Kids are Pawns
High school kids across the country reacted with anger after the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School. There has also been significant negative feedback directed at the protesting young people. (You may call this a protest about the protest about the protesters.) I’m sure most of the complaints are coming from those who favor unlimited civilian armament, but their beef that kids are naive and/or are pawns of leftist political agendas, just seems silly. Politics in the United States could not possibly become less mature by adding millions of teenagers to the mix—they will blend right in. Our current President has the maturity of a 14-year-old. His lack of a speech filter (or a Tweet filter), and his non-stop insults directed at foes (many who were recently his best buds) are beyond belief. But he doesn’t bear the blame alone—nearly half the country voted for him…while the other half voted for Hillary Clinton. It would be difficult for our teenagers to do worse.
Of course kids are limited in their understanding of political issues, but this is one of the reasons we educate them. Their introduction to political issues is part of their education, unless somebody snuck that part of education out of the curriculum when no one was looking.
The National Education Association reports:
All 50 states require some form of instruction in civics and/or government, and nearly 90 percent of students take at least one civics class. But too often, factual book learning is not reinforced with experience-based learning opportunities like community service, guided debates, critical discussion of current events, and simulations of democratic processes.
But all this is beside the point. How old do you have to be to know you don’t want to be on the tip-end of a burrowing bullet? How old do you have to be to know you don’t want your friends shot? Wouldn’t there be something brutally wrong with our kids if they remained complacent while mass killings continued across America and in the schools?
Second Amendment
The amendment, adopted in 1791, reads as follows: A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
The amendment certainly leaves a lot of room for interpretation, which is why there is so much howling about the rights granted therein (which are not actually therein). Logically, the amendment associates the the right to bear arms with the expectation that individuals serve in militias. This provision made sense when our nation was young and weak. While the nation had gained independence from Britain, clearly the British were not finished with North America. Neither were the French or the Spanish or native Americans.
The Continental Army was disbanded after the Revolutionary War, in 1783, except for a few dozen men retained to guard the munitions at Fort Pitt and West Point. The country relied mostly on four large, well-organized state militias, which maintained readiness primarily against British and native American threats. Today the United States has nearly 1.3 million people serving in the military, with another 800,000 serving in reserve capacities. It is no longer necessary for individuals to bear arms in order to provide for a well regulated militia. I suspect that if the National Guard was called to some site of civil unrest, and several well-armed civilians approached the commanding officer, volunteering their support, they would either be sent home with a “Thanks, but no thanks,” or they would have all their weapons confiscated on the spot. Resisters would be jailed.
From this perspective, it is clear that there is no longer a Constitutional justification for civilians bearing arms. Former Chief Justice Warren Burger believed that the Second Amendment guaranteed the right of states, through their militias, to arm those militias. The “fraud,” in his view, was the National Rifle Association’s campaign to interpret the amendment as a guarantee of each individual citizen’s right to arm himself.
Interestingly, many of the state constitutions of the late 1700s expressly safeguarded individual gun ownership, with language referencing hunting and self-protection. On one hand, this suggests that the right to gun ownership was commonly expected in that time in American history. On the other hand, the failure of the Constitution to use the language so frequently found elsewhere contradicts the argument that the Second Amendment actually provides for private gun ownership (for reasons other than supporting state militias).
The Second Amendment existed quietly in American history, with little interest or debate, until arrested gangster, Jack Miller, appealed to it before the Supreme Court in 1939. Congress had passed the National Firearm Act in 1934, largely aimed at gangland activity, and in response to the attempted assassination of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. The NFA put heavy taxes on the sale of sawed-off shotguns, sawed-off rifles, machine guns, and silencers. Additionally, it required that all these guns be registered. The Supreme Court upheld the NFA restrictions in the case of Jack Miller.
The picture was greatly altered in 2008. In 1976 the Washington D.C. City Council outlawed handguns in the District. Dick Heller was a licensed special police officer in the District. He carried a gun for his work but was not allowed to have a gun in his home. He appealed and the question eventually came to the Supreme Court. The Court decided 5-4 in favor of Heller.
Representing the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia remarked, “There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms.” This is a disconcerting statement, coming from the highest court in the United States, given that the text clearly says otherwise. It appears the majority opinion was based on common practice, but not on Second Amendment language. Justice Scalia’s statement is a rational embarrassment, a clear overreach of Supreme Court authority, and has subsequently contributed to the proliferation of weaponry and the culture of death in this country.
