Shorter Eugene Volokh

I’m sure it’s been done in the 280 comments his idiotic post has already attracted but one obvious response is to note that the mentally ill offspring of the teachers who you’ve armed could be the ones doing the killing with their gun. Anyway, given the current terms of the gun control “debate” it might be more enlightening to open an I/P thread.

Volokh: You probably wouldn’t much worry, for instance, that the guard would go crazy and himself start shooting — theoretically possible, to be sure, but unlikely.

Ok. The guard is George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin just came in the door to pick up his little brother’s homework. Now what?

I sometimes wonder if people like this even hear what they’re suggesting. Thanks to such gun-rights absolutism, the U.S. is saturated with firearms, and their solution is to turn every quiet little school in American into an armed citadel. They see this as a normal thing for a modern, civilized, country to do, and this is the kind of country they want to live in?

I didn’t bother reading past the first sentence: ” some rich foundation, worried about school shootings…”

They’d go through some modest training and subjected to basic background checks, and in exchange they’d be given the right to carry the same guns that the security guards would have had.

What an attractive proposition! What kindergarten teacher wouldn’t trade her time, effort, and privacy for the right to carry a gun and the associated risks of carrying a gun while surrounded by children?

In addition to the above comments, this scenario of armed vigilantes subduing mass killers would be laughable anywhere outside of a Hollywood screenwriters fantasy.
Its like that guy in Hot Fuzz, asking Simon Pegg if he ever “fired two guns whilst flying sideways through the air”, except it isn’t comedy, intentionally.

Police officers, combat veterans, will both be the first to say that when someone starts whooting the idea that an ordinary civilian- heck, even a highly trained officer- would be able to whirl around quick draw and kill the assailant is so absurd I despair that we even have to discuss it.
The almost certain scenario is that a couple of well meaning bystanders will fumble with their guns and shoot a dozen innocents in the chaos.

Having spent my younger days working night shift in a cheap motel, and knowing the sorts of people that actually get jobs as security guards, dear Cthulhu below, armed security guards are a bad, bad, bad idea.

Why not train kindergarten kids to fire glocks? I will create new markets, isn’t that the most important thing?

The last thing children need is the nanny state taking away their glocks.

But it occurs to me that the previous sentence has almost certainly already been written by someone who is not being sarcastic.

@10, 8, 6: This is why this is pure trolling: the point is that if you hypocritical liberals think teachers are so great, why don’t you trust them to carry guns, huh?

A Thought Experiment: Imagine that there were a load of guns in your child’s classroom. Awesome, right? Who’d say no to that? OK, now imagine that there were 25% more guns. Even better, right? Still with me? Of course you are. OK, now imagine that

The almost certain scenario is that a couple of well meaning bystanders will fumble with their guns and shoot a dozen innocents in the chaos.

No deity worth its salt can’t coerce its followers into engaging in human sacrifice. Not Moloch. Not the free market. Not guns.

The Second Amendment as presently considered does precisely what the First Amendment is supposed to prevent – establish a state religion.

This comment on Volokh’s post seems to pretty comprehensively address step one of the thought experiment: http://www.volokh.com/2012/12/14/a-thought-experiment-related-to-school-shootings/#comment-736896199

Meredith – how else do you expect the administrators and trustees to enforce student compliance with their wishes? By means of persuasive language?

It’s amazing the libertarians will not give up their devotion to a make-believe world in which everything is modeled by a perfectly competitive market and any public policy (say, gun control) just undermines the efficient operation of that market. More Guns Less Crime and all that.

Wait a goddamn minute.

For the last… actually for the entire time that I’ve been alive and politically aware, all of my pro-RKBA/2A friends have been telling me, constantly, that Responsible Gun Owners™ (who are, they assure me, the vast majority of gun owners) can be counted on to do one thing above all others: keep the damn guns in a locked safe when there are kids around.

So now, I take it, that story is “no longer operative” as they say, and the goalposts have been swiftly moved to “let kindergarten teachers” concealed-carry?

If they gave awards for sheer chutzpah in the defense of the indefensible, this would get the lifetime achievement statue.

Prof Robin, in practice the teachers would have to wear them all the time or there would have to be a safe on premises to store them. The whole thing is crazy.

On the other hand, having police officers act as kindergarten teachers for two afternoons a week might just be a good idea. A kindergarten teacher has to learn to be authoritative without abuse. It might also be a useful way to remind police that they, too, are civilians and that not all the public is criminal.

“Libertarians think our public school teachers are total incompetents. And now they want them to carry Glocks?”

Apparently, for the libertarian – and for all of Fox News – teaching is a greater evil than toting a glock.

There is a reason why survivors of gun violence tend to advocate for gun control, not gun rights. We need to listen more carefully to what they say.

I find it despicable that people have used this incident to showcase the need for “gun rights.” If they had a child in that room – if their child had been murdered by that shooter, they’d be singing a different tune all together. The innocents don’t go around toting semi-automatics. They just don’t. So allowing them only shifts the balance in favor of the criminally violent.

Mr. McGravitas —

Comparing the political influence of ACORN to the NRA (and other gun-rights groups) is laughable. But even if I’m wrong on this point, this might facilitate the enactment of rather modest gun controls, it won’t alter the fact that there are millions of guns in the U.S. (over 8 for every ten people). Demonize the NRA all you want, those guns will still be there. So, accepting some degree of political reality, what should we do to make our children safer?

Eugene Volokh’s writing has a creepy affect. He appears to lack compassion or empathy.

“what should we do to make our children safer?”

I can’t believe this, Prof.

It’s the gun rights proponents who never address this question except in an unrealistic way. If you want proposed solutions, read the comments to EV’s post and you can quickly find about two dozen concrete proposals.

No need to regulate guns. Do what Chris Rock recommended: $500/ bullet. And make 99% of the price Federal Taxes so we can solve the budget problem and the gun problem

If bullets cost $500 only the rich would have ammo. Problem solved.

@Brett —

The U.S. is not Japan, and Japan never had or gun culture. In any event, I’m worried about today’s children, not just tomorrow. I don’t like the idea of arming teachers, but I don’t think the suggestion of arming some subset of teachers who receive adequate training is beyond the pale (and I’m not sure why I should be more afraid of them than I am of many of those who are allowed to become police officers). And it’s a no less responsible contribution to a meaningful discussion about what to do in the here and now than proposing bans on gun sales or suggesting we should just rely upon the police to protect all of the innocents.

Henry has indicated he’s aiming at the long run, and that’s fine. But as the father of two young girls, I’d rather have a frank and potentially productive conversation about what might make them safer. I readily admit that few of my friends on the right are putting forward productive ideas, but if we care about our children — those that are alive now and may be at risk over the next 5-10 years, I think this is the discussion we need to have. And if the space for the right sort of conversation doesn’t exist yet, shouldn’t we be trying to create it? I like snarking at my ideological opponents as much as the next one, but I don’t believe it’s particularly conducive to productive dialogue.

As soon as I saw “A Thought Experiment Related to School Shootings,” I knew this was going nowhere good. Newsflash: we’ve got actual, real experiments going on in this world. Yesterday was a real data point in the research project, a data point that 27 people paid for with their lives.

@Corey,

And then of course there’s this little irony: Libertarians like to join in the anarchist bashing of public schools as dungeons of authority and coercion. And now they want to arm the teachers with Glocks?

Yesterday on Facebook I argued with a gun-rights advocate who, literally, no joke, I swear I am not making this up, claimed that the problem was children raised improperly by uncaring parents and that the solution to this problem was to institute a regime of mandatory contraception. When challenged on the point that this was, shall we say, a little less than indicative of an absolute love of freedom and a commitment to civil liberties, he offered the response that this would eventually result in the elimination of poverty and hence the welfare state, and that therefore was eminently justified on eventual-freedom-increasing-grounds.

Jonathan H. Adler: “I think focusing on things like rate of fire and ammo capacities is a positive suggestion.”

By all means try to get your fellow-bloggers to think along those lines. My guess is that you’ll be denounced as a crypto-leftist, but that’s to be expected from anything worthwhile that you do.

modern mass shootings with automatic weapons

There’s a cottage industry of conservative point-scoring in pointing out that this statement is technically incorrect, since the spree killers have used semi-automatics, so let’s just save them the bother. It’s not clear how much of a distinction it is anyway with the current technology on semi-automatics, not to mention the simple expedient of the Newtown murderer of having 2 semi-automatics.

or to put it more succinctly: “Hey Jonathan, let’s have a frank and potentially productive conversation, not including your or your daft mates”.

The differences between fully automatic weapons and semi-autos is really irrelevant and I too am tired of gun-culture types dwelling on that. I know weapons very well and am well-trained in using handguns and am in fact a very good shot–and I doubt that I could be effective in preventing something like this from happening on my university campus unless the shooter were standing right in front of me, gun holstered, and I had my 9 mm point right at him (probably not a her the stats show–I think ther was only one female shooter in the last few dozen mass shootings in the world). Then I know I could beat him to the draw–but if students are right behind, then I stand a fair chance of endangering them too no matter how good a shot I am. (Any good cop can tell you that: soft tissue penetration leaves a potentially lethal exit wound trajectory even if you use soft, expanding hollowpoints.) But even if a shooter is just nearby and target-accessible with a minute, if that shooter is using a reliable semi-auto with a drum-magazine capacity of 100 rounds, they can all easily be discharged in less than that minute.

We need at least an assault-weapons ban, much stricter guns laws for gun shows (one of the least regulated sources of some very dangerous weapons), ammunition-type and ammo magazine capacity laws, and much stricter background checks. I’m being realistic here; there is no way in hell our sick country can go back with the US awash in guns as we are now, but I sense there’s still no political will to do even a small measure of what I’ve suggested. The NRA and its members should all be ashamed (how do the people that run it sleep at night?) and dissolve that downright evil organization. Even with my own appreciation for and experience with firearms, I’d give anything to be more like Japan and less like the country that killed 26 innocents bcause we love our damn Glocks with expanded-capacity clips.

“Comparing the political influence of ACORN to the NRA (and other gun-rights groups) is laughable. ”

Because the NRA is a million times more influential than the now defunct ACORN ever was.

Right?

if you want to get serious it seems that you have to accept certain premises

Actually, no. Actually, fuck these premises. If, as you say, you’re “worried about today’s children” (43), then you should join the rest of us in treating the NRA as basically a criminal organization (as Loomis said yesterday at LGM). Enough people treat it as such, and the political space you bemoan is lacking will open up pretty damn fast. Or: what Substance said.

Though you did manage to say the truest thing on this thread:

Comparing the political influence of ACORN to the NRA (and other gun-rights groups) is laughable.

Indeed!

In case anyone feared a Brooksian epidemic of open-mindedness on the right:

In hunting, a semiautomatic gun reduces the recovery time between shots, which is especially helpful during drives, when the targets are running.

It’s NR The Corner, no link.

I was wrong at 56. Mr. Lanza’s mother was not a teacher. She was simply a private citizen with multiple legal guns, which protected her being killed in the way most guns do–not at all.

http://papersky.livejournal.com/558627.html

In ancient Carthage bronze and angry gods
demanded children’s blood and children’s bones
and people bowed their heads down on the stones
knowing their city’s life hung on those odds.

The Gun, like Moloch, keeps the people free.
But these are not my gods, will never be.

