In my ruminations on gun-control I tend to scan the history of the subject quite a lot more than the present. One reason for this is that I don't own a gun and I'm not very afraid of dying by one. One day I would like to hunt boar or deer and I would consider owning one for protection if I had much to protect in the way of family and property and lived far from any police patrols or in the ghetto. It is comforting to have the option to own a gun, but I'm not one of those types that is prepared for a civil conflict and arming himself. One reason for this is that, if such a conflict were to occur in the near future, I have no doubt some group would have extras lying around and recruit me. If it comes down to just me and my arsenal surrounded by nefarious foes then I won't have a chance anyhow.
So much for the turbulent possibilities of the future, what about the threat of being shot tomorrow? The possibility seems slim, remote enough to not disturb my peace of mind. If I am shot I imagine it would be because the police got the wrong house or otherwise made some error in the line of duty, this being an subject I will touch later. The other source of danger is gang-drug violence and I lived in Syracuse long enough to know how to avoid that threat, or a crazed gunman. I estimate a low statistical probability of my being shot tomorrow and so I am relatively disinterested on the topic.
Not everyone has that luxury. The noble rhetoric of gun-control is based on protecting the people that do live in fear of gun violence: inhabitants of the ghetto and I suppose anyone who goes to a school, mall, ect. The former deserve consideration, the latter I am going to dismiss as an aberration that is unlikely enough at present to ignore. We have to find a way to halt the trend, of course, but the solution is unknown and the issues involved are basically opaque due to the taboo of the subject. The violence of the ghetto is on a vast scale compared to the random shooters and I think gun-control advocates are correct to hammer on it.
Does that mean we should have "gun-free zones" and more aggressive policing? If those tactics were effective, perhaps. The problem with the "zone" is that gun stores are all over and so they just seep in from outside. The only way to stop that flow is through aggressive policing, which I also reject as inefectual. Worse, a police-state vibe in the ghetto increases the societal isolation, the humiliation of poverty, the eroding of civil liberties, and makes the cop's job impossible in the end. They can only do their job effectively if they are able to gather information from community members and at present there is a code of silence. The situation is getting worse by the day and bad-feelings are understandable on all sides of the untenable position.
Luckily, we can begin to heal that wound immediately by decriminalizing drugs. In a post-prohibition world the police are only there to respond to community requests for assistance and thus the community will naturally assist those who attempt to assist them. It won't happen overnight and gun-laws still would provide a rational for the poisonous stop-and-frisk style policing, but a majority of the tension would be released. With the easing of the rampant imprisonment families might be able to gather steam once more, making the presence of guns in the community no more of a big deal than they are in any suburb. Having armed citizens makes a cops job easier in a functioning community since it entails a much greater risk to criminal activity.
This does not, however, resolve the issue of gun-control. It is called a "wedge-issue" because personal opinions on guns vary so drastically as we would expect in a diversified population. For anti-gun people it is exacerbated by the sweeping rhetoric of the "gun-nuts" who want fewer and fewer restrictions on constitutional grounds while completely disregarding the legitimate concerns of the urban dwellers who are the ones suffering from violence. Both political parties make avid use of this split for cynical political reasons. Their problem is not that they disagree on so much, but that they have to find ways to brand themselves as different from their opponents. A hot-button issue like guns is the perfect tool to distract from the issues the Big Boys really care about.
We should not think that the anti-gun camp has no concern for safety and are completely bent on nothing more than disarming the population in order to oppress them. This might be on the long-term agenda, but i think that it is recognized that it's not very realistic to expect 'Mericans to give up their weapons any time soon. Hunting and gun-ownership is rife among the elite as well as the hick. I imagine that the same racism that allows liberals to accept the existence of ghettos also allows them to accept a status-quo of certain populations being allowed arms and others denied them. Indeed, considering the war on drugs, there is much more incentive to disarm the city than the country. What the gun lovers fear is exactly what happened to the Black Panther movement and other "gangs," more or less notorious. With this in mind we may determine that the agenda has already met with it's success and the further restrictions on guns are just "mopping-up." They can consolidate the success of the war on drugs in destroying Black nationalism by merely restricting ammo and marking the guns so that illegal dealers pay the price for inner-city crime.
Onto the wider goals of gun-control we leave the inner-city behind and are faced with an armed rural/suburban population that is often quite hostile to the government. Would it not naturally proceed to the stage of disarming them and hence eradicating the chance of physical resistance? I must confess that if I were a politician I would find it a lot easier to apply my agenda, for good or ill, if I was capable of using force. Although I don't doubt that fantasies of similar types do crop-up in the minds and even conversations of the liberal elite, I don't believe that it is on the top of their to-do list. For one thing, the wedge-issue is useful and there's no point in taking it away. For another, they already have the ability to use force against whomever they choose. In order for the armed populace to defend itself against an organized, efficient, trained, and superlatively armed government they would require a great deal of discipline and organization among themselves. If they had that discipline and organization they would be capable of not just defeating the powers that be physically, but also politically. Unless the police-state progresses quite a bit there would be no need to resort to violence to overthrow the government at all. It is our job to maintain this ability to effect relatively peaceful political change and not be distracted by the saber-rattling about seizing guns. If we fail the bloodshed could not be less than catastrophic and so armed rebellion should still be considered a last resort. At least we should realize that it is pointless to throw our lives away one at a time before an organized movement gains strength. What this movement is based upon remains to be seen, but I don't think that the 2nd amendment is a sufficient banner to rally around.
