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7/10/08
Dear
Mr. Grammaticus;
In
your recent first person
essay you mentioned anecdotally
that you are for gun control and do not believe people should be
allowed to
carry firearms around 24/7. I would like to request further
clarification of
your views on this, as so far I find myself in opposition to them.
This
is the
first thing you've said I've found myself disagreeing with. I
would be
very
interested in your reasons for this view, if anything else to help me
close up
holes in my argument for the opposite.
Thank you for your time;
—Sinphanius
Dear
Sinphanius:
Thanks
for writing. Before
anything else, I’d like to commend
you for having a refreshingly
original assortment of political beliefs.
If it is really the case that you agree with our
other positions, but
oppose gun control, then this is truly an unusual combination of
stances on the
major issues, and it demonstrates that you are in the habit of thinking
for
yourself, one issue at a time. Even
if
nothing I say on this particular topic cuts any ice with you, I still
wish
there were more people out there like you.
As far
as your question is
concerned, the first thing I
should do is point out that neither of us has clarified his position to
any
great extent. In a
recent essay, briefly
and by way of making a point about something else, I made an admittedly
dismissively hyperbolic statement to the effect that people
“shouldn’t be
allowed to walk around packing heat 24/7.”
On the face of it, this only means that I favor
anti-conceal-and-carry
laws, which is pretty lightweight as gun-control measures go, but you
took the
quip in the generalizing spirit in which it was intended, and intuited
that I
am more-or-less “for” gun control.
And
yeah, that’s true, I am.
And apparently,
you are “against” gun control.
Okay so
far.
Now, the
reason I’m
putting “for” and “against” in
quotation
marks here is because it’s crucial for anyone who wants to
argue about guns to
understand that it’s one of those issues where there are way more than two
“sides.” Unlike,
say, abortion,
where
even though there are sub-arguments about late-term procedures, rape
exemptions, etc., you still basically have two sides (“it
should be legal” vs.
“it shouldn’t be legal”), gun control is
an issue involving so many possible
positions about so many fine points
that it is very
nearly senseless to talk about its having “sides”
at all. Because of
this complexity (and because we
are a two-party culture that loves our “sides”),
the issue
often seems to get reduced to
a personality game about liking
guns
vs. not liking
guns, and this is problematic for all concerned, because
issues of Constitutional Law should not be reduced to high-school
cliqueyness
about what types of people one does or doesn’t feel like
hanging out with. I
hope you’re with me so far, and I think you
probably are.
Here’s
what I mean,
in brief: being all the way to one
“side” would mean believing that all
people should be able to own all
types of guns and carry them everywhere,
and being all the way to the other
“side” would
mean believing that no-one should
be
allowed to have any guns ever.
Now, since there are hardly any
people who believe either of those
things, that means most people are
somewhere in the middle, and middles tend to require a lot of
explanation. Yes,
it makes a fair amount of sense to begin
by saying that I am basically “for” gun control and
you are basically “against”
it—but this is only a beginning, and so on we go.
Now,
your e-mail
didn’t specify why you
are against gun control. As
far as I understand it, there are two main
schools of thought there:
the people who think gun control is unconstitutional, and the people
who think
it’s a bad idea societally speaking (i.e., would have bad
results). I’ll
give my counterarguments to both schools
in turn.
First,
the constitutional
argument. Let me
begin by stating very plainly that I
am not someone who takes at all lightly the idea of messing with the
Constitution. Even
if there are some parts
in it that I wish were different, I am aware that disrespect for the
Constitution
can cut both ways. When
Bush & Co.
wanted to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage a few years back,
the push
failed not because there were enough people in favor of gay marriage,
but
because there were enough people who hesitated to drag the Constitution
into
things, even though they were against it.
If, a few decades from now, the Christian
Fundamentalists have enough
power to suggest banning books that contradict their scriptures, all
that saves
us in that hour may well be reverence for the First Amendment, much of
it
possibly lodged even in the hearts of many of those same
Fundamentalists.
So,
where the Second Amendment
is concerned, it is not that
I favor repealing or “ignoring” it, but rather that
I do not consider
common-sense gun-control measures to be necessarily in opposition to it. I’m sure
you’re familiar with the wording of
the Second Amendment, but for those readers who are not, here it is:
“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.”*
*(and
yes, I know about the
thing where sometimes there’s a
comma after “militia” and sometimes
there’s not, and sometimes “People” is
capitalized and sometimes it’s not, but commas and
capitalization were for shit
then and it doesn’t make it mean something different. I know it’s fun
to act like it does, but it
doesn’t. If
they wanted to specify
something, they wouldn’t have done so via subtleties of
punctuation—they were
the Founding Fathers, not the Riddler.)**
**(That
being said, it would
appear I’ve still gone and used
the version where there’s no comma after
“militia” and “People” is
capitalized.)
