Baby steps toward gun sanity

As I previously wrote, gun owners have exactly the nation they want: one in which they're armed and the rest of us aren't.

So, do I want to disarm them?

No.

I want them to justify their guns — the really outrageous ones.

Why can't we ask someone, "Why do you need a semiautomatic rifle with a massive magazine?"

Okay, we can ask, and we do. The response is always either "hunting", "self-defense", or "fun". I'm no gun owner but it seems to me that if you're hunting for game, a semiautomatic weapon renders the target unfit for consumption, defeating the point of the exercise. I have a hard time imagining a rifle being a better self-defense weapon than a handgun in the close quarters where "self-defense' would be a concern. As for "fun", well, society doesn't have to permit all forms of fun. Shooting up heroin and shooting up a shopping mall each strikes some people as "fun" but we prohibit both anyway.

Why can't we require anyone who wants such a weapon to have a damned good reason for having it?

Why can't we bar anyone under, say, age 25 from buying or owning such a weapon? We don't allow anyone under that age to represent us in Congress. We should show at least as much care and good judgment when it comes to firearms ownership as we do when it comes to picking our representatives. (Actually, given some of the clowns in Congress, we need to show a lot more care and good judgment when it comes to firearms.)

What's so threatening about restricting ownership of and access to semiautomatic rifles and large magazines?

Next you'll come for the rest of our guns. The slippery slope, or mission creep, or whatever you call the phenomenon is a risk. However, I don't see a public appetite to go beyond semiautomatic rifles and large magazines right now. We are a long way from the possibility, much less the likelihood, of going further.

Unless, that is, the pro-gun lobby remains obdurate.

The longer pro-gun advocates resist any step to tighten our absurdly loose regulations, the more likely it is the rest of us will consider really drastic steps, including banning guns outright. The tree that won't bend will break, and all that.

The Second Amendment won't let you do that, so suck on it. That's true. Given the Supreme Court's reactionary majority that honors bloodless text over bloodied people, that ends the argument. For now.

However, the Second Amendment isn't a commandment from on high. The Constitution is ours. We get to fix it if it's broken — and it is.

Every day that the pro-gun lobby allows nothing to change, more of us embrace altering the Second Amendment.

I don't know what a modified Second Amendment should say. I do have some idea of what it should mean.

Firearms are dangerous tools. Society recognizes they have specific uses. Society can prohibit firearms whose capabilities exceed what's needed for those uses. Society can limit firearms ownership and use.

Reworking the Second Amendment would be drastic. However, I will consider any means to change the status quo.

I do not accept that we must tolerate bloodshed on a scale experienced by no other advanced nation because of unthinking obeisance to a part of the Constitution whose raison d'être is no longer obvious.

Why should we allow indiscriminate private ownership of firearms whose capabilities exceed the requirements for any legitimate use? Why should young people be able to buy such firearms before they can vote or drink?

We shouldn't, and they shouldn't.

Just acting on those two simple principles would represent progress toward sanity, and maybe even toward a less bloody future.

Gun owners have made the best possible country for themselves

When I hear pro-gun folks talk about "solutions" to mass shootings, I have a couple of visceral reactions.

First, "solution" is the wrong word. A solution is final: you solve equations, you solve puzzles. You can't "solve" human behavior.

Second, the pro-gun lobby always says that more guns and better mental health treatment are "the solution". See above re: "solution", but beyond the simplistic nature of the recommendation, the argument itself serves another purpose. By constraining our imaginations and our political responses to these options, the pro-gun lobby seeks to perpetuate a dreadful status quo.

From their rhetoric you might imagine that pro-gun activists envision a society in which everyone is armed. No bad guy would dare pull a gun to rob someone or to shoot up a school or concert because hundreds of good guys' guns would be trained on him before he could get away. (That has certainly been the vision my own imagination conjured up in the past when I wondered how a cop would tell the good guys from the bad guys in the wake of a mass shooting. I asked the same question when open-carry laws gained a higher public profile.)

However, there has never been a major nation in which all or nearly all of the population has been armed. It's only the aristocracy that is able to afford weapons, and the aristocracy never lets the peasants own effective weapons. Why would they? Some smart peasant would realize that they didn't have to take the lord of the manor's guff, and that would be that for the lord of the manor. No, the peasants, aka the great majority of the population, have always remained unarmed except in wartime.

