How America Sees Fire: The Firearm Controversy

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Gun control is a hot topic in American politics. Infamously divisive, the issue has made and destroyed many an aspiring elected official’s career. Those at the extremes of the issue speak loudly and impassioned, while the moderates remain relatively quiet. The debate has been heated and the idealists stubborn. The issue of gun control has yet to be properly decided or compromised upon in America because the two sides as two separate wholes do not share the same priorities in terms of liberty and human life.

These two positions are clearly distinct. One position values the moral right of the individual to defend himself against criminal or government tyranny over the moral obligation of society to provide peace to the land. Gun ownership is not demographically typical. As a whole, gun ownership follows certain trends in that most owners are men, and the men who are most likely to won a gun reside in rural areas or small towns and were reared in such places. Blacks are less likely to own guns than whites, in part because the black population is more urban. The likelihood of gun ownership increases with income and peaks in middle age (Petersilia & Wilson, 2011, p. 260).

As such, gun advocacy groups have a strong base of older individuals with money to spend on promoting gun rights. For individuals on this side of the debate, “guns symbolize honor, human mastery over nature, and individual self-sufficiency. By opposing gun control, individuals affirm the value of these meanings and the vision of the good society that they construct” (Braman & Kahan, 2006, p. 570). The other position values public safety and nonaggression over the individual’s personal right to keep weapons. To the proponents of gun control, “guns connote something else: the perpetuation of illicit social hierarchies, the elevation of force over reason, and the expression of collective indifference to the well-being of strangers” (Braman & Kahan, 2006, p. 570). Rather than accept the gun-related injury and death of innocents as the cost of freedom, many individuals believe that instituting gun control in some form would promote “an alternative vision of the good society that features equality, social solidarity, and civilized nonaggression” (Braman & Kahan, 2006, 571). The issue is torn between the moral considerations of two parties because, when one adopts one party’s framework of thought on the issue, the other party’s logic assumes an entirely different value system.

The gun control debate centers upon interpretations of the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, which asserts, “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.” Despite ongoing debate over its implications, the amendment had a very specific definition when it was written. Despite arguments of a monolithic, unified perspective at the time of the amendment’s ratification, those who study history have forsaken the idea that American political culture at any time belongs to any unified tradition of ethics, values, or philosophy. Most modern historical scholarship subscribes to the idea of “a more pluralistic conception of the intellectual world of the founders. Historical scholarship has come to recognize that in addition to republicanism and liberalism, the founding generation was deeply immersed in a legal tradition derived from English common law jurisprudence” (Cornell & DeDino, 2004, p. 492). The men drafting the Bill of Rights were not radical anarchists. They believed that outside of the context of “a well regulated society governed by the rule of law, liberty was nothing more than licentiousness and anarchy. This particular conception of liberty was central to the way the founding generation understood the idea of the right to bear arms” (Cornell & DeDino, 2004, p. 493). In Constitutional times, the right to bear arms centered on the ability of the community to defend itself against foreign hostiles than on the right of the individual to defend himself against another member of the community.

Interpretations of the Second Amendment, initially establishing the right of the state to maintain a militia, have changed a lot since then. Just as in the era in which the Constitution of the United States was drafted, people looking to resolve this amendment find themselves amid disputes “concerning the proper relationship between the individual, the community, and the state. Even a definitive empirical demonstration that a gun-control measure would save lives will not persuade someone who believes in an absolute individual right to keep and bear arms” (Petersilia & Wilson, 2011, p. 257). To many people, the right to maintain a gun is essentially a basic human right of self-defense. Beyond the defense of life and limb, in their eyes, gun control is a slippery slope to the total disarmament of the population, leaving nothing of significance separating their constitutional liberties from abolishment by some mad tyrant. However, keeping in mind the central concept of well-regulated liberty to the constitutional thought of the founders, it is hard to ignore the irony of gun rights activists’ invoking the image of the Minuteman. For the Minutemen themselves, “[t]he ideal of liberty at the root of militia was not part of a radical individualist and anti-statist ideology. The Minuteman ideal was a quintessential expression of the idea of civic obligation and well regulated liberty” (Cornell & DeDino, 2004, p. 494). With knowledge of the antiquated attitudes with which it was written and the modern ferocity with which it is challenged, one could fairly postulate that no Amendment of the United States Constitution is so hotly debated as the Second.

