What to Do

In discussions about gun violence on news sites and gun control blogs, I’m often asked what my solution to the problem is.

The incident at Newtown, Connecticut brings particular poignancy to this question.

First, let’s put this problem into perspective. The current U.S. population is somewhat over 318,000,000, according to the Census. Adding in non-resident visitors and uncounted aliens and rounding for ease of calculation, I’m calling it 320,000,000. Of that number, roughly 30,000 die per annum from gunshot, of which deaths two-thirds are suicides. That works out to 4.7 / 100,000, a rate that we hadn’t seen since the early 1960s.

The chart here shows data from 1976 on.

This means that your chances of dying by gunfire in America in raw numbers are one in about 10,600. If you don’t shoot yourself, your chances improve to one in 32,000. The numbers vary from city to city, but in our centers of population, murder victims tend in large percentages to be people with criminal records themselves, so if you’re not a criminal, your odds get even better.

But certainly, 30,000 is too many. The answer to this problem in the eyes of some is gun control, but as regular readers know, that is something that I regard as a violation of the rights of good people. Is there another answer?

Submitted for your consideration are my suggestions for reducing violence of all types, including firearms violence, in this country:

1. End the War on Drugs.

We’ve had a number of efforts at prohibition of substances, going all the way back to attempts at drying up the nation in the nineteenth century, but our current efforts at banning classes of entertaining drugs other than tobacco and alcohol got going for serious in the 1970s. In the forty years since, we’ve wasted a trillion dollars, and half of all federal prisoners are in for drug crimes.

As we saw in the 1920s during the Prohibition of alcohol, we are seeing again: Banning a substance only encourages criminal smuggling, gang warfare, collateral damage, and the ruining of lives of many who merely possess the forbidden fruit. Addiction should be treated as an illness, not a crime, and all recreational substances should be regulated in the manner that our two legal drugs, tobacco and alcohol, are. All who were convicted for mere possession should be immediately released and pardoned to remove the stigma of a criminal record.

2. Incarcerate violent offenders for longer terms.

Once drugs cease to be a criminal matter, we will solve the problem of overcrowded prisons. This will create room for violent offenders. Criminals who use a firearm in the commission of a crime can have extra time added to their sentences.

3. Improve schools.

As a teacher, I’ve gone on at length here about education reform. To sum up, we need to spend more money to pay teachers what they’re worth, to reduce class sizes, to repair and upgrade facilities, and to offer a wider selection of classes. The goal here is to provide all students with a chance to succeed. It seems obvious, but the more educated a population is, the less crime that population commits.

4. Improve access to mental health services–with the caveat that privacy must be protected.

In these incidents of mass shootings, some shooters are seeking revenge against those whom they perceive as having wronged them, but the typical case is a young, white, male, loner with mental health problems. Unfortunately, such individuals don’t often see themselves as needing treatment. I suspect that part of their reluctance involves a fear of being reported, so making privacy a guarantee is important. Of course, young men who head down the road to becoming a mass shooter reach a point of no return. That leads me to the next two points.

5. Stop making these shooters stars.

As author and space scientist, David Brin, argues, we should treat these mass shooters in the same manner as the Ephesians wished to treat the arsonist who burned down the Temple of Artemis. His name was to be erased and never recalled again. This, of course, will require the voluntary cooperation of news organizations, since we cannot do right by violating rights. But as long as America has a love affair with wacko killers, those nutcases will have motivation.

6. Address bullying.

Here in America, the intellectual loner is not a popular type. But a core value of our nation is that we all should be free to express our own individuality. That is one of the key messages that should be taught until the concept is absorbed. We can be ourselves without demeaning others. At the least, it should be clear that attacking others will not be tolerated.

But there’s more. We’ve created a culture in schools where someone who acts in self-defense is treated the same way as the person who started the fight. One solution to this is to teach martial arts–Krav Maga, for example, since it’s free of the religious overtones of Eastern systems–and make it clear that human beings, even students, have the right to stop physical violence used against them.

These are my answers to the problem, realistically assessed, of violence in our society. We will not eliminate all of it. Violence is in human nature, and Americans are more violent as a culture than other societies, but we can go a long way along reducing it. And we can do so without violating our rights.

Rights Are Rights

Recently, I watched the Ken Burns documentary, Prohibition. It was typical for Burns’s work, quotations from ordinary people about their lives, talking heads one after another to tell us what it’s all about, and a heavy dose of earnestness. But one thing stood out for me–namely, the link between the prohibition of alcohol and the women’s suffrage movement.

Now, I’d known about that before, but in thinking about it while watching the film, I was struck by how the push for recognizing one type of right

was tied to the denial of another.

In fact, votes for women were delayed in part because women’s suffrage and temperance leagues were so closely related.

But that wasn’t the only questionable link. The Ku Klux Klan also supported votes for women, given their common interest in banning alcohol.

But why should that matter? Unsavory characters sometimes endorse good candidates and good ideas, and politics is the mother of strange bedfellows, as the saying goes. The problem, though, is the expansion of one kind of freedom at the expense of another.

Pay attention to that last sentence. By no means am I saying that women should be denied the right to vote. It is the right of all citizens to participate in the running of their country. At the same time, there is a basic dissonance in demanding your own rights be recognized while seeking to deny rights to others.

Is drinking alcohol a right? I’ve discussed the subject of rights many times before. Regular readers will have seen my discussion of gun rights in particular. But on what basis can we ground a given right?

The old answer was that God gives us our rights, though that answer no longer satisfies the modern world. A more recent model is that society grants us rights by consensus, but this is especially insufficient, since whatever society decides to give, society can also take away, as the twentieth century reminded us all too often.

My solution to this question is to say that rights are an expression of our power to choose. As an individual, I am able to make decisions for myself. I can act autonomously. As long as I am not harming innocent others, I must be free to do as I wish, and the same goes for you, Dear Reader. This is why many things ought not to be subject to a vote. We have no business directing the private choices of others, and we must employ the lightest of touches when guiding actions in public.

An example of how this is forgotten is found in Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund and frequent author on The Huffington Post. She advocates for protection and aid of children, and in that, she has a noble cause. When she ventures into pushing gun control, however, she commits the same error that the suffragists did a century ago in wanting to curtail some rights to support others.

Better it is to seek to do good unmixed than to mingle good with evil. We do not defend one right by violating another. We do not breathe life into one right by strangling a different right. And when we permit one right to be denied, we deny them all.

Enough seriousness. Lift a glass, and celebrate freedom.