So when I hear pro-gun activists arguing for more guns everywhere, I call bullshit.

Gun owners today are a kind of shadow aristocracy. They throw their weight around in politics a little more subtly than the medieval lord of the manor did, but they throw their weight around just the same. They've become dominant enough in the Republican Party that they don't need to threaten elected officials with guns: their interests can be secured at primary time by simply voting as a bloc.

However, when push comes to shove, gun owners are quite willing to remind everyone else that they're packing. Their possession of weaponry is their ultimate claim to political power. Under the ex-domestic Dear Leader they didn't hesitate to make "Second Amendment" a threat to their opponents rather than a right conferred by the Constitution to defend the nation.

If the vast majority of us were armed, current gun owners wouldn't be an aristocracy. Ours would be a nation full of highly armed people where any dispute would turn fatal very quickly.

That dystopian, nightmarish vision is repellent to most of us — and that's just how current gun owners like it.

When they call for more guns, they mean more guns for them. They don't want me to own one, or to learn how to use it effectively.

Gun owners have exactly the kind of nation they want: one in which they're armed and the rest of us aren't.

Thoughts on the Uvalde massacre

The gelling narrative around the Uvalde, Texas massacre is centered on law enforcement's hesitation to confront the shooter. In turn, attention now is squarely on the Uvalde school district's police chief. (If you were surprised to learn the school district has its own police force, join the club.)

However, to focus on one man's purported mistakes is to miss a larger picture.

First, although the shooter got his guns legally, nobody thinks he should have. That's a failing that preceded the massacre and has nothing to do with the law enforcement response.

Second, although the police chief's refusal to act might have allowed some victims to die from lack of access to medical care, by the time the chief made that decision a lot of people were already dead. The delay, if that's what happened, came after the greater part of the killing had already been done.

Making the public narrative — the one playing out in the press and online — all about what the police chief did or didn't do is a disservice to the public. The chief's actions or inaction didn't precipitate the killing. We need to address what did.

As I've processed the limited amount of pro-gun argumentation I can stomach in the wake of the massacre, I've found that pro-gun politicians (who at this point are exclusively Republican) have settled on two concrete ideas:

• Schools should be even better fortified.
• More armed persons, both teachers and school resource officers, should be present within schools.

If what I call the gelling narrative is, in fact, true, it's worth asking why more armed persons would help. If trained police officers weren't up to the task of confronting the shooter, why should we think an armed teacher — whose first job is supposed to be teaching, not police work — would fare any better?

As for better fortifying schools, I have to ask why we think school districts should divert even more money from education to making campuses into modern castles. It's a way of putting up barriers to more shootings, perhaps, but is it the best way?

We need to consider the costs and benefits of any given approach to making schools safer, and we haven't done that when it comes to the idea of fortifying them.

Apparently, one of the mistakes that allowed the shooter to enter the school was that a door was left unlocked. The reason seems to have been that a teacher needed to fetch something (a phone, I believe) from a car. It's easy enough to blame the teacher for that consequential security lapse, and I'm sure many will. Ask yourself, though: how often have you had to leave your office to fetch something you left in your car? How big a pain was it to get back inside? The more trouble it was, the more likely you are to have pondered subverting your own workplace's security measures. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, or more, nothing bad would happen.

Now, you might argue that the teacher should have considered that one-in-a-hundred, or one-in-a-million, or one-in-a-zillion chance of something terrible happening, and not subverted school security. But is that how we want everyone at schools to think and to behave?

Do you want your kids to think of school as a deadly, dangerous place?

Maybe you do. But what if other parents don't? What if other parents are concerned about the mental-health toll on kids of treating their places of learning as besieged camps?

Look at the incident from a different perspective. Was it necessary that the shooter be legally allowed to purchase semiautomatic rifles and large magazines at the age of 18? Is that a good public policy, or is it one that the legislature should revisit? What are the public policy interests that are so important, so weighty, that they outweigh even considering whether he should have been allowed to make his purchases?

I mean, we keep people from drinking until they're twenty-one. I'm sure there are some nineteen-year-olds out there who have better judgment than some who are twice their age, Even so, nobody argues that we must let those responsible nineteen-year-olds drink. We have a consensus that younger people, statistically speaking, are more apt to abuse the privilege of consuming alcohol.

