Those who deny the inherent danger of firearms are in the same category as those who deny human impact on climate change or the link between tobacco and cancer. They mask risk and responsibility for the sake of the profits of companies that make dicey products and fund lobbying efforts to disguise their potential danger. Ours has become a nation in which rational, life-affirming precaution is seen as bad for business and denial is seen as a path to riches.
In states like New Mexico this has a terrible affect. Gun violence here is among the worst in the nation. It comes in 6th with some 15 deaths per 100,000, and has the 6th most permissive set of gun laws in the country.
Gun violence is such an epidemic in our country that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predict that gun related deaths will exceed deaths from automobile accidents by 2015, 32,036 to 32,929. For states with next to no gun laws at all, those numbers seem especially menacing.
New Mexico requires no state permit to buy a gun, has no firearm registry, no assault weapon law, no gun license required, and there are no restrictions on owning machine guns. We do require permits to carry concealed and unconcealed handguns, and property owners can post signs refusing entry into their lands or offices to people carrying guns.
While gun ownership is, as many say, a matter of libertarian culture in the American West and is often attached to a sense of personal identity, gun safety has been swallowed up in a lackadaisical attitude about the dangers of firearms. So concerned have people become with the “right” to own guns that gun culture has lost respect for the killing power, killing purpose, and potential for catastrophic accidents inherent in these weapons.
The hew and cry about gun rights is heard everywhere these days, the message about caution and care is heard nowhere. Many gun owners leave weapons lying about, they don’t lock them up, nor take the ammo out of them. Guns are so ubiquitous, so many people own them and any kind of crook or nut can buy them, that they’re almost treated like cell phones or any other kind of tool.
Even booze companies run public service ads about safe driving. Even tobacco products have the Surgeon General’s warning. Even aspirin comes with paragraphs of small print warnings. Guns come with nothing like that. In fact, if you even mention what used to be our nation’s attitude toward guns –
extreme care, scrupulous storage, and deep respect for their lethal power – you’re treated like a heretic by the Second Amendment Cult.
Despite being the most clumsy and ambiguous sentence in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment does protect gun ownership in the United States according to the conservative Supreme Court. And to repeal the Second Amendment is a political impossibility. The gun lobby knows this; their gnashing of teeth about gun confiscation is all for show.
But they also know the Second Amendment says nothing about what kinds of guns it protects. It doesn’t even use the word gun, but rather “Arms,” which could include cutlasses and dirks and brass knuckles. If you’re a conservative “originist” as far as Constitutional interpretation is concerned – meaning that you’re interested only in the original intent of the founding fathers – it’s utterly illogical for you to assume that arms means anything more other that those weapons available when the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791. And yet the originists on the Court do just that. Despite their historical scruples, anything goes for them when it comes to guns.
But I’m not interested in Constitutional hair splitting at the moment. I want to examine the illogic of the attitude that guns are not inherently dangerous. Granted a handgun could be used as a paper weight, but so could a one pound rock. But whereas a rock is heavy, and might be used to harm someone, it has no inherent danger attached to it. Guns in the hands of certain people kill other people, fast and easy, and often impulsively. Impulsive suicide and impulsive murder are to guns what speed is to cars – all up to you, and the machinery your psychology and motor skills have to work with.
But the gun industry, its lobbyists, its paid politicians, and its customers all claim that guns are not dangerous until humans activate their inherent lethal potential. And how is that accomplished? By accident, by madness, by suicidal depression, by folly like road rage or violent domestic dispute, by intoxication, by stupidly shooting guns into the air, by criminal intent, and also by acts of self-defense.
Defending yourself, standing your ground with a powerful weapon has huge emotional appeal in a paranoid world. I would argue, though, that self-defense is the stuff of movies, not of real life. Few civilian gun owners have suffered the kind of arduous training under stress that allows someone to aim and hit a target in extreme situations. They might use an assault weapon, which requires no aim, just pointing, but then if they spray bullets around, who knows where the bullets will go and who they will maim or kill.
The denial of the inherent danger of firearms is reinforced by manipulative campaigns of illogic. Some PR flack invented the slogan Guns Don’t Kill People, People Do. And the gun industry has ridden it for all it’s worth. But in fact people using guns kill people, more than people using rocks, knives, or poisons do.
Let’s see someone try to commit a mass murder with a frying pan, a bag full of big rocks, some sharp pencils, a church key, or even a meat cleaver.
To say that guns don’t kill people, people do, is like saying that blenders don’t makes smoothies, people do; pencil sharpeners don’t sharpen pencils, people do; lip stick doesn’t make lips red, people do; cigarettes don’t bring on cancer and heart disease in people, people do. It’s absurd.
Some well-meaning paranoid packing heat in a supermarket stumbles upon someone he thinks is trying to rob a cashier. He pulls his gun, tells the guy to stop, the man makes a move, any move, the gunman fires, the bullets miss, hit the shelving, they ricochet, and somehow hit me, or mine, or some kid buying bubble gum. And lives are ruined forever – just so someone can assert his and the NRA’s interpretation of his Second Amendment rights.
Why is there so much gun violence in the US? Because we minimize the dangers of guns, treat them like household objects, while allowing them to be manufactured in preposterous numbers. We no longer treat firearms with the legal restraint or ethical respect they deserve. Countries that have a realistic and responsible gun ethic have kept gun deaths to a minimum compared to us. Last year, Yahoo reports, Great Britain had 51 guns deaths for the whole year, while the U.S. had 83 a day.
If New Mexico has 15 gun deaths per 100,000 people and it has 2 million residents, that means we have some 300 guns deaths a year, which is almost six times more gun fatalities a year in New Mexico than all of Great Britain!
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