I have nothing to add to that.

@phosphorius – Correct. The influence of ACORN was vastly overstated on the right. The influence of the NRA and other gun rights groups, on the other hand, is quite substantial.

@PatrickinOhio – There are also cases where a mass killing was averted by armed civilians with proper training, as happened at Appalachian Law School. And that proves? I’m not sure either anecdote proves anything. Your post is like the talking point on the right noting that all the mass killing episodes occur in supposed “gun-free” zones. It’s a cute point, but doesn’t get us anywhere. We could trade anecdotes about guns saving lives or costing lives all day.

@js – good luck. You remind me of the folks on the right who say the first step in immigration reform has to be deporting all those unlawfully present in the country. It’s laughable.

Do people not even remember back to August? The Empire State Building “mass shooting of eleven,” 2 killed, 9 wounded. Oh, right, they had to take that back. One man murdered a former boss and was killed by the police. The other nine people wounded don’t count because — they were all shot by the NYPD.

We can sort out shooting deaths into deliberate acts like hold ups and gang slayings, and random senseless acts like this one.

The deliberate criminal acts are extremely hard to stop, since they are done by professional killers who are willing to take extraordinary steps to circumvent laws.

But if we focus for a moment on the senseless killings by madmen, we can look at several factors. The killing needs to have a gun and a madman combined. Removing either one of those would help tremendously.
Which brings us to mental health. Almost no spree killers were “bolt out of the blue”- almost all of them had many warning signs of instability and violence for years.

Could there be a way to identify and treat the mentally ill on a more aggressive stance than we have now? I honestly don’t know the answer, but I think we need to have this conversation as well, in addition to finding ways to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.

Oh, and by the way- YES, arming teachers IS beyond the pale; it deserves every bit of mockery we can throw at it.

@65 The only reason Volohk needed a thought experiment is that the real world is so damned inconvenient for true believers in guns. It’s a lot easier to just make shit up.

My point was that you don’t need to do thought experiments. The United States has been running a decades long real world experiment in arming people. Yesterday’s shooting was a result, as are the thousands of people who die every year.

Do guns deter crime? Well, millions of guns have been stolen over the years. They don’t seem seem to deter burglars all that much. And, for example, the Crips, heavily armed, go after the Bloods, who are equally heavily armed, so murderous thugs are apparently not all that deterred by armed murderous thugs.

I can imagine a world in which guns make people safer. I just read a China Mièville novel. I can imagine a lot of things.

I’ll give you this: I’ll bet some deranged, naked first year students have not been shot by trained security guards.

Guns and gun shows are an underground economy for rural areas with no meaningful jobs to offer and a population of folks with many jail and or substance abuse records in their youth and therefore no ability to qualify for credit or have a bank account. Many of these people derive what little sense of dignity they have from being hunters. People need to be able to hunt — there is nothing wrong with it. But we will have to do something about our excessively punitive justice system and the lack of jobs with dignity if we want to make a dent in the gun trade.

On gun culture: Josh Marshall at TPM has published some very thoughtful emails he’s received. Goldie Taylor on MSNBC earlier was also very interesting — I think she’ll be on Chris Hayes tomorrow.

I like how “gun culture” is trotted out as a natural fact, like gravity or the speed of light. Nothing at all about how the rabid fetishization of the gun and the concomitant RAHOWA fearmongering subtext has has been deliberately cultivated by the NRA, GOA and the Republican Party — all Adler’s fellow travelers in the toxic stew that is American movement conservatism.

Ahoy Messrs Volokh et al

Thought experiments? Love’em. Try these two::

a) Imagine the 2nd Amendment doesn’t exist. Without it, would the people of the US allow the gun culture to arrive at it’s current pass? I say no. If you agree, then the question becomes:: Is that Amendment more important than making a serious dent in the 300,000 violent crimes that are committed each year with firearms?

b) speaking of the Constitution:: can you imagine that people today could continue to insist that non-whites should only count for 3/5 of a person. No, I can’t either. So – if Americans can overcome that blight on the founding documents, why is a lesser blight more difficult?

@72
They were off duty police officers, not civilians. You need multiple anecdotes of actual civilians stopping gunmen in order to trade anecdotes and you don’t even have one.

The reason the “More guns = more security” argument is b.s. is that the shooter picks the time and place of his attack and can kill dozens before anyone can respond.

Not even our $1 trillion a year military can prevent the Taliban from carrying out hundreds of succesful attacks a month in Afghanistan for the same reason.

Actually one small Texas school has permitted armed teachers for 4 years:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/29/us/29texas.html?scp=2&sq=gun+control&st=nyt

The reason the “More guns = more security” argument is b.s. is that the shooter picks the time and place of his attack and can kill dozens before anyone can respond.

Ponce posted above. It’s worth repeating.

The reason the “More guns = more security” argument is b.s. is that the shooter picks the time and place of his attack and can kill dozens before anyone can respond.

Not even our $1 trillion a year military can prevent the Taliban from carrying out hundreds of succesful attacks a month in Afghanistan for the same reason.

The Americans made major cutbacks to joint operations with Afghan soldiers in September because too many Americans were being shot by their nominal allies. The armed teachers need to be more alert and fast-acting than veteran soldiers living in war zones.

banned commenter

watson Ladd, would you rather your intruder was armed with a rocket launcher or a butter knife?

nick s:

Indeed: “Now that we’ve ensured that events like this will be a feature of American society for the indefinite future, don’t you owe us consolation?”

Watson (88) this is really easy. Unless I’m suicidal, I’d rather be unarmed. Why? Because I can’t trust myself to shoot at a human being (and this is true for most people, including I’d bet you) – while the intruder, seeing me armed, would possibly not have such scruples.

+90 comments and no one mentioned Hitler and gun control, or the differences in private gun ownership between Israel and Palestine. Bravo – progress!

Sadly, this tragedy occurs almost six months to the day to the sierre coach accident, where coincidently 28 people, mostly students were killed.

Watson Ladd-
What world do these paranoid fantasies spring from?

Lets do a quick poll- how many commenters here have personally been in a situation where you wished you had used gunfire to resolve it?

How many people here personally know someone who has?

Asking me how I would deal with an armed intruder is like asking how I would deal with a marauding mountain lion in my kitchen. Yet it always gets trotted out as a cautionary tale that justifies arming millions of Travis Bickels.

@Liberty60

Well, how *would* you deal with a marauding mountain lion in your kitchen. Wouldn’t a gun come in handy in that situation?

(Kidding.)

@88

“The armed teachers need to be more alert and fast-acting than veteran soldiers living in war zones.”

Yep.

To effectively defend their kids, armed teachers would have to shoot anyone entering their classroom befiore they had a chance to return fire.

Of course, there’d be a quite a few “false positives,” but that is the nature of war.

Hi,
If this atrocity is not enough, and we are not already completely bereft, then there is nothing worth saying anymore.
Have a nice day,
Antti

I think the public policy discussion often runs aground very early, because people from opposite ends of a spectrum of experience with guns — say rural Utah versus New York City — reach for categorical principles, which are mutually exclusive. It is a tough, but hardly insuperable public policy problem, for a diverse, continental nation.

The politics, though, is sunk by a completely different circumstance: guns in America are a consumer good, a status-laden, fashion accessory, acquired by enthusiasts in vast quantities, and a product shaped by the enthusiasms of enthusiasts is some very ugly ways. That market demand is not for a hunter’s weapon — it is for a device designed and purposed to kill people — lots of people and very quickly — and it creates an economic interest — an evil economic interest — which is eager to create, and able to finance the creation of, a gun culture, which both fuels demand and creates an electoral powerhouse of a lobby.

This is a kind of market failure the economists fail to catalog: a commercial madness that shapes demand by shaping culture, and ends by sinking people’s lives. It is just a foretaste of what we have to look forward to, if the current libertarian enthusiasm for de-criminalizing soft drugs leads to full corporate commercialization.

What’s needed, first, is simply, disgust. An aesthetic reaction, which won’t so much seek, say, to regulate gun sales at gun shows, as a starting point, as much as it will seek to undermine and marginalize the culture, generated and reproduced by gun shows and similar events.

You remind me of the folks on the right who say the first step in immigration reform has to be deporting all those unlawfully present in the country. It’s laughable.

Well, you remind me of the folks who called civil rights protests “untimely”. And it’s not remotely funny.

“A psychopath knife-slashed twenty schoolchildren in China! Obviously that means that guns aren’t the problem!”

“Austria has lotsa guns but little gun violence – that means that our problem is the blackies/brownies!”

“Latin American countries have low number of guns per capita but high gun violence – never mind that the gun violence and ownership is concentrated in the poverty-stricken urban barrios!”

Epistemic closure and cognitive dissonance indeed…

We can examine the impact of armed guards at schools rationally. I’ve certainly heard of police officers being assigned to schools, though I’m not familiar with instances of armed private guards. If those instances exist, examining them would be useful.

The proposal to arm certain teachers isn’t new (and Eugene Volokh isn’t a sociopath for raising it again). I’m skeptical as to its usefulness, especially given the planning that more often than not accompanies a mass shooting, but I can’t dismiss it without knowing more facts. It seems likely to me that the costs of encouraging a large number of firearms to be introduced into schools will exceed the benefits – but, that’s not something we can know a priori.

But firearms policy generally cannot be all about this terrible event. Mass school shootings are rare – and the chances of a child dying in an event like this miniscule. How many children have died in mass school shootings over the last century? 80 (?), perhaps, if we include the Bath Michigan school bombing of 1927.

By contrast, roughly 100,000 persons overall were killed by the use of firearms in the 10 year period from 1999 to 2009.

So any policy to arm teachers must fit within a rational firearms policy generally.

Further, this event shouldn’t obscure the fact that mass school shootings are a threat of remote probability to the lives of children in the US, and that there are others of much greater probability. Let’s remember that 755 children under the age of 10 died in 2010 as a result of a motor vehicle accident. Roughly twice that number died of cancer. For the 40 parents whose lives have been torn apart by this shooting, there are 4,600 parents – each year – whose grief is no less profound when they lose their children to cancer or to a motor vehicle accident.

As poignantly horrific as the shooting is, as much as it brings home the nauseating fear of losing a child, we need to place mass school shootings in their proper context, among other threats and risks, when considering policy.

On a separate note – and this may just be my own way of taking a break from horrific elements of Friday – politically a push for new firearms regulation could be viewed as useful even if it were only likely to pass in a very weak form. It could be used to strengthen the President’s leverage on other issues, and it could be used to further portray the GOP as an increasingly extremist party disconnected from reality. That said, such a push also might have the effect of strengthening extremists within the confines of the GOP and making it more difficult for more moderate (or otherwise moderate) Republicans to compromise on policy matters, or shift the party. Though there are some who would view that as a long-term strategic positive, I think it’s a very serious negative consequence.

Rather than a push for dramatic new firearms legislation, then, I think the whispered threat of such a push will be used to gain ground on other policy fronts, while proposals for incremental improvements to firearms legislation are actually initiated and ultimately passed.

