Sick Unto Death

Sick Unto Death

Our American society is sick, sick unto death. Americans’ addiction to guns is nothing short of pathologic. No other supposedly advanced nation in the world is anywhere near as enamored with instruments of injury and death as are we Americans. I have Canadian friends, and they simply cannot understand Americans’ attitude toward guns. It’s not that guns are outright illegal in other advanced nations. They aren’t. Even in Soviet Russia it was possible for people to use rifles for hunting, certainly a more legitimate use of guns than any other possible use of them. Yet here’s what the rest of the world understands and we Americans don’t: A gun has one purpose and one purpose only, to inflict death and injury on some living being, be it human or animal. That’s why guns were invented. The manifold technical advances in gun design have had one purpose and one purpose only, to make the gun more effective in inflicting death and injury on some living being. Yes, we sometimes use guns for target practice, shooting at some inanimate object; but the purpose of that exercise for most of the people who engage in it is to improve the shooters ability to inflict death and injury on some other living being. Guns are instruments of violence and nothing else. Guns create violence, they don’t prevent it. Where there are guns there is more violence than where there are no guns. A person is significantly more likely to be shot in a home that has a gun than in a home that has no gun. Strict regulation of guns reduces violence. The experience of supposedly advanced nations around the world proves that truth beyond any reasonable doubt. Yet in our country we hear again and again that to stop violence we need more guns not fewer. That’s like saying that to cure a person’s alcoholism he needs more alcohol not less. The reactions of gun advocates among us to any proposal for stricter gun regulations is emotional not rational. The facts simply don’t support them or their reflexive responses to gun laws and gun violence. If our society is to get healthy around guns we need to stop the gun lobby. People, especially gun owners, need to stop believing the NRA’s lies, as many of them already have done. For us to get healthy around guns we need to stop the lobbying power of the NRA and other advocates of essentially unrestricted gun use. Our culture is mentally ill around guns. Curing mental illness is never easy, but it must be done. We must do it. We must do it now.

Of course there is the small matter of the Second Amendment. It reads: “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.” Before 2008 the courts of our country had never held that the Second Amendment creates an individual right to keep and bear arms. Indeed, on its face it doesn’t. It clearly creates a right to keep and bear arms for the purposes of maintaining a well-regulated militia and for no other. It is a basic principal of statutory or constitutional interpretation that the courts must give meaning to all of the language of a law whenever it is reasonably possible to do so. We simply must assume that the reference to a well-regulated militia in the Second Amendment is there for some reason. We cannot assume that the drafters of the Constitution put in superfluous words just for the sake of putting in words. They put the words they used into the document for some purpose. The purpose of the phrase about a militia in the Second Amendment seems obvious on its face, namely, to foster the development of local militias for the purpose of securing the state. It stretches the wording of the Amendment beyond recognition to say that it provides for essentially unregulated personal gun ownership. It just doesn’t do any such thing.

Or at least it didn’t until the United States Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US 570 (2008). In that case the majority of the court’s justices held that the Second Amendment does what it obviously does not do, namely, create a private right of gun ownership. The court read the language of the Amendment that refers to a militia out of the Amendment, holding, at least in effect, that that language has no meaning at all. In that case the court voided a perfectly reasonable law that regulated gun ownership in the District of Columbia. It is one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of recent times. It’s consequences have been and will continue to be deleterious to public safety in our country. That decision is a gross example of the kind of judicial legislating that the political right is so fond of decrying. Overruling that decision must be one of the major tasks of the Supreme Court in the years ahead.

Yet there it is, a Supreme Court decision that strips meaningful language out of our Constitution. The court was wrong, but it’s still the Supreme Court of our land. What it says, right or wrong, is the law of the land. For now at least we have no choice but to live with it and to try to do the best we can under it. Even under that wholly misguided opinion there is a lot we can do. No constitutionally guaranteed right is absolute. We all know that the First Amendment guarantees the right of free speech, but we all also know, to use a cliché that is true despite its overuse, that you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire. Why not? The US Constitution guarantees free speech doesn’t it? Well, yes it does; but it is well established in the law that constitutional rights must be weighed against other legal considerations. In the fire-in-a-theater case the right of the people to be safe outweighs the rights of any individual to put them at risk through the exercise of his or her free speech rights. The court has approved many other limitations on free speech. The First Amendment’s right of free speech is not absolute.

