Liberty or Death, or, On Regulating Firearm Safety

I grew up in a house full of guns.  As soon as I could walk, my dad started teaching me how to use them, and when I was about five, he bought me my first firearm.  My "Chipmunk" was a .22 caliber rifle much like the one that a 5 year old boy in Kentucky killed his 2 year old sister with in early May.  I was more fortunate because my dad was a responsible gun-owner who rigorously maintained (and maintains) impeccable standards of gun safety.  He also cultivated them in his three children, of which I am the eldest.

Somewhat to my chagrin today, I sold all of my guns just before leaving home.  I did so for the silly reason of proving I disliked my dad’s politics, not because I didn’t enjoy using them.  Even though I haven’t owned a gun since I left home and even though my position on gun-safety regulation is far afield from my dad's, I can respect the habits he instilled in me.  

Likewise, my appreciation for guns isn’t diminished by the almost weekly events in which a child or adult is killed or injured by accidental gunfire, often at the hands of a family member.  I don’t think the guns themselves are to blame in such tragedies.  In fact, I’m almost tempted to say that they aren’t tragedies.  In a certain sense, the problem isn’t guns, it’s the colossal stupidity we indulge in, all of us, on the left and the right, by failing to regulate firearm safety.

At the moment, regulation, even such commonplace regulation as what we have for cars, alcohol, or anything else that’s potentially dangerous, is categorically impossible because we are incapable of having so much as an adult conversation on the topic.  As a society, we are forced to a childish level of discussion about firearm safety, in part because many on the left can’t conceive that firearms can be safely and responsibly handled and owned, but mostly because many more on the rights simply refuse to engage in any discussion about regulation.

Our collective intelligence is so lacking that we prefer to treat as normal the careless slaughters like the one in Kentucky in May.  Legal gun-owners should have some measure of responsibility for the guns the rest of us have trusted them to possess.  Rather, because we’re afraid to have an adult conversation, family members of those Kentucky siblings got airtime for the nonsensical assertion that such events are, “ something you can’t prepare for."

Nothing so horrible happened in my home because of the meticulous responsibility my father took in the handling and storage of his guns.  So I can understand why he doesn't see a need to be further regulated for the purpose of gun-safety.

What I can't understand is why people like my father, who reject any and all notions of gun-safety regulation, are comfortable sharing the world with people who are unwilling or unable to practice gun-safety by the same rigorous standards.

And I don't know why anyone on the right or the left would believe that responsible safety standards will be rigorously followed without regulatory accountability.

The fact of the matter is that all of us, those on the left who want to regulate gun-safety and those on the right who don't want regulation that would make responsible gun-owners feel punished, have shared interests in gun safety.  At a minimum, most everyone agrees that some people shouldn’t have guns, and that those who do should handle and store them safely.  Right now, because we can’t be adult enough to take the issue seriously, well-meaning people on both the left and the right are giving free and easy gun access to people who cannot or will not handle them safely and responsibly.  

Because my father and I can't find common ground about what safe, accountable regulation looks like, unregulated access puts guns in the hands of people neither of us would approve of having them.

It's easy to say that the problem is the NRA's lobbying, including its deliberate misrepresentation last April of a bipartisan amendment in the Senate that would have made background checks mandatory for nearly all gun purchases.  The NRA is, after all, the single most successful lobbying group in the history of lobbying.  But that's too simple an answer.

The bigger problem is that so many of the NRA's members, people like my father, will believe anything the NRA says, despite all the facts to the contrary.  What do responsible gun-owners, deliberate killers and the merely negligent have in common right now?  They all say and do exactly what the NRA says and does.

The specific deceit of the NRA's campaign against the April Senate bill is important.  As the President correctly stated, the NRA lied to the American people by saying that it would create a national registry of gun-owners.  The fact is that a bipartisan amendment to the bill specifically precluded the formation of a national registry.  But NRA members’ fears about a national registry are more important to me than the fact that the NRA mislead them.  So what is it that so many gun owners are afraid of?

