Guns in America

We give hurricanes and tropical storms names—or the World Meteorological Organization does—primarily to make it possible to reference them without having to remember their precise dates and where exactly they made landfall: talking about Harvey, Irma, and Maria is a lot simpler than trying to reference them as “that storm in Texas back in August…or was it September?” or “that hurricane that ended up on the other side of Florida from the one they expected it to savage.”  But although naming them surely does make it easier to talk about them, it also personifies them in a strange way that makes them sound less like unavoidable natural disasters and more like unwanted visitors whose arrival could presumably have been prevented had we only thought in advance to turn off the porch lights and pull in the welcome mat. (By the way, did you know there are only six lists of names used for storms in each separate ocean region, each series repeated every six years other than when super-storm names like Katrina are permanently retired and a new name starting with that letter is chosen? Click here for a list of the names of future storms through 2022.) Still, the practice is probably more useful than wrong-minded, and it is at any rate here to stay.

We don’t have a similarly adorable way to refer to the perpetrators of mass shootings, however. Partially that is because the shooters actually have names and so hardly need new ones assigned to them. And using their real names feels right for another reason as well—because it is makes it feel more natural just to blame the shooter for the shooting and be done with it than to ask if society itself bears any responsibility for these horrific acts of bloodshed. And that impetus to look no further than the shooter to explain the shooting is incredibly strong. Indeed, when the President said the other day that the massacre in that Texas church was “about” mental illness and not guns, he was merely giving voice to the siren sentiment that Sutherland Springs had nothing to do with society itself, just with some crazy person who ran amok with a Ruger AR-556 semi-automatic rifle in his hands. And what could that possibly have to do with anyone other than the shooter himself?  Yes, it is true that there is the horrific mistake made by the Air Force in this specific case to take into account—an error that allowed a man with a criminal record for uncontrollable violence to purchase a gun he should have been forbidden by federal law to acquire—but that detail, for all it is truly upsetting, is also strangely re-assuring. It was just an error, you see: if the Air Force had correctly entered the shooter’s domestic violence court-martial into the proper federal government data base, then he would indeed have been barred from purchasing the weapon he used to murder all those innocents at the First Baptist Church last Sunday and his victims, including a dozen children, would still be alive. So it’s all about Devin P. Kelly, the shooter. And it’s a little bit about the Air Force. But it’s easy to insist that it’s not about anyone but the shooter…and particularly not about people who hadn’t heard of him or Sutherland Springs, Texas, until last Sunday.

That, however, is only one way to interpret things. If the President is right that this and similar crimes are all manifestations of mental instability on the part of the shooters and thus unrelated to questions of gun safety or gun control, then our nation—that had thirty times as many gun murders in 2015 than Canada, Australia, or Spain—should also have thirty times as many mentally-ill citizens. But I cannot find any survey that suggests that that is even remotely how things are. France, for example, is just behind us in terms of percentage of citizens treated for mental illness, but had one-thirtieth the number of gun murders that we did in 2007 (the last year for which I could find accurate figures)…just the same as the countries mentioned above.  So, whatever these figures ultimately mean, they clearly do not mean that we have thirty times the gun murders that other countries have because we have thirty times as many deranged citizens in our midst. (For two interesting surveys comparing the prevalence of mental health issues in various countries, click here and here.) But if that is the case, then why do we have these endless mass shootings to contend with in our country?

Part of the answer does indeed have to do with craziness, but not with the craziness of the shooters. In a Pew Research Center poll conducted last March and April, a full 11% of Americans responded that they did not feel that it should be illegal for mentally ill people to purchase guns. In a Quinnipiac University National Poll conducted last month, 12% of the respondents who live in households with guns responded that they saw no reason for a nation-wide ban on the sale of guns to people convicted of violent crimes. The response from respondents who live without guns was, in a sense, even more astounding: 15% of those responders—all of them people who themselves do not own guns—agreed that there was no need for such a national ban of gun sales to violent criminals. But even harder for me personally to fathom is that 7% of people who live with guns and 4% of people who don’t feel that there is no need to subject would-be gun purchasers to any sort of background checks at all—in other words, that guns should be sold in America in roughly the same way Starbuck’s sells coffee: to whomever walks in and has the purchase price in hand. And one final statistic to ponder: when asked if they agreed with the thought that a ban on the sale of guns to people convicted of violent crimes would reduce gun violence, 39% of people who live in “gun households” disagreed, as did 25% of people who live in households without guns. (Click here to see these statistic in more detail.)

