It ought to be too obvious to bear mentioning that the
problem of gun violence in the United States does not admit of easy answers,
but the spate of reactions in the wake of the tragedy in Newtown indicates that
a significant number of people with access to public platforms don’t seem to
understand that simple fact.
I understand the appeal of simplicity. The problem is that
in order to come up with a simple solution, you have to over-simplify the
problem. It’s easy to say “ban all guns,” but as we’ve learned from Prohibition
and the “war on drugs,” banning anything only creates an underground economy in
the banned substance, and underground economies are much harder to regulate and
control than open trade. Conversely, the “let’s arm everybody” argument is
equally unrealistic – to have all kinds of untrained and unscreened people
running around with deadly weapons hardly seems likely to improve the
situation.
The spokesman for the NRA says we should have armed guards
in every school, ignoring both the financial costs and the psychological costs
of our children having to go to school behind armed guards. It also ignores the
fact that in the shootings at Fort Hood in 2009, in the
most populous U.S. military installation in the world, a single gunman killed 13 people and wounded
29 others. Despite being surrounded by armed, trained military personnel, some
of whom engaged him, the killer fired 214 rounds before being stopped. There
were also armed guards at Columbine and Virginia Tech, to no good effect.
Here are some things we can say: first of all, automatic and
semi-automatic weapons have only one function, which is to shoot as many rounds
as possible in the shortest possible times. Fully automatic weapons have been
illegal since Prohibition, and the most recent ban that was allowed to expire,
was full of holes including, incredibly, “grandfathering in” weapons
manufactured and sold before the ban and already in people’s possession, i.e.,
potentially on the market. These are not hunting weapons or self-defense
weapons, they are designed for and work well in combat situations against
multiple adversaries.
Secondly, weapons for hunting or self-defense do not need ammunition
clips that hold 30 rounds or more. Hunting, say deer or elk, you’re going to
get one shot, maybe two at a time before the animal is either down or gone. If
I’m defending my home against intruders, there are unlikely to be more than a
couple of them, and they are likely to take off after the first shot or two.
Third, analogies advanced on both sides of the argument are
flawed – yes there are countries where a large part of the population own and
even carry guns, and those countries have lower rates of gun violence than the
US. And there are countries where almost no one owns guns and those countries
have lower rates of gun violence than the US. Looking at it logically, one has
to at least entertain the notion that gun ownership, whether free or
restricted, has no correlation with gun violence. What does? I have to assume
that the culture of those countries – how people approach violence in general
and gun use in particular – has something to do with it.
Fourth, blaming easy scapegoats is unlikely to make anything
useful happen. In the past ten days we’ve seen attempts to place blame on
everything from the media to the NRA, to violence in movies, to the State of
Connecticut’s position on same-sex marriage, to the absence of prayer in
schools, you name it. All of that is blatant opportunism on the part of the
speakers, cynically taking advantage of a tragedy to advance their pet agenda.
Twenty children and six adults are dead – that is a fact; anything else is just
opinion, and in most cases the “connection” between what is being blamed and
the tragedy exists only in someone’s fevered imagination.
So what do we do? As with most complex problems there are
some obvious steps to take – restore the ban on automatic weapons and beef it
up – get them off the market and make the penalties for violating the ban
draconian. In the longer run, though, let’s get into a serious national
conversation about what facilitates a culture in which gun violence happens at
a rate far higher than anywhere else in the world. Is the Second Amendment
really central to what America is about? Given the Founders wrote that
amendment when the most deadly weapon around was a flintlock, does it need to
be modified? How is it that the NRA has a stranglehold on so many of our
elected officials? What do we need to maintain, modify, or eliminate in our
national dialogue to have people be safe in their own homes, schools, military
bases, and streets? Until we address these questions, we’d best keep in mind
the aphorism, “If we don’t change our direction, we’re liable to get where
we’re headed.”
-->
1 comment:
Actually 27 or 28 people dead, depending how you want to count. 26 at the school. Mom makes 27.
and then there is his death... not sure how to count that.
Post a Comment