DYSFUNCTIONAL LEVERAGE

Leverage here, leverage there, leverage everywhere; what's a federalist to do? Any sort of word count that tracked the verbiage of TV news the last month or so must put the word “leverage” right up there as one of the most used terms. While I am sure that just about everyone knows the meaning of leverage, it is useful to analyze its significance and try to measure the functionality of relying on leverage to meet the nation's challenges. In a civics class, a concern over leverage strikes at the central aims of its subject: to describe and explain the governance of this democracy.

Of course, leverage in political terms relies on a metaphor. Leverage in the physical world refers to the use of a stationary post to anchor a pole that, in turn, dislodges and moves a strongly resistant object. Leverage, therefore, is some form of advantage to get someone in the political realm to do something he or she would not do otherwise. That is, it is the exercise of power – what politics is all about. To have leverage means to be able to implement power over some interest which is negatively impacted by what is being considered. It is claimed that President Obama had leverage over the Republican right-wingers in Congress in avoiding the fiscal cliff because if the Republicans did not give in on raising tax rates on the rich, tax rates would go up on all taxpayers. In addition, the polls indicated that if the cliff were not avoided, the electorate would primarily blame the GOP. But now that the cliff has been avoided, some say that leverage has shifted toward the Republicans since now the challenge is to get Congress to agree to raise the debt limit that Congress imposes on itself. That is, since the federal government spends more than it takes in in taxes and other revenues, it has to borrow. Congress places a limit on the amount it can borrow, but what is odd is that it does so AFTER it borrows the money. So to limit the debt limit now is to say the government will not pay what it has already borrowed.

Since the federal government owes over 16 trillion dollars (that's with a “t”), defaulting on this debt would put the world's economy in a tailspin. This is so extraordinary that the bond/debt market does not take the threat seriously. If it did, interest rates across the world would be shooting through the proverbial roof. So while there are Republicans who have spouted their anticipated leverage in the upcoming debate over the debt limit, many believe, including former Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, that the threat is baseless. If so, then the GOP has no such leverage. We will see if this is correct.

You need a scorecard to keep track. So let us look at leverage by analyzing it via its associated concept, power. In a previous posting, I reported that there are five sorts of political power: coercive, reward, referent, expert, and legitimate power.¹ Coercive power occurs when someone does something to avoid a punishment. Reward power occurs when someone does something to gain a reward or something wanted. Referent power occurs when someone does something in order to be associated with someone else or some thing. Expert power occurs when someone does something because he or she wants to follow the advice of someone who is thought to know some relevant thing. Legitimate power occurs when someone does something because it is felt that it is the right thing to do. In the right conditions, each of these bases of power can be effective and determinant.

A couple of other concepts are useful in analyzing power. There is the power player, one engaged in trying to exert power or who is targeted as the subject of being powered into doing something he or she does not want to do. Power play is the set of activities that consist of an attempted exertion of power. There is the power place which is both the physical locality(ies) in which the power play takes place and/or issues over which the power play is exercised.

These, I believe, are useful political concepts no matter what construct one aligns him/herself with in looking at governance or politics. That is to say that they are so central to viewing politics that one cannot discount them when looking at the political world. But for a federalist, some of these power types or bases are seen as being more dysfunctional to the operations of a healthy political arrangement. And we can see this in what is going on in Washington today.

Basically, what extremist politics relies on is coercive power almost to the exclusion of any other power base. Many pundits and even some scholars are describing what is going on in our national political arena as extremist politics. The political players who initiate such political plays might rhetorically justify their claims on legitimate power. But in actuality, since their opposition does not share in the initiators' view of what is good or right, their only reason to abide with what is being demanded by the initiators is to avoid punishment.

In the present exchange between the right-wingers in Congress and the President, the threat is if the President does not capitulate to reduced spending, “his” economy will be plunged into a possible depression as a result of failing to raise the debt ceiling. For a federalist, this undermines the entire legitimate foundation of the system. While all power players are claiming they want the betterment of our nation, such threats go down hard no matter how things turn out. Consequently, the electorate loses respect – its sense of legitimacy – for the political system. Look at the low level of esteem in which people report they hold Congress and the government in general. For federalists, these are sad times as we see the ideal being hammered relentlessly.