Why doesn't that same logic inform ownership or use of semiautomatic rifles and large ammunition magazines? Why do we allow the exceptions to the rule to govern in that case?

I know, I know — it's because of the almighty Second Amendment. Well, I've already explained why that's a lazy, thoughtless reason.

The Second Amendment has outlived its usefulness

This is the text of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution:

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.

Much ink has been spilled arguing about this amendment in the last couple of decades. Yet the gulf between its words and the state of the law in this country has only grown.

A lot of us believed "well regulated Militia" ought to constrain the otherwise unbounded "right of the people to bear arms" — until, that is, the U.S. Supreme Court's benighted decision that essentially rendered the first phrase meaningless. Today, a private — that is, unaffiliated with any militia — right of gun ownership is regarded as inviolable, thanks to the Court and generations of reactionary paranoia that sees guns as your only real friends. "Well regulated", meanwhile, is allowed token recognition by the Court but in practical terms what we have is better called "barely regulated".

The rationale for the Second Amendment, meanwhile, has gotten lost over the centuries. As I previously wrote, any principle whose rationale we no longer understand must be revisited.

Now, you might think that the rationale hasn't been lost: I simply haven't paid attention. That's possible: I'm not a Constitutional scholar. However, if I've missed the airtight rationale, so have a lot of people. Frankly, I doubt that's the case.

A widespread assumption is that "the security of a free State" depends on "a well regulated Militia" not just to repel external threats but to thwart homegrown tyrants, too. That's a lovely theoretical idea but it's totally nonsensical in today's United States. For one thing, gun owners would have to act as a solid bloc to resist a tyrant at the federal level, and even given the ease of coordination using modern communications, it's all but impossible to imagine that hundreds of millions of gun owners could coordinate amongst themselves. Another, not entirely unrelated objection is that many if not most gun owners supported and still support the only president in our lifetimes who has come close to being a real tyrant, the orange-haired ignoramus and grifter who still refuses to accept the indisputably legitimate outcome of the 2020 election.

Given the chance to resist a genuine would-be authoritarian, guys, you backed him. So don't bleat to me that you're acting in defense of "liberty": you don't know what the word means.

The other major objection to civilian gun ownership as a bulwark against tyranny is, we have not just a standing army but significant police forces, too. Now, feel free to laugh at law enforcement for its supposed inability to suppress armed criminals, including insurrectionists. Understand, though, that when it's facing off against armed criminals, law enforcement generally seeks to preserve life. (That is, when the lives in question are white.) If police were motivated to take armed resistance seriously as insurrection, the rules of engagement would change.

If worse came to worst, it's not unimaginable that the military would be ordered to deal with armed insurrection, either. No semiautomatic rifle, even if modified to be fully automatic, would be much use against an armored vehicle.

That idea — that we civilians would be helpless against our own military — scares the hell out of us, and it should. However, we address it by insisting on a culture and a tradition within the military that it does not intervene in civilian affairs. And guess what? That culture of self-restraint has worked. That culture, not the delusional idea of a Second Amendment-fueled civilian "resistance", has kept the military subordinate to civilian authority.

So, again, why does the Second Amendment exist? What fundamental principle(s) is it intended to protect?

I'm not a gun owner but I understand the need for some to hunt game and to control wildlife that presents a danger to them. I respect the desire some have to protect themselves and their loved ones in their own homes. These would be solid bases for a Constitutional protection of gun ownership.

Is there a rational principle that justifies massive ammunition magazines or semiautomatic rifles, though? What about open-carry? Or for that matter, concealed-carry? Is there a good reason to carry a firearm for self-defense outside the home?

These and a lot of other questions are worth debating. I think I have good reasons for why most if not all should be answered in the negative but I'm willing to listen.

However, what none of us can tolerate is an unthinking, unreasonable, unbounded worship of the Second Amendment simply because it's there. It was written by men, not an infallible deity. We are free to question it — and in the wake of the intolerable bloodshed in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York and literally dozens or hundreds more smaller "mass" shootings, not to mention the incalculable number of "smaller" murder sprees and individual homicides, we goddamned well had better question it.

It's time for the great majority of us who don't regard the Second Amendment as holy writ to force the long-overdue argument about what gun ownership really should mean in this country. Then we need to set that out in plain, clear language that is more difficult for irresponsible Supreme Court Justices to distort.