Now,
regardless of what you do
or don’t capitalize or put a
comma after, it is a historical fact that this was written back when
the States
still raised their own armies, and that the intent was to enable the
States to
defend themselves independently of the central government in case of
emergency,
and to prevent Federal tyranny over the States—or, at least,
over the People,
who then saw themselves primarily as citizens of their respective
States, and
served as such in all military capacities (although article 1, section
10
explicitly says that the States couldn’t
keep troops in peacetime, so apparently “a militia”
meant something very
different from “troops”).
Since the
question of the States giving armed resistance to the Feds was pretty
much
settled by that whole Civil War incident, we can try skipping over the
“States”
middleman and saying that the point is for the People as individuals to
be able
to resist the Federal Government—but at this point the
Federal Government has
suitcase nukes, so guess what? It’s
not
happening. The
People might stand a
chance if we had some of those flying skateboards from Back
to the Future II, but as you doubtless remember from
elementary school, those were all seized and destroyed by the PTA.
In any
case, I’m not
one of those people who try to argue
that the Second Amendment should be taken to refer to the National
Guard, or to
some other version of collective gun ownership at the State level. The Federal Government
controls the state
National Guards anyway (once the Guard became perpetual,
the Feds had to take over, as per article 1, section 10),
and as for some other permutation of a “militia,” I
don’t see why some weird
club that keeps their guns in a toolshed in the town square would
necessarily
be any better than individual ownership.
Plus, if
you read enough
old-school constitutional
commentary, you begin to see that, leading all the way into the 20th
Century, the word “militia” didn’t appear
to mean what we take it to mean now
(a specific club of dudes with guns, with an ongoing existence, a cool
name,
etc.). It seems
usually to have been
used as a collective noun meaning simply adult
males, i.e., the people who would
comprise the army if we suddenly needed an army. Know why?
Because until a lot more recently than people think,
the United States
(along with most countries) didn’t
have a
standing army. When
war broke out,
it was like “Okay, all adult males meet tomorrow at noon by that
big tree over there, and remember to bring
your own gun, because we don’t have any to give
you.” And
a lot of the Second Amendment commentary
through the years has interpreted it specifically as anti-standing-army
insurance, written in because standing armies
were associated with bellicose dictatorships.
Pro-gun
types are fond of
citing the fact that, for long
periods of English history, the people were required
to own guns, and this is indeed true, BUT with a couple of important
points in
the fine print: A) “the
people” meant the military class,
i.e., knights and assorted footsoldiers—just as in the sword
era knights were required
to maintain their
own swords, when guns were introduced knights were expected to maintain
those
on their own as well, and B) this wasn’t because people a
long
time ago knew guns were awesome as opposed to how now people are
pussies who
don’t know guns are awesome; it’s because travel
was a time-consuming pain in
the ass back then, so a standing army localized at a base was
strategically
unfeasible—i.e., the point of statutes like that was always
that the people
concerned might have to suddenly become the army, not anything to do
with a
“right” to be armed in their capacities as
individuals. By the
Late-19th/Early-20th
Century, of course, a bunch of stuff (tanks, machine guns, etc.) had
been
invented that people who were going to comprise the army didn’t
already know how to use (unlike regular ol’ guns,
which
everyone already knew how to use Back in the Day because they all
hunted their
own food and crap), and travel time had been dramatically improved, so
societies went from standing armies being unfeasible to the absence of standing armies being
unfeasible—i.e., when there’s a war now, you need
to already have an army ready to go
who knows how to use all the wack
modern shit, as opposed to the Everybody Grab Your Guns and Meet by the
Big
Tree system.
In
short, whatever the Second
Amendment was supposed to mean
in 1791, at this point either it means individual ownership for
self-defense
against other citizens, or it means nothing.
And if the Constitution existed in a vacuum, a good
case could be made
that it means nothing. But
by now there
is a long history of precedent tending in the direction of “individuals should be allowed to buy guns
and keep them in their homes.”
