Traditionally, Christians celebrate the Feast of the Holy Innocents on the Fourth Day of Christmas, December 28 (http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/liturgicalyear/calendar/day.cfm?date=2012-12-28). Thus for centuries Christians have used the Christmas season (December 25 to January 5) as a time to not only celebrate the birth of Jesus, but also to honor the suffering of innocent children as well.
But this year, in the wake of the Newtown tragedy, some people are dishonoring those children with disingenuous arguments and self-serving proposals.
The NRA leadership says “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” This reminds me of the popup on my PC screen from a company offering, for a fee, to rid my computer of the very virus that same company had sent to my computer! The scam is: cause the problem so you can offer to fix it.
If banning combat-style weapons is not a practical option, it is mainly because there are already 300 million guns owned by private citizens--some of them bad guys. So now the NRA offers a solution (armed guards in every school) to the very problem they have promoted for decades: widespread easy legal ownership of weapons designed for mass killing.
It’s an old Fascist trick, of course. In 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland in response to a supposed Polish attack against a German radio station, which in fact they had themselves faked. Hitler said: “In order to put an end to this frantic activity no other means is left to me now than to meet force with force.” Sound familiar?
The NRA is of course the main lobby for the weapons industry--and their efforts over the years have enabled the flood of weaponry that that now engulfs us. Having succeeded in shaping a nation literally armed to the teeth, they now conveniently trot out the hypocritical notion that the only solution is more weapons in more places.
Supposedly appealing to common sense, they compare guns in schools to banks with armed guards. security in American airports, power plants, courthouses, sports stadiums and Secret Service agents. But all analogies limp, and this one too: mostly those people have chosen to put themselves in harm’s way. Would the NRA have us accept that the same is true of our schoolchildren? That parents place them in harm’s way? That going to school, like being President or handling massive sums of money, inevitably brings a high risk that requires armed protection?
The underlying worldview is obvious: there is no such thing as a safe place, there is only a well-protected (i.e well-armed) place. This implies that we are all in harm’s way, all the time, everywhere. The inevitable alternative is armed protection for everyone at all times.
This idea of a fortress-culture, constantly threatened and vulnerable and surviving only by the force of arms, reflects a vision of lawless society unmatched even by the towns of the “wild west” (where, e.g., schoolmarms were not armed, and people checked in their guns on arrival). It denies the long-held notion that in a civilized society public safety is the norm, and that police are capable of protecting the citizenry from widespread violence.
This repugnant vision surrenders all hope of a peaceful society in which the average citizen can “hang up his gun at the sheriff’s office” and live secure from lethal attack. As both social vision and practical program, this approach is a scam.
Criminologists know from long study that there are three ways to protect the public against the kind of mass violence that struck Newtown.
First, we can better identify and control people who pose a threat to themselves and to others. Time after time the killers turn out to fit the profile typical of sociopaths: reclusive, socially maladjusted loners, usually young white males, unable to function among their peers. We have repeatedly failed to identify such people and provide the treatment, help, and control they need before their behavior becomes dangerous. (The NRA is at least right on one point: our media and video-game culture, by fetishizing gun violence, probably makes such people even more dangerous.)
Second, we can prevent the ready access of such people to victims. No doubt this may mean tightening security in key places, including schools. And given the entire NRA-fueled flood of guns in America, it may even require armed guards (after all, while I never purchased the virus spreaders’ “solution,” I still had to pay someone to fix my PC).
Third, we can reduce the ability of dangerous people to inflict harm. The actual damage they do depends on the lethality of their weapons--and today’s weapons are far more lethal than any in our history. The same week as the Newtown attack, a man in China armed with a knife attacked a school, stabbing 22 children. Four were seriously hurt, but none died. The main difference between that outcome and the 26 dead in Newtown was the weapon itself.
To get serious about protecting our citizenry, we must address all three of these conditions. We must build a civil society where (1) dangerous people are identified and their behavior is controlled, (2) reasonable security systems are in place, and (3) weapons of mass murder are no longer a commonplace threat.
Behind such common sense principles are some controversial truths.
First, this is not a Second Amendment problem. For one thing, the right to bear arms is no more absolute than any other right; it can be limited and regulated in the interest of public safety. But more importantly, the Second Amendment applies to gun owners, not to gun makers or gun sellers. As Justice Scalia explained in his majority opinion in the Heller case:
Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose...The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.
Thus: A citizen’s right to bear arms does not give any particular weapons manufacturer the right to make or sell any particular weapon. In short, citizens can bear whatever arms they can buy--but combat-style weapons should never be on the market in the first place!
The old IRA bumper sticker read, “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” But where do outlaws get their guns? Obviously, they get them from the same gun makers everyone else does! The only reason bad guys have combat-style weapons is because we allow their manufacture and sale to the general public. The real issue here is not gun control at all—it is the regulation of gun commerce.
Second, it takes no genius to explain why such weapons are on the market, in defiance of all logic and common sense. The answer is: money. The industry for which the NRA lobbies is perfectly content to sell us more weapons to prevent the very carnage that its previous sales made possible--but it is not willing to curtail any sales that limit its profits, and it spends millions annually on the lobbying to protect those profits. The sad truth is, we are governed by leaders who have already been bought by an industry for which trafficking in arms trumps public safety.
Third, the money behind guns reflects a much deeper problem than mere private sales to individual consumers. The attachment to guns is deeply imbedded in our public policy as well. Since World War II, the U.S. has consistently been the world’s largest manufacturer, seller, and trafficker of all weapons from handguns to nuclear missiles. Many of the world’s trouble makers (such as the Taliban in Afghanistan) rely on the firepower of U.S. weapons. Many of the world’s trouble spots are fueled by “Washington bullets.” Weapons building brought the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression, and we have been the world’s arsenal ever since. Indeed, worldwide U.S. weapons sales tripled in 2011, to $66.3 billion--more than three-quarters of the global total!
The horrific truth is that our inability to stop the spread of guns is merely the byproduct of living in “Arsenal America.”
Fourth, people who tell us the problem is the “monsters” out there are deceiving both themselves and office. While it is true that we cannot create peace and security by eliminating all evil, we are nonetheless wrong to buy the notion that America’s widespread violence is inevitably built into human nature. This crisis is not natural, it is national. No other civilized nation comes close to our violent crime rate, and few allow the sale of combat-style weapons. Americans typically live in a bubble that defines our life in our own isolationist terms, without reference to the experience of other countries. But in this case, to ignore how other countries have achieved the secure, pacific life we are failing to provide is nothing less than criminal blindness.
In future Decembers, the remembrance of the “Holy Innocents” will include not only those babies in first century Israel, but those schoolchildren for whom modern day America was a death trap. We dishonor them, their families, their peers, and ourselves if we do not finally insist that their lives are more worth more than all the money in Arsenal America.
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