You know, the defensively armed defense makes more sense if you ban automatic and semi-automatic weapons. It doesn’t make any sense for mass shootings, since a mass shooter is not, like a person trying to rob you, working on some incentive scale that responds to the threat of harm. Plus, of course, Volokh is insane if he thinks, when the madman armed with the glock and the bushmiller invades his office, that he would just calmly reach for his gun and blow them away. This doesn’t even happen in the case of soldiers, who as we know are often frozen and can’t shoot, or shooting wildly – and it certainly is not going to be the case with a comfortable bourgeois law prof, however tough he dreams he is.
On the other hand, a nation in which there is a populous segment that desires a good – a gun or a drug – that endangers the public health can be regulated in various ways to minimize the danger. I think that would involve a parity program – the weapons consumer should not be caught up in a parity race for more and more fast and lethal weapons. We should concentrate on bringing parity about by building on what was done up to 2004: we should make the manufacture and sale of automatic and semi-automatic weapons and ammunition illegal except for certain cases – for the army, the police force, etc. And we should register such weapons and over some period of time, buy them up and put them out of the market. There will be a black market in such weapons, but the mass slaughter consumer would have to work much harder to accumulate them and be subject to arrest all along the way.
While not solving the gun problem, it would solve the automatic weapons problem. It wouldn’t even require changing laws about carrying concealed weapons. If the weapons are less lethal, than the crowd defending the right to defend yourself would have more of a case.

People want guns because they want power. Then they make up reasons for the desire. If you argue successfully with those reasons (and get the gun fans to listen to you) others will be provided.

@WatsonLadd

If you’re so concerned about self-defense, go get a fucking pepper spray.

@81: Yes, but Australia was settled by people of British and Irish descent who took possession of their land by killing and disposessing the natives. You can’t really compare a country like that to the US.

Chutzpah: Writing how the US gun culture prevents doing anything about guns after spending all your life promoting that gun culture.

I think that Volokh is merely being logical, given the Prime Directive that any gun-c0ntrol measures are the first step towards total confiscation and state tyranny [NRA position] and an unwarranted infringement on liberty [glibertarian position]. So his choices (and this applies more broadly) are:
1. Say nothing.
2. Say this is the price we pay (the blood of children is necessary to water the tree of liberty). This makes you look like a moral monster, because you are.
3. Suggest some possible chenges to gun contr….. Oh noes, violates Prime Directive.
4. Aha, a positive move: more guns for the good guys.

Pointing out to him that (4) is stupid and will make things worse is pointless; it follows from his premises.

@100 It’s hardly a “paranoid fantasy” and the question as posed is stupid: “wished you had used gunfire”? Well, there are six dead adults in CT you could try to ask that question to. Most police officers will never discharge their weapon or have “used gunfire to resolve” a situation; but that doesn’t mean that carrying them is not sensible. There are two times I wish that I had a gun to draw to defend myself; my hope is that my assailant would have submitted to arrest. But those instances were too rare to persuade me to purchase or carry a gun. Still, many people take self defense classes that are never assaulted; most schools never have fires but they run fire drills.

A more valid argument is that the possession of gun for the sole purpose of defending against intruders overlooks the risks that more common scenarios pose:
– you mistake a relative or a friend for an intruder, and kill them (this has happened all too often);
– you are faced with the intruder and fire the weapon but miss. The noise and muzzle-flash deafen and blind you, and you are then assaulted by the intruder or you accidentally shoot a family member in the confusion;
– you fire the weapon but miss and hit a neighbor or family member (through walls or windows).
– your child, spouse, or lover gets the gun and shoots themselves or others accidentally (happens too often).

And it overlooks better solutions: wire-reinforced glass; steel doors with cross-bars. These are expensive and not aesthetically pleasing, but if the armed intruder scenario is so salient, it offers a better deterrent and defense against intrusion than gun ownership.

@ 103 If you.read that study, it is not a study of homeowners who are not engaged in criminal activity and own a gun facing intruders v. homeowners who are not engaged in criminal activity but do not own a gun facing intruders. 83% of the shootings studied occurred outside and 53% of the assault victims had prior arrests.

In carry-concealed states, there has not been an epidemic of multiple vigilante cross-fire or accidental discharges in day-care centers or shopping malls. Indeed, there seems to have been no effect from these laws on crime rates. So they did not reduce crime any more than they increased crime.

What irks me about the concealed-carry laws is that the lawmakers prohibit weapons in government buildings. If they believe in responsible armed citizens, why can’t I wear my pistol to visit my state legislator if I have a valid license and registration? It seems they do not believe that citizens will be responsible with arms around them. So why should I have to let the same people have arms around me?

Wait, did Wattles just offer up Bernhard Goetz as a positive example?

Jonathan

This is the polite version of what Daniel said. I have to be polite, because I am not (nearly) as smart, not (nearly) as articulate, and not (nearly) as funny, as Daniel.

I haven’t gone through the comments to the original post: are there plenty of comments from you telling Volokh for making a completely unhelpful and deranged contribution to the debate? Have you said it to him in private? If not, why are you wasting your time here?

I agree with your central point, of course. America is awash with guns, and crazy and evil people have easy access to them; and there is no political will to use state power in the way it would need to be used to actually change that state of affairs significantly. Those of us who think that state of affairs is very very bad, and can give good reasons for arguing that the state could legitimately intervene to change them have to face up to things, and look for second and third-best solutions, devising and implementing which requires extremely careful attention to empirical detail and responsible conjectures about likely consequences of various interventions. I lack the competence to do that, as does almost everyone commenting here.

So, obviously, we should stay silent, and refrain from complaining about people who defend the state of affairs that keeps the violent death rate in America spectacularly higher than any other rich democracy and lead, regularly, to spree killings of innocent people.

But people who defend the indefensible lack the standing to tell us we should stay silent. To tell us that is to violate some very basic norms of conversational politeness.

I felt bad about making fun of Volokh’s piece without actually having read. So I read it.

Holy shit, it’s a million times worse than I thought! His “thought experiment” begins with “If a school were offered armed and trained security guards to protect them from psychotic shooters, wouldn’t you agree to that?” and jumps to “But what if security guards were not available, so instead we armed and trained the teachers, wouldn’t you have to agree to that, because you agreed to the first thing?”

But that’s insane. It’s like saying: if you agree to hire a doctor to remove your appendix, wouldn’t you have to agree to removing it yourself if a doctor were not available?”

The whole point of hiring the security guards is that they are specialists who would deal only with shooters. Volokh even says “They wouldn’t deal with ordinary trespassing, vandalism, and the like. . .” Because they have to keep their minds on the psychotic shooters. But teachers can pick up that slack while still teaching? Even if you agreed to the first point about armed security guards, which is iffy at best, the second point just doesn’t follow. False analogy, bad casuistry, specious reasoning.

It’s like Fat Tony explaining to Bart Simpson why stealing cigarettes is like feeding your starving family (“What if they don’t like bread, they like cigarettes; is that wrong?”)

So 1) I will never again assume I have to read a libertarian before making fun of that libertarian and 2) No, Mr. Adler, we have not had our fun. Not by a long shot.

The idea that less guns equals less crime is absurd. The only country that has completely outlawed firearms is Venezuela and Caracas has the highest murder rate on earth.

Ban guns in the US, the sociopaths will still be sociopaths and they will find other means of dispensing their angst.

Then we can work on banning knives and sharp objects. Then the sociopaths will still be sociopaths and they will find other means of dispensing their angst.

Then we can ban chemical agents. Then the sociopaths will still be sociopaths.

Or we can actually try and provide treatment to sociopaths before they go on killing sprees. Seriously, how is banning guns going to cure mental illnesses.

Also, Volokh and Fox news are no where near a normal Libertarian view. These are extremes, if this is the definition of Libertarian than Liberals are eco-terrorists who live in the woods and don’t bath… see how ridiculous that sounds.

Anybody who thinks Libertarians, even as a large minority, are trying to arm teachers or have security guards in schools is completely disenfranchised from reality and are themselves the idiots.

At least the Venezuealan government is trying to do something.

Stirling Newberry recently had a post on blogospheric discourse, titled:
The Three-Tier Attack.
http://symbalitics.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-three-tier-attack.html
The thesis is that internet discourse is habitually hijacked. First, someone makes an outrageous statement. Thank you, Eugene Volokh
Then, various other folks chime in, in noisy and propagandistic support of crazy, while sensible people try to explain how and why crazy is crazy.

Finally, a “suit” — played here by Jonathan H Adler — shows up, to make a “serious” pose, and explain why crazy deserves respectful consideration.

There’s a simple way to move this debate forwards:

1) Find your local influential gun advocate
2) Invite them to your home
3) Debate gun control
4) When this inevitably becomes heated, shoot them
5) When challenged, invoke Castle doctrine. It’s what they would have wanted, and they are threatening your safety.

After a few hundred of these, a sensible discussion about gun ownership can be had.

@133

“1) I will never again assume I have to read a libertarian before making fun of that libertarian”

The writings of public sociopaths like Eugene Volokh and Bryan Caplan played a large part in my conversion from lifelong Republican to straight-ticket Democrat.

I began to fear for my immortal soul, and I’m an atheist.

If we’re in the business of trading anecdotes, I would point out that after the one and only school shooting spree in UK in Dunblane , hand guns in private ownership were banned (semi-automatics already having been banned after the Hungerford Massacre). Shotguns and rifles are legal but controlled. Somehow, the boot of fascist government is still not on my neck.

I’d also point out that, as far as I’m aware, the US is the only country that treats firearms ownership as a fundamental right. You sure as heck won’t find it in any international or regional human rights instruments.

From NBC news online:

Marsha Lanza, Nancy Lanza’s sister-in-law and Adam Lanza’s aunt, said there was a good reason for a divorced woman who grew up with guns to have them in the house: self-defense.

“She lived alone. She was a female (who) lived alone,” Marsha Lanza said.

Watson Ladd, I’m not even sure of the point of your remark, but I can tell you that the law is actually a great deal more complicated and context dependent that your statement would suggest. As is ever the way with people using law about which they know nothing to make a point about something in a different jurisdiction.

The advantage of getting everyone used to ridiculous extremist ideas is that slightly less ridiculous ideas, like doing nothing, can become the sensible centrist compromise.

Yes. A thousand times yes. Ridicule, shaming, and generally uncivil discourse are the only appropriate response.

@Jonathan Adler “Or is it just more fun to make fun of folks who try to think through the range of available second-best possibilities.”

How did things come to this? To the point where mooting the possibility of arming elementary school teachers is seen as one among a range of ‘second best possibilities?’

Cos from where I sit, the corresponding ‘second best possibility’ would be to declare the NRA a fricking terrorist organization (actually, international terrorist organization, given the role they played in opposing and killing the Long Gun Registry in Canada, for e.g.). I begin to envision drone strikes, and extra judicial assassinations.

Cos, well shucks, if politics is gone, and all we have left is force (might is right, and the use of overwhelming force in the cause of public safety would be nothing if not righteous) well why not let us get right down to the root of the problem? Them buggers wanted Leviathan’s black helicopters, so let us now fulfill the prophecy. Eh? Wot?

Yes, in all honesty, I believe your proposal is that extreme. Arming school teachers is absolutely insane. Where is the contrition among the rightish intellegensia? The soul searching that should (and must) follow an event like this?

How did things come to this point? What can we do to draw back from this abyss? These are the things we need to discuss. This should be the point of departure.

As regards the 2nd Amendment, any thoughts on the constitutionality of a law requiring all gun owners to enlist in their state militia, which could then “well regulate” their weapons?