We
can make cases for limiting, or not limiting, this tradition to one
degree or
another, but any limitation we might make is not
counter to the Second Amendment—only to a history of rulings
made in its shadow, during the long, slow descent into meaninglessness
of the
amendment itself. There
was no formal
stipulation that the generalized right to bear arms was derived from an
individual’s
right to be armed unto himself until Last Thursday.*
*(This
isn’t the
sardonic netspeak expression “Last
Thursday.” I
actually mean that the Supreme
Court actually didn’t say
this until last
Thursday, in District of
Columbia
v. Heller, 5-4.)
And the
current standing of the
Second Amendment, to the
effect that self-defense is an essential component, actually
isn’t a big deal
to me. I do believe
that people should
be allowed to own some types of
guns
and keep them in their homes for protection.
I am
pro-gun-control, but I am not one
of those
pro-gun-control
people who simply makes fun of everyone who owns guns and wants all
guns to be
made completely illegal within the next ten minutes.
There are responsible gun owners in my
family, and I have seen certain pro-gun-control arguments that annoy me. Even though I have just
made a case for why
gun control is not unconstitutional, there are gun-control advocates
out there
who base their stance not on arguing that it isn’t
unconstitutional, but on not
caring whether it is. I
have seen
gun-control arguments that basically amount to “guns are a
silly thing that
boys like, so whatever.”
I am
pro-gun-control, but I hope I have established that I am not one of
those
people.
So, what
I would like everyone
in this debate to admit is the following:
I would like the pro-gun people to admit that
unfettered individual
ownership of every type of gun for personal use just because guns are
awesome
is clearly not what the Second
Amendment was supposed to mean, AND I would like the anti-gun people to
admit
that, at this point, suddenly
making all guns illegal would be a
shitty idea,
because the society is just too saturated with guns by now (even though this is not
what the Second Amendment was originally supposed to do) to
attempt a complete 180.
By way
of wrapping up the
constitutional argument, I’ll
point out that, as already alluded to, there are by now lots of
different types
of guns—some with way, way
more
destructive potential than others.
And
the Second Amendment only says that the People are allowed to have
“arms.” Now,
“arms” doesn’t even mean
“guns”—it just
means “weapons.”
And even if you believe
that the “arms” referred to should
include some guns, there is no
valid
support for the idea that it must
include all guns.
If you take an all-inclusive interpretation
of the term “arms,” then that would have to include
all weapons, not just all guns,
which would mean that private citizens could own grenade launchers and
that
Bill Gates should be allowed to have a backyard full of missile silos
if that’s
what he feels like spending his money on.
Yes, no-one is really arguing this, and it seems
that the line tends to
be drawn by even the most ardent pro-gun types at “all guns,
but nothing above
guns”—but my point is that this is completely
arbitrary. There
is no valid reason for someone to
say
“obviously, what the Second Amendment is supposed to mean is
that you can’t have a
rocket launcher but you can have an
AK-47.” And
yet there are tons of people who
explicitly argue precisely this.
Honestly,
who decided that the
“arms” line should be drawn
right above the biggest weapon that
is
technically a gun but right below
the
smallest weapon that is technically not a gun?
So, grenade launchers aren’t
“guns” because they shoot grenades instead
of bullets? Is the
presence/absence of bullets
the operative detail here? How
about when someone finally invents laser guns?
Those won’t shoot bullets—will
they be okay?
Seriously. I’m
not
joking. Tell me.
Anyway,
based on this line of
thinking—which, you have to
admit, is pretty damn logically sound—I am secure in my
assertion that
automatic and many semi-automatic weapons (I am aware that the term
“assault
weapons” is a political one and does not draw a specific
line, but that saying nosemi-automatics
would mean the only
legal handguns would be revolvers... although this wouldn't really be
an intolerable imposition, since there are a lot of really fucking
powerful revolvers) should not be available to the
public, and
that sale of even the guns that should be available should involve
waiting
periods and background checks. I
think I
have successfully demonstrated my reverence for the Constitution by
now, so I
really must balk at any attempts to compare me to a totalitarian robot
from a
futuristic dystopia just because I want to “take
away” people’s made-up “right”
to instantaneously obtain multiple uzis at a drive-thru and then get
their
drink on at Six Flags with them all strapped under a pair of
zebra-striped
parachute pants.
