Answering Objections to Gun Control

The toughest position to take on gun control is middle of the road. Peace activists will say you are delusional to think that guns can be used responsibly. At the same time, gun fanatics will see the slightest move towards accountability as the one and only step needed before taking away everyone's guns. Of course everybody knows that as soon as American civilians give up their guns, the British will re-conquer America and we will all then be subjects of Queen Elizabeth II. But seriously, though, middle of the road is the position we need to take if we are serious about preventing more shooting massacres like the one in Newtown, Connecticut, that claimed the lives of innocent children. We need to get to the point where a centrist position is the position that is the politically safest for legislators and other elected officials. And for their constituents to come to the middle, we must not dismiss the concerns of responsible gun owners, but address them in a rational, methodical manner. Objection: I have a constitutional right to have guns. The Second Amendment very clearly states that "the right ... to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Response: The words in the ellipsis are not "of an individual." Let's look at the entire Second Amendment: 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. Takes on an entirely different tone, doesn't it? The right to bear arms is a communal right, not an individual right. This means, for example, that Connecticut has a right, as a free state, to have arms. It doesn't mean that every single individual in that state has a right to a gun. In general, the Bill of Rights was written out of concern for the rights of states, not wanting a tyrannical central Government, and not so much out of concern for individual rights. The word "person" (singular) occurs only in the Fifth Amendment. Notice also that the Fifth Amendment doesn't have any kind of "prefatory clause." No reason is given for why you would want to confront accusers and obtain witnesses on your behalf in a trial, for example. The Second Amendment does give a reason for why the right to

bear arms should not be infringed. The various states' National Guards are the modern descendants of the militias of those early years, and it is understood that the Second Amendment does not apply to the national "land or naval forces" alluded to in the Fifth Amendment. Those national forces, however, are indeed well regulated. Soldiers, sailors and Marines may have personal firearms, but those weapons must be properly secured, and the unit or base Armorer keeps track of all weapons, issued or personal. Shooting massacres on American bases perpetrated by American servicemembers have been extremely rare. Talking about technological issues in a founding document is often tricky. In 2012, Michigan voters balked at an amendment to the state constitution that would have required 25% of the state's energy to come from renewable sources by 2025. Who can predict what crises might arise that would render the 25% goal unrealistic? Or, more positively, who can predict what breakthroughs might occur that would render the 25% goal laughably unambitious? And that was just for a span of 13 years. Firearms are a technology that has evolved considerably in the 200-plus years the U. S. Constitution has been in effect. In the time of the Revolutionary War, roughly half of all weapons Americans had were defective in some way or other; it was a constant source of frustration to militia commanders having to turn away otherwise qualified men because there weren't arms to issue them. What if the Newtown shooter had been armed with a rifle from the 1790s? Then he probably wouldn't have even made it into the school. With a Civil War-era rifle, he may have made it into the school and killed three or four people, but he would have had to reload, possibly giving someone a window of time in which to tackle him to the ground. Our Founding Fathers would certainly have liked to have modern guns in their fight against the British, but they would have been horrified at how easy it is for a depraved individual with no marksmanship skills to quickly kill several children. Given how many children died back then from diseases, the killing of healthy children would be far more abhorrent to them than it is to us. With this knowledge of the future, I think they would have been way clearer on the Second Amendment being a granting of communal rather than individual rights. Aware of the need for change, the Founding Fathers provided for mechanisms by which to adjust and interpret the Constitution. And so, a lot of the rights granted in the Bill of Rights now have a

bunch of Supreme Court decisions that limit them in various ways. And yet, our First Amendment rights are more heavily regulated than our Second Amendment rights. The ACLU does not have a position on gun control (which goes to show you just how risky moderate positions are on this issue). But at least they have asserted that they consider the right to bear arms a community right, not an individual right, and that this interpretation comes straight from the wording of the Second Amendment, and not from a now superseded Supreme Court ruling. Objection: I need a gun for self-defense. Response: Alright, you need a gun for self-defense. How many bullets do you need for each self-defense incident? Let's say you fire a warning shot, but your assailants don't get the hint. How many assailants are you dealing with? Three? Four? You should be able to kill them with another five bullets, as you're probably a good pistol marksman. If you have more than four assailants, I have to wonder if we're still talking about self-defense. How many of these self-defense incidents occur in a year? Let's say that you're unlucky and you're dealing with four of these each year. Of course to get good at shooting takes practice. Let's say you practice at a gun range every week, and you use 20 bullets at each practice. So you need 1,064 bullets a year, of which 1,040 are for practice and 24 are for self-defense. The six bullets of a revolver should be enough to carry with you for the eventuality of selfdefense, while the 20 bullets for each practice session can be purchased at the gun range. Of course I wouldn't want the gun range to price bullets like movie theater popcorn, so I think a good gun control law should require gun ranges to price bullets for practice competitively with gun stores. Objection: I need a rifle for hunting. Response: Alright, you need a rifle for hunting. What do you use for hunting? Probably some kind of hunting rifle. I imagine that an assault rifle loaded with armor-piercing bullets would be quite unnecessary to hunt ducks or deer. Objection: The incident at Taft High School clearly demonstrates we need more people with guns, not less. Response: You're talking about the incident in which the one armed guard was "snowed in." The incident shows they needed