Public opinion is a fickle and non-linear field. In the issue of gun control and indeed in all areas of public considerations, “evaluations of risk bear a notoriously uneven correspondence to the objectively measured dangers associated with various activities. Thus many persons appear relatively tolerant of risk in their recreational activities but averse to it in their financial and workplace decisions” (Braman & Kahan, 2006, p. 572). The key issue is personal responsibility and how much responsibility any given individual is considered worthy of bearing. In America, the practice of attempting to limit the public use of firearms through legislation is not new. As firearms began to develop from single-shot blunderbusses to fully automatic machine guns and sophisticated explosives systems, “Congress first passed laws controlling firearms in the early 20th century” (Jenson, 2007, p. 132). However, federal action on the issue is not the norm. In most cases, gun control laws and legislation has been “generated and either passed or not approved at the state level. State dominance of gun control legislation has resulted in a rather piecemeal approach to the regulation of guns” (Jenson, 2007, p. 132-133). This gradual accumulation of state action has characterized gun control in America with inconsistency across state lines and full of easily exploited loopholes. Complicating the issue further, the American Supreme court has recently made a ruling, “finding for the first time that the Second Amendment to the Constitution does provide and individual right to keep a handgun in the home for self-defense, at least in a federal jurisdiction” (Petersilia & Wilson, 2011, p. 257). As state gun control statutes and federal rulings pile on top of one another, in both its legal and illegal realms, the ecology of the gun market has become too convoluted to effectively control in its current form.

This state of affairs could be seen as the objective for some gun rights activists. Individuals adamantly opposed to gun control typically interpret the Second Amendment with greater stress on the latter part, which states the right of the people to keep and bear arms. For those who see the conflict as an issue of individual rights, the right to bear arms is as vital a right as the freedom of speech, and the Constitution provides the same level of protection for one as for the other. For some of the most adamant gun rights activists, “the Constitution protects the right of individuals to have firearms for self-protection, hunting, or to wage revolution against the government itself” (Cornell & DeDino, 2004, p. 488). However, the perceived need for firearms has expanded well beyond this definition. Since the founders wrote the Amendment, as America has moved increasingly towards a more urban standard, “however, the demand for guns has become increasingly motivated by the felt need for protection against other people” (Petersilia & Wilson, 2011, p. 259). Gun rights activists believe that the right to carry a weapon is inextricably tied to the right of the individual to defend himself, and that lawful gun ownership deters crime and serves to protect the lives of law-abiding citizens from criminals. To some guns rights activists, gun ownership is the one right that ensures all others.

However, there is vocal opposition to such an interpretation. Individuals in favor of more assertive firearm regulation generally interpret the Second Amendment as a guarantee of military protection. According to individuals of such persuasion, the Amendment is defined by “the Preamble affirming the importance of a well-regulated militia. Collective rights theorists argue that the Second Amendment makes it possible for the states to preserve their well-regulated militias against the threat of disarmament by the federal government” (Cornell & DeDino, 2004, p. 487-488). This interpretation hinges on the idea that the Second Amendment deals with the establishment of a military and the sovereignty of the states. Public safety is a significant consideration in the gun control debate. In America, the law is much more concerned with the risk an individual’s actions put upon society than with the risks an individual’s lifestyle puts on himself. Americans tend to see as high government priority “many types of risks – from nuclear accidents to industrial pollution of waterways – that environmental experts view as relatively low, while essentially disregarding other risks – e.g., of accidental drownings in swimming pools – that experts rate much more highly” (Braman & Kahan, 2006, p. 572-573). The logic behind this prejudice unveils a certain theme in American thought: you are as welcome to put yourself in as much danger as you desire, but you have significantly shorter leeway when your actions endanger others. Hence, having a swimming pool in which one could drown in is legal while having a nuclear plant that could potentially spring a leak is not.

