No matter what anyone says, gun control works

Another gun massacre: Now, can we finally make mass killing a little harder?

The Newtown massacre has revived the gun control issue. Whether or not the discussion leads to policy change remains in doubt. For many years, it has been almost taboo for any political leader to discuss the subject. President Obama ignored it completely in both his presidential campaigns. Congress allowed the assault weapons ban to expire. Democrats – among whom most gun control sympathizers can be found – would not risk touching the issue. No matter how many gun massacres occurred, nothing was done to make the deadliest weapons harder to get. The next deranged mass killer can, therefore, easily walk in to a gun store and come away with as many weapons of mass destruction as he wishes. That is how successful the NRA has been in scaring people into thinking any gun regulation threatens their liberty. But a gun massacre on elementary school children might just scare us back into rationality.

            

Of course, people’s fundamental freedoms were never at issue in the gun control debate. No one would, because of any American gun control law, be unable to use a gun to hunt or defend their home. The issue was whether or not certain types of weapons could be restricted because of the extraordinary danger they posed. The Brady Bill banned certain assault weapons, whose great power and speed make mass killing easier. Other laws limited the number of guns a person could buy within a certain amount of time. Other laws required safety locks on guns. A proposed law would have required background checks for guns purchased at gun shows, but the NRA made even that modest measure impossible – while attacking (mostly successfully) the other laws.

            

The NRA’s campaign against moderate gun regulations was so successful that most politicians stopped talking about the issue in the 2000s. When guns were discussed at all, the discussion concerned laws allowing people to carry guns anywhere they went. The assault weapons ban expired. The Supreme Court nullified Washington D.C.’s gun ban. Any disturbed person could (provided he had not yet committed a felony) easily get almost any weapon he wanted. The political culture, controlled by extremism, made his evil designs easy to carry out.

            

“Easy” is the key word here. There is no denying that a committed person could always find a way to kill, gun or no gun. The issue is how easily he can carry out his plans. Making it harder to get weapons doesn’t necessarily prevent a shooting. But it means less killing in the aggregate. Gun rights advocates often miss or ignore this point. They insist that banning weapons simply won’t prevent crime. People could still get weapons illegally, they say. If people couldn’t get assault weapons, they would still use handguns. Or hunting rifles. Or knives. The (implied) point is, you can’t absolutely guarantee that weapons won’t fall into the wrong hands, so don’t bother trying.

            

This is nonsense. Just because you can’t prevent all gun deaths doesn’t mean you can’t prevent some. Indeed, that is what most countries do. They restrict guns and, sure enough, have much lower rates of gun deaths than we do. If we can’t ensure the next mass killer won’t carry out his plans, we could at least make it harder for him to get weapons that enable him to kill so many people so quickly. We could at least force him to resort to a less powerful gun or a knife, which would probably result in fewer deaths than if he uses a weapon that fires six bullets per second. Granted, no law could ever make us perfectly safe. But we could at least try to make it harder to kill so many people so quickly.

            

What would we lose in doing so? What fundamental freedom would we lose in saying no to weapons that spray bullets? What possible need does a person have for such a weapon? Does he need it to hunt deer? (Didn’t people manage to hunt before these weapons existed?) If he faces an intruder in his home, does he need to riddle the man’s body with dozens of bullets? The only purpose of these high-powered assault weapons is to kill the greatest number of people in the shortest amount of time. Why should we believe the Constitution prohibits us from stopping this?

            

Having dealt with one clearly fallacious objection to gun control, we can turn to the more serious concern about constitutionality. Doesn’t the Constitution establish a right to bear arms? True, some gun control advocates deny that it does so. But you don’t have to accept their position to accept gun regulations. You only have to accept that our rights come with limits. There are limits on our First Amendment freedoms: you don’t get to yell “fire” in a crowded theater, you don’t get to threaten the president’s life – I won’t bore you with the whole list. The point is, some things people may say are indeed not covered by the First Amendment. For the same reason, some weapons are not covered by the Second Amendment.

