Guns in America
The current national dialectic over gun control mirrors the ongoing debate over crime in general: We all want to do something about gun violence and mass killings, but what is – as it were – the magic bullet?
The answer, sadly but obviously, is that there is no magic bullet. We need to approach the challenge from multiple legal, social and personal perspectives, but like crime itself, gun violence will never go away.
I think it is time for all of us – pro-gun and anti-gun alike – to face some basic realities.
First: No degree of enforcing current laws or creating new ones will keep firearms out of the hands of all criminals and all individuals with severe mental illness. There are just too many guns around already for that to happen.
Second: The vast majority of gun owners are responsible, law-abiding citizens who feel with justification that taking away their rights to self-protection would be like banning automobiles because they sometimes fall into the hands of reckless drivers and drunks. At the same time, I see nothing wrong with registering guns as we do automobiles and find the twin arguments that (1) the government could then take them away from us, and (2) that while the Constitution does not guarantee the right to drive cars, it does guarantee the right to bear arms, to be specious and marginal.
Third: Anti-gun people say that even hunting is cruel and teaches the wrong values. Pro-gun people say that hunting teaches self-reliance, responsibility and patience. Personally, I would find it difficult to oppose hunting – whether I personally hunted or not – unless I was a vegetarian and stopped wearing leather. Industrial meat processing is far crueler.
Fourth: Advocates on both sides of the issue cite statistics from other nations to support their arguments. For example, anti-gun people bring up the sparsity of individual gun ownership in Japan and the commensurate low level of violent crime amongst the Japanese. Pro-gun people bring up the high rate of individual gun ownership in Switzerland and the equally low level of violent crime among the Swiss. Interestingly, Switzerland is probably the world’s most perfect realization of the Second Amendment and the right (and responsibility) to bear arms in support of a well-regulated militia.
The basic truth is that the comparison with other first-world nations on guns is no more relevant than the comparison with other first-world nations on capital punishment. We are each unique. For better or worse, our revolutionary origins and frontier traditions have given a large sector of the American body politic a love of firearms. Let’s be real: it’s not just about self-defense. It’s not just about hunting. It’s not just about competitive target shooting. America has a love affair with the firearm just as torrid as its love affair with the automobile. And despite highway deaths, individual murders and mass shootings, neither love affair is going to go away.
It’s who we are.
