Jamie Johnson · @JamieComic
19th Dec 2012 from Twitlonger
Just One Life
It stings a little, being “unfriended” on Facebook. Does this mean we’re no longer friends in real life, or that we never really were in the first place? And if we were, what does it say for our former friendship that it couldn’t stand a little political debate? Such was the aftermath, for me, of the Sandy Hook murders. Two Facebook “friends” aren’t anymore. Without wishing to diminish the sense of shock that we all feel at such an evil act, I can’t help feeling that our collective outrage is, dare I say it, a little manufactured and disproportionate. As I type, I can feel the hate being beamed my way through the eyes of a certain kind of reader. That reader will almost certainly be a parent, and probably one who keenly feels the potential danger to their children, lurking round every corner.
How, you may I ask, can I justify saying that there’s anything wrong with the collective outrage currently expressed through all form of social media? Very easily, in fact. As I write, President Assad’s forces are waging a brutal war against a sizable proportion of Syria’s people. Children are dying just as violently in Syria as they did in Connecticut. Certainly, we’ll silently wish there was more that western governments could do to bring peace, preferably without Assad, to Syria, but we aren’t about to choke on our cornflakes when news breaks of yet another atrocity committed against Syrian children. We won’t discuss the Syrian situation in pubs and coffee shops, at least not during the football season.
At least once a year, we hear the news of the fatal crash of a bus carrying a school skiing trip. Just over a decade ago, the aerial collision at Uberlingen killed 71 people including 45 children. Yes, we were shocked, but only for a moment because, hey, they were Russian kids. As for any discussion of what went wrong and how to fix it, that was left to the experts.
I know, I’m missing the point that someone didn’t just accidentally kill 20 children in Sandy Hook Elementary School. He intentionally, with malice aforethought, went to that school to gun down innocent children. Or perhaps I’m not missing the point. They were mostly white children at Sandy Hook, middle class and with potentially wonderful lives ahead of them. Speaking as a Brit, we tend to feel an affinity towards the US, beamed as is into our living rooms every day, and we imagine ourselves and Americans as sharing a bond. So, we feel outraged. But not at every child killed, just the news-worthy ones. The infant murder rate1 in the US in 2010, that is children under the age of one year, was 7.9 per 100,000 overall, but 17.6 per 100,000 for black infants. For 15-19 year olds in 2010, the rate at which white male teens were murdered was 2.4 per 100,000. For black male teens, it was 51.7 per 100,000. Twenty-two times higher! Where is our outrage now?
Interestingly, firearms are seldom the weapon of choice among those who murder children, though the incidence of firearm murders increase as children get older (and as the victims become darker-skinned). Regardless of the tools being used, I would love to know why on Earth it is more important to take decisive action over the deaths of 20 white children than over the thousands of black children who are killed every year in the same country. Not just black children, of course. Hispanic children and Native-American children are also at significantly greater risk than white children.
Of course there are social factors at play, in particular to do with levels of poverty, the likelihood of stable family life, education, access to healthcare and much more, which make life much more dangerous for non-white children in the US. Politicians have three options when it comes to such societal problems. Option 1, no longer openly used for obvious reasons, is racism. Blame the, predominantly black, residents of ghetto areas for the conditions in which they live. I could write a separate essay on how wrong this approach is, but since I doubt there will be any serious disagreement I shall move on. Option 2 is to admit that a shameful history has placed black Americans on the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder, and to take concrete steps to right this wrong. The 150 years since the abolition of slavery and the 50 years since the civil rights movement have not yet levelled the playing field, and many long-standing policies have had the unintended effect of prolonging the schism between white and black America. Alas, Option 2 is unpopular with voters, particularly when positive discrimination is talked about. Option 3, and this one really is popular, is to do nothing and say nothing.
