Violence in America

If one looks carefully at the different disagreements between advocates and enemies of gun control, one finds that each side has their own reading of history and their own set of facts. Appeals to history and appeals to facts therefore will not serve to resolve this disagreement. At issue are deeply buried attitudes, ancient themes in our culture. The pressing question is what we can do to weaken the influence of those cultural themes.

The disagreements:

1. The Second Amendment to the Constitution reads: "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. "

Advocates of gun control claim that this Second Amendment refers only to militias and not to the rights of individuals to carry weapons when not serving as members of a militia. (Today we call that the National Guard.) It is unclear what makes Gun Control Advocates so confident of their reading of the Constitution.

Opponents deny that. They provide a detailed history of England in the 1600s – a history that was very much alive in the minds of the authors of the Constitution. According to that reading of English history, the opponents of monarchy and of what they called "tyranny" insisted on the rights of individual citizens to own and carry weapons as a necessary defense against dictators, tyrants, or absolute monarchs.

But this is a tendentious reading motivated by a belief that there is an individual right to bear arms. That belief precedes rather than being supported by the actual history.

2. There is wide disagreement about the facts with respect to the usefulness of private ownership of guns. Gun advocates cite between 2 and 3 million cases a year where someone managed to protect themselves and their family by the use of guns. Owning a gun makes a real difference, they say, in enabling citizens to protect themselves. Opponents believe there are somewhere between 60 and 70,000 such events per year. They cite, instead, large numbers of casualties of privately owned guns. Millions of guns owned by citizens make us less rather than more safe.

The people who collected these facts approach the matter with their minds made up. Each side believes that guns save lives or that, on the contrary, guns take lives. The facts do not convince anybody.

3. The debate over guns is in part a debate over the extent to which the federal government controls the lives of citizens today. One does not have to be a flaming conservative to see evidence of overreaching by the federal government wherever you look. In medical care, in education, in day care new rules are constantly being imposed and the individual practitioner is more and more under the supervision of bureaucrats.

But on the other hand, life is becoming more complex by the day and there are more opportunities for people to be ill treated, defrauded, or humiliated. The government has good reason for stepping in to protect citizens.

In each situation, defensible limits on government regulation are not easily established. More often than not choices for or against more government regulation will respond to some deep seated values which some Americans share and others do not.

What are those values? Here we need to look back at our own history. The original immigrants pretended that the North American continent was uninhabited. Europeans came and settled it, they said, and made it yield abundant crops. But that story falsifies the actual history: about every 10 years since Europeans first came to this continent, warfare erupted between whites and Native Americans. The feeling that one needed to carry a weapon at all times rests on the reality of whites stealing the land against the determined, often violent, resistance of Native Americans.

Add to that, the history of 200 years of slavery and another hundred years after the Civil War when African-Americans were regularly lynched with impunity. The history of slavery and Jim Crow is, above all, a very violent history. The condition of the slaves and the regime of Jim Crow could only be maintained by regular and unrelenting violence. It is a history of whites imposing their regime by force of arms. To maintain themselves they needed to carry weapons and always to be ready to do violence to the people they enslaved.

This history is still alive in the very basic attitudes of many Americans. They still feel that they need to be armed in order to be relatively safe. The imminent need for armed self-defense is a strong theme in our culture. That theme is not weakened by arguing about the Second Amendment or the usefulness or a danger of everyone carrying handguns.

We inherit our gun culture from our history. Our task is to weaken those traditions by resisting the glorification of violence in all aspects of our lives: in sports, in movies, in computer games, and, yes, in the debate about going around armed.

But the enemy is not the Second Amendment. Statistics about self protection or injury by handguns are beside the point. America must acknowledge it's terribly violent history and resolve to put it behind us.

Newtown

The great sadness over the murders in Newtown leaves us with two questions: why did this happen? Why is the number of random shootings growing? And the second question obviously is what can we do about it?

