Intellectually -- despite the events in Newtown, Connecticut -- I can appreciate that the “right to bear arms” is a fundamental constitutional guarantee, inherited from both the Glorious (1688) and American revolutions. I still wonder, though, whether it applies to a society in which most people live in suburban condos and tract houses, which are largely absent of Redcoats or the Hole in the Wall gang. Why have guns in our lives? We know the status quo ante of the 18th century Second Amendment isn’t working. The issues surrounding guns failed to make even a cameo appearance in the recent election, and, when they have been raised in the recent past they certainly did not elicit the same tears that they did at the Newtown press conferences.
Americans own 300 million guns, which kill about 30,000 people each year; about half of the deaths are suicides. Teenagers are involved in a disproportionate number of the shootings and deaths in the violent exchanges, and teens and children are at high risk from all gun violence, which in 2007 and 2008 claimed the lives of 5,740 young victims across the United States (that's almost three "Newtowns" a week). What has become of the original intent of gun rights, if in those years firearms wounded 34,387 teens and children?
Ironically, gun legislation is not much of a deterrent to loss of life from gunshot wounds. In 2008, shooting deaths per thousand in Vermont, with few gun laws, were about the same as those in nearby Massachusetts, which has some of the most strict gun-control laws in the country. The gun laws in the District of Columbia do little to prevent criminals from carrying them into the capital from nearby Virginia or Maryland.
On average about 24 Americans are murdered every day with a gun, and since 9/11 some 300,000 have been gunned down. I came to many of these statistics and reflections while reading Craig Whitney’s Living with Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment, which searches for the middle ground between the National Rifle Association “standing its ground,” and those that would wish away the 300 million firearms that are in American hands.
I had turned to the book hoping to find an argument that the gun right of the Second Amendment was tied to militia enlistment, and that without a call to arms at Lexington or Concord few outside of law enforcement officers needed firearms. What I got instead was a well-reasoned argument for gun ownership, provided that the firearms are handled, bought and sold with care.
Whitney, a former New York Times editor, argues that guns are synonymous with the founding of the American republic, and that the only way to reduce gun violence is to see that firearms, like the equally deadly automobile, are only used in safe hands and in a responsible manner. He believes strict laws that prevent ordinary citizens from having guns to ward off intruders and attackers are unproductive and unconstitutional.
Among his suggestions for ways to keep guns out of the hands of those that would open fire in malls and schools are tighter background checks for buyers and sellers, including at gun shows; nationwide standards to teach responsible gun handling and the issuance of permits for owners who complete rigorous courses; better data bases to trace missing or stolen guns; harsher penalties for illegal gun use; and easier methods to trace bullets and handguns discharged in a criminal act.
My own view of guns is that they scare me. Before moving to Europe in 1991, we lived in New York City. One evening, standing on the doorstep of our Flatbush brownstone, I heard the firing from an automatic weapon on a nearby block and decided that maybe there were other places to raise my children.
Living in Brooklyn didn't give me much sympathy for the NRA, given that the borough has more liquor stores than deer, and that most local weapons are used during open seasons on shop owners. I constantly had in mind a newspaper report about teenagers carrying concealed weapons on the subway. A police detective interviewed for the story said, “I can’t say that every fourteen-year-old on the subway is carrying a gun. But I can say that every other kid has one.”
Part of the reason I react so negatively to guns is because I came of age between the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy in, respectively, 1963 and 1968. By chance, I saw each one in person just before he was killed, so the image of their head wounds (from cheap mail-order or pawn shop guns) contrasted vividly with my recent memories of their thick, wavy hair and broad smiles.
Like many, I only think about guns after hearing about shootings like those at Sandy Hook Elementary, or that a madman went berserk at Virginia Tech or at the movies in Colorado, sacrificing dozens of innocent lives on an altar that is later covered with flowering clichés from the Second Amendment (“If only the Batman moviegoers had been armed...”). Does a linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs really need nine guns for protection, especially when he is only hunting down his girlfriend?
Despite these negative feelings, I listened carefully to Whitney’s arguments that gun control has little effect on preventing murders or crimes, and that guns are in America to stay, whatever the consequences. I found myself uncomfortably weighing his long interview with a gun advocate who believes that the only deterrence to gun violence is to have everyone packing heat. Could he be right?
Although I can accept hunting rifles over the hearth and even registered handguns for home defense, I have a harder time with “the right to bear arms” when I think how easy it is anywhere in the country for a lunatic to buy an automatic weapon and use it on school kids or postal coworkers. Better registration procedures and tracking of guns might keep them away from the likes of Tucson’s Jared Lee Loughner. But do we really want the dress code at places like Sandy Hook elementary to include full metal jackets?
Flickr photo: Newtown, Connecticut, Bus Arriving by AskJoanne.
Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited,
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I found myself uncomfortably
I found myself uncomfortably weighing his long interview with a gun advocate who believes that the only deterrence to gun violence is to have everyone packing heat. Could he be right? click here
The gun laws in the District
The gun laws in the District of Columbia do little to prevent criminals from carrying them into the capital from nearby Virginia or Maryland. ammo press
Good research but...
Our 2nd amendment rights as protected by the Constitution are not something that we should take lightly or call into question frequently. I fully support the work that the NRA does, and take my Glock 19 holster everywhere I go.
