In the wake of the Aurora massacre, the usual groups are saying the usual things. Some of these things are flamboyantly stupid. For example, E.J. Dionne, complaining that dialogue about gun laws is “prevented” in America, wrote that ” where a gun massacre is concerned … an absolute and total gag rule is imposed on any thinking beyond the immediate circumstances of the catastrophe.” As James Taranto pointed out this afternoon in his Best of the Web newsletter, this assertion is obviously self-refuting — because if it were correct, Mr. Dionne wouldn’t be making it in a major newspaper, and then going on to write at length about matters that lie beyond the immediate circumstances of the catastrophe.
Mr. Taranto also gave us Mayor Bloomberg (who by the way is protected around the clock by rough men carrying guns), saying that the sensible folks who might wean America off guns “have been cowed by a handful of advocates who think that the right to bear arms allows you to go out and kill people at random.” Now I follow the gun debate pretty closely, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone, from Charlton Heston to Wayne LaPierre to Ted Nugent, interpret the Second Amendment quite like that.
As long-time readers will imagine, I’m a strong supporter of gun rights, for a long list of reasons I won’t go into here. But I will say that the Left, in its zeal to achieve near-zero tolerance of gun ownership in America, overlooks the question it should be asking if it really wants a “debate” about this. That question is:
“OK, gun advocates, will you agree that private citizens shouldn’t be allowed to possess nuclear weapons? How about tanks, attack helicopters, or roof-mounted Hellfire missiles? If not those either, then where should the line be drawn, and on what coherent limiting principle?”
But nobody seems to be asking that.
Also:
“What is the appropriate trade-off, if any, between the need to protect individual rights under the Second Amendment and the need to keep lethal ordnance out of the hands of insane people? To what extent should we be willing to err on the side of caution, and to preempt the rights of the unhinged before they kill roomfuls of people? Afterward seems rather too late.”
These are hard questions, and fair ones, and the Left should ask them. And the Right should be thinking about how to answer them.
36 Comments
Implied in the question(s) as you ask it is some sort of governmental regulation. But governments will never be able to prevent the lone idiot or crazy from doing the unpredictable. The best that can be hoped for is citizens at the time reacting in an effective manner. Else we will have the usual cops coming in minutes when seconds count. (I am NOT disparaging cops. They do a phenomenal job under very adverse conditions. An armed shooter just isn’t something they can immediately respond to.)
Hi Bill, and welcome back!
There already is government regulation of weapons possession, of course, and will continue to be. The first of the two questions asks gun advocates themselves to define what, if any, limits should be placed on the kinds of weapons citizens may possess. Given that the leading edge of weapons technology at the time the Second Amendment was written was the musket, this seems fair, I think.
The second question hews more closely to the matter of the “lone crazy”. If, to ameliorate this problem, we don’t want to crush the rights of the millions of responsible, non-crazy citizens who own guns, then are we justified in profiling mentally disturbed people more aggressively and prophylactically?
IMHO, society is so justified. Of course, there are a whole spectrum of opinions about this issue, not merely a binary pro-con partition. As they say, the devil is in the details.
But, again IMHO, if a man is walking in Times Square, wearing warpaint, stripped to the waist, and armed to the teeth, there is probable cause to arrest him on suspicion of insanity, provided it’s not Halloween.
… there is a whole spectrum …
The question of what is allowed for a private citizen to own legally is a valid one. It relates to the potential danger vs. security of storage and capability to use competently. When the 2nd Amendment was written, citizens, outlaws, and the military all had equal firepower, with the exception of artillery in the military. Today, outlaws and the military are vastly overarmed compared to citizens. Though I don’t know that owning RPGs is a great idea, banning fully automatic weapons for civilians may not be either on grounds of preservation of freedom. The problem is the debate will never be rational. On one end are those who are afraid of the physical existence of firearms and on the other, those who espouse no limits. It depends on the principles one is basing the discussion, personal protection or preservation of freedom.
The biggest problem with profiling the insane and/or irresponsible is the imprecision and outright ignorance in some cases of the rules by which to profile. TheBigHenry nailed it with “the devil is in the details.” Also you get into that horrible tar pit of preventative law. Inherently, law and policing are reactive. At best law provides the playing field upon which citizens exercise their best judgment. When the law presumes to pre-empt that judgment, the problems multiply rapidly, yet it seems that in some cases it is necessary. A comment thread is not the place to debate all this, but I did want to raise the questions.
The assertion that the Left has a “zeal to achieve near-zero tolerance of gun ownership in America” is simply untrue, as is the implication that the question of appropriate trade-offs is ignored.
Very few people advocate banning guns entirely, or even limiting them to members of a well regulated militia. There is a consensus that people should be able to own guns for sport, self-protection, and so forth. I can’t think of anyone who support a zero tolerance policy of banning all firearms in all circumstances. Can you?
