the rich people who feel entitled and can’t imagine anything bad happening to them, and the poor who don’t expect anything but the bad; all the stupid people, the confused, the baffled, the frustrated; all the power-hungry ideologues and the people in thrall to their conspiracy theories and lies; everyone who’s been traumatized and has PTSD; all the ones left behind, lying in the dust, and those who put them there.
Yes, if we can keep guns out of the hands of these dangerous folks, we’ll be safe.
Raise your hand if you’re a candidate for sainthood. Look to the left, look to the right, look in the mirror. Not too many hands up.
I’m a good person, you’re thinking. I would never hurt anyone except in self-defense, never use my gun dangerously. I haven’t done drugs, committed any crimes, threatened anyone.
Good for you. But…never? NEVER?? No one knows themselves that well.
We aren’t able to predict who is going to be the next killer. What do people always say, afterwards: “He seemed like such a nice guy.” “I would never have imagined he would do anything like that.” Here’s the thing—people change. People snap. Stuff happens to them, or in them, that no one else can see. There are no signs, or only ones that can be interpreted correctly after the fact. Look at the Las Vegas killer. No one saw him coming. No criminal record. We still don’t know ‘why’ he did it. All we know, in retrospect, is that he spent a lot of his time and money collecting guns and training with them.
I’m not just talking about mass killings. Those are awful but relatively rare. We have zero ability to find those people ahead of time and put them on some no-buy list. And these are usually determined people who are not deterred by easy-to-get-around restrictions. No, I’m talking about all the day-to-day, mundane stuff. The botched robbery. The wife-battering husband. The street-level gang-banger. The depressed teenager. All the killings that add up to over 11,000 homicides by gun in 2014. To a US homicide rate 7 times higher than the average for other developed countries, and a gun homicide rate over 25 times higher. To over 20,000 suicides every year, from guns.
We have a shitload of guns floating around in the hands of virtually everyone. In the hands of all of us with all of our frailties, all of our selfishness and anger and stupidity. Technology has made these weapons cheaper and cheaper, and more and more lethal. To make it worse, we live in a consumer driven society where amoral companies compete to develop and sell us the coolest, most effective, do-the-most-damage-in-the-least-amount-of-time toys. Other amoral companies compete to glorify gun violence in movies, TV, music, and video games. All this is insane and suicidal. Any society would suffer if it imitated this. But it’s only part of the story.
Let’s be serious for once. We have a problem that won’t be solved by restricting bump stocks or assault rifles or gun-show loopholes with all those ‘common-sense’ laws we hear about. Gun advocates laugh, rightly, at most of these well-meaning but inadequate ideas. They wouldn’t do much. The problem requires solutions commensurate with reality. We have a lot of people who exalt guns and the gun life, who get their meaning and identity largely from guns, who place guns at the center of their world. Fewer and fewer Americans own guns or use them, but those who do are more and more committed. They buy more guns. They care about guns more than anything else in life. This needs to be turned around. And that will take real action and strong laws. It will require a shift like the shifts we’ve seen about smoking and drunk driving, a rejection of a set of attitudes and behaviors that characterize a lot of Americans right now.
Yes, gun enthusiasts, I do mean you. We need to de-legitimize having guns for ‘fun’, collecting guns, seeing guns as signs of manhood and authority, and viewing guns as central to being an American. Protecting your family in your home, yes. Going hunting in the fall, yes. The current pornographic obsession with guns that we see at gun shows, in Hollywood, in the NRA, no.
These cultural shifts can’t be legislated, but laws and public action and statements matter. The de-legitimization needs to start at the top with some bright lines. Registration. Tough restrictions. Buy-backs. Destruction of illegal weapons. Lawsuits against gun manufacturers. Condemnation of cultural products that glorify guns and the gun life. Rolling back open carry laws and prohibiting guns outside the home except in carefully defined circumstances. Courage in the face of inevitable pushback and anger, knowing that the majority of Americans—even conservatives and gun owners—already back many of these measures.
The starting point should be taking back the Second Amendment. One of the gun movements great successes was a deliberate campaign to re-define the historic understanding that connected gun ownership rights to a broad public purpose, maintaining a militia for community self-defense. The Heller Case as articulated by the late Justice Scalia is a travesty of bad scholarship and sophistry. (I suggest you read it and judge for yourself). It needs to be aggressively challenged and questioned. It is not ‘normal,’ and not consistent with most legal scholarship or most Americans understanding of the English language and the meaning of the Constitution. It is now used by gun extremists to justify any type of weapon, to anyone, anywhere. On this issue Americans should never give in, never, never, never. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. It aims at securing us a decent life.
