So what’s your solution?
When I discuss the foundation and appropriate reach of gun laws with advocates of greater control, I am often challenged by the question of what my solution would be to the rates of gun homicide and violence in the United States. The assumption of my interlocutor is that I support handing out weapons of all kinds up to nuclear devices to all and sundry, regardless of age, criminal history, substance use, or other factors relevant to the illegitimate use of force against others. This sounds like an exaggeration, but alas, it is a description of the category of straw men that are dressed up and labeled “Gun Rights Supporter’s Proposal” before being trotted out as a stand-in for my views.
I do have to acknowledge that there are some on the side of gun rights who do hold some variety of the above position. Libertarians do border on advocacy of anarchy with regard to government generally and tend to view with suspicion any limitations on the sorts of weapons that each of us ought to be able to roam the world with or where such weapons may be possessed. Many will say that nuclear bombs may be an order of magnitude in power too far, but perhaps only in so far as developing such things requires a big federal agency to achieve. Middle of the road Republicans typically draw the line of acceptability somewhere inside of hand grenades, but certainly including the gun control advocates’ bugbears of AR-15s and AK-47s.
As a leftist who understands individual liberty as the necessary precondition of society, I do land somewhere within the above school of thought in that I see personal weapons—such weapons as a single person can carry and operate without aid and that are suited for fighting against other persons one at a time—are a fundamental right. (Nuclear weapons need not apply for obvious reasons.) No, I do not claim this as a right given by any god, and no, I am not saying that cavemen ought to have been issued Glocks, with the implication that their rights were violated because Herr Gaston had not invented the Combat Tupperware yet—or that the government must hand out Glocks to all citizens today. I simply mean that barring the disabling circumstances of committing felonies or being adjudicated dangerously insane, each of us has the right to acquire with our own funds and tote about such tools of combat as are appropriate for personal defense. Weapons of greater effect require cooperation to produce and maintain, and they have consequences that necessarily go beyond individual tussles and are thus properly the subject of social control.
But contrary to the assumptions made by gun control advocates, I do not state this as a solution for our rates of violence. If I am attacked, my personal weapons may give me an advantage, and I would like to see all good people have the opportunity to avail themselves of similar improvements in the odds, but when we talk about the rate of anything, we are discussing matters of social conditions and collective policy choices, not of individual acts. I carry my own weapons and take measures to be skilled in their use, but I would prefer not to have to employ them against other human beings. The way to achieve this is to find solutions that reduce the frequency of violent acts as a whole.
Gun control advocates will insist that restricting who may have what weapons—restricting to the point at which most people are denied automatically, in the common view—is the answer, but I ask them to consider the reality that many nations with the highest rates of homicide, for example, also have the strictest laws regarding the possession of firearms and other such devices. Of course, many nations with the lowest rates also have onerous gun control. The reality is that a nation’s level of regulation of personal arms is no predictor of how its residents will behave toward each other.
This is difficult for advocates of control to process. Europe is so peaceful, they will tell me, and they are correct—though they should consider the fact that the Czech Republic lets people own many types of firearms with an easy-to-obtain license, including machine guns, and allows concealed carry of handguns for self-defense, while having a homicide rate that remains consistently below one per hundred thousand. What, then, makes for Europe’s far lower rate than that of the United States?
It is my contention that the social welfare systems of European nations, combined with better access to higher education and rewarding jobs are what produces their less violent societies.
Start with education. As much as my writer’s soul might enjoy Professors Moriarty characters, the intuition is borne out by evidence: The more educated the person, the less likely it is that said person will commit crimes of violence. Tax fraud, sure, but murder, not so much.
The right wing will not like the explanation for this, as it is tied to economic class, but educated people—and I do include trade schools and the like here—make more money than the uneducated do, and rates of violence correlate with rates of income inequality. People who devote several years to learning knowledge and skills in a particular field have bought in to the broader social system that makes their profession possible—and as someone who has spent years promoting the humanities, I will suggest that exposure to the liberal arts makes for more reflective and less reactive citizens. My first recommendation, then, is to increase the resources and reduce the class sizes of primary and secondary schools and then to guarantee access to public trade schools, colleges, and universities on the same open basis. The cost to house an inmate in prison varies by state, but runs in the tens of thousands per person per annum. Imagine if we were to spend not quite so much prior to a life of crime emerging and instead produce an educated citizen ready to participate in society. As I said, the right wing will not approve of this, as it is not a demand to lift oneself aloft by one’s footwear, but I am concerned here with reducing violence, not with satisfying the demands of a Puritan’s god.
My second recommendation is to guarantee healthcare—especially mental health services to include addiction treatment—to everyone. I do not mean to imply that violence is the result of desperate people seeking medication for their sick children, but it often is the result, as we have seen with the opioid crisis, of pharmaceutical companies seeking quick profit without regard to the consequences. And as the economic cost of our broken healthcare system runs into the hundreds of billions each year, I return to the first point about income and rates of violence. To quote a line from U2, “the rich stay healthy, and the sick stay poor,” and all the pious morality from the well off will not convince the poor forever to accept their state in life as just.
Along with healthcare and education, as a third recommendation, I would offer guarantees of worker rights. Yes, the CEO should make a higher salary than the newest worker on the assembly line or behind a mop bucket, but the top executives of corporations have seen their pay shoot up in recent decades, while employees at the lower ranks have had negligible increases. Until we can automate all jobs of limited skill and guarantee basic income to all, human beings will have to perform them. I am told by Republicans that a janitor gets the same chances in the economy as a company president—i.e., both compete in the market to sell their skills at the highest rate that someone will pay for them—and that all is fair as the invisible hand directs, but our current crop of economists often leave out the essential contributions of such elements as labor and natural resources in their calculations of economic value. The capitalist—the member of the class of people who exercise control over money—currently decides how much a thing is worth, but this capitalist would find himself in poor circumstances were his workers to refuse to labor for him—and if society sided with the workers.
Thus, by worker rights, I have in mind a tax system that rewards investment over top salaries, labor regulations that require a realistic assessment of how much each person contributes to the economic value of a company or a society, and legal and lending systems that make worker cooperatives easier to form than corporations owned by shareholders. This will sound like communism to my opponents on the right, to which I say, oh well. It is a variety of socialism, to be sure, but I do not advocate for Marx’s path to this paradise, no matter how unable the right wing is to distinguish the nuances.
As a fourth recommendation, I add in a social safety net that guarantees that no one will fall below a minimum level of decent living. If we achieve the first three, the fourth will likely be little used, but no one can be certain of all outcomes. To assuage the tremors in the Protestant work ethic that such a system would stimulate, I concede the necessity of tying such benefits to a willingness on the part of adult, able-bodied recipients to perform some useful activity, be that going to school, entertaining the elderly in a rest home, sorting cans to be recycled, or whatnot.
Societies that do these things see much lower rates of violence than those that do not, and the evidence is clear that this correlation is indicative of causation. In many developed countries, these solutions came either after or along with increasing severity of weapons laws, and often, those nations lacked a culture of accepting the general arming of the people. If we in the United States wish to preserve that value, that sense of a boundary beyond which the government may not intrude into our individual lives, we had best take such steps as will reduce violence through effective means. If we do not, the demand to disarm—a demand that will by and large be carried out against the law-abiding—will only grow.