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The question seems to be: Do guns kill?
Unsuspecting European tourists are gunned down in Florida. Individual men armed with semi-automatic rifles and handguns commit mass murders in post offices, fast food restaurants, and subways. The White House is attacked. Preschools, grade schools, and high schools are targets for gun violence. Firearms are implicated in thousands of murders per year.
In response to such events, Congress has considered or passed legislation mandating nationwide waiting periods for the purchase of handguns; banning the manufacture and importation of certain semi-automatic weapons; raising the licensing fees for gun dealers; outlawing the sale of large-clip pistols; limiting the number of weapons a person may purchase in any given time period; mandating gun locks; and demanding national registration of guns and owners.
Proponents of further restrictions on firearms often acknowledge that their efforts will produce few positive results in reducing gun-related crimes. Despite this, they believe any and all steps possible should be taken to control the economic exchange of firearms. Many believe that actions which are currently primarily symbolic in nature will psychologically pave the way for what they claim is their ultimate, preferred goal: the total removal of all weapons from private hands.
Yet perhaps there is a more fundamental issue at stake than whether or not we will continue to be allowed to purchase and own firearms; a broader, more basic principle that transcends even Constitutional concerns and our ability to defend ourselves from a despotic government.
A recent indication of the real -- though perhaps implicit -- goal involved was revealed in discussions concerning health care. Appalled by what they see happening in our society, more and more doctors and politicians argue that gun violence is, in fact, a health care issue and should be treated as such. They reject the slogan of their opponents that, "Guns don't kill. People do." As with other alarming health hazards we face such as drugs, alcohol, and risky working conditions, they want to ban or, at a minimum, tightly restrict access and exposure to such potentially dangerous elements of life.
Given their premises, such conclusions are unsurprising. These people accept that the proper role of government is to protect citizens from themselves; that the Second Amendment to the Constitution was designed to safeguard our right to hunt animals; and that such "pragmatic" issues as the amount of money spent on treating gunshot wounds take precedence over any other, more abstract considerations.
These views guarantee the positions taken by those who say without equivocation that, "Guns kill." With that foundation in mind, they naturally focus their efforts on what they see as the real problem: the guns themselves.
While many people are rightly upset at legal attempts to limit their right to bear arms (as evidenced in the jumps in gun sales across the nation whenever new restrictions near passage), they would do well to recognize the theme linking this assault on individual liberty with others which have received wide publicity.
Despite the very real problem of gun violence and the deep pain and misery resulting for its victims, that direct violence is of secondary concern for the long-term safety and security of American citizens. Presently proposed political attempts to solve the problem will not work any more than will multi-million dollar donations to educational institutions by media moguls. These endeavors will continue to fail as long as they do not address the actual root of such violence.
The fundamental cause of gun violence is not poverty as claimed by the attorney general of the United States. It is not fictional violence in the media -- not in cartoons, prime time dramas, theatrical movies, or video games. It is not the break-up of the nuclear family, crucial though that situation is.
No. Despite the importance of these and other societal stressors, the cause of gun violence, in particular, and of other disruptions plaguing our lives and endangering our liberties, in general, is the concerted attacks by the political, intellectual, and cultural leaders of our nation on morality. Their actions and words constitute a denial not only of the concept of an absolute, objective morality applicable to everyone, but of the very conditions necessary for the establishment of any type of morality. If these people were to acknowledge any principle, it would be the "principle" that there are no principles.
The self-refuting nature of their beliefs does not, of course, bother them since a contradiction can occur only if certain absolutes are, in fact, possible. Since absolutes are, however, anathema to their worldview, they are unconcerned by what they do not think exists.
To state that "guns kill" or that "drugs kill" or alcohol or poverty or that any other such thing or condition "kills" is to remove individual people entirely from the realm of morality.
Ethics (or morality) requires the ability to make choices in the face of alternatives. Making choices requires the possession of free will (in the form of a volitional, conceptual consciousness). And such free will and resultant choices are possible only to specific, distinct individuals.
Where such requirements do not exist, morality does not exist. In situations where no alternatives are present, morality does not apply. Where free will does not occur, any consideration of moral issues is moot. If people are considered merely as collectives rather than as individuals, the idea of morality becomes meaningless.
So it is that statist, "pragmatic" politicians and intellectuals pursue and encourage a zigzagging course implicitly designed to bolster and maintain the conditions necessary for a situational "morality." This mercurial guideline permits them to take any action, commit any outrage against freedom, spout any lie if it furthers their goal of achieving greater power for the government and themselves and increased collectivization of the country.
Promoting guns as the cause of violence effectively eliminates people from the causal loop. It transforms people from moral beings responsible for their freely chosen actions into irrelevant carriers of the supposed true enemy, the inanimate gun. Not only does this decrease an already woefully diminished acknowledgement and encouragement of personal responsibility in our society, it serves that cynical political expediency which characterizes pragmatism. Statists find it much easier and socially acceptable to attack a "thing" than to attack the citizens they supposedly serve and our tradition of individual responsibility or to suggest a further curtailment or outright elimination of that liberty to which they must still give lip service.
To say that a victim was "killed with a gun" conveys an entirely different implicit message than to say he was "killed by a gun." The former retains the murderer's active role as a responsible moral agent. The latter relegates him to a secondary position in which he becomes almost a victim himself, a pawn to that violence engendering entity, "gun."
But guns -- no more than swords or bombs, cars or blunt objects -- are not magical talismans capable of possessing the souls of unsuspecting, innocent individuals and bending them to evil ends. Reversing the roles of tool and master may serve statism, but it does not serve morality.
Attempting to characterize gun violence as a medical problem -- in effect, to equate gun violence with illness -- is yet another tactic to weaken individual choice and morality in the public's eye. Though we can in some definite ways influence the state of our health, we are not usually morally responsible for sicknesses we contract. Thus, if morality is not a factor in illness, and guns are considered as nothing more than some kind of germ or virus to be controlled or eradicated as we did with smallpox (consider talk about "an epidemic of violence"), then the moral issues of personal responsibility and constitutional safeguards against a tyrannical government need never be raised, let alone discussed. (A side "benefit" of this health strategy is that it further stifles disagreement. After all, who would reject the notion that we should all strive to be healthier?)
Yet issues of morality, responsibility, and constitutionality are the very ones which should and must be considered and reaffirmed in this country if we are to reestablish the freedoms we have lost during this century.
The question we should be answering is not how many firearms Americans own. It is not how many people are injured or murdered each year. It is not even whether guns kill or not.
The essential, fundamental question we must focus upon is: Are we to have a society in which the conditions exist which permit each of us to make our own ethical choices or do we accept a culture in which the very foundation necessary for ethics of any kind is denied us? Morality or no morality? There is no alternative.
