Grappling with Guns

Over the past half-century our (American) attitudes about guns and gun control have changed significantly. We’ve moved from a culture that used guns as a tool for hunting and protection to a culture that is afraid of guns and fears gun owners.

This blog will look at these issues and look at the impact of changing cultural attitudes and laws around gun control and our interaction with guns.

I am a democrat.

I am also a gun owner and possessor of a concealed handgun permit in my state of residence.

I am also a college professor.

I am not (yet) a member of the NRA, but based on much of the current debate about gun control, I may join.

On Tuesday, the day after the shootings at Virginia Tech Rachel Maddow on her Air America Radio talk show began the show by listing all of the college killings she could think of and calling for gun control in the United States.

She mentioned Kip Kinkel who killed two students and injured 22 others in Springfield, Oregon in May 1998.

She mentioned Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who killed 12 students, injured 23 others, and then committed suicide.

She mentioned Gang Lu, the shooter at the University of Iowa who shot and killed five people and shot and paralyzed a woman who had graduated from my high school who had been a dancer and choreographer in the high school Terpsichore troupe. At the time of the shooting, during my senior year, I and my peers who were choreographing for the high school show felt great empathy for her and all of the victims of the shooting. Many of us had siblings or friends who had gone on to the University of Iowa to study theatre, literature, dance or other arts.

Rachel went down the list (in the US – click here for a list around the globe. This list is incomplete. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0777958.html), but she left out some crimes.

Rachel missed Dale Royer. She missed Mr. Royer for a couple of reasons. He committed his crime in December 1986, before the internet as we know it today. He committed his crime with diesel fuel (a detail I remember from sitting in the courtroom during his retrial).

Royer was a graduate student at Iowa State University. According to detective’s testimony at the retrial I observed, Royer drove to his parents farm, filled a portable tank of diesel fuel from the family fuel pump, broke into his instructor’s home during the night, and dumped fuel all over the living room, kitchen, entryway and stairwell to the second floor, then ignited the fuel and left the home.

During the chaos that ensued, the family escaped, except for two of the children, one who was in my seventh-grade class, and his younger brother. The two boys ran from their bedroom to the stairwell, and hunkered down in the corner. They were quickly overcome by smoke and died.

Rachel Maddow, however is fixated on guns. She, and many who consider themselves to be liberal want stringent restrictions on legal gun ownership. What she means is that murder is bad and she doesn’t want it to happen. I agree that murder is bad. I think it’s bad whether the means are through arson or shooting.

We are coming up on Arson Awareness Week, beginning on May 6th. In 2005 the focus was on school related arson, a growing trend in attacks on schools.

I propose that we focus on behavior rather than tools of the crime, with a focus on reducing and stopping all attacks on schools, against instructors, or against students. I want people to reach a point where they choose not to commit crimes against others, although I think this is an unreasonable hope. I don’t think we should take away the right to own tools of self-defense.

Many talk radio liberals in the past two weeks have been wracking their brains with the question, “how do we limit gun ownership in America?” Randi has asked. Rachel has asked. Thom has asked.

I want to ask, a different question – actually I want to ask a lot of questions, (Why are people obsessing about Cho Seung-Hui’s tool rather than his behavior? Why do we live in a society where liability is so high that VT officials couldn’t intervene with a comprehensive turnaround plan for their student before something happened on campus? Why when commentators bring up Columbine they forget that the attackers built and used illegal homemade propane bombs as much as they used firearms?) but these are questions to consider on another day. I have to stick to one question at a time. Today I want to focus on the hypothetical: “What would happen if we were actually to ban all civilian ownership of firearms in the United States?”

I think that we can all agree that people who set out to harm others don’t care a wit about the law, and have no qualms about using illegal weapons (note the question above that I’m not addressing in this post: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold made illegal explosives even though we as a society all agree that illegal explosives should have been, and be, and stay, illegal.) If firearms become illegal, criminals will still want them, especially because the world will be their shooting gallery. No one will be there to stop them.

Where would illegal firearms come from in a country that doesn’t produce (let’s say this is made illegal as well), import, or sell firearms? Mexico and Canada, naturally.

Can you imagine Randi and Lou Dobbs paired up? “Tonight Randi and I will begin our Fence America Campaign stopping guns, illegals and methamphetamine in a single blow, except for the massive tunnels under the border.”

