I couldn’t agree more with James D. Besser’s article that the Jewish community has a stake in the debate over firearms in this country, and that this debate is in “a pathetic state.”
But I think he and I disagree about the reasons for the dismal condition of the controversy.
There are serious issues that people on neither side of the divide appear willing to address, proverbial 900-pound gorillas in the room that everybody tries to pretend aren’t there.
Particularly interesting to me is that both sides have their distinctive gorillas, and that all of them lurk in the little sentence that seems to be causing all the trouble — the Second Amendment to the U.S. 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.”
Let’s start with today’s pro-gun folks, the Second Amendment absolutists. They strenuously avoid noticing something, namely: What the founders of this country meant by “arms” is not what we mean by that word today.
When American people of the late 18th century spoke of “arms,” they meant flintlock muskets — awkward, single shot weapons of short range and modest power that took a good minute or more to reload between firings. In 1790, to go onto a college campus with that kind of gun and randomly kill 30-plus people in a short time would have taken a whole company of trained soldiers — and even if such a company tried this, most of the potential victims could easily have run out of range or concealed themselves behind barriers that would have prevented the bullets from hitting them.
With today’s firearms, one person can unleash that much destructive power, and did at Virginia Tech last month. Not even Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin (arguably the most intelligent, imaginative and scientifically/technologically inclined of our country’s founders) could have foreseen the development of modern firearms, some of which can kill people farther than a mile away, or can send a deadly bullet through a wall or a car, or can fire a dozen or 100 rounds in the time it took a flintlock musket to fire two.
Moreover, neither could the founders have foreseen the other social and technological characteristics of this age – the automobiles that allow ease of transportation of people and guns; the Internet; the social pathologies of the illegal drug trade, terrorism, gangs and individual psychopaths.
In short, U.S. society, culture, technology and weaponry in 2007 are not the same as they were in 1790. “Arms” particularly are qualitatively different things now.
Common sense and emotional maturity demands that use and ownership of such powerful technology be stringently regulated. The pro-gun people need to stop reacting to sensible proposals with the selfishness and temper tantrums of children who don’t want their toys taken away, and start thinking seriously about public safety.
Really anachronistic?
Meanwhile, the anti-gun folks have their own gorillas they keep ignoring, namely: Why is that Second Amendment there at all? And who is this “militia” it talks about?
All the history I’ve ever seen about the subject indicates that the founders feared a professional military and feared any monopoly on deadly force by the state.
Moreover, the early drafts of the Second Amendment apparently included a definition of “the militia” as “composed of the body of the people” — that is, of all the citizens (then, of course, defined as males), not just members of the reserves or National Guard, as we know them today.
As I said earlier, times have changed since 1790. Nevertheless, is the founders’ concern about governmental power unchecked by an armed citizenry really anachronistic?
Given the many real instances of government officials abusing power, from local police all the way to the White House, gun control advocates need to ask themselves seriously and honestly: Can we really trust our security and rights to professional military and police forces with absolute confidence that their members won’t abuse their power?
If the answer is no, then we citizens must have the right to own weapons, including weapons that can match those of the professionals, in order to check and balance them.
If the answer is yes, then gun control advocates will have to “bite the bullet” (pun intended) and develop the courage to advocate openly the repeal or rewriting of the Second Amendment.
These issues hardly exhaust the subject. Pro-gun people need to examine critically their Hollywood-born fantasy about it being easy for an armed but untrained citizen to confront an armed criminal. Anti-gun people need to develop some empathy with the fear of crime and the powerful (and legitimate) desire not to be a helpless and passive victim that drives many on the pro-gun side.
But these issues regarding the Second Amendment are the ones all people in the gun debate seem to keep stumbling over.
Until they truly start thinking about them, rather than reacting emotionally, there will neither be a serious discussion of the subject nor the possibility of some kind of workable compromise.
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