Analysis of real-world events further shapes perspectives. In terms of American public policy, gun control is used as an “umbrella term covering everything from laws prohibiting the ownership of defined classes of firearms to mandating the inclusion of gun locks with every firearm sold. These measures represent discrete legislative acts passed on different dates by different governing bodies” (Moorhouse & Wanner, 2006, p. 104). The nature of the law with regards to firearms is controversial by the very nature of the weapon. Compared to other types of immediately available weapons, guns are inherently more deadly. They operate by using a small explosion to send a shaped metal projectile at supersonic speeds into the vulnerable tissue of hostile entities, ruining tissue and crippling appendages in less than a second at hundreds of meters. Evidence from the field demonstrates that if a gun is used in a street encounter, “the chance that someone will die or be seriously injured is increased... That accounts in part for the fact that while only a small fraction of assaults involve guns, two-thirds of homicides do. In short, guns intensify violence” (Cook & Ludwig, 2004, p. 590). By the nature of the United States being such a massive country, the prevalence of gun ownership varies across demographics and geological areas of the United States, “and the prevalence has a direct positive effect on the likelihood that a criminal assailant uses a gun rather than another weapon. However, the prevalence of gun ownership has no discernible effect on the overall volume of violent crime” (Petersilia & Wilson, 2011, p. 258). As a result of the prevalence of firearms in America, homicide rates are high while the crime rate as a whole is relatively moderate. Despite a fair crime rate, as a result of a higher rate of gun possession, America has something of an image of lawlessness and violence in other parts of the world. Many in the developed world see America’s cultural attachment to guns as leading to a misplaced value of personal freedom. One English reporter made a chilling comparison “between Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami that devastated coastal areas surrounding the Indian Ocean eight months earlier, ‘there were no scenes of armed gangs of looters in gun battles with the police in Sri Lanka after the tsunami’” (Rostron, 2008, p. 530-531). As unfortunate as these outsider perspectives may be, they provide a telling insight into the situation of firearms in the United States.

The differing perspectives on gun control, of course, come from differing points of view in the nation. Rates of violent crime vary widely on American soil and across the American timeline. As a rule, trends in violence “generally mirror a host of individual, social, and economic patterns. For example, the well-documented increase in youth violence between the late 1980s and mid-1990s was linked to increases in gang involvement and crack cocaine use” (Jenson, 2007, p. 131). One could strongly argue that economic issues breed violence more than the presence of lethal weaponry. Worth noting is that “reductions in youth violence in the past decade have been associated with the implementation of innovative law enforcement strategies, improvements in economic opportunities, and efficacious prevention approaches in communities and schools” (Jenson, 2007, p. 131). Despite these gains, gun control remains a problem. Guns are the instrument in an unacceptable volume of violent crime in America. Petersilia and Wilson write, “Thousands are killed by gunfire each year (including almost 12,800 homicides in 2006) and hundreds of thousands more are threatened or injured in robberies and assaults” (2011, p. 257). Gun control proponents see this as indicative of the gun’s overall negative effect on society while gun rights activists see this as indicative of the urgent and real need of the individual right to hold one’s own weapon. Public opinion can hardly be considered a logical thing. Across the board, different groups have taken a variety of different perspectives, and any given person in the United States might “disagree not only with the experts but also with one another about how seriously to take the various forms of environmental and industrial risk, not to mention risks relating to foreign aggression or economic collapse” (Braman & Kahan, 2006, p. 573). The gun control debate is a shining standard of this. If one seeks to convince another of his position, one must rely just as much on the presentation of his argument as he must on logic. The gun control debate means many things for many people, and anyone looking to sway opinion needs a certain spin to the argument if he seeks to make any difference.