But coercive power is not the only type that falls into disfavor. There are times that reward power can be almost as odious as coercive power. Take the case of voting in Congress for aid to assist the victims of the hurricane Sandy. In this case, there is the representative or senator from some other part of the country who is courted for his or her vote to get the needed legislation. That politician indicates his/her vote can be had if some “pork” (some moneyed project or financial assistance) is aimed at his or her district or state. Of course, such exercises of reward power add to the total amount requested for the aid that was to be spent on Sandy's victims. When found out, such moves undermine the whole legitimacy of the initial request and can hold up the needed aid or justify the reluctance of other politicians to vote for such aid.

I saw the musical Camelot (the film) the other day. The central theme of the story is how federalist values (cleverly symbolized by King Arthur's roundtable) led to good governance. But undermining federalist values are the self-centered aims of some who use what Machiavelli called fortuna (random unpreventable events) to advance selfish interests. In the story, there were short-sighted players who, in seeking selfish ends, were able to undo the realm of King Arthur. This is fantasy, but the message is repeated in the real world efforts of those who would seek to impose inequality and, as a consequence, subordination of some kind – in other words, diminishing the quality of liberty that a particular nation enjoys. What such stories fail to do is to convey the limited life of autocratic or corrupted rule. While such rule can cause untold misery, it sows the seeds of its own destruction.

And so the beat goes on. Power is useful and important to understand. It can be used for good or evil. A purely “realistic” view, one that only sees players capable of seeking selfish ends, implicitly communicates that political arrangements will only waste their resources in trying to create a functional Camelot. Whether or not a polity can run on solely federalist values, a polity run by leaders that radicalizes them is a question that misses the point of liberated federalism. Liberated federalism starts with the sense that goodness has to be demonstrated on a sustained basis before players assume such commitment for what is moral. Short of that, federalist values act as ideals to be sought. The practical function of ideals is not to necessarily determine day-to-day policy decisions, but to set a pervasive tone or mood or standard by which policy is judged or guided. What we cannot lose is the ideal – i. e., power players seeking legitimacy based on federalist values of equality and liberty – and if we lose such a tone or mood or standard, we are left with a politics of constant distaste. Are we there now; do we have a politics that sticks in our craw? Perhaps, but we are not far from being otherwise. Let us start by holding our politicians to a more strenuous standard. Needed: a genuine effort at encouraging those attitudes, among our civics students, for a more ideal-driven politics and governance.

1French, J. R. P. and Raven, B. H. (1967). The bases of power. In E. P. Hollander and R. G. Hunt (Eds.) Current perspectives in social psychology (504-512). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

POSITIVE TRENDS

We have been through a long period in which the economic news has been far more bad than good. The 2008 financial crisis left us in dire straits, conditions that I believe many Americans do not appreciate. Most of us understand that things have not been good, but the effects of the crisis are not fully appreciated. We, by and large, have not taken into account how much government policy has avoided the full consequences of those conditions of '08. The Recovery Act, the bailout of AIG, and the rescue of the auto industries saved hundreds of thousands of jobs directly and probably millions if one considers all of the possible effects. Of course, trying to prove all that is to prove a negative. The fact is we didn't lose all those jobs and so we will never know how bad things could have been. But for those of you who are interested, compare the relative numbers of jobs lost in this latest crisis with those resulting from the financial crisis of 1929 and you can see why many believe we skirted a depression of the magnitude of the 1930s.

But now in 2013, where are we? Is there reason to be optimistic for the coming years? Where will we be in ten years? Lately, I read two articles that give me a good dose of optimism. Warning; I am not an economist, but if I were teaching economics today – as I did during my teaching career – I would share with my students these two articles that report on two separate fundamental areas of the economy. These two areas have been problem areas and, given their weaknesses, have been instrumental in creating the conditions that contributed to first, the crisis and second, our inability to bounce right out of the resulting recession.