I’m a big believer in ridicule, shaming, etc. but there’s just so much . . .

On Meet the Press this morning Bill Bennett, with a “I know I’m going to get heat for this”, presented “putting someone armed” into schools as something which would “stop these things from happening, and if we can do that I think we should do it”. Later David Gregory said to Tom Ridge, “That’s a cornerstone principle of homeland security, isn’t it: to harden the targets.”

The very next person to speak after Bennett was David Brooks, natch, saying that “in this conversation going forward” there “needs to be respect for rural people.”

Blinkered logic and moral obtuseness as far as the eye can see, lined up like crosses row on row, each one re-enforcing the overall narrative but each one unique and awful in its own way. Where do you even start?

John,

The first holding in DC v. Heller, the recent Supreme Court decision about local gun control laws, is as follows: “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.”

There are legal concepts and arguments to make a completely opposite ruling; Thurgood Marshall called the individual right interpretation of the Second Amendment “the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people” in the early ’90s. And yet, here we are.

Both Sides Do It @158: Alas you are no doubt right. As for, “And yet, here we are”: it took almost fifty years, but Plessy v. Fergusson was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education. With smarter public discussion about guns and the second amendment, and smarter and less blinkered supreme court justices, maybe we won’t have to wait fifty years to overturn Columbia v. Heller. (Let’s hope we don’t need too many more Sandy Hook Elementary school shootings.)

http://studyplace.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/files/courses/reserve/Hofstadter-1996-Paranoid-Style-American-Politics-1-to-40.pdf

Just read the actual post – good God, Volokh is an idiot.

If I’m understanding Volokh and those like him correctly, the status quo right now — regular mass shootings — is basically what they intend, with the qualification that they also want the targets to be armed and returning fire. In other words, their vision of the second amendment is one where there are regular back-and-forth shootouts in schools and public places.

@169

“In other words, their vision of the second amendment is one where there are regular back-and-forth shootouts in schools and public places.”

I don’t think it stops there.

I think their model for America (and Israel) in the future is Russia…one big state-run criminal enterprise.

John Quiggin, #157: “As regards the 2nd Amendment, any thoughts on the constitutionality of a law requiring all gun owners to enlist in their state militia, which could then ‘well regulate their weapons?”

In fact, the men are already members; they just have no duties.

However…the first use of the term “well regulated militia” that I am aware of (I have not done a thorough literature search) is in Andrew Fletcher’s 1698 A discourse of government with relation to militias. By this he meant universal conscription. I believe the model intended by the Framers was that each state would require its citizens to participate in the militia, in a way similar to the Swiss militia. The Federal government would then be dependent on the states for its army. In practice, this was found to be inconvenient and expensive, so the states declared that most men were part of the unorganized militia, which had no duties.

A standard reference in the area is Mahon’s History of the Militia and the National Guard.

Fletcher can be found online, last I looked.

Croak!

@BothSides Heller v Columbia only 5-4, and clearly overturned lots of previous jurisprudence. So chances of reversal must be fairly good, esp if politics are going the right way.

@Raven The things you learn on blogs. I’d never heard of the unorganized militia.

I’d love to litigate the second amendment, simply as someone who regularly teaches the ablative absolute (cf. “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state” = “nominative absolute” in English). I’d love to nail the Scalia-types who think they know their grammar (because they’d probably like a return to the Latin mass and fetishize Latin and grammar and such).
Don’t know about (but will pursue with interest) first use of the phrase “well-regulated militia,” but my impression (an informed impression, I believe, though I make no claims to expertise here) is that the colonies had militias (in which participation by able-bodied men of sufficient means was often required by law, as here in Massachusetts), largely for fighting Native Americans (and also the French, at certain moments in the right British colonies). These militias (from the point of view of the British, all-too-well-regulated, and effective — think Lexington and Concord!) proved vital to the Revolutionary cause (hence their association with the resistance to “tyrants”). Add in the federalist notion of “free state,” and the later evolution of the National Guard out of colonial-then-state militias, and pretty soon you realize that the second amendment has nothing to do with contemporary, NRA- or Scalia-style notions of “individual” gun rights. This refutation coming, then, from the most “originalist” way of approaching constitutional interpretation. (If you want to go “originalist,” which I’d rather not — but then, the “judicial temperment” requires that we do go there, that we take into account all possibly reasonable arguments.)
(As for all of those (to us) unnecessary commas in the second amendment: red herring.)

Every gun nut I’ve ever known has been an asshole. At best they’re nerds like Dwight Schrute on The Office (trust me, these people really exist). Everybody hates them. They’re your aunt’s racist husband at Thanksgiving, your idiot coworker, the blowhard sitting next to you on the plane. We all put up with them because they’re insufferable and indefatigable. We know they’ll go on and on about states’ rights or refreshing the tree of liberty or some shit for an two hours, so we just try to change the subject and hope they’ll shut up. I’m done with that now. Next time one of these creeps mouths off I’m going to bore them to death. I’m going to tell them that their hobby is moronic and that I want the government to take all their guns away over and over until they shut up.

I know the left doesn’t do the demonization thing, but if it did, there is no better group of people to demonize than these assholes. There’s not that many of them, their demographic is shrinking, none of them will ever vote for Democrats anyway. They’re clowns.

John,

It’s a good bet that Heller will be explicitly overturned or else whittled hollow by subsequent rulings, but there are a couple factors working against that happening in the near to medium term.

– Chance plays a large role. If a Republican appoints replacements for two of the four eldest justices, which is plausible, five justices will be endorsing Heller for as long as Thomas is alive.

– Even if there’s a majority of Democratic appointees at some point, the Court is cognizant of itself as a political actor. If the Court is taking on other high-profile and controversial issues, it’s less likely to also take on gun control, especially since a liberal majority will have lots of Roberts mischief to undo. It’s willingness to do so is determined somewhat by the makeup and interaction of the Justices’ personalities and temperament. Also, even though it’s pretty easy to craft a ruling that effectively undermines an earlier one without explicitly overruling it, that strategy is more dependent on finding a case that can be used in that manner. Which will take time and makes the Court even more dependent on a favorable broader political context that can generate that case. All this makes mitigating Heller possible, maybe plausible, but not likely, and in any event unpredictable.

– The political context itself is still very much hard to predict. Gun massacres tend not to change the political landscape very much, either in public opinion or legislatures. This might be different because it was in an exurban area for the NY elite – in their backyard, so to speak – but since nothing much changed when a Congresswoman got shot in the head, hard to see why this would be different. It might be, the number and character of these massacres might be reaching a critical mass, but there’s nothing really indicating that it will be.

There are also ways to regulate guns within the interpretation of Heller – assault weapons bans, magazine and ammo restrictions, concealed carry restrictions, etc. – that would probably alleviate the political pressure to alter that interpretation.

– Which goes back to your original scenario: passing legislation requiring people be a member of a militia to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights. As a possible tactic or thought experiment it’s a bad example. The likelihood of that happening within the current makeup of the political power structure, or any foreseeable change to that structure in the next couple decades, is arbitrarily close to zero; a political environment where that legislation passes would require such a change in the way political power is allocated that we wouldn’t be able to predict it. Something on the scale of the Republican Party collapsing, or money being severely restricted from political operations, or a complete, overwhelming and unprecedented change in public opinion.

Consumatopia @74 hits on a vital point, the nature of American gun culture. Look at any general internet site with gun control as a topic and you will see the most venomous, over-the-top posts from a segment of gun owners. Guns are their only issue. You will not find posts defending the 1st and 4rth Amendments with the emotion generated by the 2nd. Nothing matters more to them then their guns.

Guns are clearly a proxy for other issues. Gun ownership (by this group, not all gun owners) reflects a rejection of membership in a common society. These people see themselves as alone and armed against the world. Should the economy falter, guns are protection from their neighbors and society at large. Guns give them courage. Guns give them self-respect (I’m not your chicken shit civilian waiting to be a victim, I’m ready to protect myself). These people (there are a few, damn few, women) pride themselves as being on “yellow alert” for danger at all times. Consequently, they see danger everywhere.

The mentally ill in America are steeped in gun culture along with everyone else. American’s kids play endless hours of homicide in POV shooter video games. Movies are full of tough, brave heros who can take out bad guys with laser-like precision, and then get the girl. We love guns, we worship guns. The only surprise is that so few disturbed individuals pick up guns and start shooting.

A poster above asked if any CT commenters are gun owners. I am. I’ve had a concealed weapon permit since 1984. I own multiple handguns, shotguns, and a number of military assault rifles. All of them are in a gun safe bolted into the house foundation. They rarely see the light of day and if they vanished one day my life would not be altered in the least. I don’t hunt, preferring my wildlife alive. One time, doing biological field work in a remote area, I was confronted by people who wished me harm. Placing my 12-gauge on the top of my pickup resulted in them driving away. Not exactly an everyday situation.

It’s probably not possible to reduce the number of guns in this country. But as a society we can start to marginalize and ridicule gun fetishism. I hope.

In the very long-ago olden days when even commercial television thought it had some responsibility to be pro-social, Gene Autrey or Roy Rodgers would end their programs with a little lecture on gun etiquette, saying, “Remember, never point the business end of a gun at anyone.” Perhaps it was a bit hypocritical, but the reality is that no culture with dangerous weapons has ever been without elaborate rules as to their use. Even the old West. How far we have come. I understand General Petraeus’s paramour made some extra cash appearing as a model on an assault weapon info’mercial.

My mother-in-law used to work as a nurse at a state mental hospital. It was a very nice place where they had the inmates grow their own vegetables and generally keep themselves usefully occupied. Although they were not able to deal with life on the outside, they could live reasonably pleasant lives.

The mental hospital was closed years ago. It’s now a park–admittedly a rather nice park. But now the people who would have been in it are now living on the streets and from time to time committing mass murder–it’s not this latest case I’m talking about, but some others within the last few years within a few miles of where the hospital I’m talking about used to be.

The lack of care available to mentally ill people in the US is really a disgrace.

It will be a mistake if this becomes all about assault weapons – though fitting with the idea of Obama focusing on an incremental step while using the possibility of more dramatic proposals to spur Republican movement on other issues.

Assault weapons – however we’re defining them this time around – are a subset of the problem. Lanza could have accomplished the same number of deaths, perhaps, without semiautomatic weapons. Obviously, “assault weapons” such as the rifle used in this attack should be banned; but that’s not an adequate policy response, and the ban should be a small piece of a bigger shift in policy.

Nor is ridicule, imho, an adequate response to proposals to use policies such as armed personnel in schools. There is an intuitive power to that kind of proposal for a significant number of people, and simply scorning it isn’t going to be enough. For the people to whom the proposal is appealing, the rationale is that gun control has been and will always be ineffective, and that therefore other responses are needed.

Mere ridicule enables the debate to be cast as purely partisan, a clash of opinions not decidable by facts, each side competing by the intensity of their emotions. And that’s not what it should be. Maybe it is in the land of the 10,000 year old earth, but those of us outside those communities should have something better.

188: yep. To keep us safe! It’s working out great!

Eric Vanderhoff, over at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog, commented that the best thing about the assault weapon ban was the ban on large magazines; that with smaller magazines, shooters have to stop to reload, and this gives defenders time to overpower the shooter.