This disagreement itself only fuels the problem by effecting inconsistent enforcement of gun policy across the country, allowing loopholes to be pulled open for virtually anyone looking to acquire a firearm. Because of the high number of firearms in the United States and the varying of laws between state borders, “the flow of weapons from other areas substantially undermines these efforts, whether the ‘gun-free zone’ is a flood-ravaged region, the nation’s capital city, or a college campus” (Rostron, 2008, p. 513). Put simply, in many cases, a man barred from getting a gun today in one town can simply leave town for a few hours and come back with a brand new revolver on the same day. As different political areas enforce different laws and inconsistent gun regulation remains impotent, their various attempts at solving the problem continue to flounder while common-sense prevention protocols such as background-check require all to the wayside. That the Virginia Tech shooter acquired a gun, “despite the fact that a judge had previously declared him mentally ill and ordered treatment, is a tragic testament to the insufficiency of the scattershot nature of existing law” (Rostron, 2008, p. 513). The inefficacy of the existing laws surrounding guns in preventing unwarranted gun violence causes the issue to simply fester and the opinions of either side to become more extreme.

It should not be understood, however, that the United States as a whole is a typically violent nation. Despite stereotypes and foreign opinions to the contrary, while guns do increase rates of fatalities in violent encounters, a closer analysis of crime rates reveals that “we do not have an exceptionally high volume of violence – our rates of assault and robbery are comparable to those in some other developed countries… The result… is a homicide rate several times that found in other developed countries” (Cook & Ludwig, 2004, p. 590-591). It is hard to argue that guns themselves are not key instruments of the sheer levels of this carnage. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive (ATF) has created an effective means of gauging the social violent potential of a firearm by tracking “the average ‘time-to-crime,’ or interval between a firearm’s retail sale and its recovery by police in connection with a crime, and considers short time-to-crime to be a significant indicator of illegal firearm trafficking activity.” The average time-to-crime for the nation as a whole is five years but is only six months in New Orleans (Rostron, 2008, p. 533). These numbers on their own are certainly indicative of the issue, but, to many individuals, are not considered damning evidence against the sale of guns. To many, the issue is entirely severed from the guns themselves and the emphasis is placed on the individuals who commit the crimes. Moorhouse & Wanner write, “[t]he failure to find a statistically significant negative relationship between gun control and crime rates may be because gun control is ineffective or because… the aggregation problems attendant the use of state data could mask the potential relationship” (2006, p. 121). As such, because there is nothing considered significant proof of a concrete ratio between guns and crime, the intensified violence can, in consistency with the stated logic of many gun rights activists, be considered a worthy sacrifice on the altar of freedom.

A particular nation has used gun control legislation to effectively lower the rate of violent crime much higher than that of the United States. Brazil is infamous as the possessor of one of the world’s highest homicide rates. Information accumulated by the World Health Organization (WHO) suggests that around forty-five thousand Brazilians are murdered each year, roughly one murder every twelve minutes. Homicide shows itself as the leading cause of death for males between the ages of fifteen and forty-five. Of those, “90 percent of homicides in this age group involve firearms. Population rates for firearm deaths are estimated at 21.72 per 100,000 in 2002. In comparison, there were 29,237, or 10.7 per 100,000, firearm-related homicides in the United States that same year” (de Souza et al, 2007, p. 575). Despite the apparent popularity of guns in the country, the government successfully passed gun control legislation. In October 2003, the government of Brazil passed a series of laws designed to reduce gun violence in the country. Measures were aimed at containing the flow of guns into the country, required registration for gun ownership, outlawed carrying a gun away from one’s home or business, instituted mandatory background checks on gun sales, and raised the minimum age for gun purchase to twenty-five. This national legislation “also imposed new penalties, including fines and tougher prison sentences, for people found in violation of these laws. In July 2004 additional measures took place, including a countrywide voluntary disarmament program” (de Souza et al., 2007, p. 575-576).

The legislation yielded some interesting results. De Souza et al demonstrate their findings on the subject on a series of tables, Exhibit 1 displaying the number of deaths by guns for each six-month period between 1996 and 2005. The table demonstrates “that beginning in the first months of 2004, the historical increase in firearm homicides halted; firearm homicides actually decreased 8.2 percent from 2003 levels. Observed values were 15.4 percent lower than expected levels for the same time period” (2007, p. 576-577). Some will make the argument that results like these are part of why gun control activists go to such efforts to hamper any movement within the United States towards such legislation: because the citizenry will realize its effectiveness and move further to eliminate firearms from society.

