November 14, 2019

Gun Violence Will Continue Until the Shooting Stops…

The common response to tragedies like the ones felt at Saugus High School extend from the common ilk of political bluster: Americans will not allow ourselves to be terrorized by one individual with a firearm.

But we do everyday.

Today, there is no corner of American life that has been untouched by gun violence.

We are not immune to it while grocery shopping or walking the mall.

We are not free from its clutches at concerts, block-parties, or work.

It has taken lives at massage parlors and spas, medical clinics, and protests.

It finds us whether we are downtown, at a festival, or at home;

Nor has it stopped at bowling alleys, birthday parties, breweries, or banks.

Students are not safe in their schools.

Commuters are not safe on the subway.

Our families are shattered by it.

And our children are left without futures because of it.

All are ugly reminders that the ubiquity of guns places the possibility of hurt and harm suffered at the end of the barrel not far from reality.

What results is the same deterioration of trust I witnessed three years ago from my office cluster. We operate in public spaces with more care and caution, rely on strangers less, and decline to believe in the goodness of one another more, because firearms are ever-present fixtures of American life and our contact with them is increasingly inescapable.

What’s a Good Guy to Do?

In a society soaked in gun violence, firearms are the omnipresent thumb on the scale of our interactions with one another; where anyone can have a gun, everyone is a threat. The power dynamic threads every exchange and encounter with those around us. In the spaghetti Western epic, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Blondie saw the same: “[I]n this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who dig.”

Firearms are the American counterbalance to fleeting security and certainty, with the proposition echoing throughout history. From the influence of the English jurist William Blackstone on the Founding Fathers to the commentary of Columbia Law Professor Phillip Bobbitt, guns safeguard our own soundness in the face of chaos. The Black Panther Party recognized as much, making firearms a pathway for Black Americans to protect themselves from the racist police tactics of the Oakland Police Department, advising members that “the gun is the only thing that will free us — gain us our liberation.” And when firearms had threatened such a scenario, the California Legislature and then-Governor Ronald Reagan responded by passing the 1967 Mulford Act, prohibiting the carry of loaded firearms without a permit.

Guns are the American solution to waning safety and independence because of the might that accompanies them. If you don’t want to “dig,” you better bring a gun. In other words, staring down an overwhelming number of shootings across all American spaces, “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

And so the presence of guns beget more guns.

We arm classroom teachers in response to school massacres.

We permit the production of “ghost guns.”

What we are left with are more guns than people in the United States — where manufacturing does not appear to be slowing — making firearms an inescapable fixture of American life. As a consequence, American society finds itself in an arms race that further sows the seeds of distrust in a soil that has been plenty fertilized by senseless, entirely-preventable carnage.

Let Not the Gun Go Down On Your Wrath

As long as guns are present in the United States, distrust will be foundational to the American condition, leading to our republic’s further erosion. It is certainly not a hallmark of a functioning society to consistently worry whether or not our children will return from their school day, or to provide anyone with the power to unilaterally kill nine people and wound 27 others within a matter of 32 seconds. As long as this is the case, the strands of trust we have with one another are strained and severed.

Guns have no place in America, but while they remain our very relationship to each other suffers from their presence.

I think the real central idea of this essay is the effect of gun culture on the strength of civil trust. This is an important idea to explore. I'm not sure why this connects as strongly as the present draft does to the interpretation of the Second Amendment. It seems to me that one way of taking the draft might be to leave behind the structure of "right" in order to focus on trust more closely: in almost any sphere of life, not only about weapons, trust describes a form of social interaction in which we don't insist inflexibly on our rights, whatever they are.

But if you are going to step into the question what the Second Amendment "means," you enter one of the most contentious fields of Anglo-American legal history, and better sourcing will help you. Joyce Malcolm's To Keep and Bear Arms s the best starting-place for the strong individualist claim into which the Supreme Court bought for the first time in Heller. The "discredited" work of Michael Belleisles, Arming America—which lost its Bancroft Prize and destroyed its author's reputation over serious lapses in accuracy—is nonetheless an important outline of the contending argument, that American gun culture arose after the Civil War, and that any contemporary understanding of the constitutional provision is inherently separated from any "original" 18th century guise it may seem to take on. This then raises questions about who has the right to be armed. This leads to the important work of historians such as Robert Cottrol and Don Kates, who have argued that the history of disarming Black Americans was one of the most fundamentally important instruments of white supremacy, so that the personal right to carry firearms is a necessary civil right if Black folks are to be safe here in their own country. All this work is history in the service of political action, but I have known all these scholars since I was a graduate student, and all of them—including Belleisles—are professional historians, trying to understand. If you want to think about this question deeply, you need them all.