That being said, even Justice Scalia expressed limit concerns. “Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
He also added, “We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country, and we take seriously the concerns raised by the many amici who believe that prohibition of handgun ownership is a solution…But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.”
It is worth noting that Justice Scalia specifically references “self-defense in the home” and leaves open the idea of restrictions “in sensitive places,” which might and should be interpreted “in public”.
There is a perception among 21st century Americans that bearing arms is a big part of our national heritage. This is less the case than our Last of the Mohicans images. Michael A. Bellesiles, a colonial historian from Emory University searched through over 1000 probate records, 1763-1790, in the frontier sections of New England and Pennsylvania. He found that only 14% of men owned guns there, and that half of those guns were not in working order. In 1803 the War Department did a census and found that only 23.7% of men had access to guns. These guns were far fewer than were needed to arm the militias of the day. Guns were expensive to own, required constant care, and were burdensome to lug around. The need for self protection would have been far greater in America in those early years but, as it turns out, the population was considerably less armed.
It is debatable whether it makes sense in 21st century America for the citizenry to be armed, but the right to defend one’s self does flow through American law. It is difficult to defend one’s self against an armed assailant with something less than a gun. This is the most compelling element of the pro-gun position. But to obsess over this position is to talk past the actual gun issue in America today. The crux of today’s concern is about limits on gun possession.
I don’t think the NRA is arguing for the right to stockpile nerve gas. I don’t think it is arguing for the right to possess rocket-propelled grenade launchers. I don’t think it is arguing for the right to own armed drones. Why not? The answer is that gun advocates don’t really believe they have the right to unlimited weaponry possession. (The few who are arguing this way should have their weapons confiscated immediately.) The word “infringed” in the Second Amendment is not a reference to unrestricted types of weapons—it is a statement granting civilians the right to possess weapons, period. Obviously, the kinds of weapons available in 1791 were much more limited, as was the destructive capacity of those weapons. The debate today should be about the types of weapons allowed in the hands of citizens, where weapons can be carried, and about limits on individuals who have demonstrated themselves to be untrustworthy.
If civilian weaponry is for self protection (and you can add hunting and target shooting if you like, since few people who dislike guns care about these activities one way or the other), then it should also be clear that people who don’t carry guns have the right to be protected from those who do. This is the core of the debate: how can we provide for the best protection of U.S. citizenry, considering the anxieties and situations of both those who wish to own guns and those who don’t.
One thing is clear: while the NRA wishes to preserve the status quo, the status quo is a disaster. Thirty-five thousand Americans are killed by guns each year. As a point of reference, roughly 58,000 Americans were killed in the Vietnam war—but these casualties took place mainly over a 7-year period, which works out to 8286 per year. This means that American civilian casualties are four times greater each year than our soldiers suffered at the hands of the Viet Cong.
Are we really protecting ourselves? In a 10-year CDC study, the average annual accidental deaths by firearms is 500, while deaths by legal intervention is 479. The same study showed 16,428 accidental woundings each year and 945 woundings by legal intervention. Statistically speaking, we are far more likely to hurt ourselves accidentally with guns than we are to protect ourselves from assailants.
The U.S. has 89 firearms per 100 people, which is the highest concentration of civilian-owned guns of any country in the world. Second highest? Yemen has 55 firearms per 100 people. Gun homicide rates in the U.S. are not the world’s worst, but considering only at the high-income countries of the world, the homicide rate in the U.S. is 25 times higher than the combined rate of that set of countries.
In 1996 Australia experienced a mass shooting, much like the ones the United States has come to experience regularly. That country felt it was time to act. Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard remarked before he radically changed Australia’s gun laws, “We have an opportunity in this country not to go down the American path.”
Less than two weeks after the mass shooting, all six Australian states agreed to enact the same sweeping gun laws banning semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. They also legislated 28-day waiting periods, thorough background checks, and a requirement to present a “justifiable reason” to own a gun. Homicide deaths in Australia have slowly declined ever since. In 1996 there were 354 homicides; in 2013 there were 273 homicides. This has taken place even as the population of Australia has continued to climb.
As a nation we have become complicit in the routine murder and suicide of our own populace. How can we justify our current policies? We do not live in the Wild West. This is not Ramboville; this is not a Mad Max dystopia. This is the United States, a land of culture, wealth, international power, historical idealism, and a backbone of Judeo-Christian ethics. NRA propaganda needs to be exposed for the money-grabbing exploitation it is. This country must no longer be bullied by its violent element.
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