However, Brazil is a different place with a different culture from the United States, and assuming a similar result would certainly be a flawed conclusion. The fact of the matter is that the truth, like anything else, must be sold. Objective knowledge will not go far unless the idea is socially marketable. Individuals knowledgeable in any area will usually value basing data on mathematical comparisons or some other formulaic means. Experts will rely on “[t]echniques such as ‘cost benefit analysis’ and ‘comparative risk assessment’ rank hazards according to a uniform expected-utility metric” (Braman & Kahan, 2006, p. 573). Numerical formulae simulate societies in ways supposedly free of the prejudices with which society will normally see itself. Policies generated through the analysis of such data are believe to be “superior to any based directly on public risk perceptions, the unruly character of which is attributed to the public’s lack of information about the hazards posed by various technologies and to cognitive limitations that distort layperson’s processing of such information” (Braman & Kahan, 2006, p. 573). However, a happy, logical ending to this tale of arguments over supersonic flying metal seems unlikely. In the realm of American discourse, many, from citizens to politicians to judges, believe that the gun control debate revolves around determining “what sorts of regulations will best promote public safety. But the prominence of empirical methods also reflects the influence of liberal discourse norms, which enjoins those engaged in democratic deliberations to justify their positions in terms accessible to individuals of diverse cultural orientations” (Braman & Kahan, 2006, p. 606). In reality, the pursuit of resolution is not so logical and straightforward. Humans demonstrate the uncanny ability to allow their passions to overwhelm their logic at the least opportune times, and both those who fetishize firearms and those who fear them are unlikely to be swayed to the opposing side by the best possible argument it can produce.

As previously stated, fatality rates are much higher in violent crime that involves guns than in cases involving other weapons. Due to the massive psychological advantage caused by the victim’s awareness of potential immediate death, “gun robberies are more lucrative, successful, and deadly than robberies with other weapons” (Petersilia & Wilson, 2011, p. 258). In keeping with accepted patterns of economics, gun robberies proliferate in the United States where guns themselves are readily available. This increased use of firearms in these illegal business transactions has resulted in some disastrous consequences in terms of lost human life. In the United States, “[g]uns were used in 500,000 robberies and assaults in 2006 and accounted for 28,000 death (mostly murder or suicide). They were also used in self-defense in an unknown number of cases” (Petersilia & Wilson, 2011, p. 258). Guns intensify violence, increasing the rates of injury and death for victims of violent crime. However, despite their inherent danger, it still remains that “the risk of gun misuse is quite concentrated. In particular, it appears that a majority of killers have arrest records. Gun possession by violence-prone and criminally-involved individuals poses much higher costs for society than gun possession by more responsible people” (Cook & Ludwig, 2004, p. 594). As such, gun control, while a distasteful concept to many Americans, might be practically and fairly applied in order to target the demographic that actually abuses the weapons.

Gun-control practices are usually divided into three types: “those that are intended to reduce overall gun ownership; those that are intended to keep guns away from particularly dangerous people; and those that are intended to influence choices about how guns are used and to what effect” (Petersilia & Wilson, 2011, p. 258). All three propositions do have some merit but often disagree with the values that gun rights activists base their positions on. Recent propositions for better containment of gun violence include “universal background checks; a national registry for guns;… greater restrictions on particular types of guns and ammunition that are likely to cause grave harms; and more liability for gun manufacturers in civil cases” (Chemerinsky, 2004, p. 483-484). Many gun rights activists see these actions as infringing on inalienable Second Amendment rights by limiting the types of munitions that can be purchased or doing nothing to actually solve the issue of gun violence because people will still get guns through alternate routes.

