We’ve been out of touch since Sunday evening, only getting news on the massacre in Las Vegas second-hand. I’ve done a little more reading about it, but I thought I’d put some thoughts out there before I become weighed down with too many facts, not to mention the various opinions as the incident is politicized by those for gun control and those for expanding gun rights.
By too many facts, I should explain that I want to consider the problem of mass shootings, not the Las Vegas incident in particular, tragic and deserving of attention as it is. Particular incidents tend to magnify certain facets, while neglecting other facets of potentially greater relative importance; by removing particular incidents from the magnifying glass, perhaps a more effective strategy can be found.
So, to my eye, this appears to be a struggle between societal rights and individuals’ rights, wherein we can assign gun control arguments to the former and gun right arguments to the latter. By societal rights, I’m referring to the general American, and perhaps human, need to raise children in a safe environment; the needless loss of children is unacceptable to American mothers. We can see this in, paradoxically, the anti-vaxxer movement, as the American mother in particular, no longer sensitive to the deadliness of certain diseases for which we now vaccinate, react to the probability (false, as it turns out) that vaccinations increase the possibility of autism, a diagnosis which can result in the loss of a ‘normal’ life, especially in the extreme cases characterized by brain damage of various sorts. They resist the vaccinations in this fear, resulting in the resurgence of such debilitating and potentially fatal diseases as whooping cough, smallpox, and others.
By individual rights, I mean the obvious – the right of an individual to own modern firearms for self-protection. The traditional libertarian / NRA (National Rifle Association) argument is that such guns should be available to those who feel they are in danger. Then the libertarians like to engage in a bit of handwaving that supposedly supports the argument.
The liberal reader, at this juncture, may be pointing at the Las Vegas incident and proclaiming the failure of that philosophy. Lacking the facts of this specific incident, I am going to bypass this dead end of an argument, because I think there’s a better way to approach it.
The individual rights argument has an implicit assumption in its holster, and it is this: these incidents will occur and we need to fight back.
Well, this assumption, unexamined, contains at least two problems inimical to the individual rights position.
First, by permitting the expansion of gun rights, it puts more and more firepower in the hands of the good and bad guys. The individual rights argument may be that they are equally balanced, but this is a handwave that ignores the activities of gangs and other organized crime. While we may hope that, a la the Valentine’s Day Massacre, the bad guys will fight each other, we really have a vivid example just south of the American border where the drug gangs, unintentionally presented with riches by the American War on Drugs, not only massacre each other, but the good guys as well.
And, as anyone who’s served in the military will tell you, organized usually beats disorganized. (Appeals to asymmetric warfare will be denied, as they are organized use of warfare, but in an atypical mode. The mistake is to believe that small and faced with overwhelming odds either implies or equals disorganization. The protest is amazingly weak on examination.)
But second, the assumption that these incidents, as enabled by #1, will occur is actually an argument killer. Recall that Americans, by any measure, do not want a society punctuated by mass killings. This is disruptive to the development of children, emotional and intellectual, and ultimately is deleterious to the future of society, i.e., America.
So the individual rights argument claims the gun is needed for self-protection, but the societal rights riposte is to observe that the moment that first gunshot occurs for that momentous gun fight that is at the heart of the individual rights’ argument, the individual rights argument is defeated because society is now disrupted, made less safe – and therefore the future of America is threatened by the individual rights argument.
Given human nature, this result is inescapable. The prevention of such mass shootings should be first priority, not the chance to battle it out.
All that said, given how many people view government as a potential enemy of liberty, and not its enabler, not to mention hunting and even general fun with guns, it is necessary to find that balance between gun rights which does not alienate that part of society, and gun control, where mass shootings are minimized. That has long been a difficult part of politics, as it should be. But the Republican approach of giving the NRA all the rights it wants is not a proper approach to the problem, for the NRA does not have the burden of finding the proper balance; it merely advocates on the side of gun rights.
It’s the role and responsibility of Congress to deny those rights which, if implemented, will lead to a disruption of society. If that results in denying the NRA some of its demands, then good. I would prefer to see politicians with backbones, rather than the current crop in the majority who seem bent on bending over for industry and pressure groups.
And the same for societal rights. Those restrictions which are draconian without increasing the security of society should not be permitted.
