“School Shootings” are among those events that tear people apart and, roughly, along the widening “liberal-conservative” divide. Certainly adults in both frames of belief have children, send them to school, love them dearly and do what they possibly can to keep them “safe.” How is it that they can’t agree on how to do so? Again, both types of parents love their kids.
The same divide produces separation on “rights” of a thousand kinds, on the role of governments in individuals’ lives, on the role of education, itself – particularly so-called “public” education, and even on the role of parents, themselves! Into these widely divergent sets of opinions let’s inject the subject of guns and of the Second Amendment. After all, many fear that the greatest threat to children’s well-being is of being shot inside their gun-free schools. A wide divergence, indeed.
Along with other divisions between the two generic groups there seems to be one along military lines. There are a thousand nuances, but in general conservatives are more in favor of military training, discipline, duty, honor and bravery, than are liberals. Liberals are more in favor of government in its own right, more inclined to favor extremely personal “rights” to be codified, protected and even enforced by government, and to that degree, liberals also favor police in their roles of enforcing “civil rights,” a somewhat malleable term.
Conservatives also honor police but rather more for their quasi-military structure, honor and daily bravery. At the same time conservatives see police as potentially threatening to constitutional rights, even twistable by “government” to control populations rather than to protect them. Many questions arose as part of the Valentine’s Day school shooting in Parkland, Florida: questions of policing, of guns, of safety, of parenting, of news… and of government.
Quite distinctly, liberals believe that one or another form of “gun control” will make school shootings and other crimes where guns are employed, impossible. This is not unlike liberal beliefs about governmental programs like public housing projects, in which residents of such projects will become more responsible toward themselves and others by virtue of having a decent place to live. The same could be said of liberal attitudes toward most welfare programs. In a generic sense, liberals believe that government in its great wisdom and goodness will make better citizens – better humans – than develop naturally or, incredibly in their view, by the hand of God.
Conservatives tend, generally, to see guns as protective devices in at least as great a degree as they might be offensive. Almost automatically conservatives respect and honor the Second Amendment and the civil right of gun bearing. Where liberals think that guns are the problem, conservatives think that criminals are the problem; where liberals fear guns, increasingly as they appear “scary;” conservatives respect their power and uses. Where liberals are frightened of and purposefully ignorant of guns, conservatives see mechanisms that may be learned, understood and mastered with a set of skills. The demands for “solutions” to school shootings following the Parkland “snafu,” exist in two separate universes.
Liberals want government to modify humans by legislating limits on their rights and actions: ban certain guns (scary ones), raise age limits for gun ownership and more. Conservatives want a form of the “Guardian” program1 where sovereign individuals accept the training, risk and responsibility to protect themselves and others by arming themselves – including in school environments – and being willing to confront bad people using guns, and other weapons, offensively.
Liberals, including most teachers these days, fear guns, themselves. They see the gun as inseparable from the person wielding it. That is, the gun: metal, machining, grip, trigger, sights, barrel, caliber and bullets it holds – is as evil as the criminal prepared to use it against innocents. No way can a liberal accept having that evil object anywhere near a school. “Guns in classrooms? That only puts us and our students in greater danger!”
Conservatives tend to be quieter about guns. They don’t fear them but they do feel that it’s necessary to learn about them, get trained to use them1, get trained to deal with active threats, and, in general, they feel that concealed carry by a trained individual is a wise, sensible response to armed threats. In other words, they believe in deterrence rather than response.
Response is a problem in every shooting incident. Effectively, the only good response to an armed, crazed potential murderer is an armed challenger who is prepared to fire in the moment. Schools could be turned into vaults with armored doors, metal detectors, and even Kevlar backpacks, but waiting for the potential murderer to arrive to a gun-free zone like a school and responding by hiding, simply means that it might be a tad more difficult for the killer to kill, but not at all impossible. A couple of minutes are all it takes, whether firing an AR-15 or a 9 MM pistol, to kill a dozen or two defenseless kids and nearly helpless teachers. In 3 to 5 minutes armed police could be on site, but those minutes are all that are needed to complete a tragedy as we too recently witnessed.
If first responders then fail to act in the most defensive, responsive way possible, then the number of dead will be greater. There is no alternative… in the moment.