Practical people have all kinds of answers to that second question: improved gun control, arm schoolteachers, (arm schoolchildren?), give children bulletproof backpacks. Make reporting of mental disease mandatory so that we can better assure that no guns get into the hands of people afflicted by mental illness. The NRA does not want to limit gun ownership but places blame on violent computer games. The advocates of these measures usually understand that they will not put a complete end to these shootings. But some of them may well help.

But these suggestions do not answer the first question: why is this happening?

Here we get a range of answers: America is a violent country. Our murder rate is 3 to 4 times the murder rate of other developed countries. From the beginning European immigrants to this continent have practiced ruthless ethnic cleansing. We kept slaves for 200 years and for 100 years after that we held African-Americans in bitter servitude. The 20 odd years between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II were the longest peaceful period in all of American history. As long as we have lived on this continent, we have been at war with Britain, with France, with Spain, with Mexico and other countries in Central and Latin America and, of course, with the Native Americans. We have fought wars in Algeria, in the Philippines, in Russia, in the Carribean. There are few countries where we have not deployed our violence. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States)

Our economic system stresses competition: to be sure it would not do for the top management of Amazon to shoot up the headquarters of Google. But the goal of each of these companies is to do serious injury to the other, to put the competitor out of business. Employers constantly try to depress the wages of their employees. Few Americans are seriously bothered when Walmart human relations offices explain to prospective employees how they can get food stamps and publicly financed health care because their jobs will not support them. Our economy takes cruelty and coercion in its stride.

Millions of adults watch beefy men attack each other every weekend on the football field or the hockey rink. A hockey game without a fight is not worth watching. For the younger generation, there are computer games where people massacre each other with a oversized automatic weapons in rivers of blood. For everyone there are violent computer dramas.

There are other generalizations about America we could cite here. But it is not at all clear what, if anything, they explain. Do children who play violent computer games grow up to be violent adults? Do fans of football and ice hockey commit more violent crimes? We possess no unambiguous evidence on these questions.

The English have many sins on their conscience in their long history of colonialism beginning with the ravaging of Ireland to their Indian Empire and domination of Africa. Their murder rate is a third of ours. Germany has a bloody past. Our murder rate is four times the murder rate in Germany. There is no simple and clear connection between historical sins and current gun violence.

We need to admit that we do not understand the origins of all this violence in our country.

It is not too difficult, to say, however, what we should be doing to reduce violence in the future. We must recognize it, resist it, and replace it by nonviolent means, wherever possible. We must teach our children to avoid being violent; that there are other ways for solving conflicts and we must teach our children how to excel in those. We must learn how to avoid being violent ourselves as we teach our children.

But we must teach non-violence the right way. School children who, today, are disrespectful to adults, who bully other children, or who get into fights are likely to be called into the office of the principal, the guidance counselor, the coach to be yelled at and threatened with punishment. That child learns that violence is acceptable as long as the violent one has permission. They will conclude that they too can be violent if they become teachers or principals, or, failing that, . . . . . . procure a gun. Our schools actually teach violence.

But they do not have to do that. Many schools have chosen a different path. They teach some of the students to be peer-counselors. These young mediators can, in many situations, defuse conflicts that arise in the school by helping their fellow students to talk out their difficulties instead of threatening physical confrontations. Similarly schools talk to young men about how being a man does not consist of bullying women. Young women have opportunities to reflect about their growing up into being women. Gay-straight alliances strive to gain acceptance for everyone instead of having gay men and lesbian women fall victim to bullying. There are many similar projects for teaching non-violence.

Non-violent techniques of resistance have a long and venerable history dating back at least to 16^th century England and beyond. Over the years groups have developed many different methods of withholding supports from their rulers who acted against their people. Think of the women agitating for the vote who chained themselves to the fence of the White House, of the Montgomery bus boycott, of widespread refusal by workers to work, or to leave their factories. Our children need to learn the history of struggles that were not violent. More importantly, they must be taught how to avoid violence and be encouraged to make peace.

This is a long path but it is the only one we have to stem to rising tide of violence.