On Newtown and Guns

“The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic” – Joseph Stalin (1879-1953), attributed.

I do not own guns.

My family has, both as sportsmen and to literally put food on the table during the Great Depression. It’s a sign of the diversity inherent in our country and in the people I’ve met throughout my 50 years that my Facebook feed following the Newtown tragedy was almost equally split between friends calling for gun control and, either peremptorily or in reaction to said calls, a staunch defense of the Second Amendment. One friend asked explicitly, “. . . tell me why anyone that isn’t a hunter needs the arms found (at Sandy Hook Elementary)?”

This is a reasonable question from the point of view of someone for whom the police and military have always been the good guys, the First Responders, the ones who ‘Protect and Serve’.  They can’t imagine why someone would need an assault rifle when there is a cadre of law enforcement and military personnel there to protect them. Why wouldn’t we register, limit, even ban some weapons if it would prevent tragedies like Sandy Hook?

And it probably would.

Despite the rallying cries of “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, guns are deadly. In what looked like a macabre controlled experiment, 23 children and one adult were stabbed in a knife attack in a primary school in the Henan province of China on the same day as the Sandy Hook attack. None of them died.

But to tie back to the opening quote, the point of the Second Amendment is not to prevent tragedies, it is to prevent statistics.

Stalin knew a thing or two about creating statistics. Estimates vary, but experts think Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 4 to 10 million of his own citizens. The accepted estimate of the number of Jews slaughtered in the Nazi Holocaust is 6 million, this after the passage of the Regulations Against Jews’ Possession of Weapons effectively disarmed the Jewish community in Germany. Untold millions of these victims were children as well, far too numerous to post each one’s name on a pair of photo-shopped angel wings to be shared on Facebook had the technology existed.

We, in twenty-first century America, find it difficult to imagine our police or our military knocking down our doors, rounding up our neighbors, attacking their own citizens, but the framers of our Constitution did not. They lived through it. And they provided, as a fundamental right, a means for their citizens to fight back against it and to ‘throw off such government, and to provide new Guards for their future security’ via the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.

You can argue that this right to self-defense is only nominal – that any armed resistance would be crushed swiftly and through overwhelming force. You can argue the Second Amendment is an anachronism, a relic from an age where one had to hunt down his own meals and defend himself on the frontier. You can argue the cost of innocent lives like those at Sandy Hook Elementary is not worth the benefits the Constitution affords us.

But please, let’s make these arguments in the proper forum. No half-way registration laws. No incremental laws restricting certain classes of weapons now and others later. No city-specific bans in violation of the Constitution.

If we must disarm ourselves, the only proper forum is a Constitutional amendment. Nothing else will suffice. If this issue has reached a true crisis point (and not simply a parade for posturing politicians to jump in front of), both sides owe it to our citizens to use the mechanism afforded us by the very instrument we purport to uphold. Do not pass reactive laws. Amend the Constitution if you must.