By the Goodness of Gun

Saugus is a sleepy village, belonging to the larger Santa Clarita Valley, thirty minutes north of Los Angeles on the 405. Nestled neatly between two major thoroughfares, you have to take the local roads to find your way there. Approaching the neighborhood, you will find that it is Everytown, USA. American flags fly on the sidewalk lamps, set alongside banners of the area’s recruits serving their country, and baseball fields dot the approach towards the town’s centerpiece: Saugus High School. It was there, and in that community, that I spent three years teaching.

On the morning of November 19, 2019, Saugus was just as much the same: students cycled in and out of my classroom; they threw their arms around one another as they laughed; they were at peace in each other’s company. But Saugus became a different place minutes after 7:30AM, when a student opened fire on his classmates only steps away from where my first period was underway, killing two children and leaving more injured. The headlines that followed painted a community’s picture of resiliency and strength; “Saugus Strong” was the coined phrase of choice. But missing from the coverage was the erosion of innocence that took place in the forty-some minutes I sheltered with students in the dark. While I whispered to each student that they were safely cloistered alongside me, I saw a range of emotion peering back, but trust was noticeably absent. There was no student who believed that they were safe – how could they when shots sounded just beyond the wall where they sat?

I never saw students fully trust after that Thursday morning, nor did I rediscover it in the community. Instead, students were left suspicious of sudden movement, parents were hesitant to send their kids to events with large crowds, and teachers were alarmed by individuals hurrying from where they once were. Saugus, and everyone in it, embraced one another after the tragedy, but they never relearned how to trust. While it is true that a student lacking in support and guidance robbed Saugus of one of life’s great virtues, he did so with a firearm. The same harm, in such a short amount of time, is unachievable by another implement. Yet, the capacity for such menace has been enshrined in the Constitution as an individual right through the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The clumsy clause has been the subject of serious debate, and advanced much more heartache, pervading much of our public political discourse as Americans are subjected to continued violence in its name. The words have come to live in the American zeitgeist, where many proudly proclaim that gun ownership is the “right most valued by free men." However, this might be the amendment’s entire point.

To better understand the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, it is best to first examine the context within which it is placed: a militia necessary to the security of the state. It is clear that the Second Amendment’s reference to a well-regulated militia is one composed of the ordinary citizenry, and not a national or state standing army. After all, Article I vests the exclusive power “[t]o raise and support Armies” with Congress. Instead, the state may provide for such an outfit from the populace, and those ordinary citizens must be able to possess firearms for use. This is why “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” To allow otherwise would degrade a militia’s efficacy. In this way, the right to a firearm is a predicate for any functioning militia.

Perhaps more important though, is what lies before the right to keep and bear arms: that the militia is necessary to the security of the state. The right to arms, then, is the foundation for which the state is built upon; the state’s security depends upon the American Cincinnatus to leave their plow in the field where it lies, pickup their arms, and defend the liberty we cherish. It is this reasoning that undergirds the Second Amendment, and therefore the American gun culture. The only thing standing between the degradation of American liberty and way of life is a good guy with a gun. The logical pathway resonated just as much during the time of the country’s founding as it does now. William Blackstone wrote of the vindicating right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defense, while Philip Bobbitt spoke of the American value of self-reliance for the defense of oneself and one’s family.

The issue is that the Second Amendment perverts what it is trying to protect. In the Constitutional pursuit of those unalienable rights including “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” the Second Amendment has secured a place for guns within the public trust that pervades our daily decision-making. We operate in public spaces with more care and caution, rely on strangers less, and decline to trust in one another more, because firearms are the ever-present fixtures of American life. Americans have lost what it means to be good in order to preserve the same liberty that has slowly eroded under the watchful gaze of the Second Amendment in the first place. We the people need not look further than Saugus to see that the blessings of liberty that are promised have instead been taken. The Second Amendment is not a sacred text, nor is it the pathway to the preservation of American ideals, but it is high-time for its repeal. Doing so would restore our faith in one another, and instead allow our relationships with those around us to defend the high-principles the Constitution seeks to secure.

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