Guns
The latest mass shooting revives
the debate over gun control once more. Gun control advocates
reiterate what they have said many times before, that gun sales need
to be limited, that guns need to be kept out of the hands of
criminals, of mentally unstable persons, that all gun sales need to
be subject to stricter rules. Gun advocates repeat that guns protect
their owners. Both sides cite scientific studies and facts that their
opponents reject as unreliable.
When it comes to gun sales, gun
ownership and gun control our political processes have broken down.
There is no conversation. No one exchanges ideas, no one learns from
others. No one is going to change their mind. Everyone just repeats
the same positions over and over. As time goes on each side speaks
louder. Opponents are shrill and more disrespectful. Nothing is
accomplished.
In actual cases, the evidence is
very confusing. When David Patrick Kelly started shooting in a church
in Sutherland Springs, TX a neighbor, hearing the shots, hauled out
his own assault rifle and started shooting back. Kelly fled. Did the
neighbor's attack on Kelly save lives? Gun advocates say "Yes."
But that answer depends on hypotheticals: had the neighbor not
started shooting, Kelly would have killed more people in the church.
Can we be sure of that? No, of course not.
The example illustrates how
uncertain facts are in many cases. The apparently indubitable
conclusions both pro- and anti- gun advocates draw are often
unjustified. Exaggerating conclusions merely serves to make a real
conversation from which all could learn into a useless repetition of
unsupported dogmas.
The question about gun safety has
many different aspects. Who will be safer if they own guns? Against
whom will guns protect us? Guns may protect us against robbers who
invade our house But they also open possibilities of errors as when a
father, hearing someone outside his house shoots his own son coming
home, thinking it might be a robber. (Last year 1300 accidental
shootings killed innocent victims) Will guns play a significant role
in domestic violence? Women are regularly killed by the guns of
husbands, boy friends, former lovers. (1250 women killed by intimate
partners in 2000. Half of them shot by guns.) Guns are often used in
suicides. (More than 21000 in 2013--two thirds of all gun deaths in
the US) Questions whether gun owners attempt suicide more often, and
succeed in their attempts more frequently are inescapable. Guns are
often involved in gun accidents, especially, among children who find
a parents' gun and playing with them kill a relative, not
infrequently the parent who owned the gun.
These issues are being studied but
the results are difficult to interpret. Different studies show
correlations between gun ownership and domestic violence, suicides
and accidents. But few causal connection have been established
convincingly.
The efforts to get a better
understanding of the role of guns is seriously inhibited by a 1996
federal law that prohibits federal funding of research into gun
violence. The law makes it impossible for the two government agencies
that keep track of the health and well-being of citizens--the CDC and
the National Institutes of Health--to do any research having to do
with guns, for instance, how to prevent gun violence, what, if any,
are the signs that someone will attack a crowd of people.
Kelly bought his gun legally
although, being a guilty of domestic violence, he should not have
been able to get a gun from a legitimate gun dealer. The case is
interesting: passing gun control legislation will not be effective if
it is not enforced. After Kelly served his time for domestic
violence, the Air Force should have reported this to the National
Criminal Information database but failed to do so. It appears the
military neglected to report most domestic violence convictions in
the military. Passing gun control legislation may well remain
ineffective.
Many people have very firm opinions
whether every citizen should be armed or whether laws should be
passed to radically reduce the number of guns owned by civilians in
the country. Once we look at the different issues we see clearly that
the certainty with which people hold their positions is unjustified.
The matter of gun ownership does not only have to do with the
question of security from home invasions or random attacks, it has to
do with the role guns play in domestic violence and in suicides. It
has to do with the number of preventable gun accidents that happen
every year.
The correlations between gun
legislation and security of gun owners, frequency of gun use in
domestic conflicts and in suicides are often uncertain. Causal
connections have not been established scientifically. There is a
great deal we do not know about the advantages and disadvantages of
private gun ownership. No one should claim to know
that
guns are good or bad for us.
The debate over guns is just one
example of the deplorable state of our political system. Supposedly
we govern ourselves. But in a world of complex issues on which
citizens disagree, self-government requires that citizens talk to
each other in order to discover the best policies in a given setting.
Talking to each other means that we do not claim to know what we do
not, but to recognize the difficulties of the problems we confront.
Talking to each other requires modesty, a willingness to admit
ignorance, to ask others for their insights and willingness to
cooperate.
Let us begin by admitting that we
are in no position to make strong statements about guns. Let us no
longer claim knowledge where we are ignorant.
