Do we need guns and rifles? Do we
want guns and rifles? On both counts the answers have been
extensively argued in the affirmative by gun advocates. What reasons
are given? As far as I can make out, there seem to be four basic
answers: we need it for self protection; we want it for hunting; we
want it for recreation – such as target shooting; and we “need”
it to protect ourselves against a potentially oppressive government.
A civics class can and should investigate each of these claims and
students can pass judgment on both their truthfulness and prudence.
In common parlance between us
citizens and in the media, these claims are often conflated,
interchanged, and confused with another. This is not unique to gun
safety/gun control discussions; often controversial issues are talked
about in ways that the facts, the opinions, and the other aspects of
the issues are not clearly delineated. Since these issues can easily
illicit strongly felt emotions, we can easily find our reason
overwhelmed and, before we know it, we talk about them without much
reflection. We go with our initial reaction, the one our feelings
generate, and if we find ourselves in an ongoing discussion,
especially with someone who disagrees with us, we are apt to spend
little effort in critically reviewing our understandings or views.
For example, one often hears these days the question: why does a
hunter need a thirty round magazine on a rifle to kill a deer?
First, such a question is rhetorical; the questioner asks the
question to emphasize his/her feeling that the apparent unreasonable
desire to own a weapon with over-the-top firepower is what motivates
many to buy an assault weapon. Second, such an approach conflates
the varied reasons people have to buy guns and rifles. Not all who
purchase a weapon or defend the right to do so do so in order to
protect the pastime of hunting. Yet, as this example demonstrates,
such language emotionally conflates the possible reasons people have
for advocating a position in a contentious argument. That's just
human nature; a proclivity that good citizenship should be aware of
and determined to counteract.
So, in an effort to counteract
this tendency in terms of gun safety and control, this posting will
review each of the above claims.
Claim 1: Gun rights should be
protected because we need to be able to protect our lives – and the
lives of our loved ones – and property from home invasions. The
same can be said for threats confronted outside the home.
A civics class would find it
useful to investigate the facts that support this claim. For
example, while the number of purchases of guns and rifles in the last
decade has soared, the level of crime, including home invasions, has
significantly decreased. Obviously, this fact supports the claim.
On the other hand, the chances of a gun owner or some other member of
the household being killed or injured by a weapon found in the
household are many times more likely than the weapon being used to
defend that household from any criminal invasion. This fact
undermines the claim. As a matter of fact, our nation which has over
300 million weapons – 50 % of all weapons (with only 5 % of the
world's population) – in circulation, has a 13 times more
likelihood of youngsters becoming victimized by firearms than other
industrial nations do. Another concern is that of illegitimate uses
of firearms which are bolstered with the availability of all of these
guns. Of course, the attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School is just
the most recent, horrific example of these types of illegitimate
uses.
But there is still the case of the
responsible citizen who uses a gun to protect his/her family. There
are cases when a gun has been useful in defending a person's
legitimate concerns – his/her life, the life of a loved one, and/or
property – and, therefore, this abiding citizen might conclude that
that possibility is enough to justify and make prudent the ownership
of a weapon. So, in order to make ownership legit, the right to
ownership has to be maintained. After all, this citizen might
conclude, the Second Amendment does exist and if he wants or
needs to avail himself of its protection, that's his business.
But the question still remains:
does protecting a home or person justify the selling and owning of
assault weapons? Does it, in order to stave off potential dangers in
the streets or at home, call for a weapon that discharges up to
thirty, fifty, one hundred rounds in a matter of moments? Given the
inherent and potentially tragic dangers posed by such a firearm, one
seems to have to meet a heightened level of justification for
allowing their sale in legal markets. The question then becomes:
even if you concede the right to own weapons, does the Second
Amendment protect the selling or ownership of such a device? The
possibility of another Sandy Hook attack puts this discussion on a
more somber and grave level.
Claim 2: Our rights to own
firearms should be protected so each of us, if we wish, can engage in
hunting, either as a basic activity to secure sustenance or for
recreational purposes.
There are no factual controversies
regarding this claim. Obviously, guns and rifles can be used in
hunting and its product can be used for sustenance. To what level
this latter benefit is a practical concern can be questioned; only
few among us count on hunting to provide sustenance to any degree.
But traditionally and historically, the link to securing our food
through hunting is there and some would argue that the right to hunt
is based on such a link. The only controversy is whether assault
weapons are practical in this activity. My understanding is that
they are not. In terms of hunting being a recreational activity, see
the analysis for the next claim below.
Claim 3: Our rights to own
firearms should be protected so that each of us can, if we wish,
engage in recreational activities that employ firearms.
About 35 million people in 2003
engaged in recreational activities that use firearms.1
That's a lot of Americans. From the strength of the NRA, an
organization that sets out to represent firearm users who use
firearms for recreational purposes, one can logically deduce that
these gun owners hold such activities in high regard. One can
readily surmise that prohibition of such an activity would cause very
high levels of consternation and, I believe, general incidents of
civil disobedience in which people will just keep on using their guns
and rifles. So, a question is: what would be the costs involved with
policing this prohibition? Again, as with liquor prohibition in an
earlier era or the war on drugs in more recent years, would officials
try to stop the manufacturing, transport, storage, and selling of
firearms to the general public? What would that entail? Would we
expect any better results from such policing than we saw with either
the prohibition of liquor or drugs? If not, and I think it is
obvious that we wouldn't, can we really afford such a questionable,
if not doomed, effort? The level to which many Americans would see
this policy as illegitimate is substantial. I couldn't find survey
evidence to support this last claim, but I believe it to be
self-evident.