The true danger, the unspoken agenda, of gun-control is not that we will lose our guns: that is yet remote. The damage will first be done to the constitution itself and not just one amendment of it. By setting the precedent for legislature to interfere with the 2nd amendment they set a precedent for the entire constitution and what it means to have "rule of law." The second amendment should naturally be quite close to our hearts, at least in as much as it gives the right to self-defense. Without this right all the other rights do us no good. As defenseless beings we tacitly oblige the police to become our life-line and become dependent on them. This dependence and the precedent of ignoring the constitution are anathema to the system of government we have come to take for granted. This system of government can only exist when there is a balance; the government must protect us (or our property) for otherwise why should we want it? On the other hand, if we become entirely dependent on that protection we open ourselves up to manipulation by our defenders. This is why I see the 2nd amendment not as an anachronism, but as quite relevant for the future and the principles we live under.
We must retain responsibility for our actions and not allow any concept of pre-policing to enter into the public mind. The ban on drugs damages us in the same way by giving the cops responsibility for our well-being even if the drugs haven't done any damage yet. We will soon be inundated in a level of technology that makes deception itself nearly impossible. Facial-recognition technology has advanced rapidly and I challenge anyone to be able to look the computer in the lens and lie without detection. The very electronic devices we use (as well as any metal surface potentially) can detect our bio-electric signature and know exactly who we are. Quantum computers can read our texts with the level of understanding of an unintelligent police officer or they will soon enough. Obviously the only protection against this technology is, ironicaly, an ancient document written on hemp. Thus any policy that attacks the underlying principles of the document attacks the document itself. For this reason, though i may never own a gun, I am worried about the attacks on the 2nd amendment.
All that said, I believe it is time to rewrite that little paragraph so sacred to liberty. We cannot allow the reigning philosophy in the supreme court to continue to judge not based on the meaning of the text, rather on how it should be written. The court should not legislate even if the text of the constitution is dated, as I believe it is. Taken literally it means that I should have the ability to buy a mortar-launched nuke or a sarin-gas rocket. They are arms after all? But this is absurd, I seem to hear a detractor say, there is no way the founding fathers intended that! No, of course they didn't, they didn't even know that such weapons existed. They were smart though and they knew that weapons technology would continue to progress and so they made the document mutable through amendment. In modern times this has meant that the document is mutable through the interference of unelected judges, but we cannot afford to trust a few men when so much is on the line. We must insist on our constitutional rights to make our own constitutional amendments as well as to hold state constitutional conventions in our more dysfunctional states.
One naturally wonders what the founders would have thought if they were here today, or perhaps what their foresight assumed a rational populace would decide. Unfortunately, because of the political instability of the times, we will never be able to know that. All of the convention debates were held in secret and our sources for their political thinking are second-hand and maybe even disingenuous propaganda (recall how high the stakes were back then). These are valuable tools, but they are no substitute for the real opinions that came out in private session. Some of those opinions were anti-American, especially among the delegates of powerful states. My home state of New York is not called the Empire State for no reason; they were set-up to be a power unto themselves and only joined the Union to avoid being isolated and alone. It is likely that New York had plans for a conquering army rather than the innocuous "well-ordered militia." Would they have wanted their citizens armed? We cannot know.
It is serendipitous that we do not need to know and that the foundations of the document are based on trust in the future to make the right choices given a disinterested ruling class and a balance of power. Much was left unsaid that we take for granted as being in there somewhere because of early legal precedent. Yet legal precedent is not democratic and now divisions appear wherever one looks. These divisions seem insoluble as though our entire nation is splintering and losing cohesion. Fears are inevitable of all sorts of conspiracies and all the traditional ills of democracies are evident, faction and strife. Nevertheless, the declaration of independence is a conspiracy theory itself and the government was a craft designed to weather storms of even greater severity than those they faced. The key to it all is it's mutability under rule of law and democratic oversight.
Our vessel is cracked, but not broken. I have faith that even on our most divisive issues there is a common interest and a common ground. Although we see a massive reaction of horror to the Sandy Hooks and the Chicagos there are liberals who yet fear the government more. Transparency when tragedy occurs can alleviate much of the most bitter conflict between the bleeding-hearts and the conspiracy-theorists. On both sides of the issue we must demand a real investigation of all the shootings, not accepting that the case is closed before it's made. The paternalism of the state in regard to any violence gun-related should be abhorrent to the whole public on principle, recalling that when investigations are kept secret the state has a free hand in violence. The extreme emotional resistance, perhaps noble, of the gun-lovers to any infringement on their rights must be tempered by the admittance that we don't exactly know what those rights are. As it stands today, whenever there is an attack on gun-ownership it forecasts a further attack later and so is resisted to the full. A constitutional amendment in the clearest possible terms would necessarily limit the technological level of private weaponry, but it would also serve as a shield to all weapons rights that are specified. In this way we can move to an actual debate of what the reasonable limit of private arms (maybe even public arms too, but that's another one) and make the compromises necessary to any functioning democracy. It will be easier for both sides to compromise if the compromise can be permanent and not just another policy of another administration that could be reversed in four years.
No comments:
Post a Comment