Off-Target Gun Debate

We’re having the wrong debate about guns right now.  Despite pleas from both sides to avoid politicization of the horrible events in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and then accusations lobbed at one another about the other side’s politicization of the event, we are having the wrong debate.  Schools are not the real world and either stance, more gun control or less gun control in society, isn’t applicable to the circumstances of this incident.

From the perspective of the liberal point of view, this never would have happened if there were no guns.  Realistically, that is true.  If guns had never been invented, the murderer wouldn’t have been able to kill as many students and faculty as he did.  The problem is, guns do exist. In our world, many people own guns.  Many people we don’t WANT to own guns own them.  It’s a sad fact that so many undesirables have easy access to semi-automatic weapons, oversized clips, and ammunition that is designed to inflict damage upon impact far beyond that of a musket ball.  But it is a fact, sad or not.

The liberal argument that we need to restrict guns is problematic because we do restrict them in the schools.  We put up signs about gun free zones in schools.  It’s not as though murderers check their guns at the sign and proceed onward to club people with the branch of an oak tree.  Schools are targets because they are places with lots of unguarded people clustered in miniature, cinder block classrooms, and when panic happens, they channel into the hallways.  Here are large, relatively unguarded buildings with minimal egress points and multiple floors, and a killer knows they are not going to face resistance in achieving your goal, which is to murder as many innocents as possible.  So, in our goal to achieve a world where guns don’t exist, and we restrict access to them, we see that our most innocent become targets.  The toothpaste is out of the tube on this argument.  This is idealistic, not pragmatic.

This doesn’t make the conservative argument any better.  In the NRA’s world, had the teachers all been packing, this would never have happened.  There is a phrase that I happen to lend some credence that says, “An armed society is a polite society.”  Meaning, everyone is a bit nicer when they think you might pull out a pistol and shoot them if you wrong them.  This is a bit wild west in its thinking.  It’s also misguided when it comes to school shooters.

When it comes to defending your 7-11 against a stickup, sure, the crook needs to believe that you have a firearm at the ready, and you’re willing to kill to protect yourself and your store. The thief wants to get away, and hopefully with some money in tow.  You and your Glock say otherwise, and give that thief pause.  But when it comes to the mindset of school shooters, they are looking to harm as many people as they can before they die.  The problem with an armed society being a polite society is that it relies on a logically functioning brain.

The bifurcation of my support for the second amendment is around the definition of two things: Evil and Bad.  The news media has been referring to the murderer as “evil.”  This is what the Gun lobby has been labeling him as well.  I tend to believe we all have amounts of good and evil in us.  Our brains keep us from acting on them.  This particular individual did not have a properly functioning brain.  He couldn’t distinguish what was an evil thought.  A “bad” person is someone who actively overrides that regulatory switch that says, “This is evil” and commits that act anyway.  Not all thieves are bad.  But the ones that bring a weapon to commit armed robbery are bad.  A bad person can still distinguish that they want to survive inciting violence in a store.  The “evil” person cannot, and does not want to survive their violent action.

School shooters aren’t looking to work their way from the High School to the Middle School, and on down to the Pre-K, stopping at every classroom along the way, before driving off into the sunset.  They are looking to kill themselves in a very public, very destructive way.  The University of Texas clock tower gunman positioned himself in a place that allowed him no egress, other than being apprehended or killed by the police, or jumping to his own death.  The Columbine shooters, given the bungled police response to that murderous rampage, could’ve escaped the school had they wanted to.  Instead, they killed themselves with their own weapons. The Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois, and Sandy Hook elementary murderers all took their own lives.

The fear that one of your potential victims may have a gun may provide a slight deterrent if mass murder alone is your goal, but in the end, the last goal is the killer inducing someone else to kill them, or killing themselves.  Additionally, shouldn’t we want to avoid the instance where someone considers bringing a gun to school to attempt to induce someone else to kill them?  Shouldn’t we want to avoid that trauma for students?

