Like every other American, I was shocked, saddened, and angered by the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday. Just as in past mass shootings, the response has been more hand-wringing, calls for assault weapon bans and a search for the factors leading to such tragic consequences. In every past occurrence of firearm mayhem, I have bitten my lip and kept quiet about my feelings on the subject. Although my experience with guns is admittedly limited, I have many good friends who hunt and own firearms and I never wanted to take a stance that confronted their fervent belief that gun ownership was an important right that deserved to be protected.
After the events this weekend, I can no longer stay silent on the subject. When a soldier, policeman or gang member dies as a result of gunfire, it is still tragic, but we accept their death as a possible outcome of their choice of occupation. When the victims are totally innocent 6 and 7-year olds, with an entire life ahead of them, we cannot blame the results on their own life choices.
In an effort to take the focus away from firearms, the gun industry would rather blame this latest incident on mental illness. They have a point, but not a very good one. Republican lawmakers, who have been the biggest supporters of the gun industry, are also the biggest drivers behind reducing treatment options for mentally ill people. Making it easier to get a handgun than treatment for mental illness seems like a bad societal choice and those dead schoolchildren have paid the price for decades of budget-cutting and program eliminations.
If someone in America really wants a gun, it's not hard to get one.
After every shooting, the public is confronted with the grim statistics: America, we are told, is awash in guns. There are four times as many licensed firearm dealers than there are grocery stores in the country. There are over six times as many gun dealers as there are McDonald’s Restaurants. Homicide rates from gunfire are outrageously high in the U.S (only South Africa, Columbia and Thailand have more.) Just in the last 8 years there have been almost a quarter of a million homicides and suicides due to guns. At times, the carnage from gunfire equals or exceeds that of actual warfare. In the first seven years of the U.S.-Iraq War, over 4,400 American soldiers were killed. Almost as many civilians are killed with guns in the U.S., however, every seven weeks. Since 1982, there have been at least 62 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country in 30 different states. More than 75% of the time, these killings are carried out with weapons that were purchased legally.
How do we account for this? Why does America stand alone in its horribly high rate of firearm casualties? Are we just more naturally violent than other nationalities? Is there just some “evil” in our nation that warps the actions of some misguided citizens into perpetrating such atrocities as at Sandy Hook? Does our abnormally high rate of gun homicides (and suicides) reflect some deep, tragic flaw in our national psyche that inevitably results in such violent behavior?
Most observers point to just the gun ownership statistics as the problem. There are just too many firearms, according to this point of view, and they are accessible to just about anyone who wants one. It’s been pointed out repeatedly that there are safety laws regulating all sorts of behavior but the restrictions on gun ownership are ineffective, incomprehensive and often easy to circumvent. The type of firearm, of course, is also significant and most recent attempts at “gun control” have focused on restricting access to certain types of firearms or ammunition deemed to be too dangerous for civilian use. While there certainly is a valid argument that semi-automatic weapons with high-capacity magazines have no real purpose for hunting and target shooting, I believe that pursuing “assault weapons” bans will have a negligible effect on the situation.
Weapons like this have no real purpose besides killing people....
The real solution, I believe, is much harder than the superficial idea that the violent gun death problem can be solved by background checks and weapon bans. If you really want to understand our nation’s fatal attraction to firearms, we must challenge the prevailing beliefs that firearms actually solve problems and that the answer to the problem of having too many guns is to have more of them.
That's me, right rear, clutching my favorite weapon of mass destruction....
My Own Journey
As a kid, I loved guns. Like every other red-blooded American boy born in the decade following World War II, I loved playing “war” and fantasized about shooting down Nazis and Japs like the heroes I saw on TV and in the movies. One of the favorite pastimes of me and my buddies was to “shoot” each other and see who could die the most realistic and dramatic death. The 1950s were the peak period of the TV western and show after show featured ta brave lawman facing down the desperados with his shooting iron strapped on his hip. How I longed to be Matt Dillon, solving the problems of Dodge City with a rapid draw and unerring marksmanship.
Unfortunately, my parents did not share my fascination with firearms. My mother had a cousin who lost an eye in a shooting incident and she refused to allow even a BB gun to enter our household. To my knowledge, no one in my dad or mom’s family hunted, or even owned a gun. To be sure, I had some target shooting experience in the Boy Scouts but I never developed a relationship with firearms like many of my friends.