Gun rights activists are infamously adamant in their assertion of the right of the people to bear arms as a means for the people to remain sovereign and free of unreasonable restrictions of liberty. These individuals would also regard as unconstitutional on similar grounds “laws limiting ownership of guns by those subject to restraining orders in domestic relations cases, and a ban on assault weapons” (Chemerinsky, 2004, p. 483). The idea would be that the restraining order is not enough to warrant stripping a man of his constitutional right to bear arms and that the ban on assault weaponry would leave the people very vulnerable for a corrupt and greedy government. However, there are certain gun control measures that, applied effectively, would limit the access of dangerous individuals to dangerous weapons. A solid proposition of policy “(both regulations and criminal justice response) is to make guns a liability to criminals by increasing the likelihood that they will be arrested and punished if they use a gun rather than another weapon” (Petersilia & Wilson, 2011, p. 258). The rational compromise that eludes all who seek it would be limitations on the arms rights of those who have clearly demonstrated an unacceptable likelihood of using firearms for violent crime due to a history of diagnosed mental illness.

For all the data in the world, the issue of gun control cannot be resolved by the analysis and comparison of information. If these processes had any value, “empirical research might, in principle at least, resolve the matter, and the proper choice of gun-control measures would become clear” (Petersilia & Wilson, 2011, p. 257). The issue is not the ratio between how many lives are saved and how many lives are lost. As rational as a solution stemming from some concrete logical equation might sound, no one has found a mutually agreeable compromise. Gun control proponents “espouse a romantic individualism where guns are part of individual freedom and the right of the people to protect themselves. Those who favor gun control stress the collective good and the harms guns cause to society” (Chemerinsky, 2004, p. 481). The issue is not that guns are dangerous and need to be restricted in some manner. The issue lies in that guns rights activists will say that the lives lost to gun violence are the price we must pay in order to remain a free people. To people of such conviction, to disarm is to ask for oppression. The entire crux of the matter rests in the question of whether the nation will choose to value life before liberty, or vice versa.

This vast, seemingly irreconcilable disagreement between the positions is not anything particularly special. Throughout the history of disagreement, the process of alienation and vilification of the opposite party has been a common occurrence. Controversy tends to polarize individuals along a continuum and general agreement tends to see people fall into a socially accepted line. The main difference between these two effects is that “cascade effects lead people to fall in line with an existing tendency, whereas polarization leads them to a more extreme point in the same direction” (Sunstein, 2002, p. 9). This behavior tends to warp the divergent perspectives of would-be moderates into homogenous extremism. Group polarization presents a difficulty in that it is not that people with extreme positions “suffer from some cognitive or motivational defect. The problem is instead that people may be shifted, as a result of entirely rational processes, in the direction of factual, legal, or moral mistakes.” (2002, p. 20). The groups at either extreme are fast to vilify their opponents and speak of them in terms of otherness. Group polarization is a belligerent and messy process during which an individual’s tending toward any direction in an issue is given greater inertia by group discussion. As a result, “groups often make more extreme decisions than would the typical or average individual in the group (where ‘extreme’ is defined internally, by reference to the group’s initial dispositions)” (Sunstein, 2002, p. 9). This sort of mass psychological shift certainly accounts for some of the extremism seen in this debate and many others and is the key reason for the total lack of comprehensive resolution in anyone’s sight.

Perspective is a valuable, albeit a dangerous thing. It is the tool humans use to determine the basic value of everything. It is also the key point that makes the gun control issue irresolvable by conventional logic. Because one side values public safety as a whole rather than believing in the capacity for self-defense as an unalienable right while the other believes that a sacrifice of innocent life is simply the price of living in an armed and free society, the two sides simply lack common ground to meet on. One stresses social stability while the other values individual agency. These two ideologies have separate internal systems of mutually exclusive logic. If any progress is to be made in this issue at all, both sides must step away from the issue and find some external area of common ground on which both perspectives can converge.

References

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Cornell, S. & DeDino, N. (2004). A well regulated right: The early American origins of gun control. Fordham Law Review, 73(2), 487-528. Retrieved from http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4021&context=flr

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Petersilia, J. & Wilson, J.Q. (Eds) (2011). Chapter 10: Gun control. Crime and Public Policy (257-292). New York: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=URhwAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

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