Unfortunately, Andrew F is right that mass murderers do sometimes use other methods; terrorists seem to prefer bombs to firearms. But most of the widely-publicized mass murders seem to prefer firearms, perhaps just because their imagination is limited.

“But most of the widely-publicized mass murders seem to prefer firearms, perhaps just because their imagination is limited.”

It’s the power-trip fantasy. Passive people become active and godlike holding a gun and personally dealing out death. I suspect bombers have a very different psychology. And of course, terrorists using bombs are typically political actors who are trying to avoid getting themselves killed. (There are suicide bombers, but again, different psych.)

With a gat it don’t matter if he’s smarter or bigger.

Yes, I’m puzzled why my Second Amendment rights don’t mean that I can buy a bomb at Walmart. Tyranny!

Or an aircraft carrier, a drone, or a nuclear bomb in a suitcase. I mean, parity in fighting tyranny is important, isn’t it?

I grew up in the Midwest and had one uncle/cousin who owned shotguns (they did some deer-hunting, but mostly, skeet). Having lived abroad nearly my entire adult life, I think I can more or less see both sides, and honestly, societies where almost no civilians own guns (legally) feel a lot safer, and seemed a lot safer for my children when they were little. My son never owned a toy gun or “play” weapon of any kind, and this was by no means an anomaly, it was quite common. The only person I know in the country where I live who actually owns a shotgun has it in permanent lock-down, and he was the national youth champion of Russia.

I grew up in central New York, where ownership and use of guns was about as unusual and ownership and use of a pick-up truck. I”ve owned and used them myself (unlike pick-up trucks), though I’ve never been in a non-sporting situation where I would have felt more comfortable having one at my hip.
In my long-gone youth, what people had was hunting rifles and shotguns that generally held 3-5 rounds, though many people had re-purposed surplus WWII GI-issue M-1s with a 6 or 8 round capacity (I forget which and am too lazy to look it up). Handguns generally were either 5-6 round revolvers, small-capacity semi-autos, or Old Slabsides, the 7-8-round .45 semi-auto of WWI vintage.
While people sometimes shot and killed people on purpose, and accidental discharges sometimes took out the very young or careless, or people down-range of the very young or careless, these were not weapons suited to mass murder.
What makes a gun particularly lethal and suited for mass murder is some combination of: (1) rate of fire; (2) concealability; and (3) ammunition capacity. Few civilians can own an automatic-fire weapon. Semi-automatics don’t fire any faster than a six-gun. There are laws against sawed-off shotguns, and it probably wouldn’t be too heavy a lift to ban guns with folding stocks or other features that would make them easily concealable. That leaves ammo capacity. The standard AR-15 may look frightening, but the only thing that makes it more suited to mass murder than many a normal sporting rifle is its ability to take extended magazines, a 30-round clip rather than 3-5 rounds. (Critics of the lapsed federal law had a small but genuine point when they described the assault weapons ban as the “ugly gun law” because it targeted features that did not contribute to lethality. Are we really afraid that organized thugs will make bayonet charges?) Bands on extended clips — which no civilian needs for hunting or self-defense — should be politically possible, but the horse is probably already out of the barn with so many clips already out there. Since my day, however, handguns have been designed to carry up to about 20 rounds in a normal, handgun-sized package, we’ve probably reached the practical limit of gun design in this respect, and there are too many out there to go back to setting some arbitrary capacity limit. (Again, no civilian needs an extended handgun magazine of the type that makes a handgun something other than what it is designed to be.)
I suspect that what is most likely to be effective is serious training, safety, registration, and storage requirements. How did this kid manage to get his mother’s guns in the first place? There are things that can be done about that.

In the idyllic town of Newton, the gun culture had begun to get out of hand. As one of the town residents’ amusements was to flock to unlicensed gun ranges and blow up propane tanks with machine guns.– What’s next, hand-held missile range hobbyists?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/nyregion/in-newtown-conn-a-stiff-resistance-to-gun-restrictions.html?hp&_r=0

it remains unclear where [Nancy Lanza and her son] took their target practice. Much of the gunfire and the explosions reported by residents to the police in recent months came from a spot less than three miles from their house. Police logs identified the spot as one of the town’s many unlicensed gun ranges, where the familiar noise of hunting rifles has grown to include automatic gunfire and explosions that have shaken houses.

“It was like this continuous, rapid fire,” said Amy Habboush, who was accustomed to the sound of gunfire but became alarmed last year when she heard what sounded like machine guns, though she did not complain to the police. “It was a concern. We knew there was target practice, but we hadn’t heard that noise before.”

CJ, I agree that there are far too many high-capacity mags and guns out there, but I still think a ban that included a prohibition on *sale* of these already-possessed guns could be some help.

Surely other countries – the UK, Australia? – have implemented something like this. How’d they do it?

… 204: Yep, that’s a pretty weird way, all right. Sorry some of us are interested in being practical, not in making ourselves feel righteous and special.

“Just ban all guns within urban areas.”

They already are, in general. You can’t get a permit to carry a weapon in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, or Washington DC unless you are a celebrity or are related to someone in politics or the police.

An “ugly gun law” might be extremely effective at targeting (sorry) the elements of gun culture that contribute to superhero/Rambo fantasizing.

I’m not worried much by virtual “ugly guns” in video games and movies, but I think there might be a problem, when mentally unstable adolescents find out that adults can buy the real thing at Wal-Mart.

We are going to trust teachers with a gun when we can’t trust them with a union?

“I would say that no one I know has ever held or fired any kind of gun. At all. ”

This comment stood out to me. Canada and Australia are similar in many ways but I guess gun ownership is not one of them. I know many people who have shotguns and rifles in there homes. My Uncle has quite the collection and was a semi serious competitive shooter in his younger days, my grandpa still has a few bolt action hunting rifles looked in his gun cabinet from when he used to hunt and my parents had an old .22 up in the attic until just recently. I am not worried by hunting rifles/shotguns in the hands of your average farmer or outdoor enthusiast.

All that said I do not know a SINGLE person who owns a handgun or who carries a firearm with them on a day to day basis. I also don’t know anyone who stockpiles thousands of rounds of ammo “just in case.” and I certainly do not understand the mindset of those who think the solution to school shootings is to arm school teachers. So I guess that Canada and the US are pretty different in this regard as well.

212: thanks, Ajay. Some sort of buyback scheme might have an effect.

218: there’s a reasonable amount. About 1 million people in the UK shoot more or less regularly (caveat: according to the British Association for Shooting and Conservation) – mostly shotgun, some rifle. Roughly the same number that go to church every week.

The rule is, incidentally, that if you want a shotgun licence, the police have to come up with a good reason why you shouldn’t have one. But if you want a rifle, you have to come up with a good reason why you should.

To be honest, when I first read Leiter’s post–I read his blog regularly and enjoy it even when I disagree–I assumed it was intended satirically because it was inconceivable to me that an intelligent person would something that is so clearly a bad idea for all of the reasons that have been suggested so far, and probably many more.

But, OK, sadly he’s serious. However, the few defenses of his view that I’ve seen amount to a demand for his critics to provide “a reasonable alternative” without any real effort to argue that his proposal is reasonable in the first place. And frankly, it’s hard to see how a proposal that puts guns in close proximity to children *all the time* passes any reasonableness test.

I don’t care if you’re a homicidal lunatic, a teacher or a security guard (not that these are exclusive of each other). If you bring a gun into a school, you are endangering my child. And that is absolutely not OK.

All that said I do not know a SINGLE person who owns a handgun or who carries a firearm with them on a day to day basis. I also don’t know anyone who stockpiles thousands of rounds of ammo “just in case.” and I certainly do not understand the mindset of those who think the solution to school shootings is to arm school teachers. So I guess that Canada and the US are pretty different in this regard as well.

Except for the last sentence, I can say exactly the same things, and I’m an American who lives in a state with a thriving hunting tradition. Nor is anyone I know any different from me in this regard. Anecdotal evidence doesn’t settle anything, but that applies as much to MPA Victoria’s impressions (“I guess that Canada and the US are pretty different in this regard”) as it does to my own direct experience.

From the NYT article Harold linked to, quoting a Newtown gun enthusiast who helped shout down attempts to put restrictions on shooting practice in the town:

Guns are why we’re free in this country.

It’s a pretty strange definition of freedom if you can’t feel safe in the streets, the schools, or the movie theaters unless you’re carrying a gun. (Not that carrying a gun wouldn’t make me feel a lot less safe, but never mind that.)

Someone has already said it in this thread, but it starts to look like the only freedom these people care about is the freedom to own guns. My right to be free from guns and the mayhem they facilitate — who gives a shit about that?

@Ajay Conscription was abolished in 1972, so the cut off is nearer 60 than 50. And it was a lottery scheme, and not too hard to get out of. But the main thing is that no one ever talks about their military service, except for some who were sent to Vietnam (Google suggests a total of 60 000, or about 0.3 per cent of the population). My boss in my first real job had been a conscript in Vietnam a few years earlier, but he is literally the only person who has ever mentioned post-WWII military service to me, and he didn’t go on about it. This isn’t a matter of hostile responses, I think, it is just not a topic of conversation.

So, you are probably right that Emma knows people who have handled a gun, but it would take careful calculation to realise this.

In my case, my wife comes from a farming background, so I’ve seen a few and even seen one fired. But the closest most Aussies would come to encountering gun culture is seeing road signs riddled with bullet holes, which used to be common, but is now, I think, pretty rare.

“The people who do that stuff to be fringe lunatics”

The sad thing JanieM is that they are not fringe at all. Especially when compared to Canada.

http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cfp-pcaf/res-rec/comp-eng.htm

My father brought home a luger from WW2, and my wife’s father was a career military man. (My mother eventually found a way to dispose of the luger, and my wife’s family had no gun in the house. ) As a young teen, my wife was NRA-trained with a rifle and was a first rate marksman. Both of her aunts were farm women, and rifles and handguns were always around. One aunt even slept with a pistol at her bed side — an old, old lady living alone way out in the sticks — and once had occasion to scare away a truck full of 3AM loiterers from her driveway.

Guns by themselves have no fascination for me or my wife. We’re as spooked and disgusted as anyone by gun fetishists, but gun ownership isn’t a virus. You don’t get a disease by being familiar with guns. They aren’t addictive.

American love of violence has some other source than the mechanical.

Wrapped up in all of this, of course, is the debate at the time over standing armies, which, I think we can safely say, is done and dusted — which poses the question of whether it invalidates the Jeffersonian concept of the self-organised civilian militia.

I thought it was invalidated when Jefferson fled Virginia in the face of an advancing army.

The horse is out of the barn to some extent but that in no way makes the case for a safer America hopeless. To counter the huge number of weapons already in existence, a major focus needs to be placed on ammunition. Also, victims of gun violence perhaps should be able to hold the manufacturers of the weapons that harmed them liable to some degree and be able to win damages against them in a court of law. If Bushmaster had to pay each victim of the Sandy Hook tragedy $1 million or more maybe the company would think twice about selling their killing machines to the general public. An outright ban of these sorts of weapons and the Glocks and such obviously needs to happen in addition to making ammunition of all kinds prohibitively expensive or, in some cases, banned altogether.

“Guns are why we’re free in this country.”

Actually, as a non-american, I think that the reason for the “american exceptionalism” concerning the high number of gun owners in America is because it doesn´t matters.