That could have changed because of the Vietnam War, but a college deferment and a later high lottery number kept me out of the draft and into college. By that time, however, World events had changed my views on warfare and gun usage. The assassinations of political leaders and the imposition of military force on other countries caused me to question the use of violent intimidation as an effective means of solving problems and I began to see those days of adolescent war-making as “kid stuff” and my views on war and peace began evolving. Not long after I chose “Peace Studies” as a minor and began to formulate new ideas about violence and its effectiveness to achieve desired outcomes. Gradually, I became a proponent of pacifism and non-violence and have over the years come to believe that: (1) using force to achieve one’s ends rarely works in the long run and (2) guns NEVER solve problems. In almost every case, the use of violence to get one’s way creates new and additional problems that are even harder to solve.
Statistical Uncertainties over Concealed Carry
Statistics on gun issues are all over the map. Both gun control advocates and opponents can line up apparently solid studies showing that guns do and do not cause violence. States and cities with tough gun control laws are shown as being ineffective in one study and successful in another. Comparisons of America with other nations with stricter and looser gun laws is often inconclusive about the role firearms, themselves, play in the issue. Gun advocates claim that as many as 2.5 million crimes are prevented each year by victims who use firearms themselves, although most of these cases involve just brandishing a firearm or threatening to use one. Other studies place the figure much lower and claim that such boasts of effectiveness are highly-exaggerated. Some studies how that murder rates decrease in concealed carry states while others suggest the opposite.
This is important because right now, we seem to be “doubling down” on the response to these tragic mass shootings. Not surprisingly, the first response to these events by gun advocates is to INCREASE the number of guns at the crime scene. If teachers, were only armed, we are told, this would all be prevented. The same thing happened after the Virginia Tech massacre. Concealed Carry proponents repeatedly argued that, if Virginians had only been allowed to carry their own guns, the shooter would have been stopped by their quick actions. The police, not surprisingly, are not all that crazy about such a world. How would they have responded to the situation there if, after receiving reports of a gunman on campus, they arrive on the scene and find everyone they see brandishing a firearm.
The Self-Protection Conundrum
For several years, I had a firearm training simulator located next to my office. It was used extensively to train police recruits and to refresh training for veteran officers. Basically, trainees had a pistol attached to a computer and various scenarios were presented to the officer on a projection screen. They would have to make snap judgments about who is a threat and who is not. Even veteran police officers were humbled by the experience. Well-trained shooters often made the wrong call and fired at non-threatening subjects and their accuracy at hitting their target was not especially high, either. You might think you have the presence of mind to wake up instantly from a deep sleep, assess the threat from an intruder, and neutralize the perpetrator with your handgun but the more likely scenario is you could shoot your own child who is looking for a drink of water.
Let's hope this woman doesn't have any children.....
This, of course, requires you to keep a loaded handgun by your bedside and the multitudes of Americans who have bought a gun for protection probably do so. Unfortunately, if you have children in the house, there should NEVER be a loaded firearm present; in fact to be entirely safe, ammunition and firearms should be locked up in separate locations to ensure maximum safety for your family. Such behavior, however, would make the fantasy of a nighttime shootout to take out an intruder pretty much impossible and therefore most people do not take even these simple precautions. Many innocent children have died as a result. This is incredibly ironic considering the most popular reason people give for keeping a gun at home is for protection of their family.
Adolescents, teen angst and easy access to firearms are a dangerous mix.....
Incidentally, the Sandy Hook shooting was the result of a juvenile gaining access to weapons owned by his mother, who also presumably purchased them partly for her family’s safety. It does seem incredible that there are few regulations whatsoever for how firearms are to be stored in a home and only rarely have parents been held liable when their firearms are used illegally by their offspring.
Are you really making your kids safer by teaching them to fire a fully-automatic machine gun?
Regardless of your feelings about the statistics on firearm safety, there is one correlation that has remained constant over the years. If you own a handgun, and that gun is ever used on a human being, the odds are much, much, MUCH greater that it will be used on you or someone you love rather than a “bad guy.” Firearm supporters conveniently ignore this fact when they discuss how safe we will all be when everyone we come into contact with is packing heat. Human beings can be cantankerous and people get into arguments over the most inconsequential reasons. Tempers flare, angers rise and disputes can often lead to violence. If alcohol is involved, the danger is even greater and the presence of a firearm in a charged situation can often be the catalyst for even more violence and often results in death and injury.
