Dear America,
Cover of Bill O'Reilly
Let me add something to some of my recent letters about the conservative boiler plate on the subject of gun control. As you may recall, I have been encouraging everyone who hears an answer to one of the spurious claims or arguments made by a "second amendment advocate" to proliferate it by telling everyone he or she knows, thus giving more and more rational people arguments to make in opposition to the irrational arguments against sane gun policy. And you can't turn on the television or the radio without hearing some reactionary hold forth on the subject of registries as tools of oppression or guns not killing people, but people killing people. Of course, Bill O'Reilly is one of the reactionaries I'm talking about, though I never watch his show because his smugness verges on criminality in my opinion. In fact, even when I am scanning the television channels looking for something interesting, if I happen upon his program, I don't even bother to see what is happening before I move on. But a couple of nights ago, in the brief interim between landing on his program and clicking the channel change button on my remote to reject it, I saw the statistic 32,000 motor vehicle deaths annually. I would like to say that I listened to O'Reilly prattling on the topic just out of intellectual openness, but I didn't. I just moved on down the list of channels looking for something worthwhile. However, later on it occurred to me that he was handing me another defense to criticism of gun control without saying a word, and apparently without even knowing it. In fact, his citation of that statistic was actually an argument in favor of gun control about which he was so dogmatic that he failed to notice his own petard hoisting him. Fore it may be true that 32,000 people die in motor vehicle accidents every year in this country, and it certainly isn't the case that we ban motor vehicles in response, but we do control them even though we will never prevent all motor vehicle accidents or deaths by doing so. We require seat belts, licenses for drivers, installation of air bags by manufacturers...and most important of all, we require registration. I would wager that if O'Reilly were confronted with the holes in his analogy and the ammunition, for want of a better word, that his ill-considered point gave gun control advocates, he would say, well, driving a car isn't a right like gun ownership. It is a privilege. But if there is no equivalency between the two, why did he bring it up? What was he thinking? And besides, no one is talking about taking guns away from anyone or even preventing more people from owning them. We gun control advocates merely want to make sure that those who would do us harm don't get them.
That being said, there is a direct parallel between gun ownership and the ownership of cars. Just as with guns, the right we have relative to cars is the right to own them and use them on our private property, even without licenses and registration, under the fourth and fifth amendments, which guarantee us the right to keep, own and use our property on our property without government interference unless it is seized with a warrant or taken with due process and we are properly compensated where appropriate. Similarly, anyone can own a gun and use it as he will on his own property so long as he doesn't violate the laws against mayhem and murder and his use doesn't infringe on the rights in general of others. Thus, cars are a good analog to guns when considering how to control them so as to protect society at large from their consequences. Note that I said "their consequences," not "the consequences of their use by people." There is a concept in the law that has developed over the course of the last thousand years of common law from old England to today's modern world known as the "dangerous instrumentality." A dangerous instrumentality, which a car can be as can a gun, is a thing that has the potential to injure seriously by its very nature. And while it may take a human actor to cause injury with them, those who control dangerous instrumentalities have a heightened duty to society with regard to their use by themselves and others. So if you leave your car running outside a convenience store and a twelve year old child jumps in it and drives it away, you are responsible for the harmful acts that child commits with the car because you are responsible for failing to take the precautions appropriate to its use. In fact, even if it's you who injures someone with your car, under doctrines inherent in the concept of negligence generally you are responsible; that's why we all have to have insurance. That is why we have laws about use, storage and operation of cars, and that is why we should have them with regard to guns. They are dangerous instrumentalities, and controlling them saves lives and limbs. Like every other right, even those enumerated in the Bill of Rights, which is the first ten amendments of our constitution, the right to own a car or a gun exists subject to the rights of others to be free of harm from your ownership and use. It is a right that supercedes the right of the individual, and it is inherent in the civilized nature of a society, especially a democracy like our society purports to be. The notion that gun ownership itself is a sine qua non of our democratic freedom is a flawed notion anyway, but the idea that it is absolute and exists regardless of the potential for harm to others that such an absolute right would represent is absurd...and legally incorrect as well.
When I was young I developed my own concept of society, which I called "microscosmic theory." Under that theory, everyone lives within his own microcosm and is free to do as he or she likes therein. But when his microcosm comes into the proximity of another in some respect, his freedom to act begins to be circumscribed by the rights of the occupant of the microcosm to which his own is tangential. And when the two microcosms intersect, the occupants of both microcosms have obligations to one another, each to respect and comport his behavior with the right of the other. It still seems the best way to organize a society to me, and in my opinion, that is largely the way in which our society is intended to operate, but there are a great many people among us who do not recognize the rights of others, and gun ownership absolutists are among them. Before the right to keep and bear arms in our free society comes the right to be free of harm from those who keep and bear arms. Gun owners have the right to be free of government oppression, but we all have the right to be free from the oppression of gun owners. That's where registration and regulation of guns come in. Someone ought to tell Bill O'Reilly.
Your friend,
Mike
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