Why? Because America seems to be building a large and sprawling security state, with increasing inequality and really huge rates of incarceration. Since in America radical political discontent is inexistant, discontentment is metabolized as crime, and then, the security state takes care of it in a more palatable way. And it works _ that´s why you have low crime.

This is the reason I think that the article linked by @rootles 120, and ensuing discussion, is dangerous. Once you medicalize the remaining focus of threat represented by mentally ill offenders (that are a real threat, I think, but sometimes one created in some extent by disfunctional ideologies, if you lend credit to rumours about Lanza´s mother being a crazy survivalist for example) , you create another branch of the security state that will be prone to medicalize and incarcerate the remaining political dissatisfaction _ you only have to medicalize it also, maybe along the lines of “excess human biodiversity”, low IQ, and the like.

Hermenauta — very insightful!

To come down with JanieM in her disagreement with MPAVictoria a ways back, I quote Paul Waldman at Tapped: http://leanforward.msnbc.com/_news/2012/07/24/12926630-gun-ownership-on-the-decline-but-just-as-many-guns-as-ever?lite

“In 1977, 54 percent of households reported owning guns; by 2010 that number had declined to 32 percent. And the decline happened across all age groups and birth cohorts. There are a number of explanations, including the decline of hunting as a pastime and the movement of population from rural areas to suburbs and cities. But if the number of gun owners has declined yet the number of guns hasn’t, that can only mean that America’s dwindling number of gun owners are each amassing bigger arsenals than ever.”

The larger culture uses mechanisms like gun manufacturers’ lobbying, the financing of political campaigns, and various ways of fanning the paranoid fantasies (to which Americans seem particularly prone) to persuade many Americans, including those who have no interest in guns or whose use of them is limited and unproblematic (e.g., farmers, hunters), to oppose even the most moderate gun regulation. (Note also that surveys show massive ignorance about current gun laws. Even many NRA members mistakenly believe certain things to be illegal that are, in fact, perfectly legal.)

This is how a fringe — and yes, it is a fringe — gets to dominate our legislative policies and priorities. Non-US citizens here, especially if you haven’t visited the US, need to understand this if they have any real interest in understanding the US.

“Just do it, America, and move one little step closer to being considered “civilized” by the rest of the world.”

This is what I mean. Please, non-US’ers, stop whistling into the wind. We’ve got this thing here called the constitution, plus a Supreme Court, stuff like that. There’s plenty more we could be doing than we have been, but we can’t just willy-nilly do all the things that non-US’ers here keep suggesting. Like just ban handguns (two of them are part of this story, and it’s handguns that do most of the killing in this country).

There are restrictions on various kinds of weapons already. It’s possible to do more, and constitutionally.

Well Meredith, just from an empirical perspective it doesn’t seem like your constitution is the work of god-like wisdom that americans think it is. And if you can’t change this part of your constitution after this crime, then you have serious, deep problems in your body politic. But it seems like the US left either shares in the constitution-valorization, or has flat-out given up on changing it.

It’s also difficult to change the Australian constitution (a majority of voters and a majority of states have to support the change), but we do it when we have to. But maybe our constitution was better designed than yours – it doesn’t, for example, enshrine the right to murder your neighbours.

Even the current Sup Ct’s interpretation of the 2nd Amendment would, afaik, permit a ban on semi-automatic and automatic rifles, and probably a fair amount more.

faustusnotes,
I think we’re basically on the same side of this issue. What I’m saying on the constitutional point is that, as far as I know, the relevant part of the US Constitution as currently interpreted by the Sup Ct does not prevent Congress from banning certain kinds of weapons, including the weapon used in this horrific Connecticut shooting.

D. Kopel said on the NewsHour that Connecticut has a law banning assault weapons and that the rifle used here fell outside the ban. The answer would seem to be that Connecticut’s ban wasn’t stringent enough. I understand Kopel is a libertarian blah blah and he also seems to be, frankly, a bit of an idiot, which made it particularly frustrating to listen to him make points some of which did not go effectively rebutted by the other panelists. His basic argument was, in part: We’ve tried laws banning certain weapons; they don’t work b.c of flaws X Y and Z. To which the obvious answer ISTM is: Draft better legislation!!! We’re talking about guns here, not nuclear reactors for heaven’s sake. It can’t be that hard to craft legislation that does what its proponents intend it to do.

The mother of the shooter had all those guns for “self defense.” An abysmal failure, to say the least.

I could not believe how swiftly pro-gun idiots began the pro-gun advocacy following this slaughter of very young children. Lanza killed 26 people in 10 minutes. I remain haunted by that fact.

And cannot believe there is anyone – let alone a large percentage of the population – who feels the 2nd amendment now requires arming principals and kindergarten teachers with guns in order to uphold the rights of Americans to bear arms. But there you have it. Cognitive dissonance in America.

faustusnotes: “Well Meredith, just from an empirical perspective it doesn’t seem like your constitution is the work of god-like wisdom that americans think it is.” Whence this hostility? Why impute to me belief in the constitutions’ god-like wisdom that I have never expressed (and do not feel)? Too much testosterone-infused snark around here. Bye.

Sorry Meredith, that wasn’t intended to impute any particular ideas to you, it was just a comment on the state of American constitutional thought generally.

“The most common hunting rifles in the US fire .30-06 cartridges. They will kill people quite easily, a lot more easily than a handgun (physics and all that science-stuff). Deer, bears, moose and other large game hunting share a lot of similarities to humans. Kill one, kill both.”

The CT shooter slaughtered 26 people in 10 minutes. Anyone who thinks hunters need that kind of fire power is an idiot. Seriously. People who are serious about hunting absolutely do not believe that.

A semi-automatic gun has one target – a human. In the case of the CT shooter, his targets were 6 and 7 years old. To say that nothing can be done to prevent such carnage in the future is an outrage.

Banning the kind of weapon used in the CT shooting is not the same as taking down the 2nd amendment. Banning a weapon that can slaughter 26 people in 10 minutes is done to protect Americans from such heinous violence.

Look at the pictures of those who died in Newtown. And then try to justify keeping the weapon used to slaughter them readily available. It is inexcusable. Indefensible. And immoral. And no way should the 2nd amendment be used to protect such immorality.

“This is how a fringe — and yes, it is a fringe”
Not to derail the thread but the NRA has 4.3 million members. If it is a fringe it is a pretty big one.

I understand Kopel is a libertarian blah blah and he also seems to be, frankly, a bit of an idiot, which made it particularly frustrating to listen to him make points some of which did not go effectively rebutted by the other panelists.

I saw this too, and had a very similar reaction. It seemed to me that the Brady Campaign dude (forget his name) was far too focused on forwarding some sort of middle-of-the-road proposal that would be acceptable to all sides (background checks!), but this assumes reasonable, good-faith participants on all sides. Meanwhile, you’ve got Kopel mouthing nonsense and changing the subject.

It’s really what nick s said @258: do not let them set the terms of the debate. And so also: do not make your very first rhetorical move a compromise proposal!

(Also, many thanks to Meredith (180) and nick s (210) for clarifications on the grammar and history, respectively, of the 2nd amendment. Will say that Meredith’s reading of the language, esp. re “the right of the people” is both super helpful and amazingly obvious once pointed out. Cheers.)

Oh Jesus. I just read the McArdle piece. Well… skimmed it. And it’s frankly hilarious, so maybe worth a read. The bit Chait quotes is gold obviously, but this, which follows right after is just as choice:

But I doubt we’re going to tell people to gang rush mass shooters, because that would involve admitting that there is no mental health service or “reasonable gun control” which is going to prevent all of these attacks.

Yes! That’s exactly why we’re not going to tell people to gang rush psychopaths with machine guns! (Is Adler around to talk about how this “may or may not be” the solution?)

MPAVictoria, The NRA membership (as opposed to its insane leadership) has surprising views about gun regulation — most of them (though not as many as in the larger population) favor a great deal of gun regulation (admittedly, within the limited terms of the US debate):
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/07/24/577091/nra-members-agree-regulating-guns-makes-sense/

All kinds of people are NRA members, for any numbers of reasons. (Only 4.3 million out of over 300 million? It’s not the numbers. It’s the MONEY that gives the crazy NRA leadership power.) Some members would be fringy by any definition, but most not (though I would probably agree with even the non-fringies, politically, on very little). (The truly craziest fringe probably are NOT members — they’re the kind of people who like to stay off radar screens as they hunker down in their militia compounds.)

My mild-mannered, college-educated Montana grandfather was an avid camper (primarily) and hunter (secondarily — he fished, too) — Glacier National Park, especially. Like many people in Montana back in the 1930’s, he always carried a shotgun in his car, on the shelf under the rear window. (I’m not sure Montana even required a driver’s license to drive a car in the 1930’s, when the population of the state was greater than it is today. It didn’t require one in the 1920’s.) He briefly tried to sell insurance during the Depression, including in Alberta and Saskatchewan. On one Canadian trip he got pulled over not because he had a shotgun in his car (folks in that part of Canada back then, as they probably would today, understood perfectly well why he’d be carrying a shotgun), but because it was illegally visible (or some such). The shotgun was confiscated and my grandfather was told to be on his way. Some Canadian “law enforcement officer” was personally richer one shotgun, my grandfather figured.
This story was always told in my family with a lot of affectionate laughter for my careless grandfather (whose family could ill afford to lose that shotgun, with its hunting value, in those hungry days), but part of that affection was directed the way of Canada. (We do like to imagine you are cagier than you usually let on.) Our ongoing dance with one another. We’re both awfully big countries, the US and Canada, with an awful lot in common. Maybe that’s why we both feel the need to make so much of the differences.

“gun culture”

We once had more of a cigarette culture. It is possible to make a major movement away from prominent cultural norms, believe it or not.

I don’t think the second amendment is about preserving hunting rights!

LFC: “Kopel . . . on the NewsHour . . . said . . . the previous assault weapons ban had focused on “cosmetic” (his word) features of weapons. No one offered the obvious, direct reply, i.e.: If that’s true, then develop legislation that does not focus on cosmetic features. ”

Or, maybe, the direct reply is that the “cosmetic” features of weapons are relevant — not relevant to sport or hunting, perhaps, but directly relevant to the kind of Rambo/superhero/gangster fantasies, which run quickly toward pathological uses.

Or, maybe, the direct reply is that the “cosmetic” features of weapons are relevant — not relevant to sport or hunting, perhaps, but directly relevant to the kind of Rambo/superhero/gangster fantasies, which run quickly toward pathological uses.

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed… but from now on they all have to be shocking pink and covered in My Little Pony branding.

Certainly it would make it rather more difficult to argue that owning one meant your Man Card had been reissued. (Marketing slogan for the Bushmaster .223, as used in Newtown.) But if you like hunting, you can hunt just as well with a shocking pink .30-06 rifle. If you like target shooting, here’s your shocking pink .22; carry on. If you really feel you need a firearm for self defence, well, a pink pump-action shotgun will work just as well. But if you like guns because they look mean when you pose with them…

It’s along the lines of Hunter S Thompson running for mayor of Aspen and promising to rename the town “Fat City”. If you like Aspen because it’s a cool place to live, you won’t care what it’s called. If you like Aspen because it gives you a chance to show off with conspicuous consumption, then you will probably go elsewhere, because you won’t be able to boast about your ski lodge in Fat City without the other greedheads laughing at you.