Ending It All
Finally there is the problem of guns and suicide. Just in the last 8 years, over 140,000 people have ended their lives using a readily-available handgun. Depressed teenagers, veterans with post-traumatic shock syndrome, and mentally-ill people are allowed easy access to firearms and thus an easy way to “end it all.” Guns are quick, easy and irreversible. Suicide attempts using guns are almost always successful but many of the most widely used other suicide attempt methods have case fatality rates below 5%.
Studies that compare states with high gun ownership levels to those with low gun ownership levels find that in the U.S., where there are more guns, there are more suicides. While having a handgun certainly doesn’t lead people to take their own lives, having one available sure makes it easier to carry it out once they have made the decision. This, too, is a price we pay to allow people unfettered access to firearms.
The Search for Solutions
After the funerals, the grief and the hand-wringing over the latest mass shooting, we face, as a nation, what to do next. The most likely scenario is that we will take a big sigh, express our sorrow and totally ignore the issue until the next shooting. So far, this technique has worked pretty well for the gun lobby. Enough accusations, misleading statistics and outrageous claims are thrown around to totally confuse the issue and essentially breed fear into every citizen of our nation. Fear sells weapons and if every American is terrorized, the sales of guns go through the roof.
As mentioned before, we are likely to see some ineffectual attempts to ban some assault weapons or institute additional background checks. Personally, I do not believe any of these will have an appreciable effect on the situation. The “genie” is out of the bottle. We already have millions of guns around us and trying to round up all those firearms would, of course, be impossible and restricting access now is just too little, too late. Instead, we must accept the fact that we live in an ocean of weaponry and look to a more progressive approach. The solution to our problem is not “gun control”; it is changing the way we look at guns and their effectiveness in solving problems. As I have already stated, my belief is that guns NEVER solve problems, they just make them worse. This has been shown throughout history.
Law Enforcement Issues
But don’t police solve problems when they use their sidearm in taking out a “bad guy” in the course of their duties? Not really. Leaving aside the instances where innocent bystanders are wounded or killed during shootouts, the use of a service weapon on a criminal brings a whole new crop of problems, sometimes for the officer, himself. Unfortunately, we have all seen so many movies where the policeman says “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” Even though officers are trained to NOT rely on their firearm as their main method of enforcement, in too many cases a pistol becomes a quick way to resolve a situation and shots are fired with the expectation that this will solve the problem. As I have already pointed out, even trained officers have a hard time accurately hitting their target and when they do, they often suffer, as well.
Sometimes a firearm death is harder on the shooter.....
There are numerous studies now showing the enormous toll that an officer-involved shooting incident can take on the individuals involved, as well as the police department, itself. When a police officer kills a criminal in the course of duty, that individual has essentially short-circuited the judicial process. The split-second judgment that often has to be made sometimes results in the policeman being the judge, jury and executioner rolled into one and this often places a heavy psychological burden on the affected officer. Even when justified in using their firearm, many times officers must leave the force afterwards because they are unable to deal with the trauma and reality of taking another human’s life, no matter how justified. Actually, this exact thing happened to one of my best childhood friends who became a police officer but left the force after a shooting incident.
A Challenging Future
It’s not surprising that we, as a nation, seem to believe that firearms are the solution to many of our problems. Consider the thousands of TV shows and movies that show the “good guys” always walking away from a gunfight. How many times have we seen the cavalry arrive and shoot all the Indians? Didn’t we learn that Sylvester Stallone won the Vietnam War (at least according to the body count of his movies)? As the bullets fly, the bad guys are killed, the town is saved, the victims are rescued and everything is resolved by the end of the show. Most of the credit usually goes to the effective use of the hero’s gun.
The more likely outcome of all this is that we will go the other direction: more metal detectors, locked-down schools, militarized police and even more people carrying firearms. We have already seen Illinois become the last state to fall to the “concealed carry” fantasy that every American is safer when we are all armed to the teeth. Now, enthusiasts want restrictions lifted so that concealed guns can be carried into courthouses, bars and yes, even schools. (Just today I learned that Michigan Governor Rick Snyder will veto a bill he originally wanted to pass that allows concealed carry in churches and schools). Essentially, the plan of the NRA is to challenge every state’s restrictions, expanding the right to carry weapons into ANY venue, regardless of the danger. Eventually there will be so many exceptions that there will be no restrictions at all, which is their ultimate goal.
