A TIMELY CIVICS TOPIC: GUN SAFETY AND CONTROL

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