            

Sometimes an extreme example helps illustrate a point. You don’t get to buy a nuclear weapon. To my knowledge, no gun control opponent has said otherwise. But why not? Because, of course, constitutional freedom does not mean we can do anything we wish. Practically everyone understands this at some level. We exercise our rights within certain limits: limits determined by concerns such as public safety, concerns such as protecting innocent people from massacre. So yes, we can say no to some weapons and still respect the Constitution.

            

Some other fallacious anti-gun-control arguments demand rebuttal. One goes like this: “Cars kill thousands of people each year! So we should ban them too, right?” Of course not. Cars are not like assault weapons that fire six bullets per second. Cars are something we need for modern daily life. They’re a risk we have to take. Weapons that fire six bullets a second are something we don’t need, a risk we don’t have to take. We can easily live without them. We can even hunt and defend ourselves without them. So it’s erroneous to compare guns to cars in this context. We can have car safety standards, of course – although by the logic of extreme gun rights proponents, we really shouldn’t – but there are certain things we can’t do to protect public safety. Restricting the deadliest weapons is one thing we can do. 

Sometimes the heat of debate stifles the most basic elements of good argument: the propositions upon which positions are founded. We expose ourselves -- leave ourselves vulnerable -- when we admit our assumptions or suppositions, perhaps fearing ridicule or, worse, refutation. Or maybe we assume that since our beliefs are self-evident to us, our opponents must be aware of them too. Don't be so sure. In any case, it would seem easier to resort to name-calling, attacking straw men, or other ways of avoiding substantive debate. But if you're wrong, isn't it best to find out now and get it over with before you continue making an ass of yourself? Or perhaps you're making a bad argument for a good policy. Wouldn't you rather know your argument is bad? So at the risk of ridicule or refutation, I explain some of the core beliefs behind gun control. Doing so probably won’t change hardened minds on either side, but it might help people in the middle make up theirs. I'm sure these propositions can be disputed. I welcome that. So here we go:

The propositions behind gun control

1. Guns are extraordinarily dangerous. Guns, especially high-powered ones called assault weapons, make killing, especially mass killing, easier than other means of killing – easier than killing with a less powerful gun, easier than killing with a knife, easier than building a bomb.

2. Liberal (as in non-restrictive) gun laws make guns easier to obtain. True, outlawing certain weapons won’t eliminate them completely. Some people could still get them if they tried hard enough. But it’s easier to get them when they’re legal. So, yes, having less restrictive gun laws means it’s easier for a disturbed potential killer to get the deadliest kind of firearm.

3. Easy access to guns contributes to more gun deaths and more violent deaths generally. Because guns make killing easier, more guns means more killing. This shouldn’t even be a controversial proposition. But it is. So here’s the reason. Widespread availability of guns means more guns in circulation. Since guns are extraordinarily dangerous means of killing, having more of them in circulation creates more danger, more risk of killing. More risk of killing means more deaths overall.

            This does not mean a person couldn’t save his life (or others’ lives) by shooting a shooter. It can happen. It surely has happened. But that’s not enough to override the effect of more guns making killing easier and therefore more frequent. That is, having a weapon to defend yourself is no match for not having to defend yourself in the first place – because an assailant is not as well-equipped to threaten you. Having armed staff in schools – and potentially a shootout, causing collateral damage to children and adults in the building – is no match for preventing a deranged killer from having such a powerful weapon in the first place, so that there is no need for a shootout.

            Why would it be valuable to keep a shooter from having an assault weapon? He can’t kill as many people – at least, not so fast – with a less-powerful weapon such as an ordinary handgun or rifle. Nor can he do so with a knife. (It’s no coincidence that the recent stabbing in a Chinese school wounded 22 people but killed none.) The reason he can kill so many people so fast is that he has a more powerful weapon. A slower rate of killing means more time to take him down and stop more killing. More time for the police to arrive before 26 people – or many more – get killed. Or perhaps an armed guard will take him down. Fine. He’ll be able to do it before so many children are killed. (No one’s arguing that no one should be armed or that guns should never be used for protection. The point is, we should make it less likely to need protection.) If we can keep even some killers from getting such a powerful weapon, we can prevent some deaths. More deaths than we can prevent by arming the kindergarten teacher.

4. Therefore, laws should be passed to reduce the number of the deadliest guns in circulation. Doing so would mean fewer people would die violently.