I’ve been following the gun debate in several newspapers and magazines and trying to make sense of it. Among the articles I read, I found these:
“Threatened by long-term declining participation in shooting sports, the firearms industry has poured millions of dollars into a broad campaigns to ensure its future by getting guns into the hands of more, and younger children.” The New York Times
“If the [gun] industry is to survive, gun enthusiasts must embrace all youth shooting activities, including ones ‘using semiautomatic firearms with magazines holding 30 – 100 rounds.’” Andy Fink, Editor, Junior Shooters Magazine
I’m getting a clearer idea of what’s happening to our country with regard to guns. I can’t say knowing more makes me feel better. Perhaps even more than guns, I find the mind-set of gun advocacy the most troubling. Paid advocate for the gun lobby, Dave Grossman, predicts, “Americans must accommodate to a future of armed people everywhere.” He means that we must be armed to be safe.
The more I read the more depressed I felt.
“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” is the gun lobby’s present mantra. What’s obscured by the slogan, however, is what happens when all the good guys are armed. We will have at least twice the number of guns out there and exactly who is or who is not the good guy will never be finally determined except over someone’s dead body, and even then we won’t be sure. One college student recently shot another student six times in a street scuffle in Philadelphia. Neither were bad guys. Good kids, good upbringing, as they say. A good guy suddenly became a bad guy because he was carrying a concealed weapon. When the police arrived the student said, ”I have a permit.”
The boy who was shot said, “Please don’t let me die.”
The good guy formula muddles the deeper issue. More guns lead to increased gun violence. “More American civilians have died by gunfire in the past decade than . . . killed in combat in the Second World War.” [The New Yorker]
What’s bankrolling the proliferation of firearms is an arms industry that needs to increase its sales or go under. What troubles me most is how, insidiously, in recent years, in order to insure its survival, the arms industry, working with the NRA has initiated a marketing campaign that effectively defines gun ownership as the signature guarantor of personal safety.
Large multimillion-dollar corporations and their advocates determining social policy is a frightening prospect. Increasing profits will be their primary motive, not society’s well being.
Product sales increase when people are taught to be afraid if they don’t buy. By creating a catastrophic mentality (armed people everywhere) populations can be moved to behave primarily out of fear. We see this fear mongering attempted regularly in political debates.
Author and gun advocate, Dave Grossman, describes society as populated by sheep, wolves, and sheep dogs. “If you want to be a sheep, you can be a sheep and that’s okay… but you must understand the price you pay. When the wolf comes, you and your loved ones are going to die if there is no sheepdog there to protect you.” This is a view of a society dependent on a heavily armed citizenry to settle grievances, an ideology that reveals a thinly disguised contempt for our country’s average citizen and our law enforcement systems. What’s most disturbing is how promoting gun ownership as a personal security measure foments an atmosphere of fear and suspicion of one other, the kind of atmosphere that foments the optimum conditions for their use in settling personal grievances.
Recourse to violence is invariably the failure of imagination. When I consider the formidable powers of American ingenuity (and we are a remarkable people in that regard) I know we can do better. To start the process, letters to our legislators make a good first step.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
Stephan Sonn says
It is so easy to treat this essay as a good vs evil. Manipulating into mob thinking is in fact an evil pursuit.
Organized religion has to speak to the details as a matter of mission. As is done here in this commentary.
MARY WOOD says
And it is getting worse. Flag today outside Gino’s at half mast. How can Mr.Smith & Wesson sleep at night?
Colleen Sundstrom says
This is one of the most coherent articles I’ve read about the need for gun control. I had a permit to carry a rifle or shotgun when I was 12, after taking a gun safety course sponsored by the local American Legion Post. The purpose was to train us to safely use guns when hunting. We didn’t then, nor do my family members now, use automatic weapons to hunt pheasants or deer. Assault weapons have only one purpose, killing other human beings. Our children don’t need to be taught how to do that.
Matthew Daley says
Alas, Dr. Merrill’s fundamental premises are substantially in error. Yes, the number of guns in our society has been increasing, although the rate has fluctuated over time over time for various reasons. Despite this increase in the number of guns, gun violence has gone done dramatically since the late 19980s/early 1990s, by about half actually. It continued to go down after the ban on private citizens buying “assault weapons” expired a dozen years ago. The reasons for decline in gun violence are many and complicated, but seem to have little to with more gun laws and much to do with the social consequences of Roe v. Wade. Without getting into the structure of the firearms industry or what motivates people to buy guns (where I again think Dr. Merrill is off base), let me suggest that effective solutions will be the outgrow of data based analysis and serious dialogue. Then write the legislators with ideas that hopefully make a difference and have a chance at passage.
Gren Whitman says
Describing the 33,600 gun-related deaths in 2015 (suicides, homicides, accidents) as “gun violence go[ing] down dramatically” is an attempt at dis-information.
My suggestions to reduce gun-related violence?
(1) Enforce the militia-referenced requirement in the Second Amendment and remove military-purpose weaponry from civilian ownership.
(2) Institute nation-wide background check on every gun sale/purchase.
(3) Restore funding to the CDC to conduct research into gun-related violence and the means to reduce it (much like the research and subsequent actions to reduce highway fatalities).
(4) Ensure that police departments emphasize and re-emphasize the “Use-of-Force Continuum,” counterpart to the military’s rules of engagement.
(5) Put a limit on ammunition sales and ID the buyer (like buying Sudafed).
(6) License each gun owner to assure competence and accountability.
Barbara Chase says
Thanks to this article, hopefully many of the American people will soon realize why the NRA has switched its original reason for being to promoting fear among the citizens so they will buy more guns – and weapons of war – in order to keep the gun manufacturing businesses solvent. One of the ways we can counteract the gun violence epidemic is to be sure to vote in November to cleanse our Congress of those politicians who are beholden to the NRA for VERY substantial amounts of money to perpetuate this fear. Perhaps the NRA might be better served to reverse their present course and thus better protect their gun owners’ second amendment rights and, as a result, every American citizens’ rights to life.
James Nick says
Every day on average, 55 people kill themselves with a firearm, and 46 people are shot or killed in an accident with a gun. A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used to kill or injure in a domestic homicide, suicide, or unintentional shooting than to be used in self-defense. The attorney for the police officer that murdered Philando Castile, who was legally carrying a concealed weapon, has stated his client acted because of the presence of the gun; not because Mr Castile was black. So much for gun ownership being the signature guarantor of personal safety.
The Dallas sniper opened fire on armed and trained police. A number of people in the Black Lives Matter march were openly carrying weapons. There was a report that at least one of these open-carry individuals had enough situational awareness to realize that it would have been a fatal mistake to be seen carrying a weapon in that circumstance and handed over his gun to the police. So much for an armed citizenry deterring bad guys with guns from killing good guys with guns.
Steve Payne says
The Dallas police chief said all the open carry people on the scene were a big problem
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/11/485559307/listen-on-guns-dallas-police-chief-tells-legislators-do-your-job