Hunting
rifles are fine for
hunting, and shotguns and
non-automatic handguns should suffice for home protection. Someone who breaks into
your place to steal
your DVD player isn’t looking to get into a shootout, and
will just haul ass if
he hears/sees that you have any
type
of gun. Yes, people
will say that a
shotgun won’t be enough if a bunch of people with automatic
weapons break into
your house looking to kill you, but you know what?
If a bunch of people with automatic weapons
break into your house looking to kill you, then unless your name is
Rambo you
are pretty much fucked no matter what type of gun you have. Maybe people should just
try harder not to
piss off Cobra Commander or whoever is in charge of this hypothetical
squad of
high-tech assassins.
It is
possible for a
constitutional amendment, even one from
the Bill of Rights, to simply die a natural death without being
directly
overturned or ignored. The
Seventh
Amendment says that all lawsuits seeking damages in excess of twenty
dollars
have to be decided by a jury, and since there’s no jury on Judge Judy I guess that one’s
not in play anymore. If
you want to find out, go sue somebody for
twenty dollars and one cent and demand a jury, and see what happens. Of course, twenty dollars
isn’t as much money
as it was in 1791… just like a muzzle-loading flintlock that
only gets off three
rounds a minute in the hands of an expert is no longer the most badass
single-operator weapon on the planet.
Anyway,
perhaps you
weren’t basing your stance on a
Constitutional argument—in which case, I have just wasted a
very good deal of
your time. So, on
to the “guns are a
good idea” argument.
I have
already conceded that
keeping certain guns in private
residences for protection should be allowed, so let’s get
right to the whole
“carrying them around” issue, which seems to be the
basis for your initial
question anyway. The
usual argument in
support of this involves citing some violent tragedy like a school
shooting and
saying “this wouldn’t have happened if [the teacher
/ somebody / everybody] had
had a gun too.”
Okay,
sure. Yes, if
you take some specific situation where someone walked into a classroom
or
wherever intending to shoot everybody, and someone in that room had had
a gun
and knew what they were doing with it, then they could have shot the
assailant
first, or maybe the person wouldn’t have tried it in the
first place if they
knew someone else would be armed.
Fine.
The
problem with this (in
addition to the fact that most
people who pull shit like this apparently intend
to die at the end, and so wouldn’t be deterred by the idea
that someone else
will shoot them—it would still be a “kill as many
people as I can before
someone kills me” dynamic, but just happen a lot faster, and more incidents might well be incited,
since
some of these nutjobs would like
the
prospect of things turning into a giant balls-to-the-wall shootout) is
the
whole “hindsight is 20/20” thing.
Since
you don’t actually know where something like this is going to
happen until it
happens, this line of thinking would require pretty much everybody
to have a gun on them everywhere
they go. You can
say “it only happens at
schools, so let’s just arm teachers,” but then the
crazy people would know that
and school shootings would turn into bus shootings.
So then you arm bus drivers, and bus
shootings turn into grocery-store shootings.
So then you arm grocery clerks, and grocery-store
shootings turn into
just-out-in-the-fucking-street shootings, which brings us to the
“everybody is
carrying a gun all the time” scenario.
And call
me a pessimist, but I
don’t have high hopes for the
“everybody is carrying a gun all the time” scenario. Presumably, the intent of everyone on both sides of this issue is
to reduce the number of innocent
gun
deaths—but does anyone
really think
that this number would go down if everyone were armed all
the time? Really?
Even if
we assume the best of
intentions 24 hours a day on
the parts of everyone except society’s biggest psychos, a
constantly armed
populace just doesn’t seem like a recipe for success. I don’t know how
old you are, but I’m
assuming you’ve been in college and had a least a few
different jobs—and I’m
sure in the course of those experiences you’ve been around
lots of different
people. Now, even
if you only take the
people you liked, and considered to
be basically good people, would you honestly have been more
comfortable if they had all been carrying guns all the
time? Have you
never been at some party
or night out that got a little crazy, or even privy to an argument that
got
heated, upon which you can look back now and think “You know,
it’s probably for
the best that nobody had a gun (much less everybody)?” Plus, regardless of where
people with guns
might feel like carrying them, the people who own the places would
probably
prefer that people not bring guns inside them.
And since the right-wing worldview that supports gun
freedom is also
supposed to have the utmost respect for private property, if the
proprietor of
an establishment says “No guns up in here,” then
that should mean “No guns up
in here”—and this is almost certainly what most of
them would say. Imagine
you run a bar—do you want all the
people getting smashed in there night after night to be packing while
they do
so?
