64 - 400 Million Guns, Endless Killings

            Ukraine does not yet have sufficient big guns to hold off the Russians in the east.By contrast, the United States has far too many potent weapons of all kinds, dwarfing the rest of the world in its wanton permissiveness, its unsurpassed devotion to the steady killing of innocents, and its worship of lethal death dealing every day of the year.

            The data are strikingly clear: Jurisdictions that bar many guns and try hard to keep personal guns under lock and key have fewer homicides annually. Those that ban long guns, assault rifles, and repeating cartridges report many fewer homicides from all causes. People are killers, but they maim and kill faster and more readily if they possess or can easily obtain weapons of mass personal destruction.

Statistics don’t lie. Only people lie.

            Canada’s rules on “military style” assault weapons are already stringent, but a tightening is underway. “We are capping the number of handguns in this country,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared last month.   “We have a responsibility to act to prevent more tragedies,” he declared. Then he continued: “We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action, firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse and more difficult to counter.”  (New York Times, May 31)

            Canada is going to buy back a hefty percentage of its 13 million circulating civilian-held firearms (35 such weapons per 100 people). It also is about to ban the sale, purchase, import, or transfer of all handguns and assault weapons. Automatic military-style weapons of the AR-15 and Bushmaster variety that were used by 18-year olds to slaughter African Americans in Buffalo and huddled young children in a school in Uvalde, Texas, have long been restricted in Canada. Now Canadians will have to turn them in for destruction.  Hunting rifles may be used only at target ranges, and have had to be stored in locked containers.  Police have also long been able to seize guns from persons whom a judge determined to be at risk of hurting themselves or others.

            New Zealand and Australia also have tough laws against the possession of assault weapons by civilians. Just as Canada responded to a massacre in Nova Scotia in 2020, so New Zealand quickly confiscated and barred lethal weapons after a mosque massacre in 2019.  Australia’s catalyzing event was in 2018. Whereas the United States counts 400 million or so guns for its 332 million people, or 120 firearms per 100 people – the largest number per capita anywhere – nowhere else on the planet do so few people own (and use destructively) so many guns.

            Within these United States, Hawaii and Massachusetts have the toughest laws and the fewest homicides per capita. Can there be a possible correlation?  Massachusetts passed an assault weapons ban in 1998 and made it permanent in 2004, when Congress failed to renew the federal ban on such weapons.  Massachusetts also limits ammunition magazines to ten rounds.  It requires any first time applicant for a firearm license to take a gun safety course. 

All such applicants are fully checked beforehand. But the most important Massachusetts impediment to wide-open gun ownership is that every local police chief is the licensing authority. Each chief can prevent “unsuitable” persons from owning guns. That extra level of discretion (which the U. S. Supreme Court may soon undermine) has been critical in limiting those persons in the Commonwealth who own and use guns legally. Since 2014, chiefs have further been able to revoke firearm licenses (after domestic disputes or other prejudicial occurrences) by petitioning a judge.

Massachusetts also has its own “red flag” law.  Judges may confiscate weapons from individuals deemed “at risk to themselves or others.”  But it has been used too infrequently, so far.  The legislation that Congress is now considering could include a nationwide “red flag” rule.

Newly filed Massachusetts legislation would, if enacted, regulate “ghost” guns – firearms without a serial number, often made by a 3D printer or sold in kits. There is a move in the legislature to ban the manufacturing of assault weapons in Massachusetts; Smith & Wesson, in Springfield, would be affected.  So far, however, Massachusetts has not moved to make it easier than now to sue a gun manufacturer for negligence, and claim large compensation for victims.  The Sandy Hook survivors and parents successively won millions from Remington in 2021.

Massachusetts has half the number of gun-caused homicides than Texas, per capita. New York, with reasonably strict laws, also has lower numbers of deaths (despite crazy things on the subway, and the shootings in Buffalo) than permissive states in the south and west. 

The facts are clear and not disputable. The comparative statistics are compelling, whether Americans look inward or across the seas. Every European country has many fewer guns per capita than the United States. Canada, our near neighbor with a roughly comparable demographic mix, can contain its guns and report many fewer deaths per capita, even with  wild northern and western frontiers.

Americans, however, think guns will protect them from being victimized by burglars or menaced by killers. These are contentions devoid of data. One rarely reads of someone saving herself from harm or theft by pulling out a concealed gun. And certainly not from wielding an assault weapon in the midst of, say, a sudden home invasion.

Guns have been wielded by persons chasing supposed wrongdoers, as in the tragic Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery cases. The persons with guns were never under attack, and shot erroneously.

            The possession of guns is now an identity shibboleth. That is, the assertion and maintenance of white supremacy depends, it seems, on the masculine ownership of arms, even long rifles and dangerous military-style instruments of death.  When Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) lamely said last week after the Uvalde massacre that AR-15s could be used to kill marmots, he was obviously running out of plausible excuses.

            The facts don’t lie, but the Supreme Court and those who promote gun ownership do. For the first 150 years of the Republic, the Second Amendment to the Constitution was rightly interpreted to mandate “well-regulated militias” to keep muskets (and more modern weapons) at home so that they could be used to defend states (and later the nation) in time of war. But in 2008, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for a divided Supreme Court, in District of Columbia v Heller  (with Justice John Paul Stevens leading the dissenters) decided for the first time that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to gun ownership. This cataclysmic reversal of precedent validated what white supremacists and their ilk had been demanding for decades.

            Scalia said that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to keep a usable handgun at home.  But he and the Court did not say that legislators could not impose conditions on the sale of arms or prevent guns from being carried into sensitive places such as schools.  Scalia even recognized that prohibiting the carrying of “dangerous and unusual weapons” could be regulated.  Felons and the mentally ill could be kept from guns.  Nothing in Heller, said two knowledgeable lawyers, one of whom clerked for Scalia at the time, “cast doubt” on the permissibility of background checks or “red flag” prohibitions.   (New York Times, June 1)

            Heller said “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. [It is] not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” Two years later, the Supreme Court reiterated:

In McDonald v City of Chicago, it held that “It is important to keep in mind that Heller, while striking down a law that prohibited the possession of handguns in the home, recognized that the right to keep and bear arms is not ‘a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.’”

            Whether the Supreme Court in 2022 will follow the lead of Heller and McDonald, or further dangerously restrict a state’s ability to regulate arms and the arms trade, especially concealed weapons, remains shortly to be seen.

            But what the courts have said consistently is that Congress can act to prevent gun violence. That is the battle that women, men, and children marched over the weekend want Congress to win. It is long past time for our representatives to halt the killing fields of America.