Many American gun-owners are afraid of a national gun registry because it could be used to keep a "well-armed populace" from resisting oppression from our own government.  This too-quoted refrain from the Second Amendment made sense when it was written after the Revolutionary War, and is still key to the ethos of many gun-owners.  So a point that left must be capable of acknowledging is that people's commitment to having the capacity to resist the government is a generally reasonable impulse.

Unfortunately, it's a generally reasonable impulse that currently gives cover to mass murderers, in addition to those who kill indiscriminately in the drug wars.  The NRA exploited a fear of a national registry to get constituents to pressure senators to vote against a measure that would have prevented a national registry (go figure) while having as its objective tighter regulation of who can get guns in the first place.  James Holmes would not have shot 70 people and killed 12 in Aurora, Colorado last summer if he, the known-to-be-unstable individual he is, had not been able to legally and easily build his arsenal.

Nearly everyone agrees that he shouldn't have been able to get that arsenal.  So that piece is almost easy.  Just make sure every gun-acquiring transaction is regulated with a background check.  No exceptions.

But it's not easy because if everyone seeking gun-ownership has to go through a federally administered background check, there will by default be a list of everyone who has had that background check.  This is the point that the NRA manipulates.  As the logic goes, if you’re subjected to a background check, you’re on a list, and you shouldn’t have to be on a list.  It doesn’t matter that the Senate bill specifically precluded a national registry of gun-owners.  All the NRA had to do is manipulate gun-owners fears and then enlist their help threatening legislators.

The objection to a registry should be a straw-man, though, to anyone paying attention, for at least two reasons:

First, a federally mandated requirement for background checks could easily be administered by state or local authorities.  This is, in fact, what already happens, to the extent that some local authorities require background checks.  Federally mandated standards for such checks might differ from those some localities already have in place, assuming sane legislation were enacted, but their administration could still be a local matter and the records could be kept and/or destroyed by local authorities.

Second, and more importantly, the federal government has very likely already built such a list.  The disclosures about domestic surveillance in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks earlier this year have made it clear, if there ever was a doubt, that spy agencies like the NSA do every single thing they can legally do and usually much more beyond those legal limits.  The NRA itself has, in an unprecedented move, joined ranks with the ACLU over concerns that the Patriot Act has been used to create just such a national, albeit clandestine registry.  An NBC news report describes how an FBI training manual “specifically highlight[s]” firearms sales records as objects for collection under the Patriot Act, despite the fact that “other federal laws require the destruction of records of gun purchases.”  In short, assuming that this capacity within the Patriot Act has been put to use (a safe assumption if ever there was one), a national gun registry already exists, so opposing background checks serves no meaningful purpose.

At the end of the day, though, does my dad’s desire to not be on a list trump my desire to live with a modicum of safety?

No, it does not.  Not if we’re civilized, and not if we care about saving lives and having a nation in which massacres like Aurora and Sandy Hook aren’t so passe that they go unnoticed.  Right now, that’s where we’re headed.

Reasonable people on the left and the right need to start doing the sense-making. Sense-making about firearm safety will lead to legislation.  Background checks are a good starting point.  Another obvious step should be legal penalties for negligence that leads to senseless, utterly avoidable deaths like the killing of two year old Caroline Sparks by her five year old brother in Kentucky last May.  Individuals who legally acquire guns and fail to safeguard them should bear the responsibility for what happens with them.  In my view, sane regulation would have at least one of the Sparks parents incarcerated.

In order to get to sane regulation, everyone will likely have to accept some things that they might not like.  Some people will be uncomfortable because they are afraid of guns and will have to live on the same blocks as people who have them.  On the other hand, some gun-owners will be uncomfortable because in order to legally have guns and live on my block, they'll have to have gotten those guns after somebody in state or local government took the time to make sure they were capable of and willing to take adequate responsibility for them.

The left is going to have to accept that it’s okay for some people, like my father (and maybe me), to have guns.  The right is going to have to accept that regulated responsibility and accountability should be the conditions for legal gun ownership.  It’s time for reasonable people on both sides of the issue to stop dismissing each other, to start acting like adults and do the things that can give all of us a reasonable expectation of firearm safety in the world we share.