The gun laws in the District
The gun laws in the District of Columbia do little to prevent criminals from carrying them into the capital from nearby Virginia or Maryland Richard@bestiwbholster.net
Intellectually -- despite
Intellectually -- despite the events in Newtown, Connecticut -- I can appreciate that the “right to bear arms” is a fundamental constitutional guarantee, inherited from both One Piece watch online the Glorious (1688) and American revolutions. I still wonder, though, whether it applies to a society in which most people live in suburban condos and tract houses, which are largely absent of Redcoats or the Hole in the Wall Skip Beat manga comics gang. Why have guns in our lives? We know the status quo ante of the 18th century Second Amendment
Notice that the projects
Notice that the projects beginning in the 1990s (including the one with the Duane Reade) are in the post-modern style, which learns from traditional architecture, just as the New Urbanists learn from traditional urbanism. They have some traditional detailing, the break up the buildings visually by using different materials on the facade, they break up the first floor visually by having columns between window, dividing the window area into human-scale bays - all things that traditional New York apartment buildings do. Water Damage Vista CA
I'm working on a design with
I'm working on a design with my team and we came up with an idea to use the rotation from a bicycle's axle to harness energy, but we then realized that the axles do no rotate. Is there anyway to simply make the axle fixed with the hub to rotate together? We are trying to use a dynamo on the axle. Water Damage Glendale CA
Newtown massacre and gun control
I saw a post on another blog which stated that "in the past 30 years, 543 people have been killed in 70 mass shootings. That's an average of 18 deaths per year. For comparison, three times as many die from lightning strikes."
The blogger went on to say: "The New Republic article linked in the previous paragraph states "I can't say exactly why mass shootings have become such a menace over the past few years, and especially in 2012." Given the low numbers, it's likely that it is just a random fluctuation without statistical significance.
"To put things in perspective again, half a million Americans die every year from tobacco use. Two hundred thousand die from medical errors. Those numbers are large enough that it's possible to track changes with statistical significance, and evaluate the effect of public policy. There must be a fair amount of low-hanging fruit. For example, it's feasible that a 100% tax on the price of cigarettes would save thousands of lives ever year. Why is this not attempted?"
Here is the link: http://diegobasch.com/mass-shootings-political-correctness-and-magical-t...
Luke Lea
This is top of mind for me
This is top of mind for me as both friends and clients alike struggle to, not only follow their dreams, but feel safe to put them out there. Last week, two friends bailed on their dreams – one because of pressure from peers to start making more money, the other because she cannot see how to be a mother and pursue her career ambition. http://www.koshgarianrugcleaners.com/
People need ways to protect themselves
Lu in Florida
As an older woman with some very physically limiting health problems, the only way that I can protect myself against predators--human or otherwise--is with a hand gun. And legally, here in the US, due to the 2nd Amendment, I have the right to both own and carry a gun, and I have had a concealed carry permit in two states now, over the past decade.
The police cannot protect me, and they were not there to protect my son and his girlfriend when a masked robber came up behind the girlfriend in a popular Florida restaurant parking lot at night last year, with the obvious intent of putting the gun to her head and robbing them. My son was standing by his SUV with the driver's door open, with his hand gun in his hand, trying to decide whether to carry his small pocket gun with him into the restaurant or to leave it in his SUV, as that restaurant was very busy that night, so it was likely that they would have had to sit at the bar while waiting for a table--but here in Florida guns are not allowed in bars.
So when he noticed someone moving from the bushes up behind his girlfriend and saw the gun in the robber's hand, he quickly got off four shots which did not kill the 17 year old, white Oxycontin addicted robber, but did scare away a second masked and armed accomplice. And these two morons were stupid enough to try to rob someone with an NRA sticker on the rear window that they walked right by!
The police later told my son that the 17 year old robber that he shot had been living on the streets since he was 12 years old and had been abandoned by his drug addicted parents, and that this young man had a long juvenile history of arrests for assault and robberies in order to pay for his addictions. So as long as we have the draconian drug laws that treat drug addicts as criminals rather than as a medical and a social issue, we will all have to live with these underclass predators, and we all need to be able to defend ourselves against them.
The world is a violent place, and no amount of wishful, Utopian thinking by the previously well insulated middle and upper classes here in the US will do anything to change that. And despite the media's claims that the US has the most violent crime in the developed world, the US does not even rate in the top ten for violent crime per 100,000 people--as the UK has that honor, with 2,034 violent crimes per 100,000 people, while the US comes in at only 470 violent crimes per 100,000 people.
" . . . the violent crime rate in England increased dramatically from the moment the Labour government put extremely harsh gun-control laws in place. Not only was there more gun crime, there was more of every kind of crime. If you read the British papers, you learn that the Brits got very creative about violence, resorting with ferocity to knives, broken bottles, head stomps, drowning, choking, poisoning, etc. People who want to kill will kill."
And there is a very interesting chart at the beginning of this article, showing that quite a few EU countries have more violent crimes than the US per 100,000 people, and later in the article it states that the US is ranked 13th in homicides, and I do attribute this low figure to the fact that in the red states at least, more and more people, including women, are concealed carrying. And fortunately we are also very low on the list of violence against citizens by the gov't, no doubt due to our 2nd Amendment rights.
And it's not by accident that the first thing that the most infamous tyrannical dictators in history did--Stalin, Hitler, and Mao for example--was to disarm their citizens. And how's a complete ban on guns working out for the citizens of Mexico right now? And while I doubt that the US military would turn against its own citizens, I have no doubt that an armed citizenry such as exists in the US right now could successfully defend itself against an attempted coup or an illegal gov't takeover--witness what happened in Vietnam against the most modern military in the world at the time, as well as the almost decade long war that the US has fought against the Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan.
Finally, we have to stop declaring "gun free zones," as this just sets up people--mostly students--within these zones like fish in a goldfish bowl, set up to become victims. Instead we should be more like Israel, who after a series of school shootings started training teachers and administrators as to how to keep and handle guns safely, with their school personnel thus becoming quite capable of protecting both themselves and their students. And since then there have been no more school shootings there. And as distasteful as this may be to progressives, it's a much more practical solution than starting a civil war over gun control, as fortunately it IS impossible at this point to disarm Americans--as it should be.