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We Love And Fear Guns
How are American states, the laboratories of democracy, currently handling the issue of firearms? Let's look at two of them. First up, California:
Responding to a movement that promotes the brash public display of firearms, state lawmakers on Tuesday moved forward legislation that would outlaw the open carrying of unloaded handguns in public places. Four previous attempts in the Legislature to prohibit the practice have failed over the last seven years, but the proposal has taken on a heightened profile this year in the wake of organized efforts to encourage others to show up at rallies and meet up at restaurants while carrying guns in visible holsters.
Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt says he will not challenge a new law that allows the blind and disabled to carry concealed guns…. The new law also drops the requirement that applicants for license renewal hit at least 18 of 25 targets while shooting from three to 10 yards. The test remains for first-time applicants, although a legislator said that is the next gun curb to be dropped.
But is there any middle ground? Maybe in Texas, where blind residents are forced to carry unloaded weaponry in public under penalty of law. Anyway, wow. Guns.
Photo by kcdsTM, from Flickr.
A long time ago, I did a series of reports in CA about gun ownership and kids. As part of the series, interviewed a bunch of well-meaning, normal families who all owned guns. Some of them had gun safes, some of them took their guns apart, and all of them hid their guns from their children.
And all of them had dead children.
(We also interviewed a lot of people from the NRA, who had no dead children and thought every family should have a gun in their home. Which is what the families who had the guns AND dead children also thought at one point. They changed their minds.)
A long time ago, I did a series of reports in CA about pool ownership and kids. As part of the series, interviewed a bunch of well-meaning, normal families who all had pools. Some of them had fences, some of them locked their patio doors, and all of them made sure their children never played near it unsupervised.
And all of them had dead children.
@NinetyNine I see what you did there :)
@NinetyNine it's funny, because I did the same thing about car ownership and kids. As part of the series, interviewed a bunch of well-meaning, normal families who all drove cars.
…
I could fill in the rest, but it's kind of redundant at this stage. But seriously: way, waaayyy, more kids die in car crashes than from firearms.
@NinetyNine A long time ago, I did a series of reports about the difference between a big hole in the ground full of water vs. weapons designed expressly to kill people from long and close range. And then I stopped making dumb false equivalences between swimming pools and firearms.
@flossy "Drowning is the sixth leading cause of unintentional injury death for people of all ages, and the second leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 14 years."
Your right — I shouldn't be so glib about firearm deaths when they are so marginal relative to drowning.
It's a cost/benefit thing, right? Costs in dead children are easily measured. Benefits (of cars, guns or pools) are harder to measure.
@NinetyNine This doesn't change the fact that the purpose of a swimming pool is to be a form of recreation, and the purpose of a gun is injure/destroy things. Pool safety is important. As is gun safety. As is staircase safety and automobile safety. How we pursue safety in all those different cases is going to be different, though. (The police militarism stuff below is persuasive, fwiw).
@NinetyNine So… because children die too often in swimming pools, guns aren't so bad? Indeed perhaps people should have more guns? I see! Maybe if we all pack heat we as a society will finally defeat the great blue chlorinated menace, killer of children aged 1-14.
@NinetyNine. That reminds me of a friend I had when growing up. I was about 8 or 9, and we would go to his house a lot to go swimming. Often there weren't parents around. One time his little brother decides he's gonna have a little fun and gets out their dad's pistol, starts playing the cowboy. I had the visceral instinct to run my ass out of there. I'm sure there was plenty of risk of drowning during the days I spent at that house, the hours I spent in that pool. But when that kid had that gun out, it only took seconds for him to put my life similarly at hazard. Real versus perceived risk aside, that's something I can't scrub from my memory.
@boyofdestiny Competitive shooting is a pretty popular sport. They even have it both Olympics.
@flossy You were the one accusing me of 'false equivalencies' — is your issue with guns conceptual or based on outcomes? If you are worried about the outcomes in the OP, then it's about minimizing accidental, preventable deaths. Since automobiles and ppols kill kids at a rate roughly 25x that of guns, even mentioning children in this particular conversation is really, mightily white of you.