In order for gun bans to make a difference in actual school safety, there will have to be an enforced confiscation. With millions of guns in private hands this presents the likelihood of resistance to such an action. Will police then shoot at citizens who have never committed a crime with a gun except to own it? Can such an ex-post-facto offense legally be imposed? Can the right to bear arms be subsumed by popular emotion and civic policing? It would seem that both eventualities are impossible. But the demand for them fits the essential liberal opinion of guns, gun-owners and the Second Amendment. All three are equal, and evil.
Liberals hate guns and, given their automatic equivocation of guns and owners, they often sound as though they hate their owners, too. This fits with liberals’ disrespect of any who fear government more than guns. Most of the “statistics” that gun haters cite are untrue, as are most crime statistics, themselves. Gun advocates are just as ready with inflated statistics of their own. We have reached a point in the national debate over guns and rights and of wrongs and rights, when gun haters owe it to themselves and to the nation… and to schools and children, to grasp some realities about private gun ownership and their positive impacts on crime and social order.
The vast, vast majority of gun owners are not criminals. There are more than 70 Million gun owners and more than 210 Million guns. Among the 210 Million about 6 Million people own half of them. Many gun owners have one, two or three, a rifle and a couple of sidearms. A large subset of gun owners are active hunters and they may own 5 to 10 weapons: a shotgun or two, three to five rifles and two or three handguns. Millions of guns are old, collectible, rarely even handled, much less used for anything. A significant number are antiques.
But Americans own a lot of guns… gun ownership is part of America, part of our founding and heritage, written into our constitution and a legal, civilian right, like other civil rights, in fact. Part of the chasm between beliefs is an urge and effort to, in effect, “un-do” America. Our Judeo-Christian fundament and all the laws and traditions that flow from it, are, today, offensive to this group. The definition of words and terms that describe the ideas and nature of “America,” are being changed daily. There is a large and apparently growing segment of the United States that desires to “fundamentally change” America. Those are they for whom “sovereign citizenry” is an affront, believing that a benevolent, socialist government is the only locus of trust in our society, never a sovereign individual.
Guns and self-defense are part of U. S. citizenship. The more stupidly we deal, socially, with this fact the more times defenseless people will be victimized. If we follow the concept of banning certain guns, now, upwards of 200 “types” of firearms, the net improvement to the safety of defenseless groups, most specifically and almost most defenseless, schoolchildren, will be approximately zero. In a weird way the next school shooting is almost looked-forward-to by some rabid segments of leftists, for it will help ratchet up the demand for greater restrictions on the ability to own as well as buy or, likely, even manufacture certain types of guns. The intended eventuality is a gun-free America.
That is to say, a non-American America, their ultimate goal.
Extreme defenders of the Second Amendment exclaim numerous statistics that are just as extremely “debunked” by anti-gunners. Reviewing numerous studies over the past two decades one can learn that there are many, many thousands of instances of crime prevention thanks to civilian, legal gun possession. There are probably not a million a year or two million – that is unknowable since most events are not newsworthy or even part of police reports. But, there are thousands. Even the Clinton administration, in studies2 opposing guns, found upwards of “1.5 million” yearly armed self-defense incidents. Even “simple” female self-defenses against sexual assaults number over 100,000 events per year.
Let’s consider that there are, say, 400 thousand such events of various kinds. That’s in the order of 1,100 events per day –a significant quantity. A certain fraction of those would have resulted in physical assaults and murders… perhaps what, 1 in 20? 5% of crimes? Are those lives not also of value? Is it the position of anti-gun advocates that people have an obligation to remain defenseless, accepting rapes, beatings or worse while police are either on their way or, more likely, totally unaware of the event?
Is not self-defense of oneself and family the most fundamental of civil rights? Can that be truly equated with the utter failure of law-enforcement in the matter of the Parkland massacre? Or of the Fort Hood shooting? Or even of Columbine where the weirdness of perpetrators was well-known in advance?
Anti-gun advocates need to recognize that there could barely be a civil society in the U. S. WITHOUT private gun ownership, guaranteed by the Second Amendment.
| 1http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2016/05/30/the-guardian-program/ 1http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2016/03/26/shooting-back/
2 Gun Control Fact-Sheet 2004 / From Gun Owners Foundation, 8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102 Springfield, VA 22151 |