Month: March 2020

NO MORE SAFE PLACES

“This should be our safe place.” – Dakota Shrader (16), student at Sante Fe High School (TX).

As a child growing up in a small Massachusetts town, I regularly walked to school, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. At the age of five, I learned from my parents and neighboring adults to be aware of two threats to my safety: motorized road vehicles and untethered dogs. I was taught not to cross a road until I had looked both ways to determine if the road was clear, and not to run from a menacing dog but to face it, arms down, and slowly back away. One time in an unfamiliar neighborhood, while I was selling raffle tickets to raise money for my Boy Scout troop, I turned and walked quickly away from an angrily confrontational dog, who then jumped and bit me on my back. Lesson relearned, the hard way.

In my little world, there were two places I could always count on to be safe: my home, and my school. In both places I could focus my attention freely on whatever engaged my interest, and in such manner I was able to learn and grow. Between home and school, however, was the danger zone, for there I had to be alert to possible threats to my health, even my existence.

As a parent, I imparted to my children what had been imparted to me: the message that the world is a wonderful place, but it nonetheless contains dangers of which you must be aware and against which you must be ready to defend yourself. Home, and the homes of your friends, and your school, are safe places where you can let your guard down and feel free to live, love, and grow.

We can now no longer take this conventional wisdom for granted. Since the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, according to the Washington Post’s database of school shootings, 141 students and teachers have been killed, 284 have been wounded, and over 214,000 have been traumatized by the experience of armed violence occurring during normal school hours, usually at the hands of members of their own school community, 70% of whom were under the age of 18. In a population of millions, these numbers are relatively small, but they indicate a destructive trend that’s likely to worsen unless effective measures are undertaken to arrest it. In addition, we should note that today’s mass media are so powerful and omnipresent that almost everyone—adult and child alike—has instant access to information that before the Digital Age had been the exclusive purview of the gods. This access to information, and our now habitual if not obsessive use of it, intensifies our emotional lives, especially our fears and anxieties, and in consequence we and our children have effectively lost the belief that a school is a safe space. This is a loss of innocence on a grand scale.

In the past nineteen years, 216 of our nation’s schools have been subjected to the kind of collective horror that, in the hands of emotionally disturbed and disaffected youths, only guns can engender. The failure of our elected representatives to take effective action against this horror is shameful and unconscionable. But then we must realize that our representatives—local, county, state, national–represent us. The failure is thus ours as a political community responsible for self-government.

I think that it is not for want of courage that we have failed. The failure is more due, I think, to a kind of Hamlet’s Dilemma concerning the 2nd Amendment. On the one hand we have “the right to bear arms,” which is an extension of our right to self-defense. If illegitimate force is used against us, we have the right to oppose it; and to be ready to do so, we must be prepared with appropriate means. On the other hand, possession of appropriate means such as the kinds of firearms that are today readily available to virtually everyone makes it increasingly possible for such weapons to get into the hands of irresponsible and emotionally disturbed people. An 18th century musket—the mainstay firearm available when the 2nd Amendment was written and ratified–is one thing, an AR-15 is another. One simply could not go on a mass killing spree with a muzzle-loaded smooth-bore musket. Today, even a semiautomatic handgun with 9 mm. Parabellum cartridges can make a ten-year-old a killing machine. Damned if we fail to regulate, but also damned if we do. Result: inaction.

The resistance to any form of regulation or restriction seems to be largely based on the absolutist position that sees any compromise of “the right to bear arms” as a dilution or debilitation of an absolute principle, as if a compromise would deny the “natural” right of self-defense. On the face of it, this seems a reasonable position. If others have access to guns to threaten me, I must have access to defend myself. If access to guns is prohibited by law, than the law-abiding will lack the means to resist the law-breaking. Therefore, “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” as the NRA puts it.

The flaw in this reasoning, I think, is that it regards regulation as a compromise of principle. “The right to bear arms” is a right, and therefore it “shall not be infringed.” Any right, as a right, is “unalienable,” which is to say, it can no more be eliminated than the law of gravity. It can be “infringed,” however, or indefinitely suspended, by action of others in positions of power over me, such as a parent over a child, or a government over a society. The 2nd Amendment denies the right, if not the ability, of government to do that. It does not, however, deny the right of government to regulate the right to bear arms. Indeed, government is obligated, through the establishment and execution of laws, to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” The disruption of our domestic tranquility from the increasing incidence of gun violence demands that we subject “the right to bear arms” to such regulation as will allow our children, and ourselves, to devote less of our psychic energy to a constant fear of being threatened by a bad guy with a gun.

Another flaw in the absolutist argument is that it disregards the language of the 2nd Amendment itself. 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.” The introductory phrase is (ironically!) an “absolute” construction, the grammatical function of which is to modify the following independent clause. The modification in this instance is a justification; that is, what makes just the “right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Logically, if the justifying condition is absent, the status of the following claim is abrogated; that is, in the absence of a “well regulated Militia,” the people have no just “right” to “keep and bear arms.” Indeed, the obvious intent of the 2nd Amendment, as worded, is to ensure that the citizen-soldiers of a “well regulated Militia” have ready and unobstructed access to their own private arms that they can use when called by the authorities of their “free State” to defend their “security.”

That a Supreme Court that considers itself bound to an “originalist” interpretation of the 2nd Amendment can rule that the amendment confers an absolute right of all citizens to “keep and bear arms” whether or not they are or potentially could be members of a state militia regulated by state law is illogical in the extreme. The “original” intent and sense and meaning of the amendment as written could not be clearer.

If our elected representatives fail to enact legislation that effectively addresses the solutions to this growing problem, we have ourselves to blame.