The first article is by Adam Davidson and is entitled Welcome to Saudi Albany?¹ It reports on the inordinate number of deposits of fossil fuels across many areas here in the United States. The deposits promise to make our nation energy independent. I recommend the article to you. The second article is by Charles Fishman and is entitled The Insourcing Boom.² I recommend it and want to make a few comments in this posting regarding its content.

This second article I found not only optimistic, but also providing evidence supporting a recurring claim I have made in this blog. Overall, the article gives a helpful and highly understandable review of this nation's manufacturing history since 1960. It describes the cycle our manufacturing sector went through in which it first soared and then went into decline. The prime reason for its decline is attributed to our high labor wages and contentious labor union relations. Due to a host of reasons, not the least of which are studies showing that in many industries, given all the added costs with outsourcing jobs to nations such as China, no savings have been realized. The article lists the factors that of late have encouraged many of our larger manufacturing corporations to begin moving their operations back to the US. It focuses on the decisions that GE has made. One of the factors that GE and many other firms have relied on in making their moves profitable is changing their assembly line strategies. It is this change that reflects what I have been referring to in past postings.

I have stated that many businesses in the private sector have adopted more collaborative strategies in their production processes. Read the following description of how GE's GeoSpring project has changed in its appliance division:

The GeoSpring project had a more collegial tone. The “big room” had design engineers assigned to it, but also manufacturing engineers, line workers, staff from marketing and sales – no management-labor friction, just a group of people with different perspectives, tackling a crucial problem.

“We got the water heater into the room, and the first thing [the group] said to us was 'This is just a mess … .'” Not the product, but the design. “In terms of manufacturability, it was terrible.”

The GeoSpring suffered from an advanced-technology version of “IKEA Syndrome.” It was so hard to assemble that no one in the big room wanted to make it. Instead they redesigned it. The team eliminated 1 out of every 5 parts. It cut the cost of the materials by 25 percent. … [B]y having those workers right at the table, looking at the design as it was drawn – the team cut the work hours necessary to assemble the water heater from 10 hours in China to two hours in Louisville.³

To me, this description encapsulates the strengths of federalist thinking. The business types who organized their efforts in this fashion will not use the term federalism to name what they are doing, but that's how I see this process. It demonstrates the power of federating oneself with others to tackle demanding problems. I am encouraged by this article and believe, if it is describing enough of a trend among businesses in the manufacturing sector, that it portends a healthy development for our economy in the future.

1Davidson, A. (2012). Welcome to Saudi Albany? The New York Times Magazine, December 16, pp. 20 & 22.

2Fishman, C. (2012). The insourcing boom. The Atlantic, December, pp. 44-52.

3Ibid., pp. 48-49.

ATTACKS ON A VENERABLE AGREEMENT

In this last posting for 2012, I would like to make a quick comment on the fiscal cliff. As I write these words, the President and Congress are trying to hammer out a compromise to avoid the cliff. Of all the “disastrous” outcomes resulting from going over this cliff, I believe the elimination of unemployment benefits for the long term unemployed is the worst. This is unconscionable. Beyond its immorality is the fact that it adds to the narrative many have been speaking and writing about; i. e., that the one percent has created a social system that has abandoned what long had been the tacit agreement between the economic classes. That agreement was that the rich were permitted to do those things necessary to create their wealth in exchange for an economy that provided the jobs and income that allowed a middle class to be established and maintained. The deal also included opportunities that if pursued through education, hard work, and yes, some luck, would provide some entry into the upper income class. While I don't believe this agreement has been totally abandoned, it has come under severe challenges.