Trade-offs fall under three rubrics: who should be allowed to own guns, what types of weapons should be allowed, and under what circumstances people should be allowed to carry weapons. There are plenty of ideas and legislation which addresses each of these issues.
Reasonable regulations concerning who should own guns include prohibiting felons, people on the terrorist list, and people who can’t pass a background check from ownership.
Reasonable regulations concerning what types of weapons should be allowed include banning certain types of assault rifles, as well as limiting the number of bullets which can be fired before reloading.
Reasonable regulations concerning where guns can be carried include banning them from schools and airport lobbies, as well as prohibiting people from carrying concealed weapons.
Gun control advocates have long proposed these regulations, and each of them is opposed by the NRA. There may be isolated exceptions, but to posit that the Left in general favors a “near-zero tolerance of gun ownership” creates a straw man with no basis in reality.
What to OneEyedMan appears reasonable, to me and others like me appears as intolerable restrictions and abridgement of our rights. And yes, I have heard and read proposals to completely ban all firearms.
OneEyedMan sounds like the standard gun regulation talking points. So called assault weapons are based simply on looks not fire-power. The true assault version is fully automatic which is illegal for civilians to own. The term assault weapon when applied to civilian firearms is simply propaganda.
The problem that gun regulators never seem to address is what do you do about the people who ignore the law? When you have regulated defense to a far subparity with outlaws, and the police can’t respond in time what good did all the regulations do? Allowed more death from the bad guys.
I don’t think it exaggerates, for example, Mayor Bloomberg’s position on gun laws to characterize it as “zeal to achieve near-zero tolerance of gun ownership in America”. Certainly the gun laws in NYC are designed to make it very difficult indeed to own a gun, and Mr. Bloomberg is a voluble advocate for far tighter restrictions at the Federal level. Just yesterday, in fact, he called for police nationwide to go on strike in order to pressure government to tighten gun laws. In my own conversations with folks on the Left here in New York and in Wellfleet, I’ve often heard them advocate zero or near-zero tolerance for gun possession.
Bill is quite right that “assault weapon” is a loaded and effectively meaningless term, calculated to arouse fear in folks who have no familiarity with guns.
What to Bill is an abridgement of his right to own guns to me is an abridgement of my right to live safely.
America has the highest murder rate in the developed world – by far. It also has the highest gun ownership rate in the developed world – by far. This is not a coincidence. Moreover, the parts of the US which have the highest incidence of gun ownership also have the highest incidence of murder and suicide.
With almost as many firearms as people in the US, I get that bad people will always have access to weaponry. The fact that we will never have an airtight control of weapons is not an excuse to accept the status quo.
That is a distinction without a difference. Weapons such as the ones used in Tucson and Aurora should be banned – or strictly limited – regardless of what you call them.
The societal interest in public safety far outweighs the putative rights of gun owners to possess weapons of mass destruction.
Peter, that’s not an argument, it’s just an assertion. You’re just announcing what you want, rather than even attempting to persuade us.
For example: what is it, in your mind, that distinguishes in any relevant, functional sense an AR-15, which is considered an “assault rifle”, from any ordinary semiautomatic rifle?
As for the relation between gun laws and murder rates in the developed world: Switzerland and Israel both have permissive gun laws, and rates of gun ownership that equal or exceed those of the US, with low murder rates.
You say “I get that bad people will always have access to weaponry”, but your answer, nevertheless, seems to be to disarm law-abiding citizens. Why? Firearms are used by citizens to defend themselves against criminals something like 2 million times a year.
And why are you opposed to concealed-carry laws? The point of concealed carry is that if, malefactors don’t know which of their potential victims is in a position to offer armed resistance, it has a general deterrent effect.
But we are straying from the point here, which was to encourage gun-rights advocates to think about what they would consider to be an acceptable limiting principle, and to consider also the question of how to address the problem of gun access for the insane.
My intention was not simply to bring the general disagreement between gun restrictionists and gun-rights advocates into this comment thread.
Re assault weapons: you have to balance lethality with the legitimacy which a weapon has for sport or self-defense. There is a difference between a shotgun and a semi-automatic machine gun which can fire off dozens of shots before being reloaded. At some point on the spectrum, you pick an arbitrary point and say that anything with greater lethality is unacceptable. Reasonable people will differ on where to set the dial, but this does not suggest that any weapon should be allowed to be owned by anybody who wants it.
The reason is simple: since there will always be crazy people, allowing unfettered use of lethal weaponry increases the likelihood of another Tucson or Fort Hood. Restricting access decreases its likelihood. I value human life far more than the promiscuous availability of lethal weaponry. If people are members of gun clubs and like to shoot off machine guns for sport at rifle ranges: I have no problem with that. However, letting anyone with a credit card buy the sort of weaponry which is used for mass killings is unacceptable to me and my pantywaist liberal values.