The fence will go up to the criminal’s delight – a disarmed population now fenced in, (unless we can find the tunnels and punch and kick our way through).

We all know I’m being facetious, but my point is this: illegalizing firearms will turn liberals against the policies they are currently for. Right now democrats are for fairly open borders and communication and trade across cultures. Illegalizing is the opposite of liberalism. Liberalism is about reaching across divides and communicating to reduce harm. Liberalism is about reducing crime through examining the factors that lead to crime and addressing those things in society. Gun ownership is not one of those criminogenic factors. Crime statistics indicate a downward trend in overall violent crimes, and there seems to be no statistical correlation between tight or loose gun control and crime.

Let's get together to discuss what factors reduce individual's reasons to perpetuate harm and to commit crime. To me that seems like an issue that Lou and Randi should put their heads together to support.

A concept I want to return to again and again in this blog is that the liberal position on all issues is that the rights we have are so important, so immovable, that they mitigate the risk involved in maintaining those rights.

In American culture, Democrats are usually identified as “liberal” and Republicans “conservative,” but, (I’m sure I don’t need to state this for my audience) both parties cross the conservative/liberal divide, and usually on opposite issues. Democrats have liberal views on abortion rights, Republicans have liberal views on gun ownership. Beyond these smaller views on particular issues we are all supposed to share certain unalienable human rights – the right to “equal pay for equal work; the right to rest and leisure; the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being; the right to education; and the right to participate in the cultural life of the community” (UN).

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights website “Article 3, the first cornerstone of the Declaration, proclaims the right to life, liberty and security of person -a right essential to the enjoyment of all other rights.” If an individual has the right to life and liberty, and security of person, then wouldn’t an individual have the right to self-defense? Unfortunately not in so many words. These rights are conditional, limited by the rights of sovereign states to govern their citizens. These limitations “must be determined by law, solely for the purpose of securing due recognition of the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society” (UN).

So, if a government determines that public order is better served through illegalizing weapons, they have that right. Citizens then must find other ways of protecting their individual right to life (a la duck-and-cover). However, if the government then begins to unjustly take away the rights of a particular group within its borders, the international community has a right to step in.

The point is, to argue the right to own firearms, we must return to the small view – the rights and responsibilities outlined within our country – the complex debate between liberal/conservative Democrats and conservative/liberal Republicans.

Recently I was reading a discussion of England’s 1997 handgun ban, the strongest firearms legislation in the international community. Two cases in particular stand out to me:

“In 1973 a young man running on a road at night was stopped by the police and found to be carrying a length of steel, a cycle chain, and a metal clock weight. He explained that a gang of youths had been after him. At his hearing it was found he had been threatened and had previously notified the police. The justices agreed he had a valid reason to carry the weapons. Indeed, 16 days later he was attacked and beaten so badly he was hospitalized. But the prosecutor appealed the ruling, and the appellate judges insisted that carrying a weapon must be related to an imminent and immediate threat. They sent the case back to the lower court with directions to convict” (Malcom, 2002).

“In 1994 an English homeowner, armed with a toy gun, managed to detain two burglars who had broken into his house while he called the police. When the officers arrived, they arrested the homeowner for using an imitation gun to threaten or intimidate. In a similar incident the following year, when an elderly woman fired a toy cap pistol to drive off a group of youths who were threatening her, she was arrested for putting someone in fear. Now the police are pressing Parliament to make imitation guns illegal” (Malcom, 2002).

Sometimes we look to the failures of the English system to argue against firearms legislation in the United States, but in some ways it doesn’t make sense to do this. The British system is an evolutionary system of common law that can be reversed and altered over time. The American system has been derived from a fixed constitution enacted after breaking from the British system through the Revolutionary War. It is the second amendment of that fixed constitution over which we argue.

To conclude this meandering post: an international right to self-defense doesn’t make sense because of the right to state sovereignty. States have the right to create laws and responsibility to protect their citizens through law as they see fit. In some countries limitation of individual rights seems like the way to go. They may be wrong, and we can point to circumstances we see as ludicrous, but those governments have the right to legislate as they will. In the United States we have the second amendment protecting our right to own firearms, but what we have to be even more careful of is the maintenance of reasonable individual self-defense laws in each state. It doesn’t get us anywhere to own tools of defense that are illegal to use in situations of imminent threat. This gets back to what I was saying in previous posts: we must look to behavior – is the intent of a particular act to harm, or is the intent to defend, and should we maintain the right to self-protection? Let's work with both Democrats and Republicans to maintain a liberal position on self-defense just as we work to maintain our second-amendment rights.