A heavily militarized police force very negatively affects the lives of millions of black and brown Americans every year, but because 15 idiots don't know how to properly store a gun, I'm supposed to nod gravely and approve massive restrictions that give crazed cops carte blanche to extend 400 years of injustice? I'm not the one making false equivalencies.
Before I saw the comment above, I was going to say that I am very ambivalent about this. Because even as I know that cops overreact and violence begets violence, I gotta say, if all the people milling around Miami recently had holstered sidearms, I bet dimes to dollars the Miami PD would have tread a lot more carefully in that situation. Until there is a cultural and national policy of minimizing the use of firearms and force in policing, then I am pro concealed carry, open carry, all carry.
We all smirked in college about stories — true or not — of Black Panthers in Oakland literally following patrol cops with shotguns (fully legal!) in the 60s. I thought those stories were awesome (and since we are still shooting unarmed black men on the subway in Oakland, also relevant!) and don't seem much different here. I understand there are nasty implicit political implications about some of the people who support this, but maybe we just need to build a broader anti-police coalition.
@NinetyNine I respect your opinion. I never really thought about guns much growing up. All my guy friends hunted and rifles were very much a part of our culture, but handguns just weren't around our neighborhood.
When I was in news, I still didn't have much of an opinion. It's legal to have guns, just like it's legal to have an abortion (sort of). I really, really tried not to make judgement calls on those things because, as a news person, I didn't think MY opinion was relevant. Same with politics (cute, huh? It was 100 years ago).
I will tell you that interviewing the parents, looking at the photos of laughing kids, then looking at the death scene pics…then looking at an actual dead child at a funeral, really shook me. It just seemed like something that could have been prevented.
@NinetyNine Most police officers I know just assume that anyone they approach is carrying a gun — whether legal in their jurisdiction or not — so I'm not sure your logic applies in that particular instance.
@CatsInBags Oh, no, I assume they do. And that is very much part of the problem. But if there were 40 bystanders at that Miami clusterfuck that all had visible weapons, I really doubt 12 cops would have felt comfortable chasing down and beating people for their cell phones. Purely military logic. Cops always assume the worst of people, but that's often tied with the presumption they are the superior force.
Why cops should be trained to approach anyone believing they armed is completely illogical to me. Cops have a greater risk of killing themselves driving drunk (though in NY, they just tend to kill pedestrians), but they don't approach a glass of beer with the same hyper militarized stance, now do they?
@NinetyNine I share your concern, but my feeling is that a more armed citizenry would lead to even more heavily armed cops and even itchier trigger fingers on their part. Gotta shoot the bad guys before they shoot you, you know.
@CatsInBags, @SeanP : As someone who grew up with a lot of backwoods friends, I'll report that rural authorities were a heck of a lot more circumspect in their interactions with us than, say, city cops. Admittedly, that's certainly due in part to any number of other factors, but the default assumption out past the suburbs was always that anyone you ran into was: a. either armed or had easy access to a firearm, b. comfortable with using it, and most importantly c. was almost definitely not engaged in criminal activity just by virtue of being armed. In the city, having a firearm is an instant mark of suspicion for cops; out in the woods, it's not.
@NinetyNine The interesting thing about the Black Panthers is that Saint Reagan signed legislation when he was governor that prevented them from carrying guns openly. Interesting when you consider all the crazy-ass teabaggers that want to bring their guns to political rallies.
I think the handgun issue isn't actually about guns – I mean, we talk gun stats and gun anecdotes and about guns, but really, isn't this just the purest debate on "What is the fair role of government?" On one hand, there is zero real NEED for civilians to have handguns. They're not good for hunting, they are pretty much made for targetshooting and combat. They, if misused (intentionally or accidentally) can cause great damage.