But again, should protecting
recreational use of firearms include assault weapons? It's not so
easy to just say no since many get a kick out of shooting such
weapons. A possible alternative is to prohibit average Americans
from owning assault weapons, but open places of business where
people could “rent” one, shoot a clip or two, and return the
weapon before leaving the establishment. Of course, owners of such
businesses would need special licenses and securing the weapons would
be a concern.
As for hunting, assuming one is
not including the use of assault weapons or large capacity magazines,
existing laws or the customary ways the activity is done seem to be
safe enough and I don't know of any proposals to interfere with them
beyond the laws that already exist.
Claim 4: Our rights to own
firearms need to be maintained so that any government or cadre of
government officials, especially at the federal level, will be
dissuaded from adopting policies aimed at instituting a set of
oppressive policies or an oppressive government.
In short, this claim states that
unless citizens are armed, the government will impose tyrannical
rule. Only the fear, on the part of government officials, of people
in the general public being able to fight off such attempts will we
be able to protect our liberty and freedom. A very important
question I would like students to research is whether this concern is
more a concern against unwanted policies that pockets of citizens
dislike – like gun regulations – or a concern against actual
takeover by anti-democratic forces who will impose dictatorial rule.
I, personally, find such concerns extremely farfetched, but for the
purposes of this posting, let us say there is merit to the belief
that this threat exists.
Initially, I believe students need
to put some context to this whole area of concern. Students need to
know what or who is this potential enemy of the people. The US
government is a government that has access to all modern
technologies, including nuclear weapons, means to control all
communication outlets, transportation facilities and to varying
degrees medical facilities, and the most imposing military in the
history of the world. I've been told the US government has the
world's largest air force, the US Air Force, and the world's second
largest air force, the US Naval Air Force. The only check on this
kind of power, I surmise, is to have strong local governments that
are more susceptible to the local control of citizens.
If all of this is true, students
should be asked: what effect will individual citizens and their arms
have in providing protection against our national government in the
case that it becomes tyrannical? Perhaps, to the degree this
question becomes an actual concern, a student should entertain other
options than the one that relies on armed individuals. For example,
would a well regulated militia, sponsored by a state or a local
jurisdiction, be more effective against the threat of a tyrannical
central government than Joe Q. Citizen and his assault weapon acting
on his/her own? Any resistance effort would be much more viable and
legitimate if it is made up of substantial numbers of citizens who
are trained and coordinated in whatever efforts are exerted in
fighting tyranny. Perhaps that is what the founding fathers had in
mind when they wrote the Second Amendment. With this notion,
let's look at the amendment's language:
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.
What did the ratifiers of this
amendment understand this to mean when they voted for it? No one
knows for sure. But there are certain phrases and words that should
be discussed by all of us including civics students. Of course, the
reference to “regulated militia” is important. The courts have
questioned whether this reference was meant to be a limiting
qualification – as in, your rights to bear arms must be limited for
the purposes of arming a state militia – or whether its reference
was meant to provide an example of the type of conditions when the
right would be protected. The other word in the amendment I find
interesting is “People.” In constitutional language, reference
to individual rights does not use the word people; it uses the word
person. A “People” is a collective, as in the people of a state
or a city or a community, not an individual. If the amendment stated
the right of a person to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,
this would have made the meaning clear and advocates of gun rights
would stand on unambiguous ground. But the amendment uses the word,
“People,” instead. Hence, we have the debate today as to whether
the Second Amendment grants us the relatively unrestrained
right to own and carry just about any firearm or whether the right
belongs to a community of citizens. Of course, with what modern
technology has made available in terms of semi-automatic and assault
weapons, the debate has become a terrifying one.
The final issue I would introduce
in a discussion about gun rights would be whether the Second
Amendment should be incorporated under the Fourteenth
Amendment. This issue gives civics teachers an opportunity to
point out that the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to
the Constitution, was meant, at the time of its ratification,
to limit the power of the central government. With the ratification
of the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1860s, individuals were to
be protected also against their respective state governments from
laws that transgressed their rights. As a result, citizens were not
only protected against the power of the central government but state
governments as well. The question then was what rights did that
include? Through a series of Supreme Court decisions, each of the
rights delineated in the first ten amendments, with a couple of
exceptions, has been included as a basic right and protected by the
Fourteenth Amendment. There are two rights that as of yet
have not been “incorporated” under the Fourteenth Amendment.
One of them is the right against harboring troops, which no longer
has any practical applicability, and the other right is the one to
bear arms. The Supreme Court seems, in a recent decision, to be
leaning toward incorporating this right. What do students think of
this development?
In terms of content, the above is
a possible approach to dealing with the controversy over gun rights.
I know there are other questions that can be included in a unit of
study that addresses this more general concern. Given the events of
last Friday, I am sure students have a heightened interest in this
topic. Hopefully, the above delineation of the issue might be
helpful to teachers who want to take advantage of this sudden
interest. This area promises to be an ongoing topic of national
debate. The President, earlier this week, promised that he is
committed to propose and fight for legislation that addresses the
incidents of mass murder we have been plagued with during the last
several years. It is likely that the resulting proposals will
include policies aimed at the availability and quantity of weapons.
Assuming this announcement is not just rhetoric to meet the immediate
disdain from the electorate over the tragedy in Connecticut, such a
commitment will guarantee that gun safety and control will be given a
great deal of general interest in the coming months if not years.
1See
Krouse, W. J. (2012). Gun control legislature. Congressional
Research Service, (November, 2012). Source retrieved from
website: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL32842.pdf