There are two criminal incidents that impacted me significantly while I was a young person. The first was an arson and the second, a shooting.

When I was in seventh grade a man in my town broke into his instructor’s home, doused the first floor in diesel fuel, lit the fuel, and left the home. In the ensuing inferno, two children, one in my grade, died on the stairwell from smoke inhalation.

This impacted me on a number of levels. My father is a college professor at the same school, though a different department than the intended victim. I could imagine one of his students, though I didn’t know and hadn’t met any of them, committing a similar wrong against my family. Many nights I thought about how I might escape from my second-floor bedroom, a room that was situated in my home in a similar location to the murdered children’s.

I thought a lot about how to stop the perpetration of crimes like arson and other forms of murder, and decided the best way was to become a cop. Since sixth grade I had been interested in police work, but primarily due to watching too much Hunter and Miami Vice on TV. I was aware that real policing was very different than these shows. Hierarchy, responsibility, paperwork and accountability were the reality, rebellion and vigilante justice the fiction.

To see what policing was really like, and to start my intended career path, I decided to join the Police Explorers. This was the career path that emphasized justice and used direct, targeted, and legitimate continua of force to enact good for all. This targeted direct force was in contrast to the indirect, destructive, unjustified and flippant use of force through the arson/murder.

I must say, I loved my experience in the Explorers, and I intended to stay in the troupe until I was 18, graduate from high-school, and go to the academy.

At the age of 14 my mother began taking me to the local Isaac Walton League to learn gun safety with a .22 rifle. I loved being in the out-of-doors at the range. It was in a beautiful wooded area in a valley (in a mostly flat midwestern state) carved out by the river that passed our town. I’d set up tin cans and staple some targets to the boards on the range and work on being non-reactive when the gun went off so as to hit the target at my point of aim. Quickly I learned that shooting isn’t anything like the wild shooting on TV. Shooting is about being calm and clear about your target and the backstop behind your target. Anytime anything other than calmness and focus enters your mind you lose accuracy. Everyone has heard about how Japanese Buddhists have used archery to practice meditation. I learned that shooting guns is the same.

When I was 16, in my sophomore year of High School, a peer was coerced by a parent to shoot someone. This peer was more “mature” than most of the other kids in class, and many of us saw our peer, prior to the shooting, as a good example of the freedoms we could look forward to in adulthood. Even more than that, some of the officers I looked up to most knew the kid and were friendly with the kid’s parents. Mentally I checked my peer off in the “good” category.

Thankfully, the shooting victim lived, but the court proceedings after were murky and complicated, and this pierced me to my core. I had no outlet to process such a complicated real-world experience. I was actually experiencing the world of policing that I set out to see, and I didn’t know what to think.

I locked my gun away and quit going to the range. I dropped out of the Explorers. I got involved in theatre, dance and the arts.

Eventually the rifle I learned to shoot was sold to a friend’s family whose son was in the explorers and he began going to the range to learn gun safety.

I didn’t think again about gun ownership, policing, or my experience in the Explorers until after September 11th, 2001. In the ensuing war on terror I began to again see the world through the unified view I had while in the Explorers. I began to see our individual responsibility to act for the common good in the face of moments of horror. I began to see that I could take the responsibility to step forward in the face of danger to protect others. I began to consider owning a gun and seeking a concealed carry permit.

In looking at incidents of crime and crime fighting, I see that individuals are more horrified by gun violence than other forms of violence such as arson. I think, although I’m not certain, that this has to do with several issues that can be teased out by visual-temporal design analysis of crime incidents.

If we look at an arson we can prove intent to murder, for example, through statements made by the perpetrator to others, by journal entries, by time of a crime (say the arson is perpetrated on a dwelling in which the inhabitants are sleeping at night). We can do the same in the instance of a homicidal shooting. With a gun we can prove a shooting was in self-defense against an imminent threat, however, there is never an incident that I can think of, wherein someone could light a building on fire in self-defense.