I find all of the above unfathomable. Who are these people that don’t think that keeping guns out of the hands of violent criminals would reduce gun violence? It’s a good question, too: if 25% and 39% average out at 32% of our American population, that would be about 104 million people who don’t see a clear correlation between criminals owning guns and crimes that involve the use of guns being committed. Clearly, I’m missing something here. But what could it be?

The right to bear arms is part of our national culture, part of our distinctive American ethos. The Second Amendment guarantees the right of citizens to belong to armed militias—presumably envisaged by the founders as state-wide fighting forces called into existence to defend the citizenry against outside aggression—but already in our nation’s infancy this was interpreted to guarantee the right of individual citizens to bear arms even outside the framework of organized fighting forces. And the notion that reliance on a central government to make and keep the citizenry safe is invariably going to be a good idea is not a point anyone even slightly conversant with Jewish history can or should argue as though it were a self-evident truth. And so I find myself torn in different directions here, wishing the Jews of Kovno, say, had been armed when the Germans came to take their children, but—without feeling naïve or foolish—simply not believing that kind of danger to be plausibly something we could ever encounter in America.

In my heart, I really do think that America is different…and that the foundational ideas upon which our republic rests and for which it stands really do guarantee our safety more than a Ruger AR-556 in each of our broom closets ever could. And, that being the case, I simply don’t see how anyone can read the Second Amendment to imply that every citizen, even mentally ill individuals or people convicted of violent crimes, has the right to own weapons capable of murdering fifty-eight people in a matter of minutes, as Stephen Paddock did last month in Las Vegas when he started shooting from his hotel room window at concert goers gathered below. When the President said with respect to the massacre in Texas last week that this was a “mental health issue at the highest level,” he was entirely right—but not in the way he meant. Yes, I’m sure that Devin Patrick Kelly will be posthumously diagnosed as deranged. But truly crazy is a nation in which scores of millions of citizens do not believe that making an effort, even an only partially successful one, to keep guns out of the hands of violent criminals and mentally ill individuals would reduce gun violence in our land.

Clearly, this problem is not going to be solved with one grand gesture by Congress. But small steps forward are also worth taking. Writing in the Times last week, Nicholas Kristof offered a heartening parallel by pointing out that our nation had one-ninth the deaths in automobile accidents in 2016 than in 1946, and that those seventy years of progress can be explained by the slow, incremental introduction of more and more innovative practices that simply made fatalities in cars less likely: seatbelts, air bags, child safety seats, etc.  That is a dramatic change from my father’s generation (my Dad was 30 years old in 1946) to my kids’ generation (my younger son had his 30^th birthday earlier this year). And it happened simply because there was a concerted, unambivalent national will to make it happen. And because scientists of various sorts were able to find ways to make cars safer without making them undrivable or unbearably slow or unwieldy. If that happened, and it did, then guns too can become safer. And the laws that govern their use can be made tighter in rational and reasonable ways…and without strangling or stunting the gun-owner’s legitimate right to bear arms. Take a look at Kristof’s article (click here), and you’ll see what I mean. Small steps are worth taking…even if they only yield truly dramatic results over decades.

If Sandy Hook wasn’t enough to bring us to our senses, it’s hard to imagine what would be. And yet…it simply doesn’t seem possible that there is no way at all to reduce gun violence in America. All that is required is some unequivocal national resolve to act…and creative, inspired leaders prepared to lead us up out of this morass into which we have sunk.