Nah, in 50-75 years’ time, pink would have been rebranded as manly, being a colour associated with red, which obviously refers to blood and hunting and other such masculine things. Society in general would just know that girls liked pale blue, obviously, because it’s such a gentle colour. Look at all those paintings of the Virgin Mary wearing powder blue, after all. “Studies” would declare that women were naturally attracted to blue because that’s a common colour for berries. And everyone would forget that not that long ago, things were exactly the other way around.

It’s happened before, can happen again.

Mary wore blue because lapis lazuli was expensive. It had to come in on the trade routes from Afghanistan. (Literally, it was ultramarine.)
Would pink shift its cultural meaning? Hard to say. A generation of kids wear their trousers halfway down their backsides, because the cops take away your belt in the holding pen. But the next obvious step – flourescent pastel jumpsuits – has yet to catch on.

Mary wore blue because lapis lazuli was expensive. It had to come in on the trade routes from Afghanistan. (Literally, it was ultramarine.)

That may well be the original reason why artists depicting Mary put her in blue (I don’t think the original riding-on-the-back-of-a-donkey-no-room-in-the-inn Mary had the cash for lapis lazuli, did she?), but in more recent history, it’s been used as one of the reasons why girls should wear blue and boys pink.

Meredith I agree our countries are very similar. However when it comes to gun laws and gun crimes we are not (See my earlier post on this thread for some stats). Now why do you think that is?

If only…

Good God. The Mayans were right.

But can it really be true that there is absolutely no one in front rank American politics who might even conceivable make a call for the repeal of the 2nd Amendment on the straightforward grounds that it is facilitating the slaughter of your children?

Not only can it be true, but it is true. I’m going to add my voice to Meredith’s here: the American political context makes suggestions like “amend the Constitution,” seem, well, a bit naive. If you look at what amendments have actually been added in recent times, they’ve either been administrative (defining the terms of the succession, slightly expanding the voting age) or have ridden in on the wave of a mass social movement (women’s suffrage, prohibition repeal, outlawing poll taxes). There is not, right now, in the US, a mass social movement that would support amending the Constitution to repeal the Second Amendment.

Obviously, it is possible to regulate guns much more strongly than we currently do, without amending the Constitution.

For certain values of “we,” I agree with that, but the situation is currently in some disarray, and anyone who makes confident predictions is setting himself up for potentially unpleasant surprises. I would not, for example, confidently predict that the very strictest laws now in force in any locality would be upheld, though I do think, personally, that most existing regulation would.

I think it’s worth noting that Meredith (at 243) was responding to the following paragraph (at 242).

As a result of this I also find the idea that criminals will always be able to get guns quite ludicrous. It’s often put forward by gun nuts: banning guns will only keep them out of the hands of law-abiding citizens. This is obviously rubbish. I live in Tokyo now and I have lived in London and Sydney: in any of those cities I think I could spend days or weeks investigating and I wouldn’t be able to find a gun like the ones used at Sandy Hook. If I were so lucky as to stumble upon someone willing to sell me one, I probably wouldn’t be able to afford it anyway, and/or the cops would turn up at the point of sale. It’s another piece of crazy gun-nuttery, that is. Guns are easy to ban. Just do it, America, and move one little step closer to being considered “civilized” by the rest of the world.

It seems to me that recent second amendment jurisprudence that would hold the gun laws of London, Sydney, and Tokyo to be unconstitutional is relevant to the proposition that “guns are easy to ban.” That there have been lots of different gun regulations in the US over various times and places doesn’t make post-Heller jurisprudence irrelevant. That gun regulations in the US could be stronger doesn’t make post-Heller jurisprudence irrelevant either.

There is a difference between saying “there are some specific reasons that banning guns in the US is not easy,” and believing that the status quo is desirable. Note for instance that gun regulations in Chicago and New York fall far far short of the regulations in London, Sydney, or Tokyo.

@290: As a practical and immediate matter, we can anticipate that the current court will be hostile to a wide range of otherwise plausible and logical laws. You raise Roe, and it’s a good analogy (even though I’m pro-choice.). Anti-abortion activists can choose between the bans that some of them favor and the limited bounds that the courts permit. Some attempt to challenge the status quo, but many others focus their efforts on limits that can actually pass muster with the courts.

I want a challenge to the faulty recent court rulings when we have members willing to listen to them. Until then I want laws limiting the slaughter that will actually be enforceable and not struck down, and there is a completely legitimate set of reasons to factor this into the legislation that one favors.

Apparently almost all Tennessee schools already have an armed ‘resource officer’ (god that phrase gives me the shivers) and the argument / bill is only about whether or not their should be additional plainclothes’d armed faculty:

“Say some madman comes in. The first person he would probably try to take out was the resource officer. But if he doesn’t know which teacher has training, then he wouldn’t know which one had [a gun].”

But since the kids getting shot are all in the US

Including, sadly, a child from the UK whose parents made the mistake of emigrating to the US.

Compare two responses to the appalling news, from the British press:

“Statistics may be a bad excuse for prose, but those which pertain to this subject make chilling and necessary reading. They demonstrate that there is a pathological pleasure at large in the United States. There are nearly 300 million guns to be found there, one third of them handguns – which are useless for hunting purposes, but brilliant as tools for killing. This represents the highest concentration of private ownership of murder weapons in the entire world. The rate for murder by gunfire is 100 times that of the United Kingdom.
Every year, 17,000 people are killed in America, 70 per cent of them with guns, and nearly 20,000 people commit suicide by shooting themselves to death in the home – where a gun is readily to hand in the cupboard. Almost half of all US households have a gun stored as easily as the knives and forks, the bed linen and the toothpaste. People are shot at work, at school, at the supermarket, at bus stops, or even at the front door if they ring the bell at an inconvenient time. In the whole world, only Colombia has a worse record.
The statistics are even more heart-breaking when applied to the young. The slaughter of children by gunfire in the United States is 25 times the rate of the 20 next largest industrial countries in the world combined. If you add them all up, since the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968, well over a million Americans, children and adults, have been shot to death, and even now 80 people die in this manner every day. The terrible slaughter on Friday is not as unusual as it should be.”

And then:
“”Mere words cannot match the depths of your sorrow, nor can they heal your wounded hearts … These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.” Every parent can connect with what President Barack Obama said about the murder of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut. There can scarcely be a person on earth with access to the media who is untouched by the grief of the people of that town.

It must follow that what applies to the children murdered there by a deranged young man also applies to the children murdered in Pakistan by a sombre American president. These children are just as important, just as real, just as deserving of the world’s concern. Yet there are no presidential speeches or presidential tears for them, no pictures on the front pages of the world’s newspapers, no interviews with grieving relatives, no minute analysis of what happened and why.

If the victims of Mr Obama’s drone strikes are mentioned by the state at all, they are discussed in terms which suggest that they are less than human. The people who operate the drones, Rolling Stone magazine reports, describe their casualties as “bug splats”, “since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed”. Or they are reduced to vegetation: justifying the drone war, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser Bruce Riedel explained that “you’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back”.”

One is from a paper that has referred to itself, self-mockingly, as The Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald. The other calls itself The World’s Leading Liberal Voice.

Oh, and Marc covered this already, but…

Start with taking the toughest local gun laws that have withstood court challenge (New York or Chicago) and apply them nationwide. Question for you, Meredith: Would you support that?

Do you have any reason whatsoever to believe she wouldn’t?

Do you have any reason whatsoever to be aggressive about this?

Did you Ctrl-F and go back and read what she has said already before getting pushy?

Reread this: “There’s plenty more we could be doing than we have been, but we can’t just willy-nilly do all the things that non-US’ers here keep suggesting. Like just ban handguns.”

That’s factually correct–handgun bans have been overturned with regularity. Your proposal (which I like (and that should go without saying (which is kind of the point of my comment))) explicitly falls under “plenty more we could be doing than we have been” in there. (We can’t do all the things suggested. We could do some of them.)

As for whether we should just lie prostrate before the Constitution and accept its constraints as fixed:

…pretty soon you realize that the second amendment has nothing to do with contemporary, NRA- or Scalia-style notions of “individual” gun rights. This refutation coming, then, from the most “originalist” way of approaching constitutional interpretation. (If you want to go “originalist,” which I’d rather not — but then, the “judicial temperment” requires that we do go there, that we take into account all possibly reasonable arguments.)

So, the currently salient Supreme Court interpretation is bullshit…

As for, “And yet, here we are”: it took almost fifty years, but Plessy v. Fergusson was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education. With smarter public discussion about guns and the second amendment, and smarter and less blinkered supreme court justices, maybe we won’t have to wait fifty years to overturn Columbia v. Heller. (Let’s hope we don’t need too many more Sandy Hook Elementary school shootings.)

…and we have every reason to push for large-scale change, and every reason to believe it’s possible to achieve it on a shorter time scale than the canonical previous large-scale change.

(It was weird to see faustusnotes say, “then your constitution is uncivilized. change it.” As if the need for change was a point of contention. Kinda got covered already.)

The argument over “cosmetic” features of weapons is deeper than it appears. Gun proponents ridicule assault weapon laws as naive for being based on certain appearance features rather than on some functional basis. My recall is the 1984 federal ban said that if a rifle had three or more features, a flash suppressor, pistol grip, detachable magazine, folding stock, among others, it was an assault rifle. You could buy a semi-auto rifle in the same caliber with the same functionality as long as it lacked one the suspect features. The Russian SKS carbine, having a fixed 10-round magazine, could be fitted with an after-market folding stock. A civilian semi-auto AK-47 (same caliber as the SKS), having a detachable magazine could not legally be fitted with a folding stock.

But appearance is exactly why assault weapons are popular. It’s not the caliber; you can get a rifle chambered for .223 that looks like an ordinary rifle (simple wood stock with an unobtrusive 10-round magazine) like the Ruger Mini-14 or you can get a pimped-out Bushmaster AR-15 with all of the suspect features. Both are semi-auto, both are very accurate and can be fired with rapidity. But it’s the Bushmaster that gets all the gun nuts hard. Why? Because it looks so cool, so military, so dangerous. It’s the fantasy not the function. Gun culture in America is all about the fantasy. Restricting the appearance (I do like the pink gun idea, maybe a few unicorn decals as well?) would reduce the attraction.

A prior posters reference to cigarette culture is astute. Smoking declined as it became unfashionable. But this takes sustained social pressure. Hard core gun fetishists will not bow to fashion but a lot of other people might. A not-so-easy starting point might be getting parents to say no to first-person shooter video games. If we can’t reject video games I don’t have much hope in rejecting gun culture.

Son, only a pimp in a Louisiana whore house carries pearl-handled revolvers. These are ivory.
– General George Patton, being asked by an American reporter where he got his ‘pearl’-handled revolvers.