In terms of visual analysis, a fire and a shooting vary widely. A firearm shoots in a direct path that is understood by those who practice shooting. A fire burns in all directions consuming whatever flammable material is in its path. The path of a bullet is narrow, less than ½ inch in diameter, while the path of a fire is as wide as the fire can grow before it is put out. A bullet travels at velocities higher than a thousand feet per second where as a fire grows from a single spark into an inferno over an extended period of time. A bullet kills through a single means, impact, while a fire can kill with heat, flame, or smoke. The shooter is there at the site at the time of impact, while an arsonist may start a fire and leave the scene, not knowing the result of the fire until it is reported on the news.

I think that the fact that the path of a bullet is so narrow and that the time between pulling the trigger and the impact of the bullet are so short are the things that cause so many people to be horrified by shootings, whether those are justifiable instances of self-defense or acts of murder. With an arson it seems that more people can say, “Oh, that’s horrible,” but because the arsonist is able to start a fire and leave the scene, people may dissociate the act from its result.

To me, this is a flaw in the way people think. It may be a good reason to call for criminology classes as part of civic education in high school along with gun and archery safety classes in gym. We should understand fully the horror of temporally indirect crimes like arson and we should be able to differentiate between defensive use of arms and crime.

All citizens should understand our laws about crime, our rights in terms of self-defense, the dangers of guns and archery equipment and how to be safe. We aren’t learning these things the way we were in former generations because the population has changed and culture has changed. The way we learn about our rights and responsibilities around such issues should change as well.

On Air America Radio Rachel Maddow is currently running an ad ostensibly making fun of those who want the right to concealed carry on college campuses. In the ad she says, “What they’re telling us is that guns plus more guns plus crazy people with guns equals peace.” Rachel is missing the point.

What people who are for concealed carry on campus are saying is, “People on campus with guns who have been through a background check and a certification class means crazy people with guns will think twice about attempting a massacre, and should they attempt it, they will be more quickly stopped.”

My wife is taking criminology classes at the local university. One of her instructors sent her a flyer with a crossed out handgun with text that states: “Unarmed Victim Zone: NO HELP FOR 20 MINUTES.”

For those of us with a concealed carry permit, we know, from the course we were required to take prior to applying for the permit, that in a defensive situation we are responsible and accountable for whatever we hit. If we miss the attacker but hit a fire hydrant and it floods a building causing thousands in damage, we have responsibility for the damage. If we are defending ourselves and the attacker runs away but we continue shooting, we are then causing harm rather than protecting ourselves. In that instance we can be found guilty of a crime. Just as the criminal liability is high should we overstep our legal right, the civil liability is also extremely high, even when the defensive shooter is in the right.

When Rachel says concealed-carry-approved people with guns plus crazy people (I might say criminals) with guns “equals peace,” she’s making another mistake. When a person defends herself against deadly force with a handgun that doesn’t equal peace. It equals justice. In the Virginia Tech shootings there was no justice. The shooter shot as many people as he wanted, then killed himself. There were no campus police officers that could stop the crime because they are also kept from their weapons. The police patrol and S.W.A.T. response will never be fast enough to stop such an attack because of our human rights. To make the police response quick enough would require police on every corner all the time – a police state. Should citizens with the training and permit to carry a firearm be allowed to carry on campus they would be able to respond defensively to stop and attack like the one at Virginia Tech.

Where a critique might be intelligently levied by a talk-show host against concealed carry on campus has to do with the backstop. Every person permitted to carry a gun is taught they must keep their finger off the trigger until their firearm is aligned on their attacker and that they know their backstop. The backstop is where the bullet will end up should it pass all the way through the target. As I mentioned before, a defensive shooter is responsible for whatever they hit. If the walls are paper-thin as they are in much modern construction, the defensive shooter might not be aware that the backstop isn’t safe. In a college there are students in room after room separated by the thinnest barrier. This could pose a danger should the defensive shooter not understand the construction of the building. On the other hand, those of us who have a concealed carry permit are expected to consider these realities of our environment so that we can be safe, should such an event occur.

This, to me, is the complicated arena in which we can really debate the logic of firearms in the hands of licensed citizens on campus. Do the risks posed by the complex, people-filled environments outweigh the risks posed by banning weapons on campus? I don’t think Rachel Maddow is prepared to debate the issues on such a level.