While this might sound ridiculous, it was while watching this cheesy, antic-filled 1990 Schwarzenegger action/comedy that the Newtown shootings became especially real to me. It could have been the fever. I was in fact sweating profusely pretty much the entire movie. But more likely it was the collection of heartwarming scenes from a fictional kindergarten class, where well-compensated child actors said a bunch of mostly-scripted adorable things, adorably. But I was taken with them, and it was as if all of a sudden I realized it: this is what kindergarteners are like. They say funny things and make cute faces and they wonder about the world in a way that makes you both smile and want to cry: because you love their innocence, and you know they will lose it one day.
That day was last Friday for the children of Sandy Hook, and for many others. The words I would use to describe my feelings after these terrible events are "complete frustration." This comes from my sense that America won't be any closer to a solution to its gun violence problem a year or four years from now than it is today. The circumstances are not promising: there is no national consensus on how to make our country safer from your average criminal, much less your Adam Lanzas of the world. And there is some good reason for that: there is no "one” solution, any more than there is one thing that drives a person to become a mass murderer. Even if we may have a solution, any form of political action addressing gun violence is fraught with risk—less for citizens and more for politicians. Supporting the disarmament of the American population is thought to be anti-American and dangerous to individual freedom, so that's out; the death penalty is inhumane and ineffective, says the world, so let's not mention that; prison is an overcrowded criminal factory and a blight to society, so sending more people there isn’t the answer; and resources are already stretched too thin: we can't give more to some without taking from others. Inaction, then, is the safest political course. Meanwhile, during all the political seat-saving, there is lobbying, and of course profiting. The gun industry sells millions of guns each year and says "buy our guns, but don't do anything violent." Hollywood makes gratuitously violent movies and says "watch our violence, but don't use guns." And in the background, quietly, or not so quietly, we the people are dying, as we always have.
Is this it – are we so helpless then? Are we resigned to being consumers, suckers, victims, parents of victims? There is clearly outrage in the hearts of Americans this December for these children, and for the fact that whatever sort of societal construct we live in, school shootings are a reality, and not really that rare. It is easy to place fault here: blame the guns. I mean after all, a significant number of the mass murderers in American history have purchased their guns legally. Can you really say that those murders would have happened anyway but for easy access to the weaponry used? Or blame the lack of guns. Why is it that there are armed guards outside of Tiffany’s and Louis Vuitton at the mall I go to, but there weren’t any outside of Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14th? Are diamonds and purses so precious that they warrant more security? Or maybe it's because people assume that there are a good number of individuals who would readily steal from luxury stores, but very few, if any, who would walk into an elementary school and start shooting. So really, blame our faulty assumptions about what people are capable of. Blame CNN for 24-hour news coverage that has made every shooter before Adam Lanza a household name. Blame the liberals for forcing God out of schools. Blame God.
This conversation is fruitless, because its participants are overlooking the nature of the circumstances: people are, as John Stewart once said (oh yeah, blame John Stewart too), proposing simple solutions for complicated problems. The difficulty is that we are trying to solve a problem with multiple causes on a huge scale: there are too many guns, too many people, and too many places to keep track of without allocating more resources and restricting more rights. But every freedom comes with a cost, and rights are weighed against one another. A study of constitutional law will reveal to any astute reader that no individual right within the constitution has been interpreted as a limitless freedom, but rather a conditional liberty balanced by the needs of others and the whole. Just as the individual has a right to bear an arm, the State is empowered to protect its people. Just as the individual may not bear any arm he or she wishes, at any time and place to the danger of other citizens, the State may not cross a certain line in infringing on the liberties of its citizens for the sake of security. The system was designed to be balanced. At this, I think, we have failed.
If you haven’t noticed, we have gun control. What we need is smarter gun control. A recent article in the New Yorker noted that the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco estimates that 40% of gun transactions each year fly under the radar as private sales, comprised of gun sales occurring between owners, at gun shows, and over the internet. In these scenarios, background checks are not typically required or performed. More importantly, the sales are not recorded by any government body. 33 states reportedly do not regulate gun show sales in any manner. Even if these numbers are exaggerated, this would still be unacceptable. Disarming everyone is an overreaction, and it goes against the plain meaning of the 2nd Amendment. But no one really disagrees that there are certain individuals who should not have easy access, or any access, to guns. It is apparent that limiting that class of people to felons is inadequate. The process of acquisition should simply be more arduous than it is. If we are ever to have any institutional safeguards against people like Adam Lanza, then we need to devise ways at weeding them out from the gun-owner pool. If that doesn’t cut it, as in this case because Lanza took the guns from his mother, we need to devise harsher disincentives against careless gun ownership. Stricter laws on secure gun storage would be a start. And we need to keep better track of the guns in this country. While I believe in the right to bear arms, it baffles me to think that the 2nd Amendment could be interpreted to prohibit the government from requiring gun registration. Even a cursory balancing of the right, the duty even of the State to protect its citizens against the individual’s right to bear arms would fall in favor of this simple, fair measure of gun control. Paranoia that Obama is Hitler in disguise is not a valid counter-argument.
By the same token, we need smarter security. We need to treat our children as we describe them: as our most precious resource. We must accept the realities of this world and not be naïve about the human condition, or we will continue to pay dearly for it. This is already happening. Since the tragedy last week, local officials across the country are already talking heightened security with their colleagues and constituents. The national discussion on who should be armed and who shouldn’t will likely vacillate between extremes before it manifests in responsible new ideas for schools across the country. But, as we have seen, talk is cheap. Putting new security measures in place is not. The outrage will fade, but the danger will still be there. To make progress in our discussions and in this process, we must devote ourselves to improving upon those ideas we disagree with, as opposed to criticism that ultimately produces nothing. We must remove our egos from this discussion. Of all the discussions in this country that should be free from our incessant desire to be right, surely this one is deserving. Because we need consensus here; without consensus, these ideas will die in committee (and our people in the streets).
America is not a movie. It is not Kindergarten Cop, where there is one good guy, one villain, one innocent child in danger. There is no happy ending where our need for resolution is satisfied just before the credits roll. America is a hundred million moving parts. It is less or more of this or that. Less or more violence, less or more killing. There will always be some, but we are always seeking less of the bad and more of the good. We seek a happier ending, one where we reduce pain and suffering, and increase comfort, long life and happiness. We cannot abandon solutions because they will not eradicate our problems entirely, especially when the “statistics” are really human lives. If you knew right now that stricter gun laws in America would produce 5 less murders of innocent people in 2013, and 10 less murders in 2014, and 40 less murders in 2015, would you say that gun control doesn’t work because the murder rate is more or less the same? What if it is was a 1000 less people murdered? 2000?
What about 20 kindergarteners? Is that enough?