Part of this fight is to knock down the idea that guns in private hands are our protection against bad government. Gun enthusiasts often seem to see themselves as protagonists in the next re-make of “Red Dawn”, taking to the hills with their Bushmasters to fight some shadowy state power. But if modern government does go bad, no number of pop guns will stop the 82nd Airborne or the 1st Armor Division. More to the point, the architects of the Constitution looked to strong states to help check national power, not groups of armed insurrectionists. The inability of the national government to deal with various local rebellions was a major reason to create a stronger structure under the Constitution. The 2nd Amendment is designed to protect state authority by checking the national government from taking away the weapons needed for state militias. (And also to make sure that in slave states, white citizens always had the means to keep slaves under control).
The 2nd Amendment is the only one of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights that has an explanatory preamble. The others simply define the rights being protected. That tells us this ‘right’ is something different and needs to be carefully circumscribed.
To the extent 2nd Amendment purists are motivated by genuine arguments, they rest on a deeply flawed understanding of freedom. When advocates are confronted with the undeniable consequences of their stance—the 30,000 gun deaths (and many more injuries) each year, the mass shootings, the degradation of our public space, the huge financial burden (and cost in lives) for police and private security, the humiliating damage to America’s soft power—they tend to shrug. This is the ‘price of freedom,’ as Bill O’Reilly said after the murders in Las Vegas.
The freedom arguments used here focus, as is all too common for modern conservatives, almost exclusively on possible abuses of government power. To be free is to be free of the state. But there is no freedom in practice without states. The drafters of the Bill of Rights were steeped in the arguments of natural rights theorists—Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu. Human beings living with no agreed authority over them, in some version of the ‘state of nature,’ can be argued to have a natural right to defend themselves and preserve their lives (and property, to the extent it is needed for life). But as Hobbes pointed out, this is a life “of all against all”—nasty, brutish, violent, and short. We have plenty of examples of this sort of life today, in Somalia, in Yemen, in Afghanistan, in El Salvador. These are not places with any shortage of guns.
The primordial threats come from our fellow man. It is to ease these that we have government, to protect first of all Life, along with Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. This is the natural right tradition that our Founders lived and breathed. Government cannot take away the right of individual self-defense but it can and must check the rights of individuals to use force or the threat of force to have their way in the world. Human beings are not angels. Self-defense cannot become an excuse for every manner of pre-emption or implied violence. Having and displaying modern firepower and allowing it to be widely available sends a message to your fellow citizens that any and every interaction has the potential to become deadly; that doing or saying anything offensive, even accidentally, may result in lethal violence. It signals that I as an individual, someone you may not know and have no way of knowing, am prepared and willing to take things into my own hands rather than rely on police or courts or designated authorities.
The implied threat from owning modern weapons inhibits free speech and democratic debate. This is especially the case for weapons that a reasonable person would interpret as beyond what is needed for personal defense, e.g. any type of assault rifle, or armor-piercing or extra-lethal rounds, or large clips. The same for carrying any type of gun in public.
“An armed society is a polite society” is another way of saying it is an intimidated society. Arms used to be the monopoly of the ruling elites, who used naked force to keep the lower classes submissive but among themselves relied on codes of honor backed by the threat of duels or vendettas to settle disputes. An elaborate etiquette and courtly language accompanied these norms to avoid giving offense and triggering violence. This is incompatible with a healthy democracy where we need open and unconstrained debate.
Gun enthusiasts who want to make the world safe for guns by identifying potentially dangerous people and not letting them buy guns are heading down a perilous road. All of us are potentially dangerous. And in a society saturated with guns, there is no way to keep even a mildly determined person from getting a weapon. These arguments are not serious. They are pretexts.
The true believers and 2nd Amendment purists are a minority but a very vocal and determined one, backed by abundant funding from firearms companies. They are in my view committed to a false vision of human nature and human community that violates our fundamental rights to life and liberty, and undermines democracy and individual freedom. This must be checked by the use of political power. People committed to a different agenda have to be elected and then supported in the face of intense blowback. And we must change the debate, going beyond feckless calls for ‘common-sense’ compromises and taking a clear stand against the association of guns with freedom, manliness, fun and the Constitution.