GUN CONTROL HAS BEEN MUCH IN THE NEWS LATELY, and I thought I’d share some thoughts about it. If this column seems a bit muddled or indecisive, it’s not an accident — it reflects some real ambivalence I have about this.
Some of that ambivalence comes from the makeup of my extended family.
Mom’s side of the family is primarily rural. Mom grew up in a small agricultural town, Arroyo Grande, on California’s Central Coast, in the 1930s. On Mom’s side of the family, a significant fraction of my aunts, uncles and cousins are farmers, dairymen, ranchers and so on.
On Mom’s side of the family, gunfire has benign associations — my Aunt Virginia and Uncle Leonard raised seven children; their three boys went deer hunting with their father at an early age, and they all remember fondly when they got their first buck. For people in their community (and in similar rural communities all across the United States) the opening day of deer season is a de facto holiday, with local shops closed and school out, since practically everyone in town heads into the hills with a rifle early that morning.
In short, when people in Mom’s and Aunt Virginia’s and Uncle Leonard’s community hear gunfire, it might provoke a smile and perhaps curiosity about whether the neighbor kid finally managed to bag a deer after a couple of luckless seasons.
My Dad’s side of the family is much more urban. Dad grew up in Chicago; his father was an immigrant from Ireland who worked his way up from a welder in the Chicago shipyards to being chief welding estimator by the time he retired in the 1960s.
Gunfire was nowhere near as common as people think in Chicago in the 1930s (contra the impression created by a million gangster movies like “The Untouchables”), but if you did hear gunfire, it usually meant Something Had Gone Terribly Wrong. It meant murder — either attempted or accomplished.
I know that feeling. I’ve mentioned before that I spent my formative years in Richmond, so I feel a deep connection to that city. In the last 10 years, Richmond has suffered anywhere from 18 to almost 50 murders a year, the vast majority of which involved firearms of one sort or another. (By comparison, in the last 10 years, London, England in its worst year had 200 murders — four times Richmond’s worst year in the same time period. But London has approximately 80 times the population.) I never personally witnessed a murder when I lived in Richmond, but dear friends I had there have been claimed by that horrible crime, and I have comforted the survivors of those and other murders.
So, in urban areas, guns and gunfire have very different associations and meanings than they do in more rural places. And I think the urban/rural divide explains the bitter divisions that characterize the gun control debate in the United States.
And what has become abundantly clear in recent weeks — if it wasn’t already — is that there is no easy solution.
The urban/rural divide goes back a long way in this country — all the way back to our founding, in fact. It was a factor in how the founders structured the government. The House of Representatives was heavily tilted in favor of the more populous states, since the number of representatives each state has is determined by that state’s population; California, for example, has more votes in Congress than all the other states from the Rockies to the Pacific combined. The Senate, however, is where rural states even the playing field: Every state gets two senators, whether its population numbers in the millions or it is small enough that its two senators played against each other in a high school championship game.
My family background has members on both sides of the urban/rural divide, and that background has shown me that both sides in this debate are often talking past each other, with no attempt by either side to truly understand the position of the other.
All that said, this is an opinion column, so I should probably express an opinion. So let me say this: I think, on balance, this is one battle in which justice favors the urban states, but what I’m going to propose needs to take account of the needs and (reasonable) fears of both sides.
Speaking of fears, allow me a quick aside to address something I keep hearing from a certain small but significant subset of the pro-gun folks: that an armed citizenry is our best defense in the event our government becomes tyrannical.
Let me to put this as succinctly and clearly as I can — and I say this as someone who served four years in the United States Army in a combat arms role and got a good, close look at the glittering array of death-dealing machinery that our tax dollars have bought huge piles of: If the people I see on TV talking about the “Tree of Liberty being watered with the blood of tyrants” were to actually succeed in beginning the Great Birther and Anti-Kenyan Rebellion of 2013, and the U.S. military were given free rein to use all that previously mentioned hardware to suppress the uprising, the result is beyond doubt. The rebels would be absolutely annihilated. I mean, seriously, guys. Your duck guns and deer rifles — heck, even .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifles and home-made pipe bombs — would be up against the 82nd Airborne Division, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Air Force, armored divisions, cluster bombs, artillery, predator drones, B-52 raids, and so on. Capisce?
It’s time for all of us to learn: The best defense against tyranny is not an armed citizenry. It is an educated citizenry.
Anyway, back to my position on gun control: I think this is one where the rural states need to agree to some reasonable controls, for the benefit of their fellow citizens who suffer not just more or less regular massacres like Sandy Hook and Columbine, but also the less-talked-about but in its way more heartbreaking violence in places like Richmond and South-Central Los Angeles. I’ll have more on this next week.
Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.
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Good column as always, Matt. I have a .22 rifle in my office..have shot it once in 30 years. I shot a pellet gun as a kid in WC and Dad took his 4 sons with shotguns to hunt for pheasants in my grandparents alfalfa fields in Orland in the 1950’s or 60’s…we did it with little interest…Stronger mental health rules and stronger gun controls are fine with me, mediocre or dangerous minds need some inhibitions before they destroy the innocent again—who needs a 30-round clip in public? We are either a part of the solution or part of the problem…Dennis Lund thinks that’s a worn out phrase but I hear absolutely nothing superlative from his columns either…Stay at it, you’ve got the scent–pb
Mr. Bray, the contents or size of the clip does not matter. One bullet or gun in the hand of a criminal is the issue. To answer your question, “who needs a 30 round clip in public?” …. Who needs to a huge F250 4×4 in Benicia? Trucks kill more people every year than fire arms. Are we to ban those as well?
