We’ve made a mess of our right to own guns.
Most American states — excluding ours — now allow residents to carry concealed weapons in public without a permit.
Thirty-eight states — including ours — also have “stand your ground” laws that no longer impose a legal “duty to retreat” from danger in public spaces.
This month our Legislature banned sales of assault weapons, the 10th to do so. Florida meanwhile became the 26th state to jettison licensing and training requirements for gun owners and allowed permitless, concealed public carry of weapons.
“Floridians across the state are going to be less safe because of this bill,” protested gun reform advocate Samantha Barrios. “Fistfights will now turn into gunfights.”
She’s on to something.
Most gun owners obviously are responsible, law-abiding citizens. Yet a growing minority escalate momentary emotion into murder. Disputes once settled by fisticuffs are so often adjudicated by gunfire that it’s become normalized. Reports of shooters shooting first — rather than as a last resort — while claiming they were frightened by their victims are commonplace. It’s become socially unsupportable. Intolerable.
But it’s what we do here. Six-year-olds shoot their teachers, white 84-year-olds shoot black teens mistakenly knocking on the wrong door. Already in 2023 we’ve had 160 mass shootings (four or more victims).
Yet I’m guessing that Americans hop out of the womb no more innately murderous than any other human beings born on this planet. But something happens to Americans that turns many more of us into killers than people living in other “civilized” societies.
I think that’s because it’s so easy for us to become impulse-driven killers.
Most Americans — 190.5 million — live in states that still require permits for guns; 142.7 million live in states that do not, according to The Trace, which tracks federal firearms policy.
Paradoxically, the more Americans are shot to death, the more lenient our gun laws become. Eleven states or cities have relaxed gun ownership restrictions since 2021. We’re rapidly discarding sensible gun regulation.
Frightening
Why? The answer’s inescapable: Americans are frightened of one another.
That’s clearly an unpromising foundation for self-rule. Why the world’s leading democracy produces so many frightened people is less clear.
The National Rifle Association and its allies claim that requiring gun permits means we’re being deprived of our constitutional rights to defend ourselves. The NRA holds such sway over Congress that it prevented the Centers for Disease Control from collecting, as a legitimate matter of public health and safety, shooting data that might support stronger gun regulation.
The NRA now has the ear of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Last year, in the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association vs. Bruen opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court discovered, heretofore hidden in the Second Amendment, a constitutional right to carry a weapon for self-defense in public — and thus to fire it if frightened by someone while “standing your ground” in a public space, not just in your home.
The court in this murky ruling seems to be telling judges not to consider gun safety regulation goals when adjudicating permit requirement cases. If so, government efforts to reduce gun violence become legally irrelevant, trumped by a permitless right to own guns.
“We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officials some special need,” Thomas wrote in defense of this landmark ruling.
This is public good?
If Thomas is right, it’s not the first time the Constitution has been proven tragically wrong about what constitutes a public good. (Slavery, lack of voting rights for blacks and women spring to mind.)
Proponents of permitless carry argue that the more people carry guns, the less crime there will be.
Surely this court is not asking us to believe that an unlicensed, armed populace enabled to indulge in impulse shooting in the public commons constitutes a public good? Hello?
RAND Corporation and Oxford University researchers (the latter publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association), decrying the lack of comprehensive data, concluded that “stand your ground” and permitless carry somewhat raised homicide rates and showed negligible correlation to decreased crime.
Congress showed it wasn’t serious about preventing gun atrocities after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School bloodbath that killed 26, mostly small children. Demonstrably, Congress and the Supreme Court are more concerned with the welfare of the NRA and gun makers than that of the rest of the citizenry.
We’ve raised a generation of schoolchildren required to endure active shooter drills. Every day, they’ve gone to school knowing that they might at any moment be murdered in their classrooms.
How this formative experience will manifest itself at the voting booth remains to be seen. Will they be content with a Congress and court that also forces their own children to endure it?
Some surely will be. Perhaps Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noam’s 2-year-old grand-daughter, for instance. Speaking this month at an NRA confab in Illinois, Noam said her grandchildren are well supplied with firearms.
“Now Addison, who — you know — soon will need them. I want to assure you, she already has a shotgun and she already has a rifle.”
Noam didn’t say whether that rifle is Wee Tactical manufacturers’ JR-15, an actual assault rifle downsized for kids. Wee Tactical markets its kiddie assault weapon as “tamper-resistant” — not tamper-proof. It’s offered under a banner trumpeting “AMERICAN FAMILY VALUES.”
Solveig Torvik lives near Winthrop.