But appearance is exactly why assault weapons are popular. It’s not the caliber; you can get a rifle chambered for .223 that looks like an ordinary rifle (simple wood stock with an unobtrusive 10-round magazine) like the Ruger Mini-14 or you can get a pimped-out Bushmaster AR-15 with all of the suspect features. Both are semi-auto, both are very accurate and can be fired with rapidity. But it’s the Bushmaster that gets all the gun nuts hard. Why? Because it looks so cool, so military, so dangerous. It’s the fantasy not the function. Gun culture in America is all about the fantasy. Restricting the appearance (I do like the pink gun idea, maybe a few unicorn decals as well?) would reduce the attraction

There’s something to this, but until the Vietnam War, sporting weapons and miliary weapons looked pretty much alike for functional reasons. Indeed, sporting weapons often were surplus military weapons, often unmodified or only slightly modified. It is only relatively recently that they diverged in either function or form.
As you rightly point out, a pimped-out Bushmaster AR-15 is not functionally different (collapsible or folding stock aside — a genuine functional issue that ought to be regulated) from a wood-stocked Ruger mini-14 with a small magazine. Banning only the pimped-out versionmight have some impact, but it is likely to be modest unless you ban the functionally identical mini-14 as well.

“If you don’t support them, you should have the honesty to say that you don’t think restricting access to guns is a goal worth pursuing.”

I do want guns restricted. I don’t want felons to buy them. More importantly, if folks are convicted of a gun crime I want them to forever lose their rights to own guns.

OK, we agree … now let’s look for more …

As Mr Dooley said more than a century ago, the Supreme Court follows the election returns. Henry links to an amusing study that endorses this claim in its most literal form:
http://www.henryfarrell.net/images/scj.pdf

More seriously, the case has been put pretty convincingly by Dahl and Ackerman and the counterarguments seem to me to be qualifications rather than refutations (for example, that the SC doesn’t always make politically convenient decisions and that it’s responsive to elite opinion rather than the general public).

Turning from the general case to that of the 2nd Amendment, it’s blatantly obvious that Heller is an instance of Dooley (until recently, the reasoning would have been dismissed as absurd by nearly everyone) and that, if political support for gun control is sustained, it will only take one more Democratic vote on the SC to reverse it. Even without that, Roberts appears politically astute enough to change course if it’s obvious that the Reps are backing a loser.

But appearance is exactly why assault weapons are popular. It’s not the caliber; you can get a rifle chambered for .223 that looks like an ordinary rifle (simple wood stock with an unobtrusive 10-round magazine) like the Ruger Mini-14 or you can get a pimped-out Bushmaster AR-15 with all of the suspect features. Both are semi-auto, both are very accurate and can be fired with rapidity. But it’s the Bushmaster that gets all the gun nuts hard.

I don’t know if the gun-nut community has changed a lot, or if you are not that familiar with it, but there is a whole bunch of pimped-out options for the Ruger Mini-14 as well – folding stocks, flash suppressors, big hulking 40-round magazines, etc. I can even remember reading disussions about why the Mini-14 was a superior survivalist weapon to the AR-15 in its various incarnations. Mind you, this was the late 80’s – I haven’t followed that culture for a while, but I suspect you can still get all the accoutrements still. (and for a pop-culture aside – a folding-stock mini-14 with a big banana clip was one of the guns featured on The A-Team back in the 80s)

Its the extended magazines and other such features that need to be banned. And guns need to be made so they cannot take extended magazines without remilling. The hardcore nuts will still be able to get someone to do the modifications (just as modifying any semi-auto to full-auto is relatively easy), but it will restrict access significantly.

For my credentials – though currently pretty anti-gun*, I grew up in a family where I was made a life member of the NRA when I was 3, and owned an afore-mentioned SKS when I was 13. My dad is a gun smith, owns two legal full-autos in his 200+ collection, and has flirted with the Militia movement. I know far, far too much about this sub-culture. Bruce Wilder and Dr. Hilarious are dead-on about the pseudo military culture and market.

(*Well, I still like the old black-powder rifles)

James at 292:

I will thank you very much to leave off tearing up the protection of those rights just because you want to eliminate gun ownership.

I don’t notice that your press is particularly diverse, your rights to assembly particularly secure, your freedom of religion particularly strong (aren’t you “one nation under god”?) or your right to privacy very assured, but whatever: I wasn’t suggesting you tear up those rights. The constitution contains one specific amendment about guns. Just get rid of it.

FWMason:

What about law-abiding people like Nancy Lanza? Should their ability to acquire guns be more restricted than it is currently, or less, or have we got it about right?

Is she law-abiding? How did her son get access to her guns? Had her ability to acquire guns been completely restricted, she might still be alive. Why did she need that bushmaster? What purpose did it serve? In the rest of the world, she would not have that right.

Also this business of “law-abiding citizens” is a complete furphy. Everyone is a law-abiding citizen until they break the law. Allowing only “law-abiding citizens” to get guns doesn’t stop law-abiding citizens (which many of these mass shooters are) from getting guns and then going on a killing spree. Adam Lanza wasn’t born a criminal, he wasn’t a criminal by nature, and there is no technique known to science or religion that would enable a licensing authority to identify his future crimes. This isn’t the set of Minority report. The only way to stop people like Lanza from killing lots of people with guns is to stop them getting the guns while they are still law-abiding citizens.

Yes, gun control means trampling on a “natural” right of law-abiding citizens. Deal with it.

The constitution contains one specific amendment about guns. Just get rid of it.

Three-fourths of the states have to go along with any change to the our constitution. They aren’t going to go along with a repeal of gun rights.

Even far-reaching regulations like banning semi-automatics or detachable magazines are probably constitutional, though.

Just to throw another wrinkle into the discussion, state constitutions. Washington State’s constitution provides for an explicit individual right to bear arms.

“SECTION 24 RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS. The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself, or the state, shall not be impaired, but nothing in this section shall be construed as authorizing individuals or corporations to organize, maintain or employ an armed body of men.”

I’m willing to bet that other state constitutions have similar provisions. I haven’t thought enough about the interplay of state and federal conflict of laws to have an opinion right now. The Washington State Supreme Court has interpreted other state constitutional provisions as granting greater protection than the federal constitution.

I’m willing to bet that other state constitutions have similar provisions.

Maine: “Every citizen has a right to keep and bear arms and this right shall never be questioned.” Which, to me, seems somewhat despotic in its wording.

I grew up in a family where I was made a life member of the NRA when I was 3

Things like that (along with, say, Rick Santorum making his disabled daughter a life member) really do enforce Gary Wills’ argument about guns as Moloch. It’s a pseudo-baptism; I won’t tempt the Googles, but I’m sure that zygotes have had life NRA membership imposed upon them.

James @ 306, no the 2nd amendment was definitely not meant to be about individual person rights when written. here is the first text before it was trimmed mostly for reducing space

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country; but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person

People in the text is used (as throughout the constitution) to refer to a group of people, as is clear here. Person would be used for individuals as in the last clause.

The persons like Scalia that use originalist meaning to find individual gun rights in the original constitution are lying liars. Of course original intent is of little import to a living constitution, but since the major defenders use original intent they either can’t read or are being disingenuous

Eugene Volokh has always been a rabid sociopath, and it’s nice to see that large numbers of people are finally beginning to notice. Of course, it was obvious to the rest of us back when he wrote his defense of the “deliberate infliction of pain,” “slow throttling,” and so on. If you read Volokh at all carefully over the last ten years, you had to acknowledge that he was just a much better educated version of the BTK killer. But some people are blinded by the credentials. C.f. John Yoo.

Well but is it more or less prestigious than being a physics professor?

rf @316 There was a bit of controversy when a couple of academics published a study purporting to show no effect, in that there was already a declining trend. The problems
(a) It turned out they were both tied up with the gun lobby
(b) The null hypothesis in their test had gun deaths falling to zero, so the only way to show an effect was with negative deaths

Andrew Leigh (now a Federal MP) took it to bits, and that was that as far as the public debate was concerned

^ completely screwed up the link – apologies – the address displayed is correct though if anyone wants to read it

Of course, hiring well trained armed guards (best would be off-duty cops) is not the same as allowing a teacher to carry or have access to a firearm – even a well trained and thoroughly checked teacher.But it’s not a huge stretch either, provided that the training and checking is in fact thorough and ongoing.

This is the perfect Andrew F. post.

Never mind all the posts above explaining the huge differences between them. Andrew’s a reasonable guy, he says it’s not a huge stretch, that’s good enough, right?

I’d guess that it would be moderately effective against the threat of mass shootings.

It wasn’t at Columbine, but maybe they just did it wrong.

I see that McArdle has now written a clarification and reply to critics:

I am frankly very surprised by this. I was about 90% sure that McArdle’s inevitable clarification would explain that the original post was actually a brilliant flourish of Swiftian satire, which of course went right over the stupid liberals’ heads, what with them being so stupid and all. Then she’d do a little end-zone dance, cheered on by her fans.

But no. She was actually talking about teenagers, not children…after all, having little children rushing a killer armed with an assault rifle would be madness! (Jeez, what the hell is wrong with you liberals, anyway?)

What an utter wretch that woman is. Newsweek can’t go under quickly enough.

Also – are you suggesting that the first amendment’s reference to people only applies to groups of people, not an individual’s right to “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”?

Where in the First Amendment does it refer to “a well-regulated militia”?

Also – are you suggesting that the first amendment’s reference to people only applies to groups of people, not an individual’s right to “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”?

How does an individual assemble?

There’s no shortage of games that a despot could play with the language of the Constitution. Despots all over the world have been known to interpret innocuous-sounding articles of constitutions for nefarious ends. If that’s your best response, the only solution is to get rid of the Constitution and hope for the best.

I don’t know if someone has already mentioned it, but Megan McArdle’s suggestion doesn’t even hold up to basic economic analysis. There are too big incentives to free ride in her proposed solution – to the point that it becomes unworkable. One can also explain this using game theory. I think that she should be able to draw the pay-off matrix on her own.

You know what? I was thinking about opening a discussion about firearm regulation. I thought that maybe there could be some compromise that reasonable people could agree with.
But not after reading this nonsense. I refuse to have anything to do with such impolite and ignorant bigots.

Niall @336, there are other possibilities: d) pick another target, e) lower his ambition for the attack, f) attempt a more technically difficult means of attack (explosives, for example).

Now, it’s certainly possible that the gunman could manage to kill the guard immediately, and then proceed with a massacre as though the guard were never there. But provided the guard is well positioned and protected, or that there is more than one guard, the probability of that attempt failing is significant. The point of the guards – at least with respect to mass shooters – is to reduce the probability of the event occurring, even though the measure cannot reduce it to zero.

mclaren, what I found interesting about the New York Times article is how many schools already use armed personnel – I wouldn’t have guessed it was that many. And I agree that the risk of a guard losing control of his weapon is a cost of this kind of security measure; so is the risk of the guard using the weapon inappropriately. With so many schools using armed personnel, though, I wonder whether we might quantify the risk.

Part of the problem with giving certain teachers or administrative personnel access to weapons is that the risk of weapon loss or wrongful use becomes greater, in part simply due to the increase in the number of weapons at schools, and in part due to a possible increased riskiness on the part of each individual teacher or admin as compared to a well qualified guard or police officer. That riskiness could probably be reduced close to that of a qualified guard or officer with careful selection and continuous background checking, and with thorough and continuous training.

This is all obviously from the viewpoint of an individual school district who cannot influence national gun control laws. From that district’s vantage, a nation awash in firearms is the given; the question is whether risk to the school of a shooter is worth using armed personnel.

From a national vantage though, the question is different, since at that level the existing effective level of national gun control is no longer a given.