Letter 2 America for January 15, 2013

Dear America,

The debate over gun control has been re-ignited by the shooting of school children in Newtown, Connecticut, but this new iteration of the debate is essentially unchanged from the form it has always taken.  The NRA and other gun ownership advocates continue to focus on the contrived rhetoric of the past...extrapolating from extreme examples the rule that they wish to preserve: there should be no restraints on gun ownership.  But those rhetorical ploys are all flawed in light of certain facts that have gradually trickled out of their opposition's collective mouth.  For example, Gabby Giffords, the former congresswoman shot in the head in Tucson, was interviewed with her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, on which occasion Kelly referenced the fact that 85% of the deaths from guns suffered by children in the entire world occur in the United States.  That correlates well with the fact that guns are much more available here than in any other country and we seem to have these massacres of innocents regularly while in Great Britain, where a ban on hand guns was passed after the murders of school children in Scotland, there were less than fifty gun murders in the entire country last year; there were over 5,000 here.  Thus, one cannot help but acknowledge the practical reality that there is a direct correlation between the presence of guns and their use to commit mayhem and murder, and the mass murders we experience in this country with such regularity are the inescapable evidence that something must change, but what.

The problem is that spurious arguments...new ones all the time...keep cropping up.  The rubric under which they fall is, "guns don't kill people, people kill people," and that dastardly oversimplification of the practical reality is in some sense irrefutable.  It takes a person using a gun to commit a gun related murder.  But the fact that a human actor...even an accidental one...is required doesn't mean that nothing should be done about the gun he uses in anticipation of his nefarious or negligent act.  Even though the human actor is ultimately responsible, there is no reason not to protect the rest of us, and the perpetrator himself, from his deadly folly.  So, what needs to happen now, trivial as it may seem, is that the rest of us have to develop our own trite phrases and punch lines in order to refute the gun owners' idiotic illogic, and a few of them have cropped up lately in the course of the copious media coverage of the debate.

For example, Piers Morgan interviewed two people on January 8, one a marine who served in Afghanistan and the other the mother of the young girl who was murdered in the shooting at the mall where Giffords was nearly killed.  The marine argued that assault weapons were not singled out as exceptions to the second amendment in The Constitution, nor was any other type of firearm, and thus, the right to own weapons of any kind was protected.  But of course, women were not afforded the vote, and African Americans were not even considered people in The Constitution, so the strict terms of the document must be looked at with a modern cant.  Further, the authors of The Constitution and the rest of the founding fathers were not all the sages that "strict constructionists" like Antonin Scalia would make them out to be.  For example, Alexander Hamilton, one of the authors of "The Federalist" papers was only thirty years old when he participated in the ratification process, and by the time he would have been fifty, he had had at least ten duels, including the one in which Aaron Burr killed him in 1804.  And at the time of the Federalist papers, Madison, who wrote quite a few of those documents on which constitutional authorities rely for guidance as to how to construe The Constitution today, was only 37.  So the notion that we should be guided in perpetuity by these men is in effect casting our collective fate on the gun issue or anything else of constitutional import to people who were, in political terms, not much older than adolescents, and in Hamilton's case, not even prudent ones.  The marine also argued that we don't outlaw cars, which also kill people, so why should we outlaw assault weapons.  But the bereft mother argued in retort that we don't allow people to go on the roads with military tanks, so why should we allow them to go about with assault rifles.

Then there is the fact that the primary call today is for a ban on assault weapons and their accoutrements, plus proper and enforceable procedures for registering all guns.  No one is trying to take from the American people their right to keep and bear arms in general.  Of course, the marine argued that the federal government shouldn't be empowered to take our guns away by requiring a list of their owners and where they lived.  But while he didn't use cars to defend this point, they certainly are relevant.  You have to register a car in order to drive it anywhere off private property.  Thus, to require the same constraint on those who would take their assault rifles, or any gun for that matter, out of their homes for any purpose seems not just prudent, but within the social and legal norms we have already created.  As E.J. Dione of the Washington Post put it on NPR's All Things Considered, the fact that we need cars doesn't mean that we shouldn't prevent their lethal potential from being manifested by requiring the use of seat belts when we drive them, which goes specifically to the idea that registering guns is somehow unconstitutional.  And as far as the ban of assault rifles is concerned, we allow drugs of all kinds to be sold over the counter, but some drugs are controlled, which means that you need a prescription to get them, and others are banned outright because they are dangerous, like many narcotics that have no purpose but to be abused.  If we can do that with drugs, why can't we do it with assault rifles and guns whose sole purpose is to inflict human carnage in general.

My point is that the debate needs fresh ideas in order to refute the old ones.  Everyone should be listening so that when good ones come along, we can...so to speak...arm ourselves with them.  Otherwise, the gun people will continue to arm themselves with assault weapons, and we won't be vulnerable to just their specious arguments.

Your friend,

Mike