So when people throw up their hands and say we can't do anything about guns, tell them they're being un-American--and unintelligent.
---"The Case for Gun Control: Why limiting easy access to guns is intelligent and American," by Fareed Zakaria, Time (8.20.2012)
I am a fan of Fareed Zakaria. He brings a fresh, global, and multicultural perspective--a well-schooled, researched and thoughtful perspective--to whatever topic he is addressing. He so often gives us a more insightful way of seeing a problem or solution. More, he almost always leaves us better informed and appropriately challenged by reading what he has to say. And that is no less true because he recently admitted to using some material from another writer without proper attribution. He has offered his mea culpa and apologies, and I, for one, accept them, and think it unlikely to happen again. He is just too important a voice not to forgive his unfortunate journalistic faux pas, and quickly restore his balanced commentary to the pages of Time.
But the subject is gun control and regulation. And Mr. Zakaria ably takes us on an efficient tour of recent mass homicides with firearms, the issues involved, the history, the constitution, and what is both wise and possible--even if some information is not properly cited. I really have little more to say that he doesn't say better. These excerpts from his Time article:
Gun violence in America is off the chart compared with every other country on the planet. The gun-homicide rate per capita in the U.S. is 30 times that of Britain and Australia, 10 times that of India and four times that of Switzerland. When confronted with such a large deviation, a scholar would ask, Does America have some potential cause for this that is also off the chart? I doubt that anyone seriously thinks we have 30 times as many crazy people as Britain or Australia. But we do have many, many more guns.
[...] The effect of the increasing ease with which Americans can buy ever more deadly weapons is also obvious. Over the past few decades, crime has been declining, except in one category...firearm homicides. What can explain this anomaly except easier access to guns? ...Confronted with this blindingly obvious causal connection, otherwise intelligent people close their eyes.
[...] Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. Guns were regulated in the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic. Laws that banned the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813. Other states soon followed: Indiana in 1820, Tennessee and Virginia in 1838, Alabama in 1839 and Ohio in 1859. Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas (Texas!) explained in 1893, the "mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man."
Congress passed the first set of federal laws regulating, licensing and taxing guns in 1934. The act was challenged and went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, said the Second Amendment grants people a right that "is not one which may be utilized for private purposes but only one which exists where the arms are borne in the militia or some other military organization provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state." The court agreed unanimously.
Things started to change in the 1970s as various right-wing groups coalesced to challenge gun control, overturning laws in state legislatures, Congress and the courts. But Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by Richard Nixon, described the new interpretation of the Second Amendment in an interview after his tenure as "one of the greatest pieces of fraud--I repeat the word fraud--on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."
But just to be clear: I'm very comfortable with registered firearms for hunting and sporting pursuits. I was reared in a family of wing-shooters (bird hunters). Growing up, German short-haired pointers, English setters and shotguns were a Sunday afternoon ritual with generations of men in my family. (Although guns were broken down at all other times, and ammunition was stored in different places than guns.) And I can also live with reasonable, approriate weapons for self protection, I guess--if someone is so insecure and uninformed about the dangers of intruders that they feel they must have them. (All the research shows that handguns result in far more household injuries and deaths of innocents than anything else). But I got the family gene for fly-fishing, not hunting, so I don't even own a shotgun. And I am completely convinced that nothing good or actually self-protecting will come of keeping a firearm in my home, not a handgun or rifle--and certainly not an automatic weapon.
(And in addition to shotguns, I am not unfamiliar or timid with rifles, handguns, and other weaponry, having spent six years in the Marine Corps where I consistently qualified as expert with the rifle and 45 pistol. And yes, I can get a rush from a powerful weapon as much as the next guy.)
But for all the years I have considered these issues and questions, for all my understanding and support of responsible sportsmen, I cannot and likely will never understand why some people have problems with firearms registration and their regulation for public safety. And I don't even know what to say about those who believe they need high-powered automatic weapons, and need to keep them in their homes or on their private premises. That is what I call a threat to public safety. The very fact that they are out there in private hands makes me feel more at risk--and I have good reason to feel that way. I continually read of one depressed, deluded or deranged person after another wading into crowds of people firing automatic weapons. And I do not feel any safer because I too can buy an AK-47 and keep it under my bed or in my closet.
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