The American Way of Death

When tragedy strikes, most people think that the natural reaction is do something, which isn't exactly true. If you've been following the mainstream media and the blogosphere since Friday morning, you might have noticed that the proper reaction in the face of tragedy is to get stupid.

Awesome stupidity, so powerful that it seemingly has its own gravitational pull, has been the order of the day, as it usually is.

The ignorance comes in two distinct styles. The first is liberals, who want the government to ban and/or restrict access to firearms. The second is conservatives, who want the government to ban and/or restrict access to everything else. From what I've seen since Friday, both groups seem to agree that some government infringement of freedom is necessary.

I'm not a gun nut. The fact is that I don't think about them all that much. However, I don't think that objects, in and of themselves, are inherently criminal. I feel the same way about guns that I do about drugs. Their possession should not be a criminal offense, but their misuse should be. Simply put, guns are tools, and there is currently no shortage of laws prohibiting shooting someone in the head.

Even if you were to somehow transcend the immutable laws of American gun politics and enact a total ban, you would still accomplish next to nothing. This is because you would still have over three hundred million existing American guns in circulation; enough for every man, woman and child in the United States for generations to come.

Just as the U.S government is unequal to the task of constitutionally rounding up and deporting 11 million illegal aliens, it will not effectively be able to collect and dispose of 300 million firearms. Even if the Second Amendment were to magically vanish overnight, the rest of the Bill of Rights would preclude such an effort. Guns, as you might have noticed, are considerably smaller and easier to hide than Mexicans. Getting rid of the weapons that are already out there would require nothing less than martial law, and I'm not convinced that would be very effective.

There are already more than enough weapons to ensure that what we saw in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday will happen again, and no amount of liberal wishful thinking or half-baked policy prescriptions is going to change that. Criminals are deservedly famous for breaking the law and the mentally ill are renowned for doing weird things.

Conservatives are even more disappointing. Their big idea is a return to involuntary civil commitment. The only problem with that is the paucity of evidence suggesting that it would have prevented any of the mass shootings that we've seen in the last several years. Very few of the perpetrators, if any, have histories that would meet any plausible standard for long-term commitment.

This kind of thinking reveals the hypocrisy of modern conservatives. The very people who barely trust the government to deliver the mail, let alone levy and collect taxes, want to make it easy to relieve the citizenry of their basic freedoms.

Even with the high standards the Constitution requires for criminal conviction, hundreds of people have been exonerated and released from unjust incarceration. If you operate from the premise that civil commitment requires a much lower due process standard (and some believe there should be no such standard at all,) how great is the risk for misuse of the procedure is there? There is, after all, a reason that commitments were curtailed in the first place. Does anyone trust the government to do the right thing all the time, even knowing what we do about the imperfect criminal justice system?

Like it or not, the mentally ill have the same rights you and I do, and limiting them under the color of law should be no easy task. There is no "unless you're nuts" clause in the Constitution, especially in the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments. I checked. If you want to argue that commitment is a civil action, then the Seventh Amendment should apply.

The conservative consensus seems to be, "So long as no one touches my guns, I don't care about anyone else's rights, especially lunatics." That goes a long way in demonstrating just how committed to freedom these people are. Liberals generally believe that the rights of the people are subservient to the duties of government or the needs of society. Conservatives aren't supposed to.

On the Sunday shows this morning, both Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and outgoing Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CN) went to the same stupid stand-by that morons usually do, television, movies and video games.

Firstly, this is (and excuse the pun) a weapons-grade stupid argument, for which there is little if any research to back it up. Second, it presumes that the First Amendment is somehow less inviolate than the Second, which is moronic and dangerous.

Even if you can prove that media makes the crazy even crazier, we do not order our society based on what certain stimuli is going to cause the mentally ill to do, any more than we do for children. Furthermore, I barely trust the government to deliver the mail, which presumes that the role of media watchdog is well beyond its capabilities, to say nothing of its enumerated powers in a constitutional republic.

If, as Lieberman suggests, "violence in entertainment is 'a causative factor' leading to incidences of violence," why is said violence centered primarily in the United States? Entertainment and culture is one of America's leading exports, but only Americans are violently set off by it with any regularity.

Conservative voices have spent the last few days pointing to mass shootings in Norway, Scotland and Australia to make their case that gun availability isn't a factor in the violence. And they're largely right.

But what they don't seem as enthusiastic about pointing out is that this is the fourth such shooting in the United States in the last six months. There was one in Portland, Oregon as recently as Tuesday. In other countries, they happen maybe once in a generation, but there have been two in America in the last five days.

In a country of 33 million, 1,927,693 Canadians have valid firearms licenses, meaning that about one in every sixteen of us is armed. If you assume that there are hundreds of thousands of unlicensed and illegally imported weapons from the United States here, Canada has no shortage of guns. Canadians also consume precisely the same entertainment Americans do.

Yet we don't have the issue with mass shootings that the United States does. Neither does any other industrialized nation with available weaponry. An American citizen is probably more likely to be murdered within the territorial United States than in one of the many war zones where U.S troops are deployed.

Stringent gun control in Canada is relatively recent thing that came with mass urbanization. The same is probably true of Australia. Like the U.S, both countries were "frontier nations." But of the three countries, it was only in the United States that murder rates were very high. In an era long before assault weapons and video games, the American people collectively decided that they enjoyed killing one another. And if they didn't have guns, they'd use knives or even really big sticks.

The conservative and liberal arguments about firearms availability, mental health and culture aren't borne out by the statistics in the rest of the world. But American homicide rates are utterly out of whack with the rest of the industrialized world. You have to go to the Third World or active war zones to find numbers that are anywhere close to America's.

The problem isn't with guns, mental health or culture. It's a problem with Americans. Unless and until that's addressed, nothing else is going to matter. And I'm not at all sure that's something that government can address.