Additionally, from the University of Texas to Columbine, to Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois, and even Sandy Hook, all had a connection to the school. The first three were enrolled in the schools.  These are people that were likely known, in some capacity, by their victims.  If a student enters a school, pulls out a firearm, and begins firing, it is then upon the teacher to shoot a student?  Are we militarizing the schools, making them war zones?  Could a teacher shoot a student they teach on a daily basis?  The people making these calls are mostly on the right, and by people who are not teachers.

What if a teacher loses track of a gun? What if a teacher shoots the wrong person?  What if we actually asked the teachers if they WANTED guns?  What if a teacher is clinically depressed – not a crime – and comes in with their chemical imbalance unchecked? What if the teacher becomes the threat to themselves or others?  We worry that teachers are hyper-sexualized molesters who are waiting for the right moment to impose their loose morals and sexual proclivities on our children on an hourly basis, but we’re okay with giving teachers guns?

The answer is not more guns in society as a response to school massacres.  Schools are not society. Schools are ecosystems that are meticulously controlled.  They are miniature oligarchies, not democracies.  Students get very little say as to how they are run. This is not, by the way, a plea for a more student-sourced form of school governance; it’s a point of fact that we cannot look at each school building as a mini country that appropriately mirrors our representative democracy.

The other point is defending our schools.  We defend our banks and hospitals.  You can’t get on a Hollywood lot without driving through a checkpoint with a guard.  Even Sandy Hook, where the killer accessed the building by firing shots into a window before kicking it in and climbing through was obviously not guarded well enough.

The answer is in better mental health care, and external barriers to access for the schools. We have a society that is both over and under medicated, angry, dismissive, and fearful.  We stigmatize mental illness as a weakness.  Weakness is inability through lack of effort.  Disability is inability through physical infirmity.  No one gets angry with someone who has Asperger’s, but it’s somehow a sign of weakness to have a chemical imbalance in your brain, especially one that affects the centers of your brain that control logic, reason, and morality.  This stigma, and the need to hide it and avoid treatment are just as dangerous as lax gun laws.

Arguing that “this would never have happened if guns didn’t exist” outside of schools is akin to arguing that Pearl Harbor never would’ve happened if fighter planes had never been invented.  This doesn’t mean that more can’t be done to ensure that unbalanced people have a harder time getting access to guns.  That wouldn’t apply to Sandy Hook, as the guns belonged to the killer’s mother.  The killer’s mother clearly wasn’t following proper gun safety protocols, as the guns were not secured in a gun safe, or with locks that required her combination or key.  That’s not practicing proper gun safety.

My father is a retired police officer, lifetime NRA member, and former hunter safety instructor.  He owns a man-sized, five hundred pound (without the guns) gun safe.  It has a five number combination lock to which only he and my mother know the combination.  He never treated guns like toys, or glorified them as problem solvers or security devices in our house.  They were measures of last resort.  We locked our doors. We had a dog with a deep bark.  Anyone who kept coming was going to be alerted that my father was armed and trained.

Additionally, to argue that it’s better to introduce more guns into an environment that is supposed to be about learning makes it a war zone.  It is hard enough, as it is, for the current crop of students to pay attention with waning attention spans and electronic distractions.  The threat of crossfire between faculty, administrators, and gunmen would only add to that.  Place the barriers outside the school, make it harder for disturbed individuals to gain access to firearms on a legal level, and remove barriers to access to proper mental health resources, including the social stigma of chemical imbalances.

Both sides, and the media are complicit. This argument will only help to further entrench the extremes against one another, and convince others that there is no middle ground.  There is a middle ground.  The lobbies on both sides make their money making sure the debate continues to exist.  Once one side gets everyone to agree with them, the checks stop flowing, because the lobbies have outlived their utility. For the media, it’s just easier to say the murderer was just plain “evil” instead of looking for the root causes, and it’s better for ratings to make this an ill-fitting analogy for the larger society.