I support common sense background checks and licenses for fire arms. But let’s focus on the real issue with gun violence: society as a whole is more violent. We as a nation are desensitized towards violence. We have become course and basic humanity has been diminished. Is it any question that mass killings take place?
Amazingly, FBI statistics state that gun related deaths have been declining since 1993. It appears guns are not the issue. The issue is our citizens, our society, our absence of humanity and civility. Our complete disregard for the value of life. Let’s focus on the real issue … Us!
The first gun made on a 3-D printer was fired successfully this week. 3-D printers are getting cheaper by the day, Staples is selling 3-D printers in stores and online now The blueprints to print the gun are free online. The gun can be made entirely of plastic and therefore completely invisible to metal detectors. No background checks, no serial numbers, nothing to trace them.
Any gun control legislation now is absolutely irrelevant. Congress might as well be passing laws on horse-drawn carriages and bootlegging now. All gun rules are completely out the window.
Reasonable controls only apply to law abiding citizens who are already on our side. We already have enough laws on the books. How about we go about enforcing the ones that we have rather than create more … that again won’t be enforced. Stronger controls own serve to disarm law abiding citizens and put us at greater risk and impaired ability to defend ourselves. An armed societ is a polite society.
The events of mass killings are not of regular occurrence as you state. In fact the frequency of them and violent crime has dropped dramatically in the last 20 years. Feel free to read the FBI crime statistics to validate that for you.
If there was a citizen uprising you assume we would lose at the hands of our military but I believe you are making a huge miscalculation because I am confident that many of our military personnel would not be willing to fire on fellow citizens and many would cross over onto our side effectively gutting the military. They took an oath and most of the military personnel I know live by codes and standards that live on a much higher plane than much of our society.
If you dont want to own a gun that is your choice. If I do that is my choice and I don’t want people telling me what I can and cannot own. It is a God given right to defend myself and my family and no government can take tat away from me.
A large part of society seems to want women to have a choice to take the life of an unborn baby but find it appalling for others to want to have the tools to protect their own lives and those of others. This world is really getting backward!
I believe the world is moving forward (progressive), not backwards. Backwards would be that you could beat your wife because she was your property, forward in that she is your equal. God doesn’t mention anything in the Bible about guns. Your rights, by God, is to Love your neighbor.
Matt stated: If the people I see on TV talking about the “Tree of Liberty being watered with the blood of tyrants” were to actually succeed in beginning the Great Birther and Anti-Kenyan Rebellion of 2013… The rebels would be absolutely annihilated
Instead of making things up to imagine something that is not going to happen, you could have cited an example of the Federal Government’s willingness to use its military might to annihilate innocent people. Waco comes to mind as a case in point; 76 dead including children.
You say “Instead of making things up to imagine something that is not going to happen,” then cite an example of it happening.
Regardless, it’s an instructive example — not just in the overwhelming use of force of which our government is capable (and if I recall correctly that was an ATF operation, not a US military one) but of the non-physical consequences of insurrection. Ask yourself: How are David Koresh and his Waco followers remembered? As martyrs, or as insane and suicidal fools?
I submit it’s the latter and that such a fate awaits anyone who attempts armed rebellion. Right or wrong, the victors write the history.
(and if I recall correctly that was an ATF operation, not a US military one) — It was a combined operation with ATF being the initial primary. As the siege was prolonged the FBI took the lead and forces were brought in including:
National Guard from Texas and other states, US Army personnel from Ft. Hood, including members of Delta Force as ‘observers’ and ‘consultants’, military assault vehicles and Air National guard. It was not a shining moment in US History.
Ramsey Clark stated in reference to the Danforth Report: “(it)failed to address the obvious”: “History will clearly record, I believe, that these assaults on the Mt. Carmel church center remain the greatest domestic law enforcement tragedy in the history of the United States”
Ask yourself: How are David Koresh and his Waco followers remembered? As martyrs, or as insane and suicidal fools?
Aren’t the crazies also afforded equal protection under the Constitution?
The Constitution has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. I’m sure it would be a great comfort to the Waco dead that they had equal protection under the Constitution–or that Ramsey Clark was so sympathetic. But they broke the law and shot at law enforcement, and the simple fact is when you do that, you face annihilation — for yourself and for the innocents in your care. As I said, right or wrong — but it’s always been that way and always will be.
You would benefit by reading up on what actually occurred at Waco, rather than simply brushing it off as an aberration.
Who called it an aberration?
Interesting debate. I believe the real question is “why did the framers decide to include gun rights as the Second Ammendment?”
Why did they believe that the right to own shall not be infringed?
I believe that the framers knew that the right to own property was at the core of freedom. Without private property rights freedom could not be assured. But in order to own property fully, one needs to protect that property – from individuals, and if necessary, abusive government. Hence the Second Ammendment.
Perhaps there are those that today believe that our government can be trusted fully to protect our freedoms. I would argue that our government can be trusted to a certain extent, but to fully trust without a means of revolting is naive. Responsible citizens have a right to defend themselves.
Patti Hearst, Bill Ayers, Jim Jones. Think about those names. They all have something in commen.