Let’s take a moment to consider a public policy which negatively affects black, inner-city Americans. The War on Drugs. Apart from some libertarians and a few of the most liberal politicians, no one in power is advocating the legalization of all recreational drugs. Neither am I, as it happens. But still, there is that nagging suspicion that the War on Drugs is no more effective than Prohibition, and that it’s leading to similar levels of gang-related and organized crime-related violence. Piecemeal decriminalization of marijuana doesn’t do a great deal to alter the situation. The market for marijuana is enormous (by some reckonings, it is the most valuable cash crop in British Columbia) and while there may be fewer regular users of harder drugs, it is still a market measured in the billions of dollars. The users come from all sections of society and all races, but the mules and street soldiers behind the drugs trade come perforce from those who have, or feel they have, no other choices. This is where male, African-American teens come in. Even today, fewer black than white teens enter university. The pool of teachers willing to work in the poorest areas, on low salaries and at greater risk of crime, is small and therefore quality of education suffers at all levels. As schools crumble, the education they impart gets worse, and the pool of teachers becomes ever smaller. A poorer education leads to poorer job prospects and poorer prospects for a stable family. Without an enormous external effort, the cycle won’t be broken, and the kids will remain easy pickings for anyone who needs warm bodies to shift their drugs. While the profits for those at the higher end of the drug-dealing world may be high, at street level the earnings are low and the competition intense. That drug-dealing is illegal removes any deterrent from using illegal means to keep or grow a dealer’s territory. All of this combines with lower taxation income (due to low declared incomes and low property values) for the municipalities involved, which means less policing and fewer means available to point kids in a better direction. Why aren’t we prepared to do for these millions of kids what we’ll do in the name of 20 dead white kids?
The comment which started me on the journey this article has led me down was made by one of those former Facebook friends. Before she unfriended me, she left on my wall this comment: “surely if it were to only save one life it is worth imposing stronger gun laws.” In my reply, I asked what she would be willing to give up, if it would save just one life. Understandably perhaps, from mainstream news to social media to coffee house chat, the talk these past few days has been of gun control. I will get to that, but first I’d like to say the unthinkable.
There is something, a substance, which is essentially unnecessary outside hospitals though it is legal, but which kills over 75,000 Americans every year2, and over 8,000 Britons3 when used recreationally. Compared with murder, this substance, freely available and widely used, kills about three times as many Americans and ten times as many Britons. Its affects reach far beyond the reported deaths; it can cause the breakdown of families, homelessness, unemployment and a slow, painful death. It can cause the violent death of complete innocents, and the maiming and injury of many more. Surely, if it would save just one life, you’d live without it and expect others to do the same?
If you haven’t already guessed, I’m talking about alcohol. I know some will say it really is necessary (which is a bit silly, given that it is poisonous!) and some will say “but guns are designed to kill and alcohol isn’t.” As arguments go, that is fairly fatuous. The very first knives were invented to kill, yet we all have a collection of them in our kitchens. Some of us use them to commit murder too. Bows and arrows, freely available and uncontrolled in most of the world, were originally designed to kill and many modern bows still are. In fact, most of the field events in the Olympic Games use what were once weapons of war, designed to kill. Apart from the hammer, shot, discus, javelin and archery events, the Olympic Games feature fencing, Judo, Tae Kwon Do, wrestling and boxing. Even the marathon was originally an exercise in military communications. Many modern sports, even if not designed around the needs of military training, are violent in nature.
If we can accept that the goal is fewer child deaths, regardless of the original intent behind the invention of inanimate objects, we would save far more by doing away with alcohol than we could by doing away with guns. Ah, but there is a problem with banning alcohol. It’s been done before, and the results weren’t great. Prohibition brought forth a wave of lawlessness, as booze barons profiteered in ways they never could when alcohol was legal. Just as with today’s War on Drugs, territory was fought over without regard to legal restraints. Mules and low-level bootleggers were bought and discarded just as some of today’s African-American teenagers are.
If Prohibition didn’t work, what hope is there for the War on Drugs, or gun control for that matter? Today, as many outside the US fail to realise, there are already gun bans and controls within the US. Until a recent Supreme Court decision overturned it, there was a ban on sales of handguns in Washington DC except to law enforcement personnel. Even with the ban in force, Washington DC was one of the most dangerous cities in the US. Gun control didn’t stop DC’s criminals getting guns.
So, how do we go about saving the lives of innocent children? First of all, let’s honour the memory of the Sandy Hook children properly, by letting their families grieve in private. Let us also recognize that there are thousands of other children who die needless, violent deaths every year in the US. They deserve as much grief and mourning as the Sandy Hook children, yet most of them end their lives as minor news items in local papers, leaving only broken families to mourn their passing.