It's time to retire the Second Amendment. The twisted way we've fetishized it is killing us.

The Constitution is ours, not the Founders'

It's long past time we confronted our blind fealty to the wishes and purported wisdom of the generation that birthed the U.S. Constitution.

The Founders did a remarkable job, to be sure. They gave us a document whose principles — most of them, anyway — have proven a sturdy and largely positive guide over a couple of hundred years' worth of sometimes turbulent history.

However, none of them would have wanted us, their literal and figurative descendants, to straitjacket ourselves to the exact model of government that suited them. They would have wanted us to figure out what was best for ourselves.

We have already repudiated the single most odious idea in the original document, slavery. No one with a brain and a conscience regrets that repudiation. Rather, we acknowledge that the Framers made that retrospectively immoral compromise because the alternative would have been disunion.

Repudiating slavery took an unbelievably bloody civil war. That's not how we must fix our governance, today or ever again.

We're stuck for now with the onerous high bar that the Constitution itself mandates to amend it. However, we would make better progress if we first tackled the mystical and unthinking respect we grant the Founders.

The Founders were not gods. We should never be afraid to challenge their legacy. To maintain a principle without understanding why you do so is at best foolish; at worst, it could be self-destructive. Ditto with respect to ignoring a principle that goes unmentioned in the Constitution. That the Founders didn't mention certain ideas, like privacy, doesn't mean we shouldn't consider them.

Looking backwards to "honor" the "original intentions" of those who wrote the words of the Constitution is an abdication of our shared responsibility to live according to its core principles. (That's true even if the words in question were written by later generations.)

If you flatter yourself that you are committed simultaneously to cherishing the Constitution and governing ourselves in accordance with its most important principles, then you must support at least one of the following options:

• Identifying the most important principles to us today, whether or not they're explicitly written in the Constitution, then interpreting the Constitution and our body of laws according to those principles; or
• Making it significantly easier for the modern United States to amend the Constitution so those unwritten but crucial principles are explictily written down.

Resist the urge to think of the Constitution as sacred, something to be kept inviolate because of the semidivine status of the Framers. The Framers aren't trying to muddle through the modern world, we are. It's our country and our Constitution now.

Overturning Roe is theocratic

The news has just broken in Politico: "Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows".

We can't say for sure whether the supposed draft opinion actually is what Politico's article claims, namely, work product of the U.S. Supreme Court. If it turns out to be a hoax, well, that will be that.

However, the idea of overturning Roe unquestionably is and has been for decades an obsession of social conservatives. The whole point of the sorry history of recent Court apppointments — and more to the point, denied appointments (the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Mitch McConnell's infamous and indefensible refusal to let Merrick Garland's nomination even be considered by the Senate) — has been for conservatives to appoint reliably anti-Roe Justices until a majority was in place to overturn that decision.

Now, my understanding from TV coverage is that the draft opinion attacks the "weak" Constitutional basis in the reasoning of Roe v. Wade. That has long been a criticism of social conservatives. However, it has always seemed to me a secondary excuse, one cobbled up by social conservatives to cover their real interest: they consider abortion nothing less than murder. That is why the issue is so motivational for them: nothing is as stark as the accusation that murder is being condoned under the law.

Is abortion murder, though?

Science can't tell us when (or if) a human life begins prior to a fetus leaving the womb. (At least, it can't tell us yet; I question if it ever will.) So to stake out the absolutist position that abortion is murder, one has to have a different basis for believing that an unborn fetus is alive.

The only basis for that belief is religion. Specific religious sects hold that abortion is murder.

However, not all religions or sects do. Nor, for that matter, do all nonbelievers. There is not widespread agreement, or even majority agreement, that abortion is murder. Poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans want abortion of some kind to be legal. Where to draw the line on times and procedures is hotly debated but the principle of access is not.

What will your good-faith belief that abortion is not murder be worth after this decision is issued? Even if that belief is grounded in your own religion's creed, too bad. The free exercise of your religious belief will be illegal.

This purported Supreme Court decision imposes nothing less than the religious beliefs of a minority on the entire population. It turns the logic of protection of minorities on its head — and it perverts the logic of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause by enshrining the creed of a handful of religious sects as the law of the land.

That's theocracy.