In the wake of the Valentine’s Day shooting at a Parkland,
Florida high school, Facebook lit up with the debate over gun control
and the Second
Amendment. It brought some interesting, unusual and often angry posts.
Here I comment on three.
18 school shootings already in 2018?
One of the first that I saw was that by February
14th there had already 18 school shootings in 2018. That number was so that one
of my Facebook friends lamented that even the liberal news media had grown
callous and stopped reporting on school shootings! That, until he understood
that the number was highly inflated based on what the average person would
think of as a school shooting. According to Washington
Post, No,
there haven’t been 18 school shootings in 2018. That number is flat wrong.
That number made the rounds, coming from a site called Everytown for Gun Safety,
which “has long inflated its total by including incidents of gunfire that are
not really school shootings. Take, for example, what it counted as the year’s
first: On the afternoon of Jan. 3, a 31-year-old man who had parked outside a
Michigan elementary school called police to say he was armed and suicidal.
Several hours later, he killed himself. The school, however, had been closed
for seven months. There were no teachers. There were no students.” These kinds
of numbers do not help the cause of safety for school children, more than likely
a “little
boy who cried wolf” eye-rolling response – whose lesson is that if
you always tell tales, eventually people will stop listening to what you say.
The right to keep and bear a single-shot musket
A video about what guns were like when the 2nd Amendment was written was making the
rounds on Facebook. It is entertaining and seems to make a point, but...
The 2nd Amendment does not guarantee “the right to
keep and bear a single-shot musket...” The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution
says, “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.”
It binds the federal government in regards to the rights of citizens. “Arms”
means “weapons and ammunition; armaments.” Not only does the amendment not say “keep
and bear a single-shot musket” – the single-shot musket was not the only “arms”
available in 1791 when the 2nd amendment was passed. Further, the SCOTUS
in ‘District
of Columbia v. Heller’ clarified that “The Second Amendment protects
an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia...”
It does not just guarantee guns for militia service, as some claim.[i]
The Second Amendment “is what it is” and it is not going anywhere (does anyone
seriously think they can get
38 states to vote to amend or repeal this?). Rather than a shrill
argument over what’s wrong with the Second Amendment and how to get rid of it –
an argument that never goes anywhere – perhaps both sides might try to see what
things they could agree on. Under the Second Amendment as it exists and has
been interpreted, how can we work together to curb violence in our country? It
is a societal problem – and I would say spiritual problem – much bigger than
guns or mental illness. Without guns, using diesel fuel and fertilizer, Timothy
McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier killed 168 people (19 of
whom were children) and injured more than 500 people!
Repeal the right to keep and drive cars?
Briefly on Sunday morning I noticed a meme
about the number of deaths from drunk-driving accidents circulating. Later when
I went back to check this I couldn’t find a one! (I always have trouble finding
things on Facebook when I go back to look for them. What’s up with that??) My
concern was to check whether these figures about drunk-driving were accurate,
or just “fake news” like some of the “Everyday” school shootings numbers. I
went to an official site – the National
Highway Transportation Safety Administration (Drunk driving).
According to their site, “Every day, almost 29 people in the United States die
in alcohol-impaired vehicle crashes—that’s one person every 50 minutes in 2016.”
Or, stated another way, there were 10,497
deaths in the year 2016 from alcohol-impaired related driving accidents.
I don’t want to juxtapose drunk-driving deaths
against mass shooting deaths in order to de-emphasize the latter. Mass
shootings and school shootings are very real problems with which Americans need
to grapple. Nevertheless, it seems we have decided to complacently live with a much
greater problem in terms of actual deaths. In the same period as above, 2016, there
were possibly 477 mass shootings in the U.S., which resulted in up to 606
deaths. Some of this info is hard to find, as far as totals, and some hard to
trust. I have chosen to use the high-end
numbers for comparison purposes,[ii]
derived from the Mass
Shooting Tracker.[iii]
10,497 deaths in 2016 from drunk driving. Possibly 606 deaths in 2016 from mass
shootings. One every 50 seconds from drunk driving; 1.66 every day from mass
shootings (even using some of the highest numbers reported). What does this
mean? Have we become complacent about drunk-driving fatalities? Will we become
complacent about mass shooting fatalities? Is our outrage selective? Will we trade
it for a new style of outrage when the next new problem comes along? And
finally, if banning guns to citizens is the right solution to stop mass
shootings, why wouldn’t banning cars and alcohol be the right solution to stop
drunk-driving fatalities? Why, there are not even constitutional bills of
rights for those activities!
[i] But “Like most rights, the
Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry
any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose...”
[ii]
In contrast to Mass Shooting Tracker,
Mother Jones (clearly not a
conservative pro-NRA
site) lists only 6 mass shootings in 2016 – Cascade Mall shooting, Burlington,
Washington; Baton Rouge police shooting, Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Dallas police
shooting, Dallas, Texas; Orlando nightclub massacre, Orlando, Florida; Excel
Industries mass shooting, Hesston, Kansas; and Kalamazoo shooting spree,
Kalamazoo County, Michigan – with 71 deaths and 73 injuries. Mother Jones uses
a different definition of “mass shooting” than Mass Shooting Tracker. The average person hearing “school
shooting” thinks Columbine, Sandy Hook, and now Parkland – not about some
guy shooting himself after school hours near a school that was not even open! That
person hearing “mass shooting” thinks Orlando, Las Vegas, and Sutherland
Springs – not about four drug dealers who shot each other in a turf war! While we
should not ignore other forms of murder and violence, conflating other crimes
with the ever-growing problem of shootings like the one at Parkland confuses both the issue
and the understanding of it.
[iii] Part of the problem for
comparison purposes is that there is no standard definition of a “mass
shooting.” Mass Shooting Tracker
writes, “Our definition is this: a mass shooting is an incident where four or
more people are shot in a single shooting spree.” The FBI defines a mass murder
as one event, in one location, when three or more victims are killed and the
offender is not included in the victim count. When Congress enacted the “Investigative
Assistance for Violent Crimes Act of 2012,” they indicated “the term ‘mass
killings’ means 3 or more killings in a single incident.” The Congressional
Research Service calls a “mass shooting” one in which a gunman kills four or
more people, selects victims randomly, and attacks in a public place. Also
problems arise in that data used by sites like “Everyday” and “Mass Shooting
Tracker” comes from media accounts rather than official records.
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