Many commentators, at least those outside the mainstream news organizations, have suggested that the way the media, and 24-hour news in particular, reports mass killings may actually generate more mass killings. I happen to believe this to be true, though proving it is an impossible task. For one thing, most mass killers take their own lives before anyone can find out what motivates them. Their suicide notes, when they exist, are more likely to contain tranches of self-justification than real truth. My suspicion, widely shared I think, is that the (usually) young men who do this think that it’s their one chance to “be somebody”, to be remembered and even feared.
We can’t just blame the media, any more than we can just blame the gun. No sane person walks into a school and shoots innocent people. I suspect that many mass killers were bullied and ostracized at school, but this does not absolve them of responsibility for their actions. I was bullied at school; badly enough for the psychological scars to hurt for many years after, but the experience left me more likely to protect the innocent, not less. I suspect, going back to those violent sports again, that the social structure within American high schools, where football stars and cheerleaders are more likely to be remembered than Rhodes Scholars, can make the less popular kids feel like outcasts who will never fit in. This is, of course, supposition and I cannot claim any great knowledge of psychology. What is beyond dispute is that teenage and young adult males are more likely than any other group to commit suicide. Some of them take the deeply saddening further step of taking lives other than their own. The ostracized, the outsiders, must surely be at greater risk of both suicide on its own and murder-suicide.
There is a huge question about what America does as a society once people reach such a desperate state. The US spends more, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP, on healthcare than any other western nation, yet healthcare outcomes in the US lag behind countries such as France, the UK, Germany and Canada. There is a huge amount of disinformation surrounding the healthcare debate in the US, perhaps even more than there is in the gun control debate. What is certain is that public provision of mental healthcare services is lacking, and there is a great need for America to do better in this regard.
This is the bit where I get to gun control. My starting point a few days ago was that no further gun control was necessary in the US. Most Britons regard that as an unacceptable position to take (and so do some New Zealanders, if the unfriending is anything to go by), even though I don’t argue for a similar course in the UK. Actually though, there is some sense to 2nd Amendment ideologue position. For a start, the overall murder rate in the US, though high compared with Western Europe and Canada, is not as bad as most Britons think. If you account for social factors, in particular the high concentration of murders in inner-city areas where no sane tourist and few middle-class locals would ever venture (and where those African-American teenagers are dying in their thousands), the US becomes safer still. The Sandy Hook murders were, even in American terms, an aberration. From a more philosophical perspective, liberty and public safety tend to be in competition and, in the spirit of Jeffersonian democracy, there are many who believe passionately that liberty is the highest goal. There’s also the issue of a government’s ability to trust the people it represents. To Quote Henry L Stimson, “the chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him.”
I found a blog a few days ago, written by journalist Matt Pressburg4, which altered my viewpoint a little. I had already felt some unease with the way the NRA of America (the original NRA, still in existence, is the British governing body for the sport of full-bore rifle target shooting) misrepresents gun laws outside the US as a means of building fear in its members and prospective members. Matt presents a cogently-argued picture of how dangerous guns actually are in the hands of Americans, and while he remains in favour of the 2nd Amendment he also proposes some sensible ideas which might help prevent a future Sandy Hook. Principally, he would like background checks to be more thorough, and to take longer than the current federally-mandated 7 days for handgun buyers, for all first-time gun buyers under the age of 30. He has written a further blog post since the Sandy Hook murders, suggesting tighter laws on gun storage.
Matt’s proposals, while I’m sure they’ll be detested at NRA HQ, make a great deal of sense. The NRA and many other organizations will fight tooth and nail against gun registration, national gun licensing and anything else which could potentially be used by a future, possibly totalitarian, government as a tool in the disarming of the American people. To understand how deeply this thought runs in many American psyches, I should point out that millions of people believe very strongly, and not without good reason, that the Holocaust started when Germany’s Jews were disarmed.
