Letter 2 America for April 9, 2013

Dear America,

I wrote some time ago that I felt it to be everyone's duty to collect arguments about gun control--I am calling it gun control for want of a better, more all-inclusive term--and to proliferate them as broadly as possible, and that's what I'm doing now.  I was watching "60 Minutes" this evening as Scott Pelly interviewed several of the parents of the children slaughtered in New Town by the son of Nancy Lanza.  I identify him that way because, while I chose not to encourage other lunatics to do the kinds of things he did, I think they should remain nameless, and thus deprived of any perverse gratification that they might have been seeking.  But as to the parent of the Sandy Hook assassin of children and their benefactors, she should be identified in this case, because she enable this catastrophe, and apparently did it gladly, even having left as part of her legacy a birthday care with a check in it specifically intended to allow her son to buy yet another murder weapon.  I doubt that Nancy Lanza would get any gratification out of being her son's enabler, but she deserves the ignominy; that is a topic for another day.  But as to gun control arguments, one of the parents articulated a very simple one that I can't believe I never heard before.  He said, we have all heard gun freedom advocates say that guns don't kill people, people kill people.  So if that is so, what do they have against doing something about the people by requiring universal gun registration?  The argument is so clear and obvious that it's absence from the populist dialectic on the subject is incomprehensible.  If it is people that kill people, why don't we do things with regard to those people to prevent them from doing so, and gun registration is an excellent starting point, but it is not the only measure we can undertake directed at the people who commit or enable gun murder.  

There is something of an impetus for the civil law system to play a role in deterring gun assaults and murder through the tort system.  Torts are violations of the rights of others, whether those rights are legal, constitutional or equitable.  When you sue someone who injures you with his car through his negligent acts, that is a tort action.  When you sue someone for defrauding you, that is an action based in torts.  And when you sue someone for "wrongful death," that is, causing the death of another willfully or negligently, that is a tort action.  And though it may have been around for some time, there is something of a movement toward creating a tort action for the survivors of gun violence against those who enable others to perpetrate those acts by, for example, giving unstable people guns.  In Nancy Lanza's case, the negligence was also unconscionable because she had taken the precaution of buying a lockable gun safe, but she put it in her emotionally disturbed son's room, and then didn't even lock it.  That is a case of negligence that I would imagine would be actionable as a tort under any legal system of either case or statutory law devolving from gun-related tort reform.   And then there is prevention by directing legal measures at people.  

I don't know whether requiring locked gun safes to control the circulation of legal guns could work, because as sure as there would be liability if your child took your gun and hurt someone, even by accident, because you didn't lock it up, there would be liability insurance that would insulate gun owners from catastrophic financial exposure, though I can think of ways to overcome that obstacle to deterrence too.  But there are other ways to control the people who kill people with the guns that don't.  So far we have discussed universal registration and mandatory gun safes under tort law, but what about technological measures.

As sure as there are objections to efforts to control guns, there will be objections to measures like this, but the technology to prevent guns from being fired by anyone but the persons who own them does exist.  Why not make the equipment of all new guns with such capacity mandatory by law and make it a crime to bypass it?  Then, a person could still people, but no one else could do it with his gun, including the intruder on whom he pulled it to defend himself when the intruder took it away from him.  It used to be the statistical case that if you tried to defend yourself with a gun in your home and someone was killed as a consequence, it was more than fifty percent likely that the dead person would be you, not the intruder, so required technology like this would be a form of self-preservation for gun owners, and isn't self-preservation their primary motive...ostensibly?  And what about this.  Why couldn't every gun manufacturer be required to fire a slug out of every gun he manufactures and keep that slug on file, providing the marking identifying that slug to a federal record keeping system just like a finger print.  Better yet, why not require the person buying the gun to provide his finger print as well?  Of course, there would have to be rules of evidence and probable cause enacted to prevent abuse of such data, as there are with finger prints; for example, if you want to introduce finger prints into evidence, you have to produce the thing they came off of, and if you wanted to introduce ballistic information, you'd have to introduce the bullet it came off of too.  But it isn't an unmanageable problem, and it's feasible...very much so.  That's another way to impose liability on people who kill people with the guns that don't, and it doesn't deprive them of their guns at all.

The point is that, even if people kill people and guns don't, something has to be done, and something can be.  Many things can be.  So let's do them.

Your friend,

Mike