I would not want to disarm law-abiding citizens. Far from it. I would only want guns to be registered and sold to people who are not on the terrorist watch list, do not have a criminal record, and so forth.
My aversion to concealed carry comes from a time when I took my daughter, who was three at the time, into a restaurant and saw a gun sticking out of someone’s back pocket. This is personal and anecdotal, but it’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Peter, you clearly know nothing about guns. “Semi-automatic” simply means that one round is fired each time the trigger is pulled. “Fully automatic” means that rounds are fired at a high rate on a single trigger pull. A “machine gun” is by definition a fully automatic weapon, and all fully automatic weapons are already illegal everywhere.
A semiautomatic weapon like an AR-15 is no more “lethal” than any other semiautomatic rifle, or for that matter a revolver.
A shotgun is a completely different class of weapon altogether.
Your comment amounts to little more than “I don’t like guns.”
True: I know very little about guns. There are plenty of people who have the expertise to make an informed judgment on lethality. I am not one of them. However, like Potter Stewart on pornography, I know it when I see it, and a weapon which can fire off a hundred rounds at once is unacceptable.
Well, no rifle fires off a hundred rounds “at once”. Given all you’ve displayed here, I do hope you’ll forgive me for thinking your policy recommendations are more emotional than rational.
The people who cry out the loudest for draconian gun laws always tend to be the people who know the least about guns, and just have a visceral aversion to them.
And as far as Fort Hood is concerned: that crime was committed by a soldier. Are you proposing to enact tighter gun-control laws for the military?
I should be more specific: two things that do make a weapon arguably more lethal are the number of rounds it can fire without reloading, and the ease with which it can be reloaded. This seems a reasonable area of discussion as regards appropriate limitations. Should, say, possession of a 100-round magazine be illegal? 50? 10?
But does making such things illegal, as with so many other aspects of gun control, simply tip the balance of firepower in the direction of the outlaws? Given that the person committing mass murder is clearly undeterred by the harsh penalties already associated with that most heinous of crimes, why would we imagine that he will be deterred from the far lesser crime of illegal weapons possession?
Does making something illegal ever prevent everyone from breaking that law? Of course not. But laws exemplify the basic tenets of a culture. While we argue about the definition of semi-automatic and accuse one another of insensitivity or emotionalism, the killings continue at an increasing rate. Clearly some action is necessary.
Tighter gun control might not remove guns from the equation of violence completely, and I think few would argue that it’s going to solve the problem alone. But it would reflect a conscience about gun violence that our current laws do not. That seems like a reasonable starting point to me, and it’s hard to see how whatever additional effort that would be required of hunters, target shooters and home defenders – i.e., the only people that should need guns in the first place – is worth dying for.
We live with 3 or 400 million other people here. That means we can’t always have it our own way.
Churchgoer, implicit in your remarks is an unstated premise, namely that more restrictive gun laws are what “conscience” demands: i.e., that to favor such laws is a morally preferable position.
But given that guns in responsible hands can prevent crimes, and in fact do so millions of times each year, that assumption is questionable, to say the least. And your brief list of who you think should “need” guns leaves out the private citizen who simply wishes to be able to defend himself or herself against physical assault, or who might be in a position to defend innocent people against the next James Holmes. (See, for example, this video.)
Here’s my (admittedly not thoroughly-thought-out) proposal:
A blue-ribbon (or red-; but not green-) panel of weapons experts is formed, with nominations submitted by the three Branches; this panel will hammer-out a weapon vs. lethality spreadsheet.
Another panel of experts (law, economics, political science, martial arts, reconstructive surgery, etc.) is convened to determine a weapon-lethality deemed by the experts to be a “reasonable” upper limit for private-individual ownership.
We then have a national referendum with the following three choices: (1)small nuke; (2)”reasonable-lethality” weapon; (3)nail clippers.
Plurality becomes the law of the land.
No more questionable than your assertion that guns prevent crimes millions of times each year, Malcolm.
In case of a tie-vote: rock; paper; scissors.
No, that’s right out of a Justice Department study made during the Clinton Administration, and amply reconfirmed since then.
Even if it’s half that, or even a tenth, the defensive use of firearms certainly deserves to be part of the moral equation.
If we took such a vote here, my predicted outcome would be:
(1) small nuke: 0;
(2) “reasonable” lethality: Malcolm; TBH;
(3) nail clippers: Churchy; One-eye;
Don’t know Bill very well, but I’m guessing he’s either the tie-breaker for “reasonable” or he favors nukes.
I scanned the article you referenced. If you scroll down to the last third of the report you’ll find some meat. But in any case I listed home defenders in my spur of the moment shortlist of those who have reason to pack. My point was that our culture is to some extent defined by its laws, and that not enlisting our conscience, or morality if you like, to help us decide whether guns that fire multiple rounds should be illegal is increasingly self-destructive. That is all.