Background checks are already part of the process of handgun purchases in the US, along with a waiting period, so it’s not unreasonable to ask for better background checks and a longer waiting period. It should be noted that some states cannot or will not complete background checks within 7 days, at which point a buyer may collect his gun regardless. Thirty days, on the other hand, should be adequate. Extending background checks for under-30s to include rifle purchases is not going to be the end of the world. As a quid pro quo, Matt suggests that subsequent purchases should not require background checks to be repeated. Where Matt’s proposal may face real opposition is when he suggests that the name of prospective gun buyers under 30 should be made public, so that anyone with a serious objection can make it known. There may well be privacy concerns around this, and it also gives potential thieves advance knowledge of whom they can steal a gun from!
Much of the chatter on news channels and the internet concerns the legal purchase of semi-automatic rifles such as the Bushmaster used by the Sandy Hook murderer. The Bushmaster is a copy of the AR15, which became the M16 and eventually the M4 in US military service, though obviously with no facility for fully-automatic fire in civilian hands. What do people actually need these rifles for? Well, many of them are used for target shooting, both formal and informal. Some, especially the more expensive varieties, are used for varmint shooting. Some are used for making holes in Coke cans. This will no doubt seem like overkill to many, though there’s no great philosophical difference between owning more gun than you need and owning a Ferrari in a land with speed limits. In any case, the actual power of an AR15’s bullet, usually expressed as kinetic energy in feet-pounds, is considerably lower than that of a bullet from the average hunting rifle. There are many types of semi-automatic hunting rifle, and for the first five shots they can be fired as fast as an AR15.
One suggestion is to limit the size of magazines allowed for semi-automatic rifles. This is the case in Canada and Australia, and was the case in the US (with enough exceptions to make it meaningless) from 1994 to 2004 under President Clinton’s Assault Weapons Ban. It is difficult to argue against a ban on high-capacity magazines, at least for rifles. Handguns are often bought for self-defence in the US, and there is some justification for not being forced into having to change magazines when the Congress, rather than your gun manufacturer, decides it’s necessary. You may be trying to stop a home invasion at the time. If someone is threatening you at a distance that needs a rifle, taking cover or leaving the area makes more sense. I reminded my wife of the time a couple of years when she shot an AR15 at a range in Canada. I asked her what she would have done had it been fitted with a 30-round magazine. Her answer was that she would have emptied the magazine and enjoyed every shot. I then asked her if she would trust herself to own an AR15 with a 30-round magazine. She said yes, but she still thought a 10-round limit was enough. It seems that most of us trust ourselves. It’s those other people we have trouble trusting.
Besides making gun buying a lengthier process for under-30s, and possibly limiting magazine sizes, another sensible course of action would be to mandate reasonably secure gun storage. Most (actually, all) responsible gun owners already comply with this, at least as far as is necessary to prevent those within their households who aren’t allowed to touch the guns from doing so. By its very nature, a home defence gun (usually either a handgun or pump-action shotgun) has to be close at hand with easy access. This certainly complicates matters, though for handguns it is possible to buy a small safe with a fingerprint recognition lock. Unless you have a pressing need to protect livestock from predators though, there’s no reason I can see to store a rifle anywhere other than in a gun safe.
I believe there are ways of allowing widespread gun ownership while still preserving public safety, as I hope at least some readers will agree. To truly cut down on untimely, unnecessary deaths, not only among children but the wider community, will take far more than gun laws though, and unfortunately will take action far beyond anything Congress is likely to consider anytime soon. Sandy Hook is not about drug laws, but fixing drug laws will save a huge number of lives as well as potentially leading to huge economic and social benefits. I would like to see the day when the murder and incarceration rates for young black men are the same as those for young white men. Sandy Hook is partly, but not wholly, about guns and since we do have a fairly clear idea of a perpetrator profile for mass killings it makes sense to target that demographic. Sandy Hook may also be about mental healthcare facilities, and fixing those will take a Congress with the sense to climb out of the ideological trenches and take on a huge lobby of vested interests.
May God bless and comfort the souls of those killed at Sandy Hook.
Note 1: Figures courtesy of www.childtrendsdatabank.org
Note 2: CDC figures from 2001, www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5337a2.htm
Note 3: Office of National Statistics figures from 2010, www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/subnational-health4/alcohol-related-deaths-in-the-united-kingdom/2010/stb-alcohol-related-deaths.html
Note 4: Neon Tommy blog, at www.neontommy.com/news/2012/07/doing-math-guns