Gun Violence Prevention
Guns & Cars & Traditions
Gun control, or gun violence prevention, as activists prefer to call it these days (full disclosure – I am a member of a religious group called the Joint Episcopalian-Lutheran Gun Violence Prevention Task Force), has become an issue with terrible regularity in the United States, because of our tragic tradition of mass murders. The latest are a killing spree in Atlanta massage parlors, in which six of the victims were Asian women, and a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado. Full disclosure again – my brother and his family shop at that grocery store often, and I have an ex-girlfriend who lives in Boulder. None of them were effected, bit it hit close to home, as it has done for so many.
By now, the responses are predictable: Republicans and conservatives offer “thoughts and prayers” for the victims, while Democrats and liberals respond that thoughts and prayers, while good, are not in and of themselves enough, and have become an excuse for inaction on the part of governments. Another predictable part of the response centers around the comparison between guns and cars; liberals argue that getting a gun should involve at least as much regulation and paperwork as being able to drive a car. After all, you need to take a test and get a license for driving a car. The state requires that because driving a car can cause injury or death both for the person driving and someone else.
I think the analogy between being licensed to drive a car and own a gun is a good one, but I’d like to explore the similarities further.
Cars are dangerous for two reasons: first, because, when they are moving, they are carrying lots of force, and that force, when applied to a person, can cause damage. Second, they are dangerous because people can lose control over them. Sometimes it’s an external factor, like ice on the road, sometimes it’s about the car, like a blown tire, and sometimes it’s the fault of the person driving. The worst problems, of course, are when the person driving is under the influence of a mind-altering substance, like alcohol. We have addressed the issues with car safety in three ways:
1. Technology. Cars now have seat belts, air bags, video cameras in the back and other technologies to make drivers more aware of their surroundings and potential hazards. To prevent people from drunk driving, we have breathalyzers, and smartphones so people who not competent to drive can call a taxi, Uber or Lyft.
2. Cultural traditions. Groups like MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) have helped established certain cultural norms making drunk driving a taboo, with catchphrases like “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” It’s perfectly acceptable to prevent someone from driving drunk, and in some cases, it can be wrong to let someone drive drunk. Bartenders are very aware of this.
3. Laws. We have lots of laws that regulate how cars are built, who can drive them, and how they can drive them. Governments impose certain standards for safety. We test people regularly to determine if they are capable of driving, and, particularly for people who are older, we are prepared to suspend someone’s license if they have experienced the kind of cognitive decline that means they can no longer drive safely.
None of these impede anyone’s freedom in any way, and there is very little debate about this. It does not infringe on anyone’s rights if one person in a group at a bar is a designated driver. At one point, my family took away my grandfather’s driver’s license and his keys. He was upset about it, but everyone else involved was relieved.
The problem with gun violence prevention is that we have all of these in place in America, but we are not effectively utilizing them, because any time there’s any suggestion of doing so, certain people scream about “Second Amendment rights” and refusing to give up their rights to own guns with minimal government interference. So let’s apply the analysis above to gun violence prevention:
1. Technology. We have things like gun locks that prevent unauthorized usage by putting a lock on the gun itself. We have safes that can contain guns. A company makes something called a “Gunbox” (full disclosure once again: I contributed to their crowdfunding campaign). Technology works both ways here, just as it does with cars: technology has made guns far more lethal, but it can also make them safer.
2. Cultural traditions: This is much trickier with guns than it is with cars. For some people, guns are an essential part of their cultural tradition. They hunt, eat what they have hunted, and keep trophies, like deer heads, on their walls. In some parts of the country, most people in an area have guns, there are lots of stores that sell guns, ammo, and relevant equipment, and sometimes people have to use guns to protect themselves from dangerous wildlife. In other parts of the country, no one hunts, few if any people use or own guns, and dangerous wildlife is only seen in zoos or on YouTube videos. In parts of the country where guns are common, they are also sometimes used for fun, like skeet shooting, or in competition. In parts of the country where guns are not common, there are no organized competitions or places where shooting is done for fun. I’m not going to get into the issue of guns as a symbol of masculinity, because that is ground well-trod.