I mean,
even back when people
wore swords around, everyone knew
it was bad news for certain guys to
wear them into the bar:
Thou
art like one of
those fellows that, when he
enters
the confines
of a tavern, claps me his sword upon the
table
and says ‘God
send me no need of thee,’ and by the
operation
of the
second cup, draws him on the drawer when
indeed
there is no
need.
—Romeo
and Juliet
(III.i.5-9)
I’m
not saying all
gun owners are like this, but they don’t all
need to be like this for
conceal-and-carry to be a horrible idea.
And that’s the problem with the “if
only somebody with a gun had been there!”
argument—for every one
“somebody with a gun” who ends up
stopping a crime or saving a life, there will be many
“somebody with a gun”s who end up shooting a kid
who,
strangely as he may have been acting, was only reaching into his
backpack to
get a pen. And even
if no shots are
fired, the simple act of drawing a
gun is a big deal. Have
you ever been in
a room where somebody with a loaded gun suddenly whipped it out and
aimed it at
someone? I’m
not saying I have, but I’ll
bet it’s harder than people might think to just say
“Sorry, false alarm” and
resume the lesson plan afterwards.
I’m
not saying heroic
stuff wouldn’t ever happen—I’m saying
that more than enough horrible accidents would happen to cancel it out
(except
in the minds of those people for whom the prospect of winning the
right-place-right-time lottery and being a hero is more important than
the many
additional innocent lives that would be lost as a result of the relaxed
conceal-and-carry laws necessary to enable their
heroism—which, sadly, is
probably a lot more people than I’d like to think).
Pro-gun
types often respond to
this with “okay, don’t have
everyone carry guns all over the place—just give them to the
authority figures
in places where trouble might break out, like teachers, pilots, cab
drivers,
etc., and give them training and whatnot.”
But the problem with this, “give them
training” is easier said than
done. Being
“trained” to use
a gun is one thing—it just means
learning how to shoot and how to hit what you’re shooting
at—but being
“trained” to carry
a gun is quite
another. It
involves not only knowing
how to use it, but something much harder—knowing how to not use it.
Think
about how frequently
police officers don’t use
their guns. They
are zipping all over the place dealing
with people’s bullshit every day, often finding themselves in
situations where
the level of danger is not immediately clear, and the overwhelming
majority of
the time they do not even end up drawing their weapons, much less
discharging
them. Simply giving
a gun to a teacher
or a bus driver is not enough, even if you also train them to be an
expert
marksman. The level
of psychological
training necessary for someone who wears a gun to refrain from whipping
it out
and yelling “freeze” every time someone looks at
them funny is such that you
would have to effectively make the teachers or bus drivers into cops before it becomes a good idea
to arm them. And
most teachers, to say nothing of cabbies
or supermarket checkers, are simply not emotionally equipped to also be
cops
(the amount of time and resources it would take to do this
notwithstanding). And
if you don’t want to take my word for
this (which would be an entirely reasonable reaction, since I am not
trained in
law enforcement) go ask a cop—someone whose life revolves
around stopping bullshit
from going down and presumably knows a thing or two about how best to
stop it,
and who has probably seen countless situations end badly even though
everyone
involved had the best of intentions—whether he or she thinks
it is a good idea
to hand guns to teachers, cabbies, bank tellers, bartenders, and the
ice-cream
man. I bet the
answer will be something
along the lines of “Fuck no, what are you nuts?”
Where we
end up, then, is with
the conclusion that the only
people who should be the cops, are the cops—at least,
anywhere outside of a
private residence. If
you want there to
be more cops, or at least more trained armed security personnel, in
various
places—if you want them stationed on campuses—I
would not object. I
am not one of those people who want no guns
to be around; I just think it makes a big difference who’s
carrying them.
Well,
Sinphanius, I hope this
response answered your
question to whatever extent you wanted it answered.
I didn’t get too much into specific
gun-control statutes, but I’m not sure you wanted me to. As you can see, even
though I spoke very
generally most of the time, the response still ended up the longest
Reader Mail
piece by far. Like
I said, this issue is
complicated, and regardless of whether you or other readers end up
agreeing
with everything I said, I hope I was at least able sufficiently to
demonstrate
that the matter of guns in America is hardly as simple as
“for” and “against,”
and that we could all benefit from ceasing to see it in terms of
“sides.”
Your Well-Regulated Editor,
—Sexo Grammaticus
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