Neither is the right to keep and bear arms that the Supreme Court created in Heller. If the public’s right to be safe outweighs anyone’s free speech rights in certain cases, surely in most cases the public’s right to be safe from gun violence outweighs an individual’s right to have a gun. Virtually unregulated gun ownership makes us all unsafe. Sure, most gun owners are responsible and law-abiding people; yet it cannot be denied that there are people among us who are neither responsible nor law-abiding. We all have the right to be as safe from their acts of violence as we can be. There simply is no rational argument against expanding the laws on background checks for gun ownership for example, yet the US Congress won’t pass even that important and minimally invasive measure. Their refusal to do so is a sign of pathology not reasonable consideration.

Gun advocates say that none of the measures people like me advocate will stop all gun violence. To that I say Duh! Of course they won’t. Can you seriously expect us to conclude from that undeniable fact that no further gun regulation should be enacted? The premise—gun regulation won’t stop all gun violence—while true simply doesn’t support the conclusion—that no more regulatory laws should be enacted. None of us has any guarantee of absolute safety in this life. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do what we can to increase public safety. Our governmental entities enact legislation to improve public safety all the time. Take safety regulation in the workplace as an example. Can such regulation prevent all industrial accidents? Of course not, but it does make the workplace safer. That accidents still happen is no reason to repeal the laws and regulations regarding workplace safety. It’s the same with guns. Safer is better, even if safer doesn’t amount to absolutely safe.

Gun advocates say that automobiles kill more people in the US every year than guns. I’ll take that as true for the sake of argument. Once again that contention does not support the conclusions gun advocates draw from it. Let’s look at the differences between automobiles and guns as  starting point. First of all, automobiles are designed, built, and sold overwhelmingly for legitimate purposes. Yes, criminals use cars too; but most of us by far use them for lawful and constructive purposes. Guns are designed, built, and sold for the purpose of causing injury and death. That is not a legitimate purpose. Gun advocates say self-defense is a legitimate purpose of guns. OK, I’ll accept that as true for purposes of argument; but look the at differences in how we regulate guns and how we regulate cars. You have to pass a test on your knowledge and ability to handle a car to get a driver’s license. You don’t to get a gun. Cars are licensed, guns are not. Cars display license plates that make it relatively easy to identify and locate the car’s owner. Guns don’t. We must all operate our cars within the limits of numerous traffic laws put in place to improve safety on our streets and highways. Far fewer laws and regulations govern the use of guns. We know that while cars are mostly used for legitimate purposes they can be dangerous, so we surround them with laws and regulation. We know that guns are nothing but dangerous, and we surround them only with weak regulation that is full of loopholes. All this makes absolutely no sense.

The most vociferous gun advocates don’t support repealing our traffic laws, so why don’t they support stricter gun regulation? There’s only one answer to that question that I can come up with. Pathology. We are pathologically addicted to guns. Perhaps that addiction comes from our history. We developed as a frontier society in which guns were common and often necessary for personal safety and to obtain food. We are such a society no longer. To cite just a couple of examples, Canada and Russia developed as frontier societies too, but they aren’t pathologic about guns. We are. It’s time for us to get healthy. We must enact whatever gun safety measures we can under Heller. Beyond that, we must overturn that tragically wrong decision. If we cannot adequately regulate guns under the Second Amendment, they we must repeal or modify the Second Amendment. When we are sick we consult a physician. We’re sick about guns. There are lots of people among us working hard to enact better gun regulation. We need to turn to them in order to gain our health around guns. We’re sick. It’s way past time for us to get healthy.