another armed guard, someone properly trained and qualified. Letting just any vigilante wacko have a gun would likely do more harm than good. Objection: Criminals will always have guns. Response: Your pessimism seems to be justified: certain kinds of criminals will always have guns. And while the loss of any life is always tragic, at least gun-wielding criminals understand that they live by the gun and could die by the gun. But this should not be an excuse to just give up and do nothing. Objection: Banning a certain kind of weapon only shifts its sales to the black market. Response: That sounds like a very reasonable prediction. Would it also be reasonable to suppose that supply would decrease somewhat? Let's say that demand stays constant. Then, if you remember the basic economics class from high school, this would result in higher prices for the banned weapons. I suppose we would still have to worry about wealthy, homicidal maniacs, but the higher price tags might discourage poor, homicidal maniacs. Objection: In America, there are already lots of laws on gun control. Adding more laws is not the answer, changing the culture is. Response: It is necessary to change the culture, but it is also necessary to enforce the current laws, adjust them and unify them. The current laws are piecemeal, inconsistent and generally don't take into account either interstate commerce or online sales. You can buy guns anonymously in one state and then pretend you don't know about gun registration requirements in your own state. Your lawyer could argue that you were confused by the various states' regulations. Objection: I am a responsible gun owner. Why should I have my gun taken away because of an insane madman? Response: If you really are a responsible gun owner, you wouldn't mind demonstrating it. Objection: Gun control is ineffectual, as we clearly saw from the negligible effect of the assault weapons ban. It has never worked in any country that has ever tried it. Response: There certainly are gun control horror stories, like England's. But there have been success stories, like Japan's. But, to pre-empt your next objection, what works in one country will not

necessarily work in America. By the same token, what fails in one country will not necessarily also fail in America. Effective gun control must take the culture into account. Objection: Access to quality mental health care is a more important issue than gun control. Response: You may be right about that. But what if someone slips through the cracks of an improved mental health care system? Wouldn't we want to at least prevent them from slipping through the cracks of a flawed gun control system? Objection: Registering weapons is just a prelude to taking them all away. Response: No, taking all guns away would also require a repeal of the Second Amendment that you so eloquently quoted a few minutes ago. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a constitutional amendment through these days? Millionaire bridge monopolist Matty Moroun spent at least $30 million of his own money trying to get protection for his Ambassador Bridge monopoly enshrined into the Michigan state constitution. Multiply that by 50 and that gives you some idea of what it would take for an amendment to the U. S. Constitution to go through. Gun fanatics wouldn't be the only ones fighting a repeal of the Second Amendment: civil rights groups would likely enter the fray, concerned that such a repeal would open the door on repealing the entire Bill of Rights as well as somewhat newer amendments, like women's suffrage. Besides, were you aware that in the early 19th Century, Massachusetts conducted several counts of privately owned guns? While Massachusetts seems to have maintained a low percentage of private gun ownership over the past two centuries, the idea of totally disarming Massachusetts remains completely ludicrous. Objection: More children die in car crashes than in shooting massacres. Don't believe me? I have a bunch of statistics to show you. Response: I believe you, and I don't need to see your statistics to believe you. I hope you agree with me that some accidents are preventable. For example, when someone who has had just a little too much to drink leaves a party after refusing a cab, or someone who answers a text message while entering a freeway even though the message wasn't urgent at all; the resulting accident could have been prevented in both instances. There will always be secondguessing when analyzing an accident, like "if I had left just one minute earlier," but some other accidents are much harder to

prevent, such as when an animal gets in your path out of nowhere. Maybe we're not doing enough to prevent drunk driving and texting while driving fatalities. But, as far as I know, neither the auto lobby, nor the alcohol lobby, nor the phone lobby are opposing laws against drunk or distracted driving. Can you imagine General Motors lobbying for a law that prevents pediatricians from asking parents about seatbelts? Compare that to the NRA lobbying in Florida for a law that prevents pediatricians from asking parents about guns in the home. Shooting massacres aren't the only way children die from guns. If you want, I can show you some statistics about children who die playing with guns (excluding suicides). Not as many as in Newtown that one fateful day, but quite a bit more when you add them up over the months. There was a child who died in a gun store parking lot from a gun that went off by itself. Identifying all potentially homicidal maniacs would do nothing for children killed in gun accidents. Objection: Gun control is strictly motivated by fear. Response: The fear of dying randomly, shot by an antisocial maniac who armed himself to the teeth at a low price, can certainly motivate gun control. But aren't those who oppose gun control also motivated by fear? The fear of not having any gun at all seems to outweigh the fear of dying. But the fear of total disarmament in America is irrational, whereas the fear of shooting massacres and gun accidents is very well justified, as the 2012 shooting massacres clearly showed. Maybe you have a better chance of dying in a plane crash, or from lung cancer. But you can choose not to get on a plane, you can choose not to smoke. If some crazy bastard comes into your school, church or movie theater and sprays several dozen bullets in a few minutes, the decision is not yours. Whether you live or die depends on the vagaries of the bullets.