Joseph E. Stiglitz¹ argues that in the past recent decades, this deal has eroded away and a new agreement has taken its place. Let me apply the perspective I have been developing in this blog to what Stiglitz highlights. What I see is that after World War II, through the fifties, sixties, and into the seventies, the weakening perspective of federalism finally lost a hold over our ideal visions of what governance and politics should be. In its place, we have had the ascendance of what I have been calling the natural rights construct (or the classical liberal view, as it is known in philosophical circles). There are those among us, like those who are known as libertarians, who even radicalize its tenets. This view, through the years, had become more and more popular. Finally, those most enamored by its message of liberty were rewarded by the election of its most noted standard bearer, the trans-formative president – Ronald Reagan. And with his election, Reagan and his Reagan Republicans have been able to implement their preferences in many areas of public policy. For example, labor unions, that have played such an essential role in creating the middle class among the working class, have been the target of anti-union policies – the latest being experienced in Wisconsin and Michigan.

The work of the natural rights advocates has not been a small project. For one thing, they have to undo the mountain of public policy we generally call the New Deal. This was the plethora of programs and benefits the federal government put in place to meet the challenges of the Great Depression. I always taught my students a way to get a handle on all these specific policy initiatives was to think of three Rs: Relief, Recovery, and Reform. Not original with me, this handle categorizes the three major aims of the New Deal: address the human needs of those who were in dire distress due to the severity of the depression, get the economy turned around and headed towards prosperity, and put into place those programs and regulations that would, at least in theory, prevent a recurrence of another depression.

But all of this – and it was not accomplished without a lot of opposition from the conservatives of the time – could not have been done without an underlying understanding among the citizenry that this nation was one based on a congregational commitment. This commitment placed a mutual responsibility on the shoulders of each citizen for the welfare of every other citizen. The reforms of the New Deal were based on the realization that the older vision of this mutual responsibility was no longer viable. That vision primarily placed responsibilities on private charities and religious organizations. With the rise of the corporation which revolutionized our whole economic structure, the nation could no longer rely on such private agents that mostly operated in the context of a rural society. By the 1930s, our urban based labor class needed government to respond to an emergency such as the Great Depression. And so the New Deal was instituted and, by and large, we still live under its protection.

But today, too many of us have obliterated this conception of mutually responsible citizenry. Slowly but surely, without such a strong sense for the commitment, many of the elements of the New Deal have been scaled back or are under attack. Even the most cherished programs, such as Social Security, have been threatened by formal proposals from those who most ardently voice the principles of the natural rights construct. And I will end this year by stating as simply as I can, that civics education with its adoption of the natural rights perspective as its main guide toward determining its content, has helped enable these attempts to transform our basic and historically honored agreement.

1Stiglitz, J. E. (2012). The price of inequality: How today's divided society endangers our future. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company.

A BASIC COMPONENT OF CIVICS

With the a new year upon us in a few days, I thought it would be a good time to write about one of the basic social relationships with which all nations – for that matter, all social collectives – must deal. According to Marxian thought, this relationship is the main one that societies must handle. That is the one between both a nation's wealth creation and distribution and the rest of its institutions; i. e., the function an economy plays in determining how the nation goes about its “business.”

I don't believe any blog needs to convince you that the role of the economy is central to the concerns of a nation. Our media gives this aspect of national life sufficient coverage to satisfy the demands of its readers and viewers to stay informed over the ins and outs of the world of businesses and job markets, investments and bankruptcies, savings rates and consumption rates, etc. We seem to be constantly concerned about whether the economy is growing toward a state of prosperity or whether it is mired in a sluggish recovery as it is now. At times, we have been in prolonged periods of downturns in varying degrees of recession and even depression. We are presently justifiably worried that pending tax raises will snuff out our anemic climb out of the dismal conditions that the 2008 crisis triggered.

Nobel prize winning economist, Joseph E. Stiglitz,¹ points out that, on a worldwide basis, governments are not doing what we should expect them to do when it comes to economic policy. He explains that we should expect them to put in place those policies that stabilize economic conditions. Yet, governments have allowed destabilizing levels of unemployment and underemployment to persist. By doing so, their polices (or lack of policies) have allowed under-utilization of resources – specifically labor resources – while, at the same time, sacrificing our commitment to fairness. In our nation, the interests of the 99 % have been advanced by their advocates claiming that, one, markets are not working correctly, two, markets are not efficient, and three, the political systems are not correcting the conditions that cause the markets to be dysfunctional. After all, under traditional market dictum, markets are supposed to be stable, but the crisis of 2008 amply demonstrated that they are not. For example, reviews of the behavior of bankers, the main culprits in the financial collapse, from commentators from both the left and right, have indicated that they behaved according to rational incentives – what market theory calls for. Given the inability of the markets to self-correct in the months leading to the debacle of '08, that would indicate that there were, and some fear still are, basic problems with the purity of related markets, such as the market for real estate.