But I feel like nobody's opinion comes from facts on whether or not pros outweigh cons. Isn't it really just a litmus test of where we feel on the issue of "If there is a thing which is in no way essential to life, but also not damaging unless misused, should it be outlawed?" It's not a question of handguns, it's a question of where we draw lines between "freedom/personal choice" and "safety/protection of society".
@Leon Saint-Jean If you extend this logic to 'patrol officers should not carry sidearms' I'm all with you. We have one of the most militarized police forces of any democracy, the highest incarceration rate, and more crime. So outlaw handguns, change sentence guidelines and give cops billy clubs. Now, which one of those three do you think you can very likely make happen?
@Leon Saint-Jean Hanguns are used by hunters all the time, I mean, just FYI. Also, I'm guessing you live in a city? Or at least a pretty well-settled suburb? I'm not trying to be shitty here; a lot of people just don't get that many people carry handguns because they live far away from other people and way out of range of the local police, and might actually have to defend themselves from an attacker (human or animal) when they're alone. Handguns are a lot more practical to tote around than long guns, and are more useful at close range
@Drew Habits Hunter here. And while I'm not necessarily against handgun ownership, I have to disagree with the assertion that "handguns are used by hunters all the time". They're absolutely useless for any kind of bird or duck hunting, and have very, very limited use in big game hunting – they can be used to take deer in certain circumstances, but 1) I wouldn't try any animal larger than a deer, and 2) pistols are typically only legal where rifle hunting is legal (which knocks out big sections of the US). I know a lot of hunters, I hunt myself, and I've only ever known one person who has EVER used a pistol to hunt.
And sure, a handgun can come in handy for self-defense, but most people are quite frankly not going to actually be able to hit anything with a pistol in a life-or-death situation.
So, yeah, handguns. I think people ought to be able to own them. But they're a lot less practical than you might think.
@SeanP @NinetyNine @Drew Habits – All reasonable points and I am grateful to have a place where the tone of a discussion about such a hot topic is so polite. I think the one thing I failed on in my post was making it seem like I was saying it was the RIGHT decision to limit personal freedom "for the good of society" – I just think that the debate is ABOUT that.
On guns themselves, I'm honestly not entirely sure where I come down – what I really am arguing for is that we need to evaluate how we feel about the roles of the state & individual and their interplay FIRST in order to give us a more clear context in these debates. When I say "a handgun is not needed" I mean "In a perfect world" – I know that this perfect world is not what we have, and debating what the government and what the individual is responsible for correcting / coping with in this imperfect world is a debate I'm more interested in than guns themself (though they make an excellent test case as an extension of our theoretical principals).
@SeanP : Agreed. Only time I've ever even heard of a handgun being used to shoot a deer was when the animal had already been hit by a car and had to be put down. Carrying a handgun in the woods is more or less explicitly for self-defense, and mostly because toting around long arms outside of hunting season tends to set any interactions with game wardens or local authorities off on the wrong foot, to say the least.
@SeanP All the hunters I know carry them in case they have to finish off a wounded animal with a less-expensive round. I'll grant that that's a small sample size! I didn't mean to imply that they were anybody's primary beast-slaying dealio, sorry if that's how it came across
PS Hundreds of thousands of kids have bagged millions upon millions of ducks with handguns since 1984, I am JUST SAYIN'. And every single one of them has tried, at some point, to shoot that fucking dog
@SeanP I'm not sure that's necessarily relevant. Pretty much any firearm other than a shotgun is useless for hunting birds.
I was pretty anti-gun ownership until a friend of mine went to post-Katrina NoLa to work at a public defender's office. The thing is, nobody "needs" guns until there is a disaster and the cops aren't doing their job any more – and nobody can predict when that might happen, or prevent it universally.
What is this, hot-button issue week on The Awl? First the false rape accusation, now guns?
@Ham_Snadwich I don't have an opinion on handgun ownership. They do seem useful in my quest to eliminate humans and nature, but how do we feel about LOL (laughing out loud or lots of love)?