But there are potential areas of commonality. There’s a program called ASK (“Asking Saves Kids”). The idea is that if a neighbor invites a parent’s kids over to come play at their house, the parent whose kids have been invited can ask the inviting parent if they have guns in their house, and if so, are they locked up? I don’t have kids, but this seems like a perfectly reasonable question to ask. If the inviting parent does have guns and the invited parent is not comfortable with that, they can decline the invitation. This doesn’t infringe on anyone’s rights or freedoms, it just establishes boundaries. It’s a playtime equivalent of agreeing to disagree.
Another area of potential agreement is hunting and fishing. On the one hand, this would seem to be a serious divide. On the larger issues of climate change, fossil fuels, and governmental regulations, liberals and conservatives are on opposite sides of the issues. But when it comes to forests and rivers, there’s lots of areas of agreement. Hunters and fishers have strong reason to favor preservation of forests, woodlands, prairies, rivers and streams, because that’s where they fish and hunt. Environmentalists feel the same about preserving the same areas. There’s even part of corporate America that has this perspective: sporting goods manufacturers and sporting goods stores, who make lots of money off of people who hunt and fish, are, for the same reasons, strongly supportive of preserving open areas of land and water.
Something else about hunting and fishing that unites conservatives and liberals is healthy eating. As a cousin of mine who hunts and fishes once pointed out, when you go hunting and kill something, that meat has no GMO’s, no antibiotics, and was not fed with any kind of feed grown with pesticides or fertilizer. She regularly cooks food for her family that they hunted or fished for on their own. In an odd way, hunting and fishing is a great way to procure organic food.
3. On the issue of laws and regulations, the difference between cars and guns is, of course, profound. Some may grumble about speed limits, but there’s no disagreement that cars should be regulated. Whether or not guns should be regulated divides this country like few other issues. But taking into account culture and technology might help reframe the issue. We can begin by acknowledging that there are cultural traditions that should be respected. Hunting and fishing are ancient traditions in all parts of the world, not just America. Those are not going away, and they should be preserved, But technology has changed guns in profound ways, and in ways that have little impact on the traditions of hunting and fishing. Nobody needs a gun that fires multiple rounds a minute to hunt for anything. For Second Amendment advocates, imposing laws restricting gun ownership apparently feels like a violation of some kind of sacrosanct right. The Second Amendment is,, after all, part of the Constitution, and therefore should not be challenged or changed. But the Founding Parents did not write the Constitution in stone. The Constitution, for the most part, does not dictate WHAT the content of laws should be; it creates a structure for how laws shall be passed, how they shall be determined to be proper and in accordance with previous laws, and how power shall be wielded. The Constitution establishes for how the rule of law will evolve, which is the opposite of establishing absolute rules. The Second Amendment, after all, is not part of the Constitution itself. It is an AMENDMENT, which means that it is an addition to the Constitution. The Second Amendment itself is an example of how the Constitution was designed to change. The Supreme Court, in the Heller decision, ruled both that individuals have a constitutional right to own firearms, and that the state has the right to regulate that ownership. That opinion was written by the noted conservative Antonin Scalia.
As the technology of automobiles changed, the cultural traditions around them and the laws regulating them changed as well. We take for granted things like stop signs and traffic signals, but someone had to invent those, and laws had to be passed to enforce the rules around them. The technology of firearms has changed very dramatically as well. No one’s freedom were unfairly infringed when laws were passed imposing speed limits and drunk driving laws. If someone’s license is taken away because they were caught driving drunk, it is not an infringement of their freedom, it is holding them accountable, punishing them for illegal behavior, and protecting the rest of society from potentially dangerous behavior. The same is true of universal background checks. If someone fails a universal background check and is not able to buy a gun, that is because we as a society have passed a judgment that they do not deserve a gun, because their past behavior indicates that owning a gun would make them potentially dangerous to the rest of us. What is the purpose of government if not to keep citizens safe?
The gun control debate has become deeply divided and polarized, but we have more in common than we realize. As technology changed cars, laws evolved. The same has happened, and should continue to happen, with firearms, because changing laws to fit changing times is what democracy is all about.