The Remington 100 round drum can fire a hundred rounds in four seconds. I think that qualifies as “at once.”
My ignorance of weapons is irrelevant and my opinions are not emotional, as they are based on my keen powers of observation and ratiocination. One does not need to have expertise in the mechanics of firearms to have an informed opinion about gun control. That would be like insisting that in order to have an informed opinion on health care, you have to have expertise in surgery.
The assertion that “guns in responsible hands can prevent crimes, and in fact do so millions of times each year” is irrelevant. Few people – except maybe for Bloomberg (who is mayor of the city which has historically had the most stringent gun control laws in the country) and your Wellfleet neighbors, who must have been red diaper babies – argue for taking guns away from responsible owners (and I would be surprised if that is what Bloomberg advocates). The issue is whether those who are mentally incompetent, have criminal records, or otherwise are more likely to use weapons with bad intent should be allowed to own them.
Peter, you wrote:
No, if you are going to call for bans on particular sorts of weapons, you should know at the very least what the terms and definitions mean, in order to understand what it is you are proposing to ban, and why.
Your example would be more like calling for a ban on certain sorts of surgical tools without knowing what those tools actually do.
Now that’s a little better, and is conceptually distinct from the question of whether people who are NOT mentally incompetent, do NOT have criminal records, and are NOT likely to use weapons with bad intent should be able to own them.
Which brings us back, after a circuitous digression, to my original two questions.
Churchgoer, you wrote:
But here again we can infer your enthymeme: that the voice of conscience on this matter is clear, objective, and unanimous, and calls for more restrictive gun laws.
I think gun-rights advocates are following their consciences no less than anyone else; the difficulty here is that the “correct” moral posture on this matter is something about which there can be principled disagreement.
@TheBigHenry–I’m a tie-breaker for reasonable. Can’t see owning a nuke or even an RPG. The risk if it were misused is too great. However, I probably am on the permissive side of reasonable. I tend to think fully automatic weapons might be made available to civilians. I certainly don’t think there should be any restrictions on ownership of semi-automatic weapons, other than the ex-felons, the insane, and minors under the age of 12 or 14.
@Bill: I suspected as much. When I lived in Manhattan, I fantasized about owning a tank. It’s all about the street-parking …
When I lived in Los Alamos, I actually considered owning a nuke. Alas, the paperwork was prohibitive.
This is America, there will never be total consensus on any issue. No doubt some Americans would condone public guillotines, wild animals as pets in apartment buildings, incest, eye for an eye punishment of criminals and so on, not to mention recinding equal rights for minorities and women and outlawing immigration. But reason and shared social mores prevent such allowances and we’re the better for it, though some would argue to the contrary. Until their arm gets bitten off by someone’s pet Bengal tiger.
If a surgical instrument were shown to be more dangerous than beneficial, it would be outlawed until further notice, even before everyone understood how it worked. Why not guns that shoot more bullets than can be counted? They’ve proven to be extraordinarily dangerous in the society. How are they beneficial?
But this is a blog and as in all blogs, nobody is ever convinced to change their mind about anything. It’s simlpy an opportunity for people to vent, to show cleverness, to be funny or vitriolic. And there’s probably no harm in that, unless people start dying from it. Then, of course, it would only be reasonable to question their place in a conscientious society.
My opinion, of course.
Churchgoer:
Though it may seem perfectly obvious to you that your position on gun laws stands exactly where the national consensus ought to be, by any rational or moral standard, nevertheless the opinions of “conscientious” Americans (just as conscientious as you, if you can believe it!) are deeply divided on this topic, as on so many others.
Now you’re getting somewhere! This is much better. Instead of railing (“venting”, to use your term) about the lack of “conscience” in the nation’s lawmaking, just go ahead and make your case in practical, pragmatic terms. It’s quite possible that a persuasive case can be made that, say, high-capacity clips might cause more harm than they can reasonably be imagined to prevent, and that banning them is therefore a reasonable limitation of Second Amendment rights. This is the sort of questioning I called for in the body of this post: if we agree that a line is to be drawn somewhere (and even Wayne LaPierre would agree with that), then where should the line be, and why?
Commenters included? The fact is that people, however open-minded they flatter themselves to be, very rarely have their minds changed by arguments, whether in discussion threads or anywhere else. Closed-mindedness is always the other guy’s character flaw. We ourselves, on the other hand, would of course always be open to persuasion, if we hadn’t already been persuaded by the Truth.
Anyway, are you seriously making a generalized distinction between blogs (all several hundred million of them), and the conspicuous ideological flexibility of, say, MSNBC, or the editorial board of the New York Times?
Ominous rumblings at the end, there, by the way. I don’t think I’d enjoy having my place “questioned” by the arbiters of society’s conscience, so I suppose I’d better start watching my step.