Dysfunctional markets lead to conditions that defy basic economic laws such as demand equals supply. As wealth and income are skewed to certain upper segments of the population, there are huge levels of unmet needs. This is due to significant unemployment which in turn becomes a major cause for inequality. GDP might go up, but standards of living erode and that is the high price of extreme inequality. Why? Because the conditions that lead to less stability in our markets transform markets into becoming less efficient and, ultimately, this leads to less than optimal growth in the economy. As a result, all of these negative conditions come about and, by the way, we place our democracy in peril.

Dangers to our democracy can have many origins, but of basic concern here is what significant levels of inequality can lead to: a lack of legitimacy. Citizens, under whatever system of government or whatever set of governing principles is employed, must feel that certain standards of fairness are maintained. But when there is a large disconnect between the compensation some receive and the contribution to the society or economy those individuals provide, then the fairness standard is strained. This was the case when the economy imploded in '08. When we hear that bankers received large amounts of compensation in the form of salaries and bonuses despite the fact that the banks these individuals work for lost great amounts of money, the entire set of assumptions regarding how efficient the market for executive talent is is seriously questioned. We see and understand that the misdeeds that the culprits of 2008 perpetrated on the rest of us have gone mostly unaccounted for and this fact can be the basis for a lack of legitimacy in the system itself.

From the federalist perspective, the above conditions have several points that are disturbing. Most basic is that skewed wealth and income which we have experienced in the last decades are in itself troubling. Only the most naïve cannot see the instability such a condition causes. One does not have to feel envy to begin questioning the whole purpose of the system. When a system loses all sense of “we are all in this together” and instead adopts a feeling that one is only here to meet the interests of an obscure ideal or, worse, the interests of some advantaged group, then the rationale for our democratic project is undermined. And hence, the role of civics should be to not only describe and explain the economic conditions that are affecting the democratic quality of the governing system, but also to educate the youth as to their interests and the means by which to improve the status of those interests. It should do this if for no other reason than to help restore a more democratic society. One need not be a Marxist to see this basic relationship and demand that our educational efforts address its related concerns in establishing and/or maintaining a meaningful level of equality.

1The concerns expressed in this posting inspired from Stiglitz, J. E. (2012). The price of inequality: How today's divided society endangers our future. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company.

HIDDEN “LUMPS OF COAL”

The traditional way in which teachers of civics classes have taught how a bill becomes law has been much maligned. I'm sure most of you have seen the cartoon that depicts the process as “Bill” gets born and proceeds through the two houses of Congress. Our hero (the cartoon features a male voice for Bill) makes it through, but the journey is long and filled with hazards – many of his cohorts die in the process. The criticism is that the cartoon whitewashes the level of politics that law-making involves. A much more realistic version of the process, although the story involved is about proposing an amendment to the Constitution, is shown in the movie, Lincoln – a film all high schools should show their students. In that feature film, you get a real sense of what “sausage making”¹ is all about.

Why is the film's version more useful than the cartoon version? An obvious answer is that reality – the more real the better – gives students a better context, a better basis by which to build expectations for the possible, a more accurate ability to place accountable judgments and therefore, an ability to vote more effectively. So far, this is pretty obvious stuff. But transparency does not end with merely having a realistic view of the law-making process; it also goes to the substance of the laws that get through the process. Of particular import is how “submerged” provisions of laws and their resulting policies affect the welfare of citizens – often those who are the intended beneficiaries. These elements are important to look at if we want to make public policy more transparent.

Suzanne Mettler has a short book out that reports on her work on the issue of submerged policy.² She conducted what can be described as a “survey-based experiment” in which, through a set of questions, she (and her collaborator, Matt Guardino) determined if added information about a particular policy would change people's minds about a given policy. But before revealing what they found out, what do we mean by submerged policy? These are policies that because of what the law arranges, in its implementation, have components that are either difficult to understand, to trace, or to appreciate. Consequently, the average citizen is not aware of how the policy unduly benefits some and hurts others. Often these arrangements usually benefit third parties or favor parties that unduly secure resources from the way the policy works out. Oftentimes these incidents of less than transparent provisions are named “shadow,” “hidden,” or “camouflaged” policies. For example, our public health programs that pay third party insurance companies instead of paying health care providers directly, do what they do without a full appreciation of their effect. Or, the student loan program used to pay banks and other lending institutions instead of paying colleges or students directly amounts to a hidden benefit for those third parties, the banks. An example of a group of citizens unduly benefiting from a policy is the upper income people's benefit from the homeowner mortgage interest tax deduction.

What the researchers found was that if added information is given to those surveyed, the subjects change their opinions concerning those policies and they usually change in the direction that favors a more equitable distribution of resources. These changes usually involve money or are against business interests benefiting from policies that are meant to bolster opportunity for those not so advantaged. A review of the types of laws and policies that come under these concerns include tax expenditures, loans, loan guarantees, and contracts involving third parties – such as insurance companies. They also found that the changed views were not limited to policies that had hidden beneficiaries, but policies that are meant to help the poor. When given more information about the Earned Income Tax Credit, for example, respondents report a more positive view of such a program.

One related issue with this entire area is that if a set of policy makers wants to reform a policy that has “submerged” elements, those officials are subject to and often are the target of propaganda, sponsored by the benefited parties, that capitalizes on the very obscure nature of the policy area. We saw this in the propaganda blitz against the Affordable Health Care Act – Obamacare – in which such ludicrous charges of death panels and the like were rolled out. We heard the cry: “Do you want government making your health care decisions for you?” While unaccountable insurance companies are making a lot of our current decisions for us, we tend not to know this until the day comes when an insurance company is telling us or a relative that a particular procedure is not covered under the policy we or our relatives have. The fact is that while the charge that government was taking over our health decisions was and is overstated, we at least get to vote for those government policy makers who are setting up the programs while we have no say as to who sits in those executive suites that run the multi-billion dollar insurance companies. But facts like these are “hidden” or not fully appreciated or understood by many voters.

Under a civics curriculum that is guided by a liberated federalist outlook, classroom instruction would shine a spotlight on this type of problem since the emphasis would be on having stakeholders informed and active in the formulation of public policies. Of course, the issue has to be prevalent enough to justify class time, but Mettler's book illustrates how this angle to viewing public policy has unearthed a significant number of policy concerns. Her book does this by using a concept that portrays a non-federalist character in many of our laws and policies – an element that purposefully hides a “lump of coal.”

1Term is a euphemism for law-making.

2Mettler, S. (2011). The submerged state: How invisible government policies undermine American democracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. This study came to my attention in a book review: Howard, C. (2012). Political Science Quarterly, 127 (3), pp. 480-481.

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

REALLY?

Note: I wrote this on December 14^th. Hopefully, it is not taken in any other way than how it was intended. I have no special insight in regard to the madness that the incident in Newtown, Connecticut represents.

Today is the day we saw senseless mass murders take place in Connecticut. We are experienced with this type of tragedy, but never with something quite like this. Our hearts broke when, at the time of the Gabrielle Giffords' shooting incident in Arizona, a young girl, Christina Taylor Green, was hit by a stray bullet and killed. That was one child. Today there were twenty! Do our feelings become numb with such a number or with the repetitiveness of such incidents and do we have to accept this as just another reality that characterizes modern life?

No, it's not inevitable. We know that those nations with strict gun control laws have, by far, fewer incidents of gun violence. Historically, in modern times, some have had mass murders, but nothing like the numbers we are seeing within our nation during our own lifetimes. I have visited some of those countries and never felt for a moment that I was in an oppressed country. Today, my mind has roamed over the different aspects of this tragedy. It has ranged to related and, some might say, unrelated topics and circumstances. I have given some thought to this whole notion that there is little we can do about limiting the number of guns out there because of the Second Amendment.

As I understand it, those who support unlimited gun ownership and unlimited gun trade cite the amendment to claim that these conditions are constitutionally protected. Yet this argument does not seem to hold equally to all constitutionally protected transactions. For example, I find it inexplicable that many who are so concerned with gun rights engage in antagonistic political activities when it comes to whether a woman can attain a constitutionally protected abortion. For that woman who feels she needs an abortion, she will find in some areas of this nation it is nearly or outright impossible to get that abortion. Yet, in those very areas of the country, there are practically no limitations or obstacles to anyone exercising his or her unquestioned and unlimited right to obtain a firearm. I couldn't help weighing the dichotomy this disconnect represents: the relative worth of a non-conscious life form versus that of a six year old. Why do I think this seemingly unrelated thought? I think it because I can't help noticing that those among us who are most vocal in attacking the constitutionally protected right to have an abortion are, in many cases, those who are most vigorous in their efforts to protect the questionable rights surrounding the ownership and selling of firearms. Unfair to make this relationship between seemingly unrelated concerns? Well, that's one of the ironies that is angering me today.

I can't help thinking – and perhaps those who want reasonable gun control should take note – that those who have successfully placed legal obstacles to those who would either provide abortion services or those in need of an abortion, on the other hand, have craftily taken advantage of constitutional law to protect the interests of the gun industry and those who wish unrestrained access to acquiring firearms. While in many southern states, governors and legislatures have thought of inventive ways to make it almost impossible to obtain an abortion – in some cases, to one hundred percent effectiveness – they or just about anyone else can't find ways to reign in the number of guns that are out there. When any efforts to bridle in the excessive quantities of guns and other weapons are raised, cries abound in our political environment that express outrage. How dare one even think of placing any obstacles in the way of anyone getting a gun or a rifle no matter how destructive the weapon might be? After all, the cries announce, it's that person's constitutional right to own a gun or rifle even if he or she has a questionable past or has a mental illness.¹

I have in the past questioned the interpretation that many and now the courts have used to determine the meaning of the Second Amendment. Of course, leading that pro-gun advocacy has been the NRA. But even in singling out the NRA, we need to be careful. Recent surveys indicate that the rank and file of that organization support, along with most Americans, restraints on the ownership and selling of firearms. Yet, that organization maintains the position that we as a nation cannot sensibly put in place the types of laws and programs that would get a handle on this seemingly unlimited cache of weapons that is out there among us – weapons that are becoming ever more dangerous and destructive.

Why does that arsenal exist? To protect us? Well, it obviously is not doing so. As a matter of fact, it is only heightening our chances of meeting a gun-wielding person with a troubled mind threatening our lives and those of our loved ones. Or perhaps we might fall victim to some nearby altercation or youth gang activity where a gun is pulled, discharged, and we are in the path of its bullet's projection. Yes, the chances are low for any one of us being so victimized, but in total, too many of us are. If not you or I, maybe a loved one will be the one not coming home some evening. And by loved ones, as we found out today, our concern is not limited to any age group – six year old children, for God's sake. Even the youngest among us, in the safest of settings that we can provide, are potentially in mortal danger with an ever more probability that the worst can happen.

Note: While the above argument is not directly related to civics education, per se, it surely identifies a topic a civics classroom can and should address. The extremity of the events in Connecticut are such that I felt the need to express my reaction. Thank you for allowing me this indulgence.

1I know that there are federal laws against mentally ill persons buying a firearm, but with the gun show loophole – which sidesteps the need for a background check – and the need for a person to be adjudicated with such an illness, this protection has proven to be ineffective. In addition, this